There is one area in which Fran Lebowitz has by all measures succeeded brilliantly, one that Scorsese's film, which consists almost entirely of uninterrupted images of her, gives us plenty of time to ponder. Fran Lebowitz has perfected her look. Her boulevardier wardrobe, her trademark cigarette/sneer, her unruly Beethoven bob: She has precisely distilled, or perhaps invented, our idea of what a "sardonic New York literary curmudgeon" should look like and has stuck to it faithfully for decades. This tastefully nihilistic pose has been her fortune and, perhaps perversely, also her undoing as an artist. "I'm not interested in other people, so I don't expect them to be interested in me," she claims. Fair enough (if somewhat specious), except that the single requirement of the art of writing--to say nothing of the art of conversation--is exactly that.
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