DOOMED BOURGEOIS IN LOVE
T H E   I N T R O D U C T I O N

AT WHIT'S END — Mark C. Henrie

DOOMED. BOURGEOIS. IN LOVE.
With those words, used in advertising copy to promote the 1990 Academy Award-nominated Metropolitan, Whit Stillman debuted his peculiar comic genius. At once class-conscious, theory-laden, nostalgically romantic, and deflatingly ironic, Stillman has charmed thousands (though he doubtless hoped for millions) of viewers. Such enchantment is an unexpected sensation for today's ironical "bourgeois bohemians," who are otherwise given to dismissing sentimentality in art. The affectionate mood so successfully conveyed by the films thus presents a puzzle, as does the maze of hyper-reflective dialogue which tends to overshadow the plots—perhaps by design. At first amused by the earnest conversations of his characters, we begin at length to realize that Stillman is playing a deeper game than we had suspected. Themselves charmed, and therefore intrigued, by Stillman's art, the writers gathered here have each applied their considerable critical intelligences in an effort to uncover the purposes so cleverly hidden in the comedy.

Nicely turned out in dinner jackets and evening gowns, Stillman's smart set in Metropolitan discourse loquaciously—and in self-consciously perfect syntax—about their own demise. The film takes us into the privileged drawing rooms of Manhattan's Upper East Side during the Christmas debutante season where, to our surprise, we encounter "basically...good [people]."* It would appear that the only villain in this world of mannered innocents is a titled German aristocrat who mocks manners as something unserious. But there is another villain: time itself. The timeless moment of "the season" passes, dissolving the Sally Fowler Rat Pack. But more seriously, as the grand social theorizing which constitutes an astonishing portion of the film's dialogue suggests, the passage of historical time seems to doom those echoes of chivalric romance which stir at least a few of these quasi-aristocratic souls. Yet "doomed" is not the last word here; love is.

Barcelona (1994) then chronicles the encounter of two very American cousins with the wiles and seductions of an old Europe now promiscuously new. While both manners and morals give rise to comic inversions, the serious question the film raises concerns the nature of patriotism as a human excellence. The radical Spanish journalist's cosmopolitan sophistication neglects the fact that cultured prosperity is secured by the unsophisticated courage of those who are willing to put themselves at physical risk for the defense of others. And as American boys winning the hands of Spanish women in marriage demonstrates in the end, the love of familiar ways is no insuperable bar to an attraction for the Other.

The conclusion of Stillman's trilogy, The Last Days of Disco (1998), portrays a group of Harvard graduates in their first jobs after college who take up with two Hampshire graduates working in publishing. Where for others the disco scene involved an unrestrained embrace of the culture of sex and drugs, here the main attraction is "the exchange of ideas and points of view"—on such subjects as the interpretation of animated Disney features—and the return of the civilizing influence of music one can dance to. The heroine, whose virtues exceed all others in her social group, learns at last that love is a grace which can perfect us as it overcomes our amour propre. But what is more, we learn in the film that beyond all manners and convention, this grace abounds for those who have ears to hear.

What brings unity to these films as a trilogy is of course Stillman's filmmaking art, an unostentatious realism that turns our attention to what his characters are saying—to the word. But the other source of unity is the human type they chronicle. The urban haute bourgeoisie (or "U.H.B." or "uhbs") as they are called in Metropolitan were known in "better" days simply as the gentlefolk. Democratic and meritocratic America has never had much time for gentility, and radical ideologies in principle despise the well-born. For these reasons, the gentlefolk tend to appear in our popular art either as villains or as fools. But Stillman's films insist that there were (and are) true virtues to be found in this class and its ideals. The manners of Metropolitan, the courage of Barcelona, the opening to grace of Last Days—each captures a facet of a kind of knight-errantry which is a permanent human possibility. And by the genius of Stillman's irony, he has shown the humane gentleness of his subjects in such a way that we end up simply liking them, despite all our prejudices against them. Villains they are not, and their foolishness is readily forgiven.

