August 22, 2024
By Oliver Traldi
The second film by writer and director Whit Stillman, the male Jane Austen of the nineteen-nineties, is Barcelona. It turned thirty this July. Much like Austen, Stillman is a gentle ironist most loved, and I suspect much misunderstood, by the kind of people at whom he is most likely to poke fun. The sort of sexed-up melodrama one sees in the most popular Austen adaptations–Keira Knightley brought to gasping in a flesh-moistening downpour by the sheer animal magnetism of a furiously arrogant Matthew Macfayden–is reflected in a sort of upside-down and cracked-across mirror in effusive reviews of and friendly conversations about Stillman, which tend to take seriously the asinine and opportunistic theorizing of his characters. Defenses of the bourgeoisie, of text over subtext, of disco, detachable collars, and timeworn clichés, seem the key to the director’s own views, a sort of talky traditionalism.
The response is understandable. Stillman’s characters often express conservative social and aesthetic sentiments that rarely appear in movies. And the expression is often memorable – usually funny and occasionally poetic. But I think the real theme of Stillman’s films is the insufficiency of all this theorizing, particularly the way our theories fall apart when they come up against the realities of the situations in which we find, pursue, and maintain love. It’s not just that our theorizing fails to get us to the truth. Truth is sometimes an inappropriate social goal. On the other hand, polite fictions and prosocial manipulations often elicit the actual truth of our emotions and characters in a way that intellectual inquiry is not strong enough to accomplish.
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Stillman’s most analysis-paralyzed character is probably Metropolitan’s Charlie Black. First the ideological opponent, then the romantic rival, and finally the last remaining ally of the protagonist Tom Townsend, Charlie is introduced as he argues for the existence of God from the evidence of our “sensation of being silently listened to with total comprehension.” “Most of our waking life is taken up thinking to ourselves,” Charlie says. In part I think Metropolitan is meant to put into question the value of such thinking and talking. Certainly Charlie and the others don’t seem to be too good at it, as evidenced by Charlie’s paradoxical assertion that “social snobbery [is] looked down upon” in the United States.
If thinking often goes wrong, and there might be no one really listening, writing too often goes wrong. There might be no one really reading. One of the movie’s funniest moments comes in a discussion between Tom and the female protagonist Audrey Rouget about Austen’s Mansfield Park. Tom has been saying that Mansfield Park is a bad book, and it comes out that he hasn’t read it; his opinion is based on a critical essay by Lionel Trilling. Audrey asks: “What Jane Austen novels have you read?” And Tom replies: “None. I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelist’s ideas as well as the critic’s thinking. With fiction I can never forget that none of it really happened, that it’s all just made up by the author.”
In this little exchange, and the dialogue that precedes it, both characters say very silly things. It’s not just that Tom hasn’t read Austen; he badly misconstrues the Trilling essay, too. Even worse is the notion that what’s important in a novel is “the novelist’s ideas,” and that fiction is unique in being “all just made up by the author.” In fact, the theorizing of Tom, Charlie, and their friend Nick Smith is just as “made up” as fiction. If anything, it seems less constrained by reality. By the end of the movie, commenting on Audrey having put herself in an odd situation by going to antagonist Rick Von Sloneker’s beach house in the Hamptons, Tom says: “It’s not something Jane Austen would have done.” In a way, Stillman has Tom commit the same error all over again – identifying the author with some claim or thesis rather than with the life of her books.
The Austen-tinged misinterpretation is a bit funnier in The Last Days of Disco. In that movie’s best-known scene, the characters discuss Lady and the Tramp at the movie’s central setting, a club based on Studio 54. Charlotte, the female semi-antagonist, has brought up the movie as part of a story about her niece and nephew, an excuse to say to her boyfriend, Jimmy, that she’s “beginning to fall in love with the whole idea of having kids.” Alice, the movie’s point-of-view character, says that she hates Lady and the Tramp, that it’s “tacky” and “depressing”; her goal is to get one over on Charlotte. Alice is dating a jerk, Des (played like Nick by Chris Eigeman), who works at the club. Josh, a bipolar prosecutor who is investigating the club for various financial and drug-related infractions, takes up Alice’s cause, ranting about what he considers the depressing part of Lady and the Tramp: how it presents Tramp, a jerk, as a desirable character, when in fact he’s “a self-confessed chicken thief.” Lady, meanwhile, is an empty-headed “ostensible protagonist.”
