I Love New York

I have a love-hate relationship with New York City. On the one hand, I was born there, although my family quickly moved West by the time I was four, so my memories of NYC are contained to eating silly putty on a fire escape, sledding down what seemed to be a gigantic hill with my father right after Christmas (the mountain was actually a small hill at a nearby park), and learning to count to ten in Mandarin with my grandfather (regrettably, I retained none of those lessons). I hate New York because I find it to be a congested, dirty, loud, expensive space. But the truth is, I don't really hate it--I just find that the energy of this particular city is one that leaves me feeling slightly manic. I can blend in all-too-well as a rude New Yorker, not making eye contact, weaving through crowded sidewalks, and pushing my way with the best of them into and off of a subway.


[Look at the teeming masses; these people do not look like happy campers as they weave in and out of the city's traffic]

But I recently saw a film that made me fall in love with New York again. Or at least it made me miss New York, specifically, and all cities in general.


Definitely, Maybe falls into the category of romantic comedy, and if you look at this movie poster, you will note that your usual cast of Hollywood stars are in this one--and it's not a very diverse cast (except in terms of hair color--they did manage to find a blond, a brunette, and a red-head for this film).

But while the central cast is not too diverse, the way that New Yorkers are represented are. Now, I'm not putting a plug for this film--unless you are the kind of person who will watch most romantic comedies. I'm in that category (although I drew a line at P.S. I Love You)--it's my not-so-private vice, if you will. Anyway, what impressed me about this film was that it didn't have a typical *happy* ending, Ryan Reynolds character is both human and incredibly caring towards his 10-year old daughter (played by Abigail Breslin) but most of all, when I got to the scenes of him working on Clinton's NY campaign (the film is told in flashbacks and what brings young William (Reynolds character) to the big city are his idealistic dreams of electing Bill Clinton into office in 1992--so he is in NYC working on the NY primary), and when they showed scenes of Clinton's campaign staffers, it looked to be 50/50 in terms of people of color and white people.

[Aside: Interestingly enough, this mirrors the current campaign staff of Hillary Clinton. You all know that I am an Obama supporter, but one of the things that made me feel I could vote for Hillary is that when they did a report over the summer of the racial demographics among the various staffs of the Republican and Democratic contenders, only Clinton had a white staffer minority--40%; the rest of her staff was comprised of people-of-color, including a fairly high percentage of American Indian staffers--something you DO NOT see a lot of in national campaigns]

Where was I?

Oh Yes. The cynic in me, of course, wants to note that these were background extras--meant to give a sense of the diversity of NYC and that none of the lead or even supporting cast (with the exception of Derek Luke) was a person of color.

But what made me miss New York was that the film actually DID try to present the real diversity of the city in terms of race. And it made me realize that I miss that--I miss seeing, in an everyday sort've way, a mix of different people. Unlike with other televsion series and films, like Sex in the City or Friends or films like Thirteen Going on Thirty (a terrible romantic comedy I caught on tv the other day), Definitely, Maybe really tried to give a real flavor to the city as it is--in its messy diversity. And I appreciated that they made an effort to cast a wide range of people and to show the racial diversity of NYC--because if you watch these other shows, they make it seem as if NYC is populated by beautiful and glamorous white people. And, again, I'm not holding up this particular film as a reality check to Hollywoods'image making of itself, but I've gotten so accustomed to seeing cities mis-represented that it made me smile to realize that someone thought about the casting decisions, in terms of race, for the background scenes and tried to populate the film with a cast of extras that you'd actually find in NYC.


But more than just the diversity of the background cast, watching this film made me realize that I really do miss the energy of living in NYC or maybe just any city (San Francisco, Chicago, Washington DC). I miss the vibrancy of walking down a crowded sidewalk and the stimulation of sights and sounds and smells that the city brings. I miss the skyscrapers and the throng of traffic and the ability to take mass transportation nearly 24 hours a day. And, yes, I miss the diversity--the thrill of realizing that I get to blend into a crowd and that I'm no longer "the only one."

