Spike Lee’s New Short Film Is the Celebration New York Deserves

Let’s be honest: New York isn’t—can’t possibly be—what it once was. To be fair, though, people have been deploying some variation on that complaint since there was a New York to speak of, and the city and its denizens have been defying stereotypes for just as long. It’s natural that many New Yorkers have felt mournful of late (how could they not?), but a brand-new short film from director Spike Lee has taken a decidedly different tack.

With Frank Sinatra’s “New York New York” blaring over images of iconic New York attractions that quickly give way to images of field hospitals in Central Park and health care workers in masks, the nearly four-minute video feels like a much-needed show of faith that New York will absorb this crisis into its DNA and eventually come out on the other side, somber but still fundamentally itself. And really, who better to send that message than Lee, one of the city’s most keen-eyed observers?

Watch the full video below.

Being offered a glimpse at Lee’s New York has made me reflect on mine, as so many residents are currently doing. I grew up in the city, and my version of it was never about gleaming skyscrapers and refined trips to the Met: It was the early-morning subway rides to school frantically doing my algebra homework between the 1 train’s vibrations, the bodega on the corner where I bought my best friend a copy of Playgirl for her 18th birthday, the drunken 2 a.m. trips to the hole-in-the-wall South Asian joint in the East Village where cabbies went to fill up on chana masala and dal between shifts.

What I miss most about normal life in New York right now aren’t the grand, sweeping experiences that make you sure you’ll never live anywhere else, the ones that Lee so expertly captures at the start of his video. Those are wonderful, of course, but right now, I miss the smaller, more routine moments. I long to pack a bar’s back patio with my friends, but even more acutely, I long for the tiny gestures of neighborliness that New Yorkers are so adept at showing one another when nobody is watching.

I wish I could go back in time to late February or early March and thank more profusely those who made my pre-pandemic city feel like home, from the servers at my favorite diner who never rolled their eyes when I showed up thrice weekly to each and every stranger who (without being asked) helped me haul a recalcitrant two-year-old’s stroller up the subway stairs during my sweaty summers of babysitting.

For now, financial shows of support—from tipping big on delivery orders to donating to mutual aid funds for my laid-off media colleagues to helping feed essential workers—will have to take the place of in-person gratitude, and I plan to continue it long after the peak of this pandemic has passed.

I genuinely believe the COVID-19 crisis has presented us all with a new definition of what it means to be a good citizen, and taking my cues from Spike Lee, I have to trust that New Yorkers are up to the challenge—not because Andrew Cuomo or Bill de Blasio or any other government figure believes in us, but because we believe in each other.

Originally Appeared on Vogue