Portraying American Cities in Film: Thumbs Down from Professors Muzzio and Halper

Douglas Muzzio, Baruch College’s political pundit extraordinaire, has a secret life. For a number of years now, he’s been writing a book that has nothing to do with Charles Rangel, Kirsten Gillibrand, David Paterson, or any of the other New York politicos whose fortunes and misfortunes are grist for his mill. The book, Decent People Shouldn’t Live Here: The American City in Movies, 1895-2005, will look at the bias against American cities in film.

As an off-shoot of this project, on April 11th, Professor Muzzio and his sometime co-author Thomas Halper, chairman of the Department of Political Science, will deliver a lecture at the 55th Annual Meeting of the British Association of American Studies. The lecture, titled “Menaces and Launderettes: The American and British City in Movies, 1980-2010,” will be presented at the University of East Anglia to the British Association of American Studies. Muzzio says that he and Halper will compare representation of American cities in the 1980’s, the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, to the urban landscape of today, Barack Obama and Gordon Brown presiding. They are also promising to contrast the “reel” city with the “real” city.

So, have they discerned any major cinematic shifts in the portrayal of cities within the past 30 years? Not so much. Professor Muzzio says that urban centers continue to be portrayed as grim and dim. Except for the occasional romantic comedy that bathes everything in a golden hue, cities are nasty places, best avoided. New York and London? “Landscapes of fear,” Muzzio calls them. (But don’t get him wrong, on screen or off, he loves them both.)