Blood Jump #6: Back in the U.H.B.
Blood Jump is back from summer break with three by Whit Stillman.
Blood Jump is an independent and free publication, but writing has value. Solidarity with the WGA, SAG-AFTRA, and everyone striking.
Whatah summah. We’re cranking the windows to let the sunbaked dust motes spill from Blood Jump HQ after a longer-than-expected summer break. July took us down the coast of California for the death of Dead and Company and the birth of my surfing career.* August brought us to upstate New York to laugh and dance and cry with friends old and new. Our cups were filled and depleted and filled again and spilled on rented carpet; our cats grew spiteful in our absence and have since forgotten we’d ever left.
There’s been a lot between these trips I would have liked to have covered for Blood Jump (Barbenheimer: Good! Springsteen at Wrigley Field: mixed bag!), but such is the price of a long break. I was lucky enough to take a few days of downtime to immerse myself in the films of Whit Stillman, a body of work whose dry wit and literary devotion are catnip to me, ahead of Fireflies Press’s upcoming compendium. Stillman is the rare satirist who draws complete portraits without pulling punches; his movies are at once playfully brutal and tenderly nostalgic, the kind of love you engender for a home you realize you’re now permitted to leave.
For this week’s Blood Jump, we’re shaking the sand out of our keyboards and pulling the dying summer sun over privilege, posh parties, and cultures past their prime with Whit Stillman