“The New Yorker at 100” is a nimble and infectious documentary, one that brings off a trick more challenging than it looks. (In that way, it’s a lot like the magazine.) In just 96 minutes, the film, directed by Marshall Curry, lays out the fabled history of The New Yorker. It colors in the magazine’s larger cultural significance. It gives us a close-up, between-the-lines portrait of how The New Yorker gets put together each week, using the creation of its 100th anniversary issue (which came out this past February) as a template for what happens on a regular basis.
And it folds all of this into the more enticing story of the magazine’s vibe and aesthetic: the way its commitment to truth and beauty are flip sides of the same coin, and how its manner of looking at the world, while up-to-the-minute and fully alive, is slyly rooted in the analog sanity of an earlier time. The New Yorker loves and fetishizes its traditions (the monocled fop Eustace Tilly, that stately but sensual Adobe Caslon font), but the magazine’s ultimate tradition is cutting through the scrim of contemporary noise to look reality in the eye, presenting it to the reader with a no-fuss vibrance.
If you’re a fan of The New Yorker and want a backstage tour of how the very refined sausage gets made, “The New Yorker at 100” draws back the curtain in an enchanting way. Here’s the fateful weekly cartoon meeting, where the final 60 contenders (out of 1,000 weekly submissions) get sorted into yes, no, or maybe baskets. Here’s the writer Nick Paumgarten trying to drum up a Talk of the Town piece by wandering through the East Village and questioning random New Yorkers about what’s on their minds, a catch-as-catch-can method that, in its way, reflects the magazine’s democratic openness.
And here’s David Remnick, The New Yorker’s editor since 1998, doing his daily two-step of menschy straightforwardness and Machiavellian demand — a mystique that brings out the best in his writers, because they know just how tough he is in pursuit of the Platonic ideal of quality. For Remnick, The New Yorker is a mission that delights and consumes him — he describes himself as feeling like Fred Astaire when his feet hit the pavement in the morning, and he’s such a compulsive scheduler that his idea of relaxation is a Sunday guitar lesson. He also describes, with cutting candor, how having a profoundly autistic daughter humanized him as a journalist.
In the 1960s and ’70s, I was one of countless middle-class kids who grew up with The New Yorker because my parents subscribed to it. It arrived each week looking less like a magazine than a plumply beautiful objet d’art (the painted covers, the cartoons and illustrations placed just so, the pages so voluminous they threatened to burst out of their stapled binding).
In that era, The New Yorker occupied a weirdly contradictory place in the new American nexus of highbrow and lowbrow, tradition and counterculture. The magazine still looked the way it did when Harold Ross created it in the 1920s, yet its airy elegance had a timelessness about it. Its articles were written in rigorous prose — yet they had a lightness, an accessibility that invited you in. The writing was pure, yet every column was lined with flamboyantly tasteful advertisements; the magazine was a kind of literary cash cow. The editor starting in 1952, William Shawn, was a famously shy and soft-spoken man, yet in the photographs we see of him in the documentary he has the gaze of a killer.
And, crucially, the magazine set itself apart from the tumultuous vulgarity of American pop culture, yet by the ’70s the hippies and game-changing boomers had evolved into what was called “the film generation” (this meant that they were the first generation that liked to watch rather than read), and no writer of the 20th century had her finger on the pulse of movies as electrifyingly as the New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael. Kael was, and remains, the magazine’s grandest contradiction. She was the rock-star writer who helped to keep The New Yorker relevant, even as her heady stream-of-consciousness prose undercut the magazine’s Zen stateliness.
Kael is mentioned in the documentary’s opening fanfare, and never again after that: a crucial omission. I say that not just because, as a critic who grew up with her, Kael looms large for me, but because she was the magazine’s most popular and important writer for 25 years. (What, you’re going to say it was John McPhee?)
Mysterious Kael snub aside, “The New Yorker at 100” spotlights those moments when the magazine shifted the culture and altered the essence of journalism. John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” the revelatory 30,000-word report on the aftermath of the dropping of the nuclear bomb (it took up an entire issue in 1946), was devoured the world over. It was, in effect, the documentary that the U.S. government wouldn’t allow to be made. Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” written in installments for The New Yorker as she was dying of cancer, was the book that launched the environmental movement. In 1962, Shawn recruited an unknown writer named James Baldwin to write a piece about the Black experience of racism that became the eye-opening template for “The Fire Next Time.” And Truman’s Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” serialized in The New Yorker, birthed not only the true-crime genre but the non-fiction novel. It proved highly controversial, because Capote made up certain conversations, and Shawn ultimately said that he regretted publishing it. But its influence was immeasurable.
It’s easy to make a case for The New Yorker’s singularity based on seismic works of journalism like these. Yet “The New Yorker at 100” gets into how The New Yorker has long been a magazine devoted not just to seriousness but delight, and how those two qualities are symbiotic. Everything in the magazine is aesthetic — the beautiful covers, the way the words on the page have the feel of physical objects. Jon Hamm, Molly Ringwald, Ronny Chieng, and Jesse Eisenberg (who became a contributor of humor pieces) each sit for an interview in one of the magazine’s original wooden office chairs, testifying to the effect the magazine had on them. Yet the documentary references the nearly iconic joke about how issues of the magazine would pile up in people’s homes, like the ultimate unread homework assignment. Was — is — The New Yorker too precious for its own good? Occasionally yes, mostly no.
And 100 years on, what I continue to find extraordinary about The New Yorker — I think this is key to what Remnick, in the film, calls “miraculous” about it — is that the magazine was founded, in the Algonquin Roundtable ’20s, as a way of looking at the world that, in its casual American insouciance, would remain above the fray. And it stayed above the fray, even as it drew closer to the perils of the real world (the disaster of a nuclear holocaust, the murder of the environment by chemicals, the psychological murder that is racism, the violence that would begin to tear through Middle America) than any other journalistic institution did. Now, a century later, as the proliferation of shabby and kaleidoscopic media threatens to tear our very perception of reality apart, The New Yorker is still above the fray. We might need it now more than ever, even as it undergoes the ultimate stress test: Is there a place in our fractious civilization for a publication this civilized?
variety.com
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