If I understand Stillman right, this is a characteristic scene full of strategic remarks, references, and reversals. For instance, Tramp doesn’t steal chickens in Lady and the Tramp. Where chicken thieves do appear is in the television-film version of Emma made two years prior, starring Kate Beckinsale, who plays Charlotte in The Last Days of Disco. They bookend the movie and function finally as a sort of false but socially acceptable reason for Emma’s new husband Knightley to live with her and her father, who would otherwise be so lonely that he would not approve the match. (This follows soon after one of Emma’s most famous moments, in which Knightley, well pre-engagement, scolds Emma – “Badly done, indeed!” – for failing to maintain a polite fiction about a kindhearted but annoying older friend.) Similarly, this scene sees Alice and Josh start to develop a narrative explaining Alice’s hop from Des to Josh, which begins to seem imminent to the viewer (though not to Josh). They start to get their story straight.
The Lady and the Tramp rant is also classically Stillmanian in its reversals. Everyone takes Josh to be implying that Des is like Tramp. Yet Tramp’s questionable behavior is most like Alice’s– she is involved in one way or another at one point or another with most of the movie’s male characters. Meanwhile, it’s Charlotte, with whom Alice has an increasingly antagonistic relationship, who seems more traditionally virtuous in her focus on Jimmy, who spurns her while idealizing Alice in the end, and in her desire for children. And Josh and his colleagues, the ostensible lawmen, are in fact the ones undermining the rules-based order of the club – the owner says of them, when they’re Jimmy’s guests, that he doesn’t “want that element” there. Finally, the scene in its literal exposition of themes in the movie itself mimics a scene actually in Lady and the Tramp, when Tramp’s friends, at the pound, explain to Lady that compared to his ex-girlfriends, she may well be “someone different, some delicate, fragile creature, who is giving him a wish to shelter and protect,” explaining the narrative from within it.
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Perhaps language functions better for public coordination of polite fictions than for private groping toward powerful truths. In Love and Friendship, Stillman’s adaptation of Austen’s novella Lady Susan, the eponymous lady (played like Charlotte by Kate Beckinsale) is visited in London by her late husband’s brother and his wife. All three people want Lady Susan’s daughter Frederica to stay with the couple rather than with her mother, but like Emma’s father, Susan rejects the notion until the other two can come up a justification that makes it seem as though Lady Susan favors it out of love for her daughter rather than for the opposite reason. The ability to counterfeit justifications is a prized trait, especially in a husband; the wife says at another point: “Charles always seems to have some pretext rather for doing just what’s wanted.” This is not so different from Lady Susan’s own remark later that “facts are horrid things.”
How horrid? In Metropolitan, Audrey virtuously opposes a game of “Truth.” The revelations made in it, that Tom still takes himself to be attached to a woman who was for a while involved with Von Sloneker and that Nick was involved with more than one woman in the group, help destroy the characters’ relationships. The other factor is that it transpires that the tales Nick has told about Von Sloneker are lies, although he claims that they’re a “composite” of true stories. In the end, Tom doesn’t turn out to be as attached to Serena as he thought, and Nick turns out to have been right about Von Sloneker’s character, even if not the details of his conduct. The game of truth elicited falsehoods, whereas the game of “composition” of falsehoods evoked the truth. (In Stillman’s fourth movie, Damsels in Distress, set at some sort of college, Greta Gerwig’s character Violet says: “He’s lying. I find that very attractive.”)
But it’s in Barcelona that honesty comes under the fiercest attack. The point-of-view character, Ted Boynton (played like Charlie by Taylor Nichols), works in sales, where he can put into practice various philosophies of human relations found in business guides. He “do[es]n’t consider high-pressures sales sales at all. It’s a form of fraud.” And avoiding fraud, Ted learns from these guides, is part of the essence of salesmanship: “The wisest and best salesman,” he quotes Frank Bettger’s How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling, “is always one who bluntly tells the truth about his article. . . If he does not sell the first time, he leaves a trail of trust behind. Being bluntly honest is always safe and best.” Sales is more than just a job; it’s “a whole way of thinking about experience.”
But it turns out that Ted’s “not cut out for sales.” What’s more, he’s been kept in the job through a well-intentioned deception that goes against his “whole way of thinking about experience.” His sales targets, which he hasn’t come close to meeting, were there to motivate him and to keep him from wondering whether sales was his “life’s work.” In other words, his immersion in the culture of sales was prompted by actions contradictory to what he took that culture to be. His career transitions into leadership and “the cult of management,” and his personal life comes to involve both a new decisiveness and a more casual relationship with honesty. His way of thinking about experience has evidently changed.
