After three decades of inhaling American-dominated, disproportionately New York-based media, Sharon Lam’s first time in the city became a traipse through a collage of movie sets rather than any real place.
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‘Excuse me, how do I get to 9/11?”, a tourist asks Liz Lemon in an episode of 30 Rock. When I was watching I laughed, but last week, when I went to New York City for the first time, I was barely any better. While walking around with my flatmate, I point at a stoop. “That’s just like Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment.” I point at a rubbish bin. “That’s just like Oscar the Grouch.” I point at another stoop. “That’s just like the video where the guy goes ‘and they were roommates’.” I point at some steel girders. “That’s just like what they used to eat lunch on up in the sky.” My flatmate has now unwillingly found themselves on a week-long New York City Tour of Stuff Sharon’s Seen on TV. Outside 30 Rockefeller Plaza, “that’s 30 Rock”, I immediately identify. When I see some vaguely tall buildings in the distance I gesture towards them and state matter of factly, “Don Draper”. At any large set of steps, “xoxo, Gossip Girl.” On the subway I go, “This is just like Broad City.” “The Warriors.” “Spiderman 2.”
I could not stop seeing references. Everywhere read as some fictional character’s house, workplace or origin. After three decades of inhaling American-dominated, disproportionately New York-based media, my first time in the city became a traipse through a collage of movie sets rather than any real place. After all, this was the Big Apple, the titular city of Sex and the City, the city that never sleeps, concrete jungle where dreams are made of. All these songs, TV shows, movies – I could not separate New York as polis from mythos. Never had a place been so built up in my imagination before. They say to never meet your heroes. But what if your hero was a place? And that place was where they filmed Heroes?
It wasn’t that my expectations of the city were particularly glamorous; New York is not necessarily over-romanticised in its portrayals. Yes, you have your When Harry Met Sallys and You’ve Got Mails, but you also have your Dark Days and Taxi Drivers. I’d been strap-hanging in London and Hong Kong for six years now and was familiar with the various everyday urban detriments that are more or less the same wherever you are in a capitalist world – packed subway cars, packed buses, living cheek to cheek in an unjust society while trying not get dripped on by aircon water. I ran no risk of Paris syndrome. In fact, I had no hard expectations. All I wanted was to feel a little bit closer to the stories I’d seen on screen.
As I walked around the city, never running out characters that could have walked down the same streets, I couldn’t help but wonder how much of my American media consumption was my own decision. I had put the reasoning down to having grown up on island nations (Singapore, New Zealand) that didn’t have enough local output to fill all the hours of scheduled television. Pre-streaming, American imports were unavoidable, especially considering the frightening amount of TV I watched. After school: Arthur, The Simpsons, Friends. After dinner: Survivor, America’s Next Top Model, Desperate Housewives. American accents became the default audio for television and movies. But it was also a conscious choice – whenever something local came on, I would cringe and flick to another channel. Even the Saddle Club with their Australian accents was too close to home (also, the horse girls at school freaked me out, but that’s another story). My whole life I have watched TV to escape, to go somewhere else, not somewhere that could be down the street.
And now I had gone to that place of escapism in real life. Everything felt half-real, half-synthetic. I wasn’t sure exactly what character and what show I was in but it started with a walk over the Brooklyn Bridge. There, a film crew were setting up for a Spike Lee film. “So, Denzel’s going to be walking down right here at sunset,” we overheard a crew member saying. Denzel Washington wasn’t seen but the air felt electric, he was in the metaphorical building. The remaining days were filled with a museum carpark lichen walk, an event so niche and so up my alley it turned it into a cul de sac, lemon drops and live jazz, rooms filled with dirt from the 70s, bagels and cheung fun, tamales and latkes. There seemed to be something happening everywhere. Without trying, encounters abound – a sudden parade of dance ensembles, getting shat on by a duck, a THC gummy-triggered run-in with Hugh Jackman. Anything could happen here!
Even our isolated hotel, the only affordable one we could find, turned out to be next door to a wildly viral sandwich shop. The sandwich shop, which doubled as a bodega, let customers pick anything to add to their sandwiches. Videos showed customer creations like jelly bean Philly cheesesteaks and chopped cheese sandwiched between Pop Tarts. But mainly they became famous for the modern showman-like way one of the shop’s owners made the sandwiches, with catchphrases like “suuuuuure”, and “never ever ever”. If you know, you know. It really is very catchy.
We went in one night, and when we paid the cashier asked us where we were from and what we were doing in New York. He’d grown up in the city and could never believe that people came here, from so far away – here there was nothing to do. He always asked visitors for suggestions, the city was boring to him. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I’d mainly just been gasping at various stoops.
Everything reminded me of the comfort of TV, the promise of a story. And now, I could interact with that world as closely as one could – by drinking coffee out of the same-looking paper cup, by crossing the street under the same yellow traffic lights. In one of my most rewatched New York movies, and one guilty by unanimous verdict of romanticising the city – the aforementioned You’ve Got Mail – Meg Ryan’s character writes to Tom Hanks’ character, asking, “I lead a small life – well, valuable, but small – and sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven’t been brave? So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn’t it be the other way around?”
Did I like New York only because everything reminded me of something I saw on TV? Or did I like New York because I was on holiday in a metropolis of distractions and I could forget that in my own city where I live, my life would absolutely never be seen on TV (unless there is a show with no dialogue where the arch nemesis is hard water stains, the enemies-to-friends plot is with the overweight cat down the hall, and the grand quest is the (futile) pursuit of recreating Pret A Manger’s porridge at home.
I left New York both completely satisfied, and with the knowledge that I should probably never live there. Some things need to be kept at a distance to remain special. I needed to maintain separation with the city to keep its magic and more importantly, the fuel to my escapist stream of content. Perhaps one day I will not feel embarrassed by my own existence and not need to suppress the darkness, but until then, as fantasy is not my thing, the fiction of New York is all I have! If I were to live there, I would become the sandwich shop cashier. The grass would no longer be green. The novelty would wear off, I would think nothing of having my coffee refilled at a diner instead of giddily saying yes, I’d walk past Parsons or Mood without saying “Project Runway”, I’d eat a slice of pizza like one drinks water. I would not be able to soothe myself with Nora Ephron triple bills. No, I could not let that happen.
When I came back to London, I found myself rewatching Eyes Wide Shut. Watching Tom Cruise stalk around the city in his pea coat, I pointed at the screen and said “I did that”. The first time I watched it, I understood it firstly as a movie about suppressed, ever-present desire. This time, I understood it much more as a movie about class and money, and the invisible, unshakeable forces that keep society in status quo, strata upon strata. Where would I have appeared in the movie? As a background extra in a coffeeshop. Never interacting with the Harfords, never interacting with Domino. Everyone kept in check. The affluent living in one version of New York at the cost of those living in a version of New York underneath them. Eyes Wide Shut, of course, was never even filmed in New York, but due to Kubrick’s fear of commercial airlines, entirely in England. In fact, some of Tom Cruise’s scenes of him walking despondently around New York City were filmed with a projector and a treadmill, on a film set an hour’s drive from where I live. It’s a small world, after all.
Correction: This article has been updated to state that Stanley Kubrick is the director of Eyes Wide Shut, not Alfred Hitchcock. The Spinoff deeply, deeply, deeply regrets the error.