Amazon Prime India dropped Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn to its viewer’s right in the middle of a raging pandemic. It is likely that most subscribers ignored it and rushed instead to rival Netflix’s extremely delightful Tiger King. I mean what would you expect for a movie with such a boring name like Motherless Brooklyn, right? A name like Brooklyn 101 would have attracted more eyeballs I guess. It is also likely that many subscribers preferred watching some more pandemic related films like Contagion or Outbreak to get some lessons. I mean after all what lessons can a slow-paced detective thriller film set around urban planning politics in New York in the early 20th century give us about the current pandemic, right?
Well, it seems quite a lot.
Before we get on to those lessons, let me get the customary summarizing of the plot done with. Our protagonist, a private detective, named Lionel Essrog played by Edward Norton, is thrown away by the violent murder of his boss for blackmailing influential figures of the city (always a bad idea). Norton’s quest to uncover the truth after many deadly hoops lead him finally into our main female protagonist. This young African American woman activist tells him and us, the audience, that Moses Randolf, the powerful city planner, a bona fide racist pig, is using his state authority to tear down mainly African American and poor white neighbourhoods to build highways and parks to beautify it and make New York city automobile friendly (thus boosting suburbanization as well as property values of upper-class white neighbourhoods). The film soon gets into China town level murkiness when Norton realizes that this is the same woman whose secrets his boss was attempting to trade with Moses Randolf.
Hint: Like in China town, the ugly truths are always as much personal as political.
The film, based on Jonathan Lethem’s award-winning novel, is based on the actual politics around the gentrification of New York City during the early part of the 20th century by celebrated urban planner and autocrat Robert Moses, credited by many for “reviving” the city. It may thus come as a shock to many of us that the charming New York (the Central Park and Studio apartments) we all so much love, the place where Harry met Sally, the place where all our F.R.I.E.N.D.S hang out, the place where Woody Allen goes on his long neurotic rants has a dark, violent history.
Yes, sir, this is all great, but what does it have to do with the current raging pandemic?
Well sir, for starters many of those much urban renewal projects which made those cities ‘charming’ came out of attempts to manage density or congestion to tackle epidemics. The park building exercises in New York by celebrated planners like Robert Moses and Frederick Law Olmsted to create Lung Spaces for the city to free the miasma of a disease believed to have been bought by the immigrant population[i]. David Harvey notes the brutal remaking of 19th century Paris by Baron Haussmann by tearing down squatter and working-class settlements in central areas in the name of civic improvement to solve the surplus crisis of capital (Harvey, 2008)[ii]. Thus, the beloved wide walking boulevard of Paris, which gave rise to the celebrated figure of the flâneur, who walks and consumes the city, has a brutal history.
It was not much different here in our own country.
The colonial administration in India too often addressed threats from epidemics by pushing violent projects of decongestion. Historian Janaki Nair looks at how state planning authorizes in cities of Mysore and Bangalore attempted to decongest native areas aftermath of plague outbreak by building planned extensions outside the old city. These extensions were built along existing caste lines and involved displacing the lower caste populations living in those areas, lest they ‘pollute’ the new upper-caste residents (Nair, 2005)[iii]. Similarly, Sheetal Chabria looks at how the plague anxiety in Colonial Bombay gave birth to the creation of a historical category of the slum, which has now become a ubiquitous word in our vocabulary (2019)[iv]. She notes that out of the various types of “informal” tenements in the city, only those in the central area were chosen to be designated as ‘slums’ to provide legal backing to governmental interventions to improve them. Most of the time, as Chabria notes, the existing tenants did not get a place in the redeveloped housing complexes, thus reproducing the existing hierarchies.
The COVID-19 crisis has already bought in many discussions on how to manage congestion and density in our cities. Though the crisis is largely the result of the inadequacy of national health infrastructures to deal with the viral disease load, many commentators are yet again blaming the congested nature of our city living. The Mayor of New York, Andrew Cuomo tweeted that the density level there is destructive (Cuomo, 2020)[v]. In India, Dharavi as usual dominated discussions in the media and state alike since the outbreak. Movies like Slum Dog Millionaire have already made popular the image of Mumbai ‘slum’ as a hotbed of excreta, literally. R. Jagannathan writing in Swarajya magazine argues that “In stages, the Dharavi slum must be erased and the same people re-housed in high-rises that are well-managed by property maintenance companies for moderate monthly rents and maintenance charges. COVID-19 has demolished the case for allowing too many slums to fester.[vi]”
Given our competitive electoral democratic politics, intense litigations over land and a shift in urban policy-making towards ‘community participatory approaches’ in the recent urban missions, large scale gentrification in our cities like the remaking of Paris or New York would be a challenging endeavour to undertake. This must not make us complacent as civic improvement projects in the name of decongestion have no doubt received a fresh impetus with COVID-19. Motherless Brooklyn then comes at the right time for all of us as a useful warning to remind us about the violent legacy of such needless decongestion projects which end up reproducing existing social hierarchies.
P. S 1: They should have really named the movie Brooklyn Nights!
P.S 2: If you do like movies about urban politics in India then do watch Vada Chennai by Director Vetrimaaran and actor Dhanush and Kaala by Director Pa. Ranjith. (Motherless Brooklyn is currently streaming on Amazon Prime India)
[i] https://placesjournal.org/article/frederick-law-olmsted-and-the-campaign-for-public-health/?cn-reloaded=1&cn-reloaded=1, accessed on 7th August 2020.
[ii] David Harvey. 2008. The Right to The City. https://newleftreview.org/issues/II53/articles/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city, accessed on 7th August 2020.
[iii] Janaki Nair. (2005). The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press.
[iv] Sheetal Chabria. (2009). Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay. Washington: University of Washington Press.
[v] https://twitter.com/NYGovCuomo/status/1241750717939007490, last accessed on 7th August 2020.
[vi] https://swarajyamag.com/ideas/why-covid-19-is-an-urban-health-crisis-resulting-from-faulty-policy-priorities, last accessed on 7th August 2020.
***
Varun Patil is a Sociologist trained at Delhi School of Economics. He is a researcher on urban and land issues and often moonlights as a filmmaker.