THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT FRAN a.k.a. FRAN-BLINGS a.k.a. DEFENDING MY NEW MOMMY

On Fran Lebowitz and her perceived power.

The moment Fran Lebowitz uttered the words “I have no power,” I knew think pieces the world over would land with a whopping thud into the consciousness. In fact, about five minutes into Pretend It’s A City, I foresaw legions of naysayers inspired to challenge Fran Lebowitz’s particular brand of peevishness. As much as I enjoy being right, I was bummed to find my prediction to be so accurate. I consumed the series so swiftly and with so much delight that an inevitable red flag popped up in the periphery of my mind. Someone will ruin this for you, it warned. There’s no such thing as an unproblematic fave. It didn’t take very long for the critics to emerge. Naysayers are not novel for Fran Lebowitz. In fact, the aforementioned quote (In full - “The anger is, I have no power, but I’m filled with opinions.”) is part of a longer rant about how Fran could understand why people hate her if she was a gatekeeper of any sort, if she was able to make changes and didn’t. But because she isn’t a gatekeeper, because she has very little ability to make real change, she finds the people who are infuriated by her tiresome. This pretty much encapsulates the most persistent gripe about Fran, that she’s somebody with a lot of influence who insists she actually has none. Her perceived lack of power and self purported lack of income really seem to grind the gears of her critics. It’s an insistence on underdog status, coupled with an ostensibly unrighteous anger that annoys people. To the naked eye, Fran’s sardonicism feels based on petty and outdated grievances, on inconvenience and a disdain for people. But I would argue that calling her misanthropic is to misunderstand her anger which is based on wanting the best for everyone (she just defines the best in very narrow terms). Fran exercises a logic centered on personal belief and insists that she is right every time. Society does not take kindly to women with opinions who don’t struggle with indecisiveness, and who aren’t burdened by domestic responsibility or heteronormativity. The fact that Lebowitz is able to make a comfortable, even enviable, living as a creative without having to create anything? Forget it. She might as well get a bullseye stitched to the back of one of her impeccable Savile Row suit jackets.

For anyone who remains in the dark about who Fran Lebowitz is, she’s a fixture in the New York circle of tastemakers, a presence that looms large in Manhattan social lore as a cultural observer and humorist. Once upon a time, she was a writer of books and articles, but has famously suffered a “writer’s blockade” since the 1980s. Now, she makes her living as a personality, conferring her opinions like sought after grenades on college campuses and at various speaking engagements. Other things Fran is known for; her aversion to technology, her (amazing) uniform of blazers, cuffed jeans and cowboy boots, and an inexhaustible addiction to cigarettes. Pretend It’s A City is a seven episode demonstration of all these things, with Fran radiating as a host at its center. The series is a sort of follow up (maybe a redo? a sequel?) to Lebowitz’s and Scorsese’s first venture together, Public Speaking (which in my opinion is slightly better than Pretend It’s a City, but only slightly) which premiered on HBO in 2010. Let me tell you what Pretend It’s a City is not. It is not an intimate portrait of Fran Lebowitz, or a document outlining her friendship with Scorsese. Nor is it a “love letter” or an ode. Pretend It’s A City is specifically concerned with what Lebowitz thinks about the changing city around her - it’s not about how she feels. This distinction is crucial, but more on it later… Some of the criticism I read mentioned Lebowitz’s dearth of vulnerability. Ginia Bellafante writes that “she advances her dubious self-certainty over curiosity every time” and Daisy Alioto takes it one step further in DIRT. “An armchair psychologist might say that Fran Lebowitz lacks the courage to look stupid, the vulnerability and depth of feeling it takes to put your own art out there. Instead, one is forced to conclude that if Fran Lebowitz said one truly vulnerable thing publicly she would simply die.” Alioto writes. To these notions I ask, why are we so obsessed with women being vulnerable? And why do we assume that Fran is performing her emotional totality in a series on Netflix? It’s as silly as assuming anyone is performing their totality on any platform with social capital. And if we do feel the need to perform our totality online or onscreen, God help us all. What a trap!