Stillman himself is from an elite socio-economic background. He is a graduate of Harvard College who has lived in Barcelona and once worked in publishing. He has an enduring appreciation for disco music. Clearly, he writes about what he knows. But in so doing, he has hit upon an exceptionally useful device to explore the possibilities and limitations, in a democratic age, of human beings as such. In each of his films, Stillman provides a highly reflective portrayal of the lives, loves, and longings of the high-born class who in another time would have been the serenely self-confident carriers of aristocratic tradition. Under democracy, the status of this class is profoundly in doubt—as are the very ideals and virtues that the aristocrats claimed to represent. While necessarily touched by anxiety, Stillman's young men and women at least remain aware of a rumor of the noble and the gracious, of the higher things which are properly human. Thus, oddly, Stillman's rare specimens may be closer to human nature than are we. But like all of us, the gentlefolk suffer the disorientation of modernity, the loss of tradition. The perplexity that animates each of Stillman's films is how to find our way, how to live well, when the cake of custom has been broken. And what is most striking in Stillman as he confronts our common predicament is his standpoint of gentle hope.

Each film in the trilogy concerns an ending, a passing away. In Metropolitan, the characters lament that they are living through the last debutante season as they know it, one already "pretty much reduced" from earlier years. Barcelona takes place in "the last decade of the Cold War." And a sense of ending is explicit in the faux-apocalyptic title of The Last Days of Disco. In each of the films a wistful nostalgia colors everything. While our progressive civilization dismisses "mere" nostalgia out of hand, Stillman strives to give nostalgia its due. For such a feeling arises from a powerful intuition of the human good which is revealed in its passing away. Knowledge of that passing good should stir us to affection—and away from cynicism—for to know the human good is to know an essence that can never finally pass away. History does not have the last word. As Ted Boynton explains in Barcelona, Americans are denigrated in Europe because it is known they love hamburgers, which are terrible in Europe. But hamburgers really are great in America, and "it is that ideal burger of memory we crave." Great burgers, of course, are real. Perhaps so too our longings for a remembered, better past also point to something real. Such a comic sensibility can lead us beyond nostalgia and pain of loss: it contains the germ of action. The great critic Allen Tate glimpsed as much when he observed, "The most that we can do with the past is to salvage what is good in the present and hold on to it; and that creates a new past."

Now, such ponderous thoughts must not obscure the fact that Stillman's films are comedies. They are usually thought to be comedies of manners, but that is likely not correct. In a typical comedy of manners, conventional people confront situations which try the resources of conventional manners to the breaking point. But this is not the source of the delight in Stillman's films. How could it be in an age which has unsettled all manners, when there are no conventional resources to be tapped, let alone strained? Stillman's characters, moreover, are self-conscious about the plight of convention in the modern world in a way which unsuits them to the traditional unreflective roles in a comedy of manners. If anything, Stillman's films might be classified as comedies of mannerlessness. And yet, they are not grim or black comedies; far from it.

That we live in a time of disruption, of the hollowing out of old beliefs, manners, and traditions, is an intuition shared by many twentieth-century artists in every field and of every political persuasion. Such a diagnosis of the age lay behind T. S. Eliot's great modernist poem, "The Wasteland." The same view inspired abstract expressionism in the visual arts as well as the American dramatists of mid-century. Such an intuition leads many architects today to build avowedly ugly buildings, since to do otherwise (it is said) would be to "hide" the harsh realities of modern life with mere "pastiche." In an age of spiritual crisis, confident and celebratory genres such as the epic become an impossibility. As these examples indicate, a discordant and tragic retelling of the human condition would seem in the first instance to be the appropriate artistic response to the disruptive spirits of the late-modern or postmodern age. But that is not Stillman's response. While seeming to agree substantially with this diagnosis of our spiritual malady, Stillman's comic art resembles instead that of the novelist Walker Percy. In fact, the title of one of Percy's comic masterpieces, Love in the Ruins, captures nicely the essence of Stillman's trilogy. We may hope for redemption after all.

In his warmly affectionate embrace of all his flawed and sometimes foolish characters, in his abiding hope in the power of friendship and love, and in the chorus of quixotic commentary that peppers the dialogue, Stillman reveals himself as something like a latter-day Christian humanist. Perhaps in an age such as ours, it is not tragedy but comedy which is the truly illuminating artistic response. Not the ridicule-ridden ancient comedy of an Aristophanes, but the gentle and ironic comedy of a Thomas More. When the action of Stillman's trilogy is arranged chronologically, Barcelona, not Last Days, is the final act; and as in Shakespeare, the comedy concludes with a multiple marriage—an affirmation of the potentially sublime goodness of human love. At present such comedy is a rarified taste, but its discreet charm may lead one day to a common grace.

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