Class Clown
Considering Whit Stillman.

By Terry Teachout, Commentary’s music critic, is writing a biography of H. L. Mencken.
February 9-10, 2002

Doomed Bourgeois in Love: Essays on the Films of Whit Stillman, edited by Mark C. Henrie (ISI, 176 pp., $14.95)

hirteen years ago — that can't be right, but I'm afraid it is — I was running a monthly cocktail party-salon headquartered in an Upper East Side townhouse that had once belonged to Alan Jay Lerner. One evening, I showed up to unlock the bar and saw to my amazement that the room in which we gathered each month was full of strange-looking equipment, and the furniture draped with white sheets. Upon further inquiry, I learned that our digs would be temporarily doubling after hours as an interior for a movie, written and directed by a casual acquaintance of mine. People one knew didn't make movies back in 1989, nor did the acquaintance in question seem even slightly plausible in the role of auteur. Little did we know that our meeting place that night would come to be revered by independent-movie buffs as the home of the Sally Fowler Rat Pack, the anxiously earnest young debs and escorts of Whit Stillman's Metropolitan. The rest is cinematic history. Stillman shot Metropolitan on a shoestring, and followed up with two even more personal movies, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco, completing a trilogy that has long since established him as one of the wittiest filmmakers of his generation, or any other. He is the sort of person who would get a MacArthur grant if they gave MacArthur grants to people like him (though every once in a while, believe it or not, they do). My guess is that a quarter-century from now, he'll be talked about the way today's critics talk about, oh, Billy Wilder. 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.

Doomed Bourgeois in Love contains an introduction, nine new essays, and four previously published reviews. The contributors range from impeccably usual suspects to a number of smart people whose names I didn't know. All agree that Stillman is the real deal, though some of them, as Lauren Weiner admits in her very fine consideration of his use of irony, "run the risk of investigating away all the charm" of his films. One essay (not hers) starts out like this: "'Amerika, du hast es besser!' Goethe exclaimed." Yikes!

In between these occasional miscalculations, the authors 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. For Whit Stillman is a comedian of the best kind, one with a highly developed moral imagination: His films are rooted in a clear-eyed understanding of just how hard it has become for nice young men and women to figure out the right thing to do in a culture without rules. As Mark C. Henrie, the editor, explains, "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. . . . Perhaps in an age such as ours, it is not tragedy but comedy which is the mature response."

Much of the book is devoted to this theme, and variations on it. Joseph Alulis, for instance, reads Metropolitan as a "defense of virtue," while Peter Augustine Lawler, in "Nature, Grace, and The Last Days of Disco," contends that Stillman's films are "rather Socratic, Christian, and at least ambiguously conservative." Fortunately, several essays range further afield, among them George Sim Johnston's "Whit Stillman, Novelist," a review of Stillman's novelization of The Last Days of Disco. Unlike most critics, Johnston saw that the book — far from being a casual knockoff of the screenplay — was in fact a fully imagined reconception of the film, worthy of consideration in its own right as a freestanding work of literary art:

[The film's metamorphosis into the book] is as miraculous and unexpected as anything in Ovid. It is as though the author had a burden of social knowledge that he could not fully discharge in one medium and so turned into a novelist to get the job fully done. If Stillman's movies remind you of a European art film that is actually fun, this novel puts one in mind of the good old days of elegant social fiction-of Wharton and Fitzgerald, Marquand and Cheever.

At the same time, Johnston's typically acute review points to a weakness of Doomed Bourgeois in Love, which is that many of the contributors are not especially responsive to the specifically cinematic aspect of Stillman's work. With a few notable exceptions, they seem to think of his films as more or less equivalent to their scripts: an admiring but equally misguided inversion of one of the two criticisms leveled most frequently at Stillman, which is that his characters are too talky (a "defect" about which he is rightly unapologetic).

As it happens, the screenplays of Metropolitan and Barcelona have been published, and to read them is to see at once that he really does think in theatrical terms, if not necessarily visual ones (though he is marvelously good at using decor to evoke a strong sense of time and place). No more than Jean Renoir or John Sayles is he interested in "pure" cinema; like them, he understands that there is more than one way to make a movie. "Some visual purists still think film is pictures at an exhibition," he once said to me in an interview. "They seem to forget that we've been making sound films ever since the Twenties. Talk is incredibly important. . . . Of course you have to be very careful with it, and I understand why all the screenwriting gurus warn against too much dialogue, but I think they're making a mistake. Even action films often have very good dialogue, though there isn't necessarily a lot of it. What's the charm of a buddy comedy? Just to see two guys shooting bullets? It's what the two guys say to each other that matters."

The other criticism, of course, is that Stillman makes movies about young people with money, which is both a silly oversimplification and — to invoke a new epithet — classist. In any case, as James Bowman points out in "Whit Stillman: Poet of the Broken Branches," he uses the besieged values of the urban haute bourgeoisie as a symbol of "a much less subjective and more accessible kind of goodness and innocence." That's what makes his sweet-tempered, souffle-light tales of uncertain youth as much a part of the indie-flick subculture as, say, Kevin Smith's Clerks (an edgy, sexually blunt comedy set in a New Jersey convenience store). Stillman's droll, oddly formal-sounding preppies and yuppies-just like Smith's grubby, potty-mouthed Gen-X slackers-are lost in postmodern America, looking for an exit sign. He 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.

EDITOR'S NOTE: NRO interviewed Whit Stillman in October of 2000. Read the interview here.