Whit Stillman's Metropolitan
Middlebrow art as the proper reflection of the middle class society
So here’s the new podcast: Sam Goldman & I talk about Whit Stillman—the twilight of the preppie class. WASPs who at their height led America through WWII were soon after reduced to democracy & humbled in the transformations of the 60s. The confidence that the behavior & ideas of gentlemen mattered was broken; the remnants of that consensus were gradually rendered obsolete until, by 1990, all that was left was, on the one hand, the late G.H.W. Bush, & on the other, Whit Stillman.
American democracy, however, looks as confused & lost today as the young bourgeois in love did in this movie 30 years ago—behold the longing for tradition & for a return to a European past, whether artistic or religious, which has gotten so strong & public that it’s time to revisit the only honest view of such souls cinema offers America.
Stillman is the most Tocquevillian artist of his generation, a gentle adherent of democracy who was brought up with some of the taste or sensibility of the American aristocracy & who seems to have preferred France to America, living mostly in self-imposed exile. Too decent for Hollywood, too conservative for American publishing, & not harsh enough for the new conservative populism. Still, he is a good teacher about the concealed longings for love & friendship of Americans who have any talent or pride, & partly that’s because he is dedicate to middlebrow, the form of poetry that best fits the middle-class republic.
On the dramatic date issue (7:00): right on, Mr. Goldman. My just published chapter "Social Dance in the Films of Whit Stillman" takes all of the evidence from the trilogy and the LDoD novelization and proves that it has to be a Christmas season of '68, '69, '70, or '71.
Carl, I take it you take the mention of Bunuel's 1972 film as a writer's joke?