FILM « In Which We Watch The Metropolitans »
Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 9:35AM 
The Betterment of All Mankind
by ALEX CARNEVALE
Metropolitan
dir. Whit Stillman
93 minutes
In my first days of college, I had little to no knowledge of the affluent world. I never knew that New York private schools existed; I didn't know what sorts of people they produced, and if I thought hard about it, the richest person I knew was probably my pediatrician.
It took Whit Stillman's 1989 film Metropolitan to explain what such people are actually like. Watching it again twenty years later, it's astonishing how little has changed.
It is largely untrue that the affluent are as unhappy as the poverty-stricken. This is the sort of myth perpetuated by people with no imagination. Just as the fools who endorse climate change treaties for the betterment of mankind never stop to consider the effect on the impoverished, so too does the relativist ignore how degrading poverty is because it doesn't suit their general theme.
Yet to talk of such things in generalities degrades them further. To be a poor person in America isn't much like being a poor person in less decadent countries. To be a poor person in the third world isn't much like being a poor person a century ago, or a millennia ago. On the other hand, a fabulously rich person is the same forever.
Metropolitan takes place in the living rooms, debutante balls, bathrooms, vacation homes, and saloons of people so wealthy it has lost all meaning for them. Their children are the protagonists, giving Stillman a way to analyze how he himself felt about being a trust fund baby.
Our heroine is a young woman named Audrey, and the antagonist is the object of her affection, the (relatively) impoverished ginger colt Tom Townsend. In a particularly candid moment, he tells her, "I don't read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelists' ideas as well as the critics' thinking. With fiction I can never forget that none of it really happened, that it's all just made up by the author." Though he lives on the Upper West Side (the horror!) with his mother, Tom fits in splendidly with the upper crust, where his lack of imagination is quite regular.
It's said that Gossip Girl took some of its flavor from Stillman's film, but the message is rather different. Both celebrate the excesses of the upper crust with aplomb, although it's fair to say Stillman feels a great deal worse about them.
In television, we must care about the characters. Part of the reason Gossip Girl won't be on the air this time next year is that true to soap opera/Shonda Rimes convention, no one really does care about the people involved. If Stillman himself entertains the illusion that such people can be sympathetic, he does a marvelous job of undermining them at every turn. No matter how winsome Tom and Audrey are, we can't really see through the eyes of debutante monsters. The rest of the urban-haute bourgeoisie crew is similarly horrifying, and Stillman has them constantly glib in a dialogue style that would be stolen wholesale for Wes Anderson's Rushmore:
It's a tiny bit arrogant of people to go around worrying about those less fortunate.
People see the harm in what excessive candor can do.
Men are dates, date substitutes or potential dates. I find that dehumanizing.
The acid test is whether you take any pleasure in responding to the question "What do you do?" I can't bear it.
I've never been this drunk before. The problem is, with Fred no longer drinking, I can't pace myself.
The most important thing to realize about parents is that there is absolutely nothing you can do about them.
And so on.
Since he's been professionally affluent all his life, Stillman has only made three films, none more successful than his first. Perhaps abject poverty would have been a greater artistic motivator; perhaps not. Eventually the UHB scene breaks down and people go their own way. Whit wanted to portray the end of a period in a certain part of American life. That this period ever ended is a lie.
Venture out to the Hamptons, to Martha's Vineyard, to any of the privileged, isolated places of the world. They contain the same coterie of people, swapping bodily fluids all summer, sopping themselves with Cristal. The party is ongoing, and threatens to do so no matter how low the Dow goes.
For the economy, this is a boon. We need our richest to spend aplenty; incidentally it is these folks who pay 95 percent of all taxes. I'm not a class warrior and there's nothing wrong with wealth as long as it's obtained ethically. If this is true, why should we so resent spoiled young men and women from wealthy families? All young people are foolish; this is a constant part of their charm. As they age and grow other they possess fortunes by which influence and power spring off naturally. This may not be good for us, but there's little about which to be outraged.
