In just 96 minutes, it captures the history of The New Yorker, its influence, its daily workings, and its mystique of intellectual delight.
“The New Yorker at 100” is a brisk and captivating documentary that accomplishes a feat more difficult than it seems. (In that respect, it’s much like the magazine itself.) In just 96 minutes, the film, directed by Marshall Curry and narrated by Julianne Moore, presents the legendary history of The New Yorker. It illustrates the magazine’s immense cultural importance. It offers a detailed, behind-the-scenes portrait of how The New Yorker is made each week, using the creation of its centennial issue (which went on sale last February) as an example of what happens routinely.
Director: Marshall Curry
Stars: David Remnick, Françoise Mouly, Nick Paumgarten
And all of this is woven into a compelling story of the magazine’s essence and aesthetic: how its commitment to truth and beauty are two sides of the same coin, and how its worldview, while current and vibrant, is subtly rooted in the analog sensibility of an earlier era. The New Yorker loves and cherishes its traditions (the monocled dandy Eustace Tilley, that elegant yet sensual Adobe Caslon font), but the magazine’s fundamental tradition is to cut through the curtain of contemporary noise to look reality squarely in the face, presenting it to the reader with unadorned vitality.
If you’re a fan of The New Yorker and want a behind-the-scenes look at how this exquisitely crafted magazine is made, “The New Yorker at 100” reveals its secrets in a charming way. Here’s the crucial weekly cartoon meeting, where the 60 finalists (from among 1,000 weekly submissions) are sorted into yes, no, or maybe piles. Here’s writer Nick Paumgarten trying to land a “Talk of the Town” piece by strolling through the East Village and asking random New Yorkers what’s on their minds—an improvisational method that, in its own way, reflects the magazine’s democratic openness.
And here is David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker since 1998, with his daily routine of candor and Machiavellian demandingness, a mystique that brings out the best in his writers, because they know how demanding he is in his pursuit of the Platonic ideal of quality. For Remnick, The New Yorker is a sacred mission that both delights and consumes him. He says he feels like Fred Astaire when he steps onto the street each morning, and he is so obsessive about planning that his idea of relaxation is a guitar lesson on Sundays. He also describes, with touching frankness, how having a daughter with profound autism intensified his humanity as a journalist.
In the 1960s and 70s, I was one of countless middle-class children who grew up with The New Yorker because my parents subscribed. It arrived every week looking less like a magazine than a beautiful, weighty art object (the painted covers, the precisely placed cartoons and illustrations, the pages so thick they threatened to burst from their binding).
At that time, The New Yorker occupied a strangely contradictory place in the new American landscape of high and low culture, tradition and counterculture. The magazine still looked much as it had when Harold Ross created it in the 1920s, but its elegant lightness had a timeless quality. Its articles were written in rigorous prose, yet possessed a lightness and accessibility that invited reading. The writing was impeccable, but every column was crammed with advertisements of extravagant taste; the magazine was a kind of literary gold mine.
The editor from 1952, William Shawn, was a notoriously shy and soft-spoken man, but 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 boisterous vulgarity of American pop culture, but by the 1970s, the hippies and influential baby boomers had become what was called "the movie generation" (meaning they were the first generation who preferred watching movies to reading), and no writer of the 20th century had a deeper understanding of film than The New Yorker's film critic, Pauline Kael. Kael was, and remains, the magazine's greatest contradiction. She was the star writer who helped keep The New Yorker relevant, even as her exuberant, free-wheeling prose undermined the publication's serene elegance.
Kael is mentioned in the documentary's introduction, but she doesn't appear again—a crucial omission. I say this not only because, as a critic who grew up reading her work, Kael is a foundational figure for me, but because she was the magazine's most popular and important writer for 25 years.
Setting aside the mysterious snub of Kael, "The New Yorker at 100" highlights those moments when the magazine transformed culture and altered the essence of journalism. John Hersey's "Hiroshima," a revelatory 30,000-word report on the aftermath of the atomic bomb (which occupied an entire issue in 1946), was avidly read around the world. It was, in effect, the documentary the U.S. government wouldn't allow to be made.
Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," serialized in The New Yorker while 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 an article about the experience of racism in the Black community, which became the groundbreaking blueprint for "The Fire Next Time." And Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood," serialized in The New Yorker, gave rise not only to the true crime genre but also to the nonfiction novel. It proved highly controversial, because Capote invented some conversations, and Shawn eventually said he regretted publishing it. But its influence was immeasurable.
It's easy to argue for The New Yorker's uniqueness based on groundbreaking journalistic works like these. However, "The New Yorker at 100" explores how The New Yorker has long been a magazine dedicated not only to seriousness but also to pleasure, and how these two qualities are symbiotic. Everything about the magazine is aesthetic: the covers, the perfectly placed doodles, the way the words on the page, and even the punctuation marks, have the feel of physical objects.
Jon Hamm, Molly Ringwald, Ronny Chieng, and Jesse Eisenberg (who became a contributor of humor pieces) are interviewed sitting in one of the magazine's original wooden office chairs, testifying to the impact The New Yorker had on them. However, the documentary also references the almost iconic joke about how issues of the magazine piled up in people's living rooms, like the ultimate unfinished task.
Was—is—The New Yorker too pretentious? Sometimes, yes. Most of the time, no. And a hundred years later, what I still find extraordinary about The New Yorker—I think this is the key to what Remnick, in the film, calls "miraculous"—is that the magazine was founded, in the era of the Algonquin Round Table in the 1920s, as a way of looking at the world that, with its typically American insouciance, would remain above the fray. And it has remained above the fray, even as it revealed the dangers of the real world (nuclear disaster, the environmental destruction wrought by chemicals, the violence that began to plague the American heartland) with greater depth than any other journalistic institution.
Now, decades later, as the proliferation of chaotic and superficial media threatens to distort our very perception of reality, The New Yorker continues to stand apart. Perhaps we need it now more than ever, even as it faces the ultimate test: Is there a place in our fractious civilization for such a refined publication?
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