The Dancing Bourgeois

My Whit Stillman opinions... let me show you them

Creatures, I wrote this for magazine publication and it got turned down for being too inside-baseball. I don’t have time to do a full rewrite and also, you know where inside baseball goes? This newsletter, that’s where. I don’t fully agree with my final paragraph (I’m right about which of Stillman’s movies are best and which one is not good though). I enjoyed writing this, and I hope you get a kick out of it too.

One night during the deb season of 1969, Whit Stillman got press-ganged into going to a party: “My best friend’s mother from high school called me and said, ‘Can you and Tony take Suzy to this dance?” Stillman’s 1960s had, so far, been a welter of self-serious left-wing politics that distorted the lives and psyches of their hagridden adherents—Dostoyevsky’s Demons with the violence turned inward. When the reluctant escort entered the world of the debutante balls, it struck him as—and he knows how this sounds—a haven of lucidity. Twenty years later, Stillman recreated that swank and sinking Atlantis for his first film, Metropolitan, a romantic comedy about a young socialist (more precisely, a Fourierist) who winds up at a deb afterparty when the partygoers steal his taxi. Metropolitan introduced audiences to Stillman’s obsessions, each enough on their own to fuel a full career, and only becoming more kaleidoscopically weird in conjunction: failure, dance, sympathy for folly.

Four films and the pilot for a failed (or at least, unmade) television series later, Stillman’s work remains a souffle-light confection of irony and moralism, full of dancing prigs and wise ingenues. Now Fireflies Press, in collaboration with the Marseille International Film Festival, has brought out Not so long ago, a slender fuchsia volume dedicated to Stillman’s work: something between a scrapbook and a festschrift. There are short essays, a handful of film-related book reviews by Stillman, casting-call notes and manuscript notes and a fan letter from Patricia Highsmith. The memorabilia, which all concern Metropolitan, won’t tell fans anything we didn’t already know, but there are some pleasurable notes on how Stillman conceived the characters in this first film of his “Doomed Bourgeois in Love” trilogy: Charlie Black is “[c]alled ‘the preppie Spengler’ for his principal theory that they are all doomed to failure”; the Fourierist Tom Townsend “enters group as distant outsider with anti-social chip on his shoulder. By end of week two, as old order disintegrates, he finds himself a pillar of the old values.”

The essays are the usual mixed bag. There are small jewels, like Nick Pinkerton’s summary at the end of the introduction, “He is not a punitive artist”; or Serge Bozon’s, “He is a great filmmaker with a tiny world.” There are even moments where the essayists’ insight into Stillman’s world can provoke deeper reflection, as when Bozon notes, “[W]hat Stillman brings to life is not so much a story as a series of doubts, snippets of conversation and gossip, which is why he almost exclusively films party scenes.” The epistemology of the afterparty—yes, that sounds about right for this filmmaker whose compositions so often include eavesdroppers and interlopers. Even the essay with the most overegged prose, Félix Rehm’s meditation on the role of words and labels (“The words form a spinning top that refuses to fall into the thing it designates—in this case, the genesis of a norm, the imposition of a collective imaginary”), rises to an appreciation of dance as the source of community without labels, happiness without personae: a “miracle.”

Every Stillman film has a communal dance scene, including his two masterpieces of the form, the “Love Train” that takes over New York City at the end of Last Days of Disco and the sun-soaked fantasy “Sambola” in Damsels in Distress. These communal dances do not provoke, and aren’t filmed as, communal ecstasy, but are instead a form in which our individual, absurd longings take on a beautiful order. Ecstasy in Stillman’s films is always momentary and ridiculous: the quintessential Stillman moment is the bit in Barcelona when the buttoned-up sales executive, who reads Ecclesiastes hidden inside this month’s Economist, gets his Bible and his jazz records out and begins to dance around his apartment, mixing Qoheleth and “Pennsylvania 6-5000.” In the interview with Cyril Neyrat, Stillman notes that his dialogue tends to avoid direct emotion, “whereas the music that we like is full of emotion.”

Music is also often where Stillman touches a religious chord: As he notes, “The [Doomed Bourgeois in Love] trilogy starts and ends with a hymn.” This aspect of Stillman’s work receives no attention whatsoever in Not so long ago. Neyrat swerves away from the mention of hymns with, “Let’s return to the nightclub,” and in the essay entitled “Belief in a Higher Power,” that power is either dance or, possibly, Greta Gerwig’s “tender, slightly melancholy gaze.”

The heart of the book Neyrat’s long interview with Stillman, which offers insights into the autobiographical, technical, and philosophical elements of his films. Sometimes all three elements come together: Metropolitan, whose evocative opening title card gives the volume its name, feels timeless, in part because Stillman “couldn’t represent [1966 – 1974, the actual time period he was imagining] with our budget and I wasn’t really interested in making a period film.” This practical limitation meant that “everyone thought the film was about their own time,” with one viewer even feeling “like he had returned to the fifties”! I confess that I always assumed it was meant to take place in the early ’80s—in part because of the repeated, casual references to parental divorce, one of the consistent markers of Gen X culture. But Stillman was born in 1952; his parents, it turns out, broke up before everybody’s did. The end of deb culture, unhooked from 1960s period detail, becomes a synecdoche for all endings, all our vanished worlds, even our doomed bourgeois bodies. As the Fourierist Tom Townsend (Edward Clements) argues, “Everyone ceases to exist. That doesn’t mean everyone’s a failure.”