In this day and age, perhaps the one thing a famous person can’t get away with saying is that they have no power. There’s no doubt Fran possesses a certain amount of stature, due to her proximity to power and the reality that her income is based on people’s readiness to listen to her. But, I suppose the way I see Fran Lebowitz could be described as influencer adjacent, which is to say, they are only as powerful as what they’re shilling and where they’re shilling it. In Fran’s case, it’s her intellect, her taste, her hot takes. For influencers of my generation, it’s gummy bears and weight loss tea. Fran’s efforts aren’t branded or sponsored, she stands for no corporation except the corporation of Fran Lebowitz and so we belabor over where to place her. All the frustration we feel about her success is directed (misdirected) at the fact that she’s achieved everything we hope for without selling out - without selling anything at all, actually. Influencers have platforms, but the power of a platform is limited, and it doesn’t help to pretend that’s not true. How powerful can a platform be if you aren’t the gatekeeper of it? If your livelihood is dependent on that platform to perpetuate its own relevancy? In an interview with Kara Swisher of the NYTimes’ Sway podcast, Fran talks about an encounter she had with Jack Dorsey (she forgot his name, referring to him as “the guy” “who owns Twitter, invented Twitter”). She told him about how she had run into an actor who mistakenly believed he had been tweeting back and forth with the real Fran Lebowitz and was angered when Fran told him it wasn’t her. When Fran recounted this to Dorsey, rightfully angry that someone could pretend to be her online, and asked for him to fix it, his remedy was for Fran to create a verified account for herself so nobody else would. “I said, you have to fix this because it’s not fair that someone pretends to be me, and people are talking to this person or tweeting with them or whatever. And he said, oh, here’s what you have to do. You have to open a Twitter account called @TheRealFranLebowitz. I said, here’s what I have to do? Do I own Twitter? This is what you have to do! But of course, as you are aware, that is not what they do, and that, to me, is outrageous.”

The only way to regulate Twitter is for everyone to join it, apparently. I think this says a lot about how Fran thinks about power, and about how we assume all types of power have the same potency. How deeply frustrating it can be to have the ear of powerful figures who don’t understand (or rather, don’t care to understand) your experience with the power they have over you. Celebrity is not the same as power. Influence is not the same as dominance. Fran is not a gatekeeper. She may mildly shape discourse, but she doesn’t bend it to her will. You know who does? Jack Dorsey, and I have yet to see anyone demand vulnerability from him. As I mentioned, Lebowitz is uninterested in technology. She is not online in literally any way, shape or form. She doesn’t own a cell phone or a computer (she’s mentioned in several conversations that this isn’t an ideology, but plainly the result of being uninterested). To my generation, simply being known and being able to hold attention for a matter of time is a special currency; not necessarily authority, but influence to be sure. To someone who is uninterested in social capital in its current form, in public life in its current form, the idea of platform meaning power might sound silly. Whatever we consider “the public” to be is changing, morphing into a virtual space, and to an septuagenarian who has no interest in the world of social media, “the public” means something different. Power means something different.

To be clear, even though I’m taking the time to defend Fran at length, she really needs no defending. Her fans outweigh her naysayers. For every critical piece about Fran there are several glowing reviews, but the nagging fact of the matter is that the naysayers have a point. I’ve been thinking for such a long time about why criticisms of Fran stay with me - why they henpeck me and vex me - why I feel the need to understand them. All I can land on is this; I admire her. She’s everything I’m not, yet everything I wish I was. She’s decisive where I waver. She doesn’t define herself by output and I feel like a failure when my productivity slows. She’s quick, and bold and wears the same thing every day. I’m lagging, and timid and still don’t know how to dress myself. Perhaps what I love so much about her is what Joan Didion would define as self respect. “In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues.” Fran’s self-respect is not affixed to the “doubtful amulets” associated with manners or positive optics that drip with vulnerability or even sentimentality, but rather an unapologetic sense of judgement. The very culture that is so heavily concerned with accountability and an intolerance for missteps seems uniquely bothered by someone who holds everyone to an extremely high standard, including herself. She admits she’s judgmental (“Holding a grudge is the modern equivalent of having standards. Because if people don’t hold grudges, it means they just don’t care what people do.” Another piece of evidence supporting my theory that Fran does not hate people but to the contrary is obsessed with them!) She knows she’s unproductive (which to me feels like a sort of radical act in the face of hustle culture; the less and less she puts out, the more we adore her. I have no choice but to Stan, really!). Fran shares something with Didion too. She doesn’t pontificate on how she feels, she talks about what she thinks. There’s a chasm between her thoughts and her feelings and it’s filled with humor and astute observation, rather than emotion. I came to this conclusion before reading this interview where she touches on her relationship with Toni Morrison briefly. "If you could ask her something right now, what would it be? How should I think about this, Toni?” And I mean think. Not “How should I feel about this?” I know how I feel. But what is the right way to think about this? Because we would disagree about things, and lots of times she made me change my mind. And no one else has made me change my mind." When most of the sentences that escape my mouth start with the phrase “I feel like…” it’s truly refreshing to hear someone give primacy to their thoughts over their feelings. Like most unrequited relationships, my love for Fran is based on projection. I love her for the same reasons I love New York; they both allow me to pretend that what's bothering me is related to my location rather than my mental problems, they both make me excited to get old, and they both eradicate my fear of missing out. She’s self-certain, but she has the courage of her mistakes. She is not nice, but she’s kind (a hilariously accurate contrast that’s been coming up frequently in a lot of dialogue I’m seeing online), just like New York City. My reverence for her lies in her embodiment of an ethos that was abandoned when we started placing importance on emotion and tone over intellectual nuance and fact. Ideally, we could have both. Ideally, we could be Fran.