Teaching Tolerance

I have a certain fondness for films with teachers. You know the kind--the ones where the teacher is truly inspirational and reaches out and makes a difference. I'm thinking of films like Stand and Deliver or Lean On Me. Maybe it's because I'm a teacher myself, and I secretly harbor a wish to make that kind of impact on my students (but truly--can I make that much of an impact teaching at a research university? Then again, we shouldn't belittle any kind of teaching--and the problem with Hollywood is that they overly romanticize the teacher (oftentimes white and middle-class/privileged) who comes into a poor public school and transforms the unruly and poverty stricken children into model citizens and straight "A" students).

Anyway, in the last two weeks I happened to catch 3 different films about teachers on Cable TV (two were shown on the Ted Turner's TCM station).

Mr. Holland's Opus, the first of the trio, features a beleaguered public school music teacher (who really wanted to be a great American musician/composer and only took to teaching as a way to pay the bills but of course discovers that he loves doing it and his students love him) over the course of his career, which starts in the early 60s and moves us into the mid-90s.

Then there was Mona Lisa Smile, set in Wellesley College (an all women's college--and still around to this day--and it's Hilary Rodham Clinton's alma mater) of the mid-1950s and starring Julia Roberts as a California transplanted Art History professor trying to get her students not to accept the limitations of their gender. She is revered and reviled by both teachers and students because she pushes at boundaries and won't accept the limitations placed on her or her teaching.

But perhaps the greatest of all the films that I saw recently was To Sir With Love, starring the magnificent Sidney Poitier. I cry every time the end comes--seeing Poitier react to his students' kindness (I don't want to give away the end in case anyone hasn't seen this fantastic film).

To Sir With Love is set in a working-class West End London neighborhood of the mid-1960s. Poitier is a West Indian transplant teaching at this school because racism prevents him from the engineering job that should rightfully be his--and he's just biding time until he can get a "real" job. You can guess what happens in the meantime.

Although I feel sheepish putting To Sir With Love in the same category as the other two films I mentioned above (because the other two films are problematic in certain ways--but what can you expect from mainstream Hollywood media?), all three, besides fitting into the whole "inspiring teacher" genre, are also films with the message of teaching tolerance. In Mr. Holland's Opus, it is the title character who has to learn to adapt and accept his deaf son, as well as the intolerant administration who must learn to adapt to and accept more contemporary forms of music (like jazz and rock and roll) as part of a music curriculum. In Mona Lisa Smile, there is a small sub-plot about a lesbian nurse who is ousted by the administration, not for being lesbian (although it's clear that being queer didn't help her to stay) but for distributing birth control to undergraduates (in violation of MA law of the 1950s), and of course there are the various plots featuring Wellesley women and their quest to find their own identity--whether it is within or without the bonds of marriage.

But of course the film that really teaches tolerance is To Sir With Love. It's overly idealistic, it defuses racial issues in the 1960s by putting Poitier in London, and the racism is really on the mild side, so it's not perfect. But it is so well done--and it feels real--or maybe it's just that Poitier's acting is really so marvelous. Anyway, it strikes me that this film really holds up well--which is sad, of course, because it means that there is still a fair amount of racism and intolerance of difference--and fear about racial others and mixed-race people (again, I don't want to spoil the film by saying too much, but Sidney Poitier's class is not monoracial; there is a mixed-race white-black character and an Asian girl in the class). But it's also so great to see a film in which a teacher, who is a person of color, is teaching tolerance and really changing his students' attitudes--and they are largely all white.

What I wish is that we had a film featuring an African American teaching at an elite boarding school to a largely white, privileged class. What would tolerance look like then? How much difference could a teacher of color--someone with a real social justice bent, make to a group of really privileged students? I wonder when Hollywood will make that film.