This evening, I went to Musical Cartoons Before the Code, an excellent retrospective at Film Forum that celebrated obscure animated shorts from the golden age of American animation. Not all of the shorts were good—if anyone ever asks you to watch Buster Bear, run—but this was more of an academic exercise anyway. I was there to see these cartoons in beautiful, recently restored glory, and to see the pencil tests at the end.
I have always loved pencil tests, which are assembled before any inking or painting has been done. Here’s an example, some of Milt Kahl’s work on The Jungle Book. Isn’t that magical? Nothing but charcoal on a page, and it’s so full of life. The pencil tests included in Musical Cartoons Before the Code were taken from the Fleischer Studios film Mr. Bug Goes to Town. The pencils looked even better than the finished scenes in a number of cases. Some subtleties in the animation get washed out by the coloring process. I love rough pencils because they remind you that there’s a person behind all of that work. If the animators disappear into the background of the finished product, pencil tests insist on their presence.
On my way home, I decided to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, which I haven’t done in years. It was the perfect night for it. The moon, just past full, was still bright. There was a terrific breeze. It was crowded, as tends to happen on the Brooklyn Bridge on beautiful nights. In the midst of all my people watching, I was most struck by the level of production now involved in taking photos. I passed a group of four women in their early 20’s who were operating as a studio for one another. While one posed, another would hold their phone up as a light, experimenting with angles, while a third took the photos.
At right about the midpoint, I passed a family of five. One of the children, a boy around 12 years old, was wearing a Make America Great Again hat. You don’t see a lot of those in New York City. The last time I saw one was a year or two ago, when I shared a subway car with an Orthodox family—boy howdy, the layers—on their way to a protest. In day-to-day life in New York City, you can almost forget it’s a thing. But here was this kid, sitting on a bench on the Brooklyn Bridge at 10:30 at night, wearing a MAGA cap.
It feels overly-dramatic to say, “I almost stopped,” but I did feel the impulse to do so. I wanted to tell that kid that that hat isn’t welcome here, to ask him who he thinks built the Brooklyn Bridge. I didn’t, though even as I walked off the far end of the bridge I was still considering turning back. I still think I should have.
I wanted to tell him that the Brooklyn Bridge was designed by John Roebling, a German immigrant. I wanted to explain to him that the caissons, the foundations that allowed for cable suspension, were dug out by Irish immigrants in conditions so horrendous that Caissons Disease was a real thing. It wouldn’t have mattered, though, and I knew that. So instead I kept it to myself, and thought about it for hours.
The contradictions inherent in MAGA are well-documented. I’m not breaking new ground by pointing out that the bridge upon which they were enjoying their night was built by the very people their figurehead is illegally rounding up and illegally deporting. They are likely in full awareness of the irony of the fact that during their trip to New York City, their food gets made, laundry gets washed, streets get paved, pests get controlled, and lives are made possible by the labor of people who that hat seeks to harm.
The other problem, of course, is that that hat is intended as a provocation. It’s a dare. “Go ahead. Say something. Prove we’re not welcome.” I am again not breaking new ground by observing that MAGA-ism is entirely founded on the presumption of grievances like that. “The big city looks down on us and rejects our views. It’s unsafe.”
The fact that that child wore that hat in the city, the fact that his parents were okay with him doing so, puts the lie to the whole movement. You don’t feel unsafe. You don’t feel threatened. You feel powerful. You know a guy in his mid-30’s with an MFA is going to walk by with his bike and get “triggered” and not do anything. And two weeks from now, or a month from now, when the President of the United States says he is sending the National Guard into New York City because of its elevated crime rate, you’ll talk about how he’s right to do it, how you went there a few weeks ago and didn’t feel safe for a moment.
Sitting on the Brooklyn Bridge at 10:30 at night in your MAGA hat, you looked pretty safe to me.