#14 of 28 in the 20th century series
Here’s an unusual one: this movie is only 45 minutes long. Even today there aren’t too many venues for 45-minute films, though the rise of streaming services has offered creators a little more leeway to play around with different lengths than had previously been the norm. In 1989, though, the only way for three of the top directors in the industry to get their short films in front of the public was to team up and release them as a two-hour anthology, New York Stories. When I rented New York Stories back in the early ’90s, I was interested in all three films, but it turned out that the one that stuck with me was Martin Scorsese’s contribution, “Life Lessons”. Rewatching it, I was surprised at how well I remembered a movie I saw once (maybe twice?), well over a quarter of a century ago—it turned out that I practically had the whole thing memorized. Which, in retrospect, is weird. “Life Lessons” is about a big name in the New York art world, a Jackson Pollock-style “action painter” named Lionel Dobie; he’s a big, shaggy bear of a man, fiftyish and starting to gray, who blasts classic rock cassettes in the middle of the night as he straps on a trash can lid full of paint and lays into his canvases. In a tiny room in the corner of the studio lives his 22-year-old “assistant”, Paulette. The deal is pretty straightforward: he gives her room and board, advice on her own painting, privileged access to the upper echelons of the art world, and “life lessons that are priceless”, and in return, she does some grunt work around the studio, stretching canvases and whatnot, and lets him fuck her. The terms of the deal are not discussed in such stark, mercenary terms—to Dobie, Paulette is his lover, his muse, his protégée—but you don’t need to be an expert on Marxist theory to distinguish the superstructure from the base. As the film begins, Paulette has run off to have a(n ill-fated) fling with a performance artist closer to her own age. Dobie coaxes her back with assurances that they can make a seamless transition to a purely professional relationship and he’ll be fine with it. Spoiler: he is not fine with it. The rest of the movie is about Dobie’s attempts to maneuver Paulette back into his orbit. He tries every trick in the book except for the one that might actually work: he won’t lie to her about whether her art is good. He’s not an asshole about it—he’s diplomatic, even encouraging. But being dishonest about art is the one line he won’t cross.
Unlike Dobie, I was never a big fish except in some very small ponds, but I did once make a living in the arts. I am also now around Dobie’s age. And I am no stranger to the age gap: while Dobie’s primary relationship is with a woman in her twenties, at least he has people in his social circle who don’t fit that category, and it occurs to me that at present, I don’t. So if I were to have just watched this movie for the first time and declared it an instant favorite, I imagine that some might draw some conclusions from that. But, as noted, when I did add this movie to my list of favorites, not only had I not reached Dobie’s age, I hadn’t even reached Paulette’s. So how could it have resonated with me way back then? I guess that really it comes down to the fact that, back then, Taxi Driver was my favorite movie, and “Life Lessons” covers a lot of the same territory. Scorsese actually took a few runs at obsessive stalker types around this time: in addition to this and Taxi Driver, there was The King of Comedy in 1983 and Cape Fear in 1991. These movies all present different flavors of the same essential character: Travis Bickle is the violent loner, Rupert Pupkin the self-described “schmuck”, Max Cady the movie monster. Lionel Dobie has a leg up on the others in that he may be an infuriating, controlling man-baby, but he can hide his personality defects behind his success. And we’re shown that that success is no accident: in the world of the movie, at least, his paintings are indeed great art, and one of the key scenes in the film involves an enraged Paulette storming into the studio space to have it out with Dobie, only to find herself entranced by watching him paint, amazed to find herself in the presence of a legend at work. The problem is that he seems to need to be immersed in crazy drama all the time to serve as fuel for that work. Maybe back in the early ’90s, before I’d ever been in a relationship, I watched this and thought, “Ooh! This is indeed dramatic! Scorsese’s cooked up another winner!” But having since been through some of that drama myself and wanting to never ever go through anything like it again, I found it kind of exhausting. At one point Dobie tries to convince Paulette to stay with him by telling her that he’s the sort of guy who loves so deeply that he’s been married four times—as though that were a recommendation and not an indictment. But that’s not uncommon. I’ve probably read thousands of bios on Wikipedia, and so many of them show strings of marriages and divorces. That’s a lot of months embroiled in a horror show of fighting and trauma and heartbreak hiding inside the flat statistics in an infobox.
“Life Without Zoe”
Sofia Coppola and Francis Coppola, 1989
If you had asked me in the early ’90s what my least favorite movie was, I might have mentioned this one. As I recall, I found it so unwatchable that I fast-forwarded through big chunks of it. But it’s not unwatchable, exactly—like, it’s competently made. It’s just loathsome. The story is about a bunch of tween girls from the uppermost crust, catered to by a legion of uniformed manservants as they bop around the city in ostentatious retro hats, attempting to win the favor of the richest boy in the world. (His manservants wear turbans, because it’s that kind of movie.) This culminates in a party that is an absolutely obscene display of inherited wealth—Rich Kids Before Instagram—but which is presented as a beautiful fantasy for the plebs in the theater to enjoy, the same way they’d enjoy a visit to a theme park. There’s a bit in which one of these girls (the Zoe of the title) gives a bag of Hershey’s Kisses to a filthy man living in a cardboard box surrounded by piles of garbage, and he cheerfully says in his Oscar the Grouch voice, “She’s why I love New York!” The Coppolas seem to think this is heartwarming. It should actually be a call to start lining up the guillotines.
“Oedipus Wrecks”
Woody Allen, 1989
So if “Life Lessons” is set in New York as the center of the art world, and “Life Without Zoe” is set in New York as the center of the world’s accumulated wealth, then “Oedipus Wrecks” is set in New York as the center of the world’s Jewish diaspora. It is basically a forty-minute Jewish mother joke. But I was oblivious to this when I saw this back in the early ’90s. Had you asked me to summarize the movie back then, I would have said something like this: There’s this guy named Sheldon who has an overbearing mother; one day, during a magic show, she disappears; for a while, everything is great; then, to his horror, she appears in the skies above Manhattan, an astral projection ten miles wide, and spends weeks humiliating him before an audience of millions. That’s a storyline based on a pretty generic theme, to the point that “a mom embarrasses her son” was a staple joke on the deliberately generic TV series The Wonder Years. What I didn’t pick up on when I first watched “Oedipus Wrecks” was this wrinkle: the main thing Sheldon’s mother is so overbearing about is that she doesn’t want him to marry the blonde “shiksa” he’s been seeing. This is what she takes to the sky to harangue him about, and when his relationship crumbles under the strain, and he forms a bond with a Jewish woman who cooks the way his mother used to, she is finally satisfied and returns to ground level. The film doesn’t necessarily endorse the mother’s bigotry, but neither does it repudiate it. So insofar as I think the world would benefit from more inter-ethnic and inter-faith families, I think I have to hit the gong on this one too.
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