DOOMED BOURGEOIS IN LOVE
Essays on the Films of Whit Stillman
Edited by Mark C. Henrie
List Item No. 307a
ISBN: 1-882926-70-6 (paper)
192 pages
List Price: $14.95
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Critics have praised the films of writer/director Whit Stillman for their exceptionally intelligent portrayal of the lives and loves of the "urban haute bourgeoisie." His three comedies of manners—"Metropolitan," "Barcelona," and "The Last Days of Disco"—sparkle with urbane and ironic wit. In Doomed Bourgeois in Love, the traditionalist social critic Mark C. Henrie brings together a collection of political theorists, literary critics, and classicists to explore the meaning of Stillman's films. These essays contend that Stillman's art is an effort to "ironize" our ironic age; as such, they constitute a major achievement of Christian humanism in our time.
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What They're Saying...
"[Stillman is] one of the wittiest filmmakers of his generation, or any other. And now he is the subject of a book of essays, a few of which are high-minded enough to make a doctoral candidate blush. The contributors...have a great many shrewd and illuminating things to say about Stillman and his art; and if they sometimes lapse into overseriousness, it is the vice of a virtue, which is that they take him very seriously indeed. [Stillman] is the poet of their touching plight, and Doomed Bourgeois in Love pays due tribute to the singular subtlety with which he has given it voice."
— National Review
"One often hears literate people sigh, 'Why are movies today so awful? What happened to dialogue, to manners, to moral depth?' Then along came Whit Stillman, whose movie Metropolitan instantly demonstrated that, against all odds, it was still possible to make movies that were both serious and fun, mannerly and full of life. Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco confirmed the triumph. Whit Stillman is already a national treasure. This fine collection of essays, as wide-ranging as they are well written, does what the best criticism always does: whets one's appetite for Whit. This is a book to be read in daylight hours; in the evening, you will want to watch and rewatch the films of a young American master."
— Roger Kimball, The New Criterion
"Anyone who enjoys Whit Stillman's movies-which really ought to be everyone, East Side, West Side, Uptown, Downtown—will be grateful for this thoughtful and highly readable collection of essays on his art and inner meanings."
— Christopher Buckley, author, Wry Martinis and Thank You for Smoking
"Stillman is the poet of the broken branches, of the fragmentary remains of the old, unpoliticized culture which both he and his most articulate characters continue to believe was not what present-day ideologues think it was but what the people who developed it over the centuries thought it was. In other words, Stillman stand for the right of the past not to be colonized by the present..."
— James Bowman, American Editor, Times Literary Supplement
"Stillman is the Balzac of the ironic class, the Dickens of people with too much inner life."
— Stephen Hunter, The Washington Post
"If F. Scott Fitzgerald were to return to life, he would feel at home in a Whit Stillman movie. Stillman listens to how people talk, and knows what it reveals about them. His characters have been supplied by their Ivy League schools with the techniques but not the subjects of intelligent conversation, and so they discuss "The Lady and the Tramp" with the kind of self-congratulatory earnestness that French students would reserve for Marx and Freud."
— Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Contributors Include:
- Joseph Alulis
- James Bowman
- E. Christian Kopff
- Peter Augustine Lawler
- Mary P. Nichols
- Lauren Weiner
- David M. Whalen
- R. V. Young
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