But, the question remains: what is it really? The Scorsese series gives the field of answers, which seems to correspond to it best. Rather than an author or a comedian, a socialite or an actress, she alone is the living memory of many New Yorkers. That of the 1970s in which she arrived, against the advice of her parents and settled there as a journalist and columnist, in the magazine Interview d’Andy Warhol, then in Newsweek and in Miss. At Warhol, she wrote a column with the absolutely sprawling title, I cover the waterfront, a reference to a piece by Billie Holiday which already says a lot about her: the song is about loneliness and abandonment, from the point of view of someone abandoned by the city and looking at the sea, waiting for the return of this being who is gone and which we know will not come back. But after all, why not wait? All of Fran is there: the solitude, the point of view that we choose to look at things without worrying about others. Atrabilary, misanthropic? Not only. Because, however, she does not look at the sea. She looks at the city. She looks what she wants, where she wants. She takes some, she leaves some.
It’s quite apparent in a photo of her taken by the big Peter Hujar in 1974. He catches her jump out of bed, psychedelic wallpaper above her. And she looks at him, fixes him by imposing her angle on her, having nothing to do with what he tries to capture. She’s the one in charge.
In a recurring feature, Scorsese films her moving within a gigantic mock-up reproducing NYC. I cover the waterfront, but backwards, on the other side. And then, it’s not just 1970s New York and its sense of celebration. There is also the hardest part of the 1980s, those of AIDS and friends who fall one after the other. In 2020, at the end of all these years of surveying and connecting the different New Yorks, Fran Lebowitz could well be a maieutic on her own: all the thoughts of New York for 50 years converge in her and seem to find in her words a both acerbic and limpid translator who does not bother with much, except having wit in all circumstances. And above all never to indulge in nostalgia. It is not so much a body that Scorsese films but a word in movement, which tells the present, while strafing a number of anecdotes on what has been lived, fully. In a way, Fran Lebowitz, in permanent representation, is the opposite of representation. What she tells is what has been experienced directly by her and remains present in her thanks to her words, and the links that her brain, which works at breakneck speed, makes between it all. At home, therefore, no nostalgia, no remorse. Only the fact of moving forward. And never regret, for example, having one day dumped an impressive amount of photographic prints that one of his friends had given him. This photographer, to whom she was close, was Robert Mapplethorpe. But Fran Lebowitz is like that. What matters to her is not so much the material evidence, as the indissoluble presence of those who have been with her. Are they as real as Scorsese who laughs at his jokes or as ghostly as all those whom she still meets the memory of during her wanderings in the city. Scorsese films Fran like a gangster. But it’s probably because, like any good self-respecting gangster, she walks in the company of ghosts. As long as this strange cross between Oscar Wilde and Woody Allen, will make his intelligence reason in the streets of New York, the city will still be standing.
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