The interview explores Stillman’s influences (Scott Fitzgerald, The Mary Tyler Moore Show), and then proceeds in roughly chronological order through the filmography. Stillman says that he raised the question of preppie decline explicitly in Metropolitan in part “to make the audience not hate the characters too much. They are all doomed, why hate them?” But he also argues that “the psychology of decline exists in this class. The certainty that whatever our parents have, we will have much less.” (This certainty, and the response of irony and resignation rather than resentment, are further elements that make Metropolitan feel so Gen X.) Neyrat notes the balanced composition of Metropolitan’s shots, and Stillman elaborates that it was important to him, “this rigour, this elegance.”

Sometimes Stillman validates my own reactions. Barcelona, Stillman’s second film, has some great lines (“I don’t go to bed with just anyone anymore. I have to be attracted to them sexually”) and line readings (“Where are the red ants?”), and that one perfect jazz-Bible scene. But overall it feels a bit crude. The culture-clash jokes are predictable, the girls are one-note, and the politics are a little too easy. Everybody says facha, or fascist, but nobody says “Franco.” Stillman calls it “caricatural” and notes, “It’s the film that now is most removed from my point of view, my vision of the world.”

With Damsels in Distress, Neyrat and Stillman identify what makes the film sing: Cinematographer Doug Emmett’s “amazing” backlighting, making the scenes glow to the point of overexposure—a film technique conveying overwhelming joy, in a movie about suicidal depression. Greta Gerwig is equally luminous as Violet, the leader of a color-coordinated band of co-eds, seeking love among the lunkheads and trying to prevent suicide with scented soaps and dance practice. It’s a joking-not-joking riff on Dostoyevsky’s famous line, “Beauty will save the world.” The humor is unusually broad for Stillman and unusually risque, but there’s a gentleness in this story about people changing for the better. The frat bro who never learned his colors ends up identifying the whole rainbow! Violet is one of Stillman’s perfect Moebius strips, whose folly is always also her wisdom.

The Last Days of Disco is my vote for Stillman’s masterpiece: his tightest storyline, with his most distinctive set of characters; the final pairings (or likely future pairings) link virtue to virtue and vice to vice without lessening our sympathy for either. Modest Alice (Chloe Sevigny) is also foolish, and undergoes suffering that allows her to understand the insufficiently-prosecutorial assistant district attorney Josh (Matt Keeslar). Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) and Des (Chris Eigeman) are much crueler than Stillman’s usual fools, their folly blurring into wickedness. And yet Beckinsale and Eigeman give these glib, self-justifying creatures an ingenuous charm. Charlotte’s vain, envious performance of “Amazing Grace” touches something more sublime than she can recognize; Des’s deciduous self-awareness provokes his glorious rebuttal of Polonius’s platitude, “To thine own self be true.” Stillman proved in Barcelona that he knows how to deal out just enough punishment to justify his films’ reconciliations. By the end everybody’s unemployed (except Alice, her career launched by an ethically-dubious rebranding of a fraudulent memoir), Des is angling to make Charlotte his future ex-wife and/or sponsee—and an entire subway train comes together to dance.

Jane Austen has been a touchstone throughout Stillman’s career, usually to brilliant effect. He started with Audrey (Carolyn Farina) in Metropolitan defending Mansfield Park right before she and her friends unwittingly reenact one of its subplots—a touching and insightful updating that proves Audrey’s point that Jane Austen might understand our world better than we understand her work. 2016’s Love and Friendship is Stillman’s first Austen adaptation—and his weakest thing by far, though I’m the only person who thinks so. The period setting makes Stillman’s characteristically stilted dialogue feel expected, rather than individual: “What you say surprises me,” which would be an endearingly bookish phrasing from Audrey, here tells us something we already knew about the setting rather than something we didn’t know about the character. Neither youth nor warmth leaven Lady Susan’s (Kate Beckinsale) self-absorption. The pure characters are bland and the fool is merely stupid.

Stillman at one point calls Metropolitan “class porn,” but he’s at his best observing the specifics of the cashless bourgeois: the ironing board, the unemployment office. People call him a moral filmmaker, and he is, but he’s an even better observer of the folly of all our attempts to be both virtuous and happy. People call him old-fashioned, but his sensibility has always felt younger than his age. In Not so long ago, they call him a “puritan” (they mean he believes in modesty), but his most memorably religious moments are weird, sublime, and often embarrassing, rather than moral.

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that this Austen-inspired filmmaker struggled (again, no one else agrees) to make an Austen film. Maybe he loved her work too much. Stillman has always been at his best when he loves ironically—when he takes both sides in all those afterparty arguments.

Photo of a defender of the bourgeoisie (this is not a particularly bourgeois pastime) via Wikimedia Commons.