One scene in Metropolitan clarifies the problem rather succintly. Nick Smith (the hilarious Christopher Eigeman) is patiently explaining how the poor Tom can fit into the debutante scene at no great cost. You just need one jacket, and it can even be secondhand! You just need to wear a corsage, and it's not that expensive. At first we respect Nick for advising his poorer friend on how to fit in. But soon enough we realize: It's terrific to have a lot of money, but it's terrible to think that gives you a right to tell other people how to live.
Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He tumbls here and twitters here. He last wrote in these pages about his trip to Hawai'i.
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Reader Comments (12)
I found this movie sort of unwatchable, but it's worth it to see a young Taylor Nichols. The fact that his character in "Boiler Room" is later taken for every penny he owns (by Giovanni Ribisi no less) is too perfect for words.
Alex, under what measure do "these folks" pay 95% of all taxes?
"I'm not a class warrior and there's nothing wrong with wealth as long as it's obtained ethically. If this is true, why should we so resent spoiled young men and women from wealthy families?"
A. If we define the word "ethically" so broadly that it leaves a single billionaire unindicted, the word is meaningless. Fantastical wealth gaps are all, in every case, traceable to some King's army; some peasant's broken fucking heart. You think the mind-bogglingly attenuating power continuum that runs from a mine in the CONGO and through your i-pod and into the coffers of the i-pod King is "fair"? You think all that excellent real estate in Southern California was a gift from the gods or that the people who pick the bananas that go on your generic cornflakes are really worth a 1,000x less per hour than some lawyer with a cushy phone-in job at an NGO that burns cash to get its matching EU grant every year? What's more "ethical", addicting poor people to shit they don't need (games) or to shit that will kill them (McDonalds)? What's less "ethical", securing another twenty years of oil by killing a million-plus-change towel-heads in Iraq or Afghanistan, or retarding the development of alternative energy to make sure the oil-drenched robber barons running the government, and their upper minions, can put their unconsciously evil children through film school?
B. Fuck them and *then* Eat Them
He made perfect films.
Steven -- you had me until "towel-heads."
Zoe: you had me until you missed the angry sarcasm of "towel-heads".
You’re Kinda Like This Guy (with polarity reversed)
It's (debs, expats in Franco's Spain, disco) all history as a non-arc, about to fall off a cliff and zooming off towards intellectual sentimentality instead. Taylor Nichols and Eigeman (well, their characters—but for these two their personas don't alter much from what Stillman made them, which is the best thing about this movie) talk about Charles Fourier, which is really too self-conscious. Moreover, they argue about whether or not something has failed because it has ceased to exist, or whether existing at all is enough of a triumph. I think it's worth noting that on the surface the movie features nostalgia-dolls more than rounded people—but my father watches it and waxes on and on about the ballroom events and Christmas breaks of his adolescence, and I've always given Metropolitan more respect because he claims it's entirely accurate.
"To be a poor person in the third world isn't much like being a poor person a century ago, or a millennia ago."
Really? Because actually it is. Because those living under the poverty line today often basically are living in the middle ages. I realize this doesn't fit as tidily in your thesis, but it ain't true.
i think what steve is saying is that, without a lot of poor people, there wouldn't be any rich people.
which is true.
stillman is like the wasp version of woody allen. i love 'metropolitan'. good writing, dialogues, and shots of the old new york that has now been gentrified. an underrated movie that should be seen, esp. to those who thinks that nyc is all bout to see them scary sadshaws. and, a much better precursor to 'gossip girls'.
[also posted an appreciation to this film]
You don't give the movie much credit for its humor, by which I mean you don't give Stillman much credit for creating wonderfully sympathetic characters. You also don't understand the many distinctions between Metropolitan characters who are upper-class preppies and the contemporary middle-class nouveau riches! Do you think it's incidental that none of the Metropolitan characters are Jewish? That their clothes are so remarkably unadorned? You must always historicize this movie to understand its details. To do so is to see why Metropolitan stokes so much nostalgia in young rich people: it is to see that the movie is a dirge to the virtuous upper-class protagonist! For ever, never, Tracy Lord!