Dishonesty in the film is represented by Ted’s cousin Fred (Chris Eigeman again). Like Nick, Charlotte, Violet, and Lady Susan, Fred’s negative contrast with the apparently virtuous characters turns more positive as the movie continues. Fred, a visiting naval officer who crashes with Ted, tells the beautiful Spanish women in Ted’s social circle that Ted is a sexual masochist. This falsehood spurs their interest, most of Montserrat, with whom Ted develops an obsession. But Ted’s reaction to Montserrat becomes a story of its own, with Ted falling in love quickly and wanting to get married, which draws the interest of his eventual wife Greta. Ted’s appreciation for situation-generating falsehoods is shown at the end of the film, where he repeats Fred’s lie about a colleague, garnering him the interest of another attractive Spanish woman.
In the New Yorker, Louis Menand wrote: “What is exceptional about Austen as a novelist is that she tells us exactly how much money each of her characters has.” The currency of Barcelona is beauty, and Ted’s honesty seems part and parcel with his discomfort with beauty. He says: “You see a beautiful girl and you're immediately subject to all these emotions, some of them very powerful, almost uncontrollable.” Meanwhile, Ramon, the polyamorous Spanish creep who writes articles accusing Fred of being in the CIA and has some sort of claim on Montserrat, is obsessed with the “idea of physical beauty.” There is some connection between Ted’s anxious sincerity and his discomfort with the power of his reaction to female beauty. In a way it is through his interactions with two seemingly unvirtuous characters, the pathological Fred and the nymphomaniacal Ramon, that he overcomes both of these traits.
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What is virtue, and what can the virtuous learn from the cruel, stupid, dishonest, and manipulative people around them? What even differentiates them? The miscommunications and misconstruals in Love and Friendship revolve around different versions of the Ten Commandments, which Sir James Martin, a very rich idiot who is romantically pursuing Frederica, incorrectly calls the Twelve Commandments. But because Frederica’s mother seems to be Catholic while her relatives are Protestant and because different adults in her life want different things from her, she really is in the position of having more “commandments” than usual to follow. In the end she takes the idiot’s suggestion of paring them down by a couple. Austen’s novella ends with Frederica’s choice, Reginald, who had been smitten with her mother, swearing off women: “Frederica was therefore fixed in the family of her uncle and aunt till such time as Reginald De Courcy could be talked, flattered, and finessed into an affection for her.” Similarly, Love and Friendship ends with Lady Susan saying: “My daughter has shown herself to be cunning and manipulative. I couldn't be more pleased.”
Even if it’s not true of Frederica, it’s true of many of Stillman’s other virtuous characters. Audrey must generate the situation with Rick to draw real action out of Tom and Charlie. Alice must use her apparent virtue to attract a man who is willing to accept that she’s contracted multiple sexually transmitted diseases; she also concocts a brilliant move to advance in the publishing world, reclassifying a falsified memoir from nonfiction to “self-actualization.” And isn’t that just the point – that self-actualization can never be nonfiction?
In Barcelona, Greta twice appears luckily in the course of Ted’s flights from Barcelona to Chicago. We find out that she’s “actually looking forward to the eighty channels of television and the abundance of consumer products in the U.S.” Yet she briefly disappears right before the wedding, possibly because an ex-boyfriend has shown up. Even Ted turns out to be more of a manipulator—a “playboy/operator type,” as Rose says in Damsels in Distress—than he’d thought, when his salesman “Maneuver X” turns out to be, in Fred’s words, merely playing hard to get. Meanwhile Fred shows his low opinion of speech when he asks about Montserrat: “You mean, she’s dumped Ted and gone back to Ramon because of some conversation?” When he himself explains that he’s fallen hard for Montserrat, he says: “I’ve seen her in all sorts of different situations and contexts, some of them really, really difficult.” This is what real truth, truth about virtue, comes from: being tested in difficult situations. What we might say about ourselves in a tweet or a dating profile is, compared to that, just words.
Stillman is on the side of virtue, but virtue must be prudent to be—as Trilling says of Austen’s irony—on the side of life. As Violet says in Damsels in Distress, “I’ll grant you that it’s a tactic, or perhaps even a ruse, but without some of that, would our species even survive?” At the end of Love and Friendship, Reginald presents Frederica with a poem (which in reality was written for the wife of Revolutionary War hero Henry Knox) which includes the line: “Virtue, the charm that most adorns the fair.” That virtue is a kind of beauty which serves life, sometimes through forthrightness but sometimes through games and guile, and which captures language rather than being captured by it, maintains its mystery, and, at least in the events that transpire in Stillman’s films, the mysteriousness of love.
Oliver Traldi is a philosopher at the University of Tulsa Honors College.
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