ED KOCH IN KOCH

How am I doin'?

Hard on the heels of a film about his famous successor Rudy Giuliani, but not soon enough for its subject to quite live till its release (he died on Feb. 1, 2013, the very day of the New York opening), we have Koch, a documentary about the mayor of New York for three terms, from 1977 to 1989. Ed Koch is a character somehow very worthy of a city that's feisty and provocative and says what it thinks. Koch could be unpleasant but he was honest and funny. He was also some kind of consummate politician, with no wife. It was as if the city itself was his bride. "You'll find a better job," someone tells him when he has just lost his bid for a fourth term: "There is no better job!" he unhesitatingly shoots back. Bride? Lover? He would not say if he was straight or gay, but he was strong on gay rights -- though faulted for his handling of AIDS -- and in favor of abortion rights. Koch's development of affordable housing this film credits for saving the faltering city (in bad shape at the end of the Lindsey administration), rather than Giuliani's corporate deals and crackdown on crime and men with squeegees. Koch seems both a more complex and a more folksy figure than Giuliani.

Koch appears in this film as a kind of Speakers Corner politician, a borderline crackpot because so unsuave and direct, and willing to engage in verbal sparring with anyone, anywhere, even though he could dismiss adversaries he deemed unworthy with breathtaking speed. Black critics early on dismiss him as something worse than a racist -- an opportunist. They could not forgive him for stubbornly insisting on closing close Sydenham Hospital in Harlem in his first term even though he had promised to keep it open. This move saved $9 million, but made him many enemies, and he more recently described this action as uncaring and wrong, a slap in the face of black leaders who had helped him get elected in the first place.

Partly the Koch record is a mixed and somewhat ambiguous list. On the one hand the documentary presents the feisty mayor's accomplishments that put brought an economically failing city back to prosperity despite President Gerald Ford famously refusing to release federal money to bail it out. On the other hand it keeps bringing up blows to the Koch administration like the alienating of the black population and the scandal of a prominent official who committed suicide after being exposed as receiving thousands in bribes. Koch wasn't good at smoothing things over.

This film sketches the disastrous state New York was in when Koch took over as mayor, as well as some background on his own earlier life, but where it excels is as a compendium of the mayor's verbal debates with all and sundry, as well as many comments in interviews recently granted in his modest lower Fifth Avenue flat and in the back of limos. Koch admits he loves the city. He recalls flying back to it at night, looking out, and declaring with his broad smile, "This is mine." He loves to talk. He loves the limelight. The latter taste explains how Koch could have remained busy into his seventies and eighties as a TV figure, movie critic, and active endorser of other candidates, including (crossing his democratic line) Bloomberg for mayor and Bush for president -- seemingly anything that would keep his name in the papers. He thrived on the limelight and craved constant feedback, though his public mantra, "How am I doin'?" tended to be largely rhetorical, and sometimes backfired. Where Barsky is less effective is in providing a sense of the mood, style, and major events of the period of Koch's reign as mayor of New York, which could have been far richer.

The fascination of Ed Koch is that just as he kept his sexuality under wraps, at least while in office, he remained fascinatingly unclassifiable for most of his career. Hard to know how to take him. He can be very annoying, but then he can make you smile, and you never feel that he is a mean man, at heart. His sheer joie de vivre is infectious, and rare in these ponderous times. Ideologically, moreover, he represents the kind of politically mixed figure that has become more common of late in big city mayors, one who blends fiscal conservatism and social liberalism, thus marginally maintaining the viability of a working class and middle class population while providing the rich with incentives to want to stay around.

Koch debuted at the Hamptons Festival, October 2012, and began a limited release 1 and 15 January 2013.
_________
For a feature story (finally) on Koch's longtime closeted homosexuality, see "The Secrets of Ed Koch" in The New York Times, May 8, 2022.

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.