James Bowman
Whit Stillman:
Poet of the Broken Branches
It is a mistake, I think, to look at Whit “deb” parties in white tie and tails, seem to
Stillman as an apologist for what one of his have no interest in rock ‘n’ roll or much
characters in Metropolitan wanted to call popular culture subsequent to the 1950s
the Urban Haute Bourgeoisie, or UHB. and whose social chit-chat is sprinkled with
Apart from anything else, it is far from clear references to Thorstein Veblen, Lionel Trill-
whether any such thing actually exists in ing and Jane Austen. But the rarity of such
nature in the form proposed by the term’s creatures and the ideal quality of their world
inventor, Charlie Black. To Charlie, it seems is something that Stillman’s characters
to mean the same thing as WASPs, themselves seem to assume. In Charlie’s
“preppies,” or “People Like Us,” but with case, that assumption is what lies behind his
the vague expectation that the quasi-aca- prophecies of impending preppy doom. In
demic, quasi-sociological sound of “Urban Metropolitan, what binds these characters
Haute Bourgeoisie” will prevent it from together is not social class, or money, or
accruing the connotations of racialism or even their shared prep school backgrounds
snobbery which attach to the older terms. so much as the fact that they are all young
Yet there are plenty of people from any people who have taken up, in one way or
sociologically identifiable equivalent of the another, an implicitly adversarial relation-
urban haute bourgeoisie, even those who ship to the youth culture whose values pre-
have lived all their lives on the Upper East dominate among their coevals.
Side of Manhattan, who nevertheless would True, the contrast between the culture of
see the characters in Metropolitan as being these rara aves and that of their more recog-
quite as alien as they appear to most Ameri- nizable contemporaries is mostly implicit.
cans. The big dogs of the 1980s pop scene are the
This non-existence of Charlie and his barkless canines of Stillman’s film whose
friends as an identifiable social sub-class in absence helps to define in outline what a
the real world is surely the point about notional alternative to their cultural tyr-
them in the movie. It may be that there are James Bowman is the American editor of the Times
in New York (or were, as late as the 1980s) Literary Supplement, media critic for the New Crite-
young people of 20 or so who still go to rion, and film critic for the American Spectator.
THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW—Spring 2000 15
Poet of the Broken Branches by James Bowman
anny might look like. For Stillman’s real nostalgia for childhood is also a paradoxi-
purpose in inventing such outlandish char- cal longing to be shown the way out of
acters as Charlie and Tom Townsend and childhood by parents who want to be chil-
Nick Smith and Audrey Rouget is not to dren themselves. Tom and Nick in Metro-
defend some notional class of juveniles who politan discover a box of toys put out in the
are still prepared to argue the merits of the street for the trash collector. “The child-
detachable- as opposed to the soft-collared hood of our whole generation is repre-
shirt so much as it is to call such a class into sented here, and they’re just throwing it
existence. out,” laments Nick. But the more particu-
lar and poignant significance of the box
Whether or not, that is, these people ac- only becomes clear with Tom’s realization
tually exist, they are so rare that it is as if that the toys are his own and are being
they didn’t. Stillman is perhaps trying to thrown out by his divorced and remarried
disguise his and their isolation from the father, who is leaving town without telling
depressing realities of late 20th century him.
America by putting the phantom class of This too is characteristic in Stillman’s
the UHB on a par with other categories work. The childhood innocence of which
called into existence by sociological nomi- the film is so solicitous is continually under
nalists. But his subsequent films, Barcelona assault from the selfishness and sexual self-
and The Last Days of Disco make it clear that indulgence of the previous generation. It is
their real function is to give us a hard but this harder but usually hidden edge to his
not unhopeful look at the prospects for satire which saves Stillman from a J.M.
innocence in our time. By this I mean not Barrie-like idealization of childish inno-
just, or perhaps not even sexual innocence. cence. His characters’ reminiscences about
His characters all live in the ever-widening the past always have a purpose in making
wake of the sexual revolution and are not the present appear more clearly defined in
politically or spiritually self-confident its foolishness, wrong-headedness or back-
enough to set themselves up as ideologi- wardness by contrast. Thus Josh in The Last
cally-motivated opponents of that revolu- Days of Disco is remembered by the other
tion in the way that subsequently young characters, especially Des, as having stood
people have done in True Love Waits and on a table and sung the hymn by John
the pro-virginity movement. But regret for Greenleaf Whittier which begins: “Dear
lost innocence of a more general kind is such Lord and Father of Mankind, forgive our
a recurring theme for Stillman that his foolish ways.” He had to leave college for a
literary forebears would seem to be Alain- while.
