IT’S A BEAUTIFUL SHIP. PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE LOOMING ICEBERG: Alexandra Pechman Came of Age in Early Aughts New York — Her First Feature Magazine Tackles the Time with a Light Touch.
When lockdown hit in March 2020, journalist-turned-filmmaker Alexandra Pechman couldn’t help but get a little nostalgic for the good old days. Who didn’t?
“We couldn’t really look forward, so a lot of people were looking back. We were all inside and everyone was feeling so nostalgic and reading old journals and diaries and talking to people from the past,” Pechman told IndieWire in her first long-form interview for her first feature film, “Magazine.” “I was also looking back at what my career had been, and I kept going back to that kind of cusp-y time at the beginning of my career in magazines. It was the last gasp of the Old World, and so it was that feeling of this complicated nostalgia of, ‘Oh, I really miss that time, but also that time was not great for me or people like me, and why do I miss that?’”
The world of “Magazine” was pulled from Pechman’s own early career in journalism, notably pre-#MeToo. As a young writer in the late aughts, she published stories in Vogue, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker, and was a staffer at The Paris Review, Aperture, and W magazine. By 2019, Pechman had sold her first script and joined the WGA. And she was trying to get comfy with the idea that, as her filmmaking career was on the rise, she was going to have to say goodbye to journalism.
Her big farewell: a delightfully winsome, extremely smart first feature, captures the specifics of the time (it’s set in 2011) while hinting at what very much needs to change in the years to come. The film stars Lily McInerny as starry-eyed poet Nora, who alights on a summer internship at the lauded lit mag Platen, where she meets fellow interns, played by Lukita Maxwell, Ruby Cruz, and Daniel Zolghadri, plus an alluring older editor, played by Joshuah Melnick.
As John Podhoretz tweets:
In 2011, when I reviewed The September Issue, a cringe-inducing documentary starring Anna Wintour and the staffers of Vogue, I wrote:
It’s a fascinating time capsule of a film, sort of the Titanic or Last Days of Pompeii of the New York magazine industry. And beyond the world of Vogue depicted in the movie itself, of a supremely competent insular liberal Masters of the Universe worldview just before the lights went out on the world’s economy, and elites got what they wanted in the years that followed — good and hard, as Mencken would say. President Obama likes to say that Americans have been pretty soft in recent years; he need only watch this film to see how right he was about his core constituency. When Occupy Wall Street complains of “The One Percent” and their enormous wealth, well, come and see the plutocratic excess inherent in the system.
Still though, forget ‘80s nostalgia. I can understand early 2010s nostalgia among coddled leftists when compared with the autophagy they’re faced with today: “You Better Get Ready for … War”: Socialists Call for “War in the Streets” and the End of Capitalism. “‘The Democrats cannot be reasoned with. They must be destroyed.’ There is little subtlety in the message, [University of California Santa Barbara History Professor Butch Ware] has explained: ‘You cannot call yourself a revolutionary and not be talking about training with weapons.’”
