Whit Stillman's comic art

Whit Stillman has claimed that he does not want to make serious dramas, only comedies. This does not mean, however, that his work has no serious intention. Critics have classified his three films, Metropolitan ( 1990), Barcelona ( 1994), and The Last Days of Disco ( 1998), as comedies of manners, and are reminded of Jane Austen. And well they might be, for Stillman has admitted that Austen, along with Tolstoy and Samuel Johnson, are the authors he loves most. A comedy of manners, according to the dictionary definition, is a satirical treatment of conventional or fashionable society. Satire arises when an author places an outsider among those who take the fashions, customs, and attitudes of their class for granted, allowing the audience to see conventional society from the outsider's perspective. In Austen's Pride and Prejudice, for example, we watch along with Mr. Bennet the absurdities of his wife's efforts to introduce their daughters into fashionable society. Comedy lies in the discrepancy between that society's understanding of itself and what the outsider sees. In a way, a comedy of manners portrays fashionable society itself as a version of the classic comic figure, the boaster, at whom the audience laughs when the discrepancy between his pretensions and the truth comes to light.

Comedies of manners, however, need not be simply critical of the manners they satirize. While the English society of Pride and Prejudice offers us the hypocritical Miss Bingley, it also offers us Mr. Darcy, whose character and life reveal a sensitivity and moral worth inconceivable without society. Elizabeth Bennet may be an outsider whose keen perception penetrates Miss Bingley, but then so is Elizabeth's sister Lydia whose scorn for conventions leads to disgrace. Nor is it possible to understand Stillman's comedy without exploring the ambiguity of his attitude toward his characters, captured by one reviewer as "mocking affection."

In Metropolitan, we see a group of Manhattan socialites through the eyes of outsider Tom Townsend (Edward Clements), a Westsider among the Eastsider elites, a disciple of the French socialist Charles Fourier, a reader of Thorstein Veblen, and one opposed to debutante parties on principle.

One of the debutantes of the group, Audrey Rouget (Carolyn Farina), is herself a kind of outsider, due in part to...