Fournier and J.D. Salinger. To Des, who left Harvard for more con-
In part this is the merely sentimental ventional reasons, this was the defining
innocence enjoyed by those from well-to- moment of Josh’s life, though Josh himself
do families who have enjoyed sheltered is now inclined to play it down. He was
childhoods. But the note of nostalgia— treated for depression and is now “nor-
sometimes for a world that they themselves mal.” Yet as he gingerly explores the feelings
have never known—is seldom struck by his of Alice on the subject of his “breakdown,”
young characters without also making the Josh shows that he has forgotten none of the
serious point that they are bewildered by words to the hymn:
what it means to be an adult in a culture Breathe through the heats of our desire
dominated by the values of children. Their Thy coolness and thy balm.
16 THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW—Spring 2000
Poet of the Broken Branches by James Bowman
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire, take for granted about the world. Ted’s
Speak through the earthquake, wind and fire virtue and belief in Dale-Carnegieism is
O still small voice of calm.
mocked and disparaged while Fred’s irrev-
Whether Alice is genuinely alarmed by the erence comes up against the new pieties of
evidence of an unbalanced personality pro- what we now call “political correctness.”
vided by Josh’s impromptu recitation of The hostility that both encounter from the
these healing and comforting words or ambient culture of post-Franco Spain is
whether she only pretends to be, it is clearly what brings the two together again after an
Whit Stillman’s excellent joke about a popu- almost inevitable estrangement, uniting all
lar culture so heated by “our desire” that a that Stillman sees as being best about
longing for coolness and balm is seen as a America.
sign of madness. There is a marvelous scene early in this
This scene also furnishes a clue as to what film in which Fred tells some of the remark-
it is that prevents his idealization of the past ably pretty but “promiscuous” girls of
from degenerating into mere nostalgia. For Barcelona that his cousin “might seem like
whether it is represented by Glenn Miller in a typical American, like a big, unsophisti-
Barcelona or the hymns in Metropolitan and cated child, but he’s far more complex than
Last Days, or by the disco music of the latter, that.” Not only is he “an admirer of the
the idealized past nearly always stands for Marquis de Sade and a follower of Dr.
a much less subjective and more accessible Johnson” whose nickname is punta de
kind of goodness and innocence. In diamante, but he wears tight leather thongs
Barcelona, for example, the lost ideal is under his clothes to give himself a masoch-
political innocence, in the sense of a belief in istic thrill as he dances. As intended, the
the essential benevolence of American girls are impressed, but the joke is on them.
power in the world—which was becoming Fred takes advantage of their own childish
as rare or rarer than sexual innocence by credulity about American childishness to
the late 1970s or early 1980s when the film show that they are in fact the “unsophisti-
is set. The belief in love, friendship and the cated” ones, easily seduced by false tales of
American world-imperium all come to- perverted sexual practices and psychologi-
gether in that film as part of a complex cal “complexity” because the straightfor-
which Stillman presents to us as a bulwark wardness and plain-dealing of Ted as he
against the prevailing cynicism. This he really is is beyond their comprehension.
does in the same spirit of gentle self-defla- Later, Fred defends his lies to Ted by
tion with which Nick offers his defense of saying: “Do you think any even mildly cool
preppy-culture and Josh offers his of disco- trade fair girl would give you the time of day
culture—that is with assurances that they if she knew the pathetic, Bible-dancing
believe at least some of what they say. goody-goody you really are?” But he also
In some ways, Barcelona is the most points to the dilemma that confronts them
ambitious of the three films. It presents us both when he adds that there are books and
with two American archetypes: Ted movies about sado-masochism. “At least
Boynton and his cousin Fred, the one an people into S and M have a tradition!” he
earnest, upright, hard-working Puritan and calls out—unlike, that is, the victims of the
the other an irreverent, iconoclastic, good- American cultural shipwreck of the 1970s
time guy. Both of them have to come to who are forced to invent their own tradi-
terms with a culture which is at best bewil- tions—perhaps something like Ted’s weird
dered by and at worst hostile to all that they practice of dancing (alone) to the music of
THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW—Spring 2000 17
Poet of the Broken Branches by James Bowman
Glenn Miller while reading the Bible. Like- unpoliticized culture which both he and his
wise, in The Last Days of Disco, the young most articulate characters continue to be-
professionals take up the dance craze of the lieve was not what present-day ideologues
1970s as heralding (falsely, as it turns out) think it was but what the people who devel-
a return to the courtship rituals of their oped it over the centuries thought it was.
parents—or even their grandparents. In other words, Stillman stands for the
All these characters constitute not some right of the past not to be colonized by the
identifiable Urban Haute Bourgeoisie de- present, not to be politicized by what in
fined by income, education, or ethnicity, historical terms is our very parochial ten-
but Stillman’s representatives of the or- dency to see all things in terms of power
phans of the sexual and, at least partly, distribution. Even when his characters are
political revolutions of the 1960s. Their political, like Tom in Metropolitan, their
cause is not the retention of entrenched views are likely to be expressed in the most
power or privilege but the right to hold on quaint and old-fashioned ways. Tom is a
follower of Charles Fourier (1772-
Courtesy of Castle Rock Entertainment.
1837), the French utopian social-
ist and author of Le Nouveau monde
industriel who was the inspiration
for Brook Farm. When Charlie
points out that Brook Farm ceased
to exist and therefore Fourierism
was a failure, Tom quietly replies:
“Everyone ceases to exist; that
doesn’t mean everyone’s a failure.”
Although Tom abandons his
Fourierism by the end of the film,
Writer-director Whit Stillman (right) pauses from shooting The his forlorn clinging to a long-out-
Last Days of Disco (1998) on the New York Subway. dated creed is treated with typical
respect by Stillman. Later it is Tom
to customs and beliefs that they persist in himself who has to be put right by Audrey
believing to be something more than the when he tells her that “nearly everything
ideology of a ruling class. For the popular that Jane Austen wrote looks ridiculous
culture has tended to adopt the Marxist- from today’s perspective.”
Leninist view of American power as impe- “Has it ever occurred to you,” she replies
rialist just as it has the weird, Freudian- with her own version of Stillmanian quixo-
feminist view of traditional sexual morality tism, “that today from Jane Austen’s per-
and courtship customs as “repressive.” spective would look even worse?”
More recently it has been picking up aca- There is an interesting inversion of this
demic-Marxist views about the old bour- remark in Barcelona,when Ted observes to
geois high culture of Dr. Johnson and Jane Fred that the sexual revolution lately came
Austen. Scarcely knowing what they were to post-Franco Spain has turned the world
doing, the carriers of the popular culture upside down. “Has it ever occurred to you
have cut a swath through the old culture, that the world was upside down before and
throwing up broken branches left and right. it got turned right side up?” asks Fred.
Stillman is the poet of the broken branches, “No, I don’t think that’s it,” Ted an-
of the fragmentary remains of the old, swers.
18 THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW—Spring 2000
Poet of the Broken Branches by James Bowman
In an interview with Psychology Today, Whit making purpose. His characters are all ideal
Stillman spoke of the effect on him of having versions of himself: kids from privileged
dropped out of college and gone to Mexico: backgrounds who learn not to feel guilty or
It turned out to do the opposite of what it was
ashamed of the fact. But because there are
supposed to do. It didn’t make me a mushroom- so few such people in reality, or at least so
dropping pothead; seeing another culture and few who are able to give expression to their
the way the less affluent in that culture coped uncomplicated identities, we have to take
with life actually made me much more conven- them on trust. They are, as it were, hypo-
tional. It made me more respectful of conven-
thetical. But the people Stillman is really
tional people in the United States.
writing for are those just below him on the
He goes on to give this example: social scale. Not the urban haute bourgeoi-
The people we derided in Cambridge were the
sie but the suburban petite bourgeoisie, who
Pine Manor [College] girls who wore pink ape their betters even when it amuses their
pastels and came in on Saturday nights sort of betters to sneer at people like themselves.
overdressed. The farm girls in Cuernavaca, Stillman instead holds up for their admira-
Mexico, on Saturday night came in wearing the tion a version of what the upper class—that
same colors. No politically correct Harvard
upper class that the middle classes have
person would sneer, because they’re working
class—and yet their aspirations were so similar always emulated—would be if it existed in
to the aspirations of all the people we sneered at our world. And because he does this in a
back in Cambridge. It makes you think about spirit neither of snobbish superiority nor of
what it is you should really disrespect. fashionable self-hatred but of good-hu-
mored self-depreciation, he makes of the
This is the heart of Whit Stillman’s film- UHB something genuinely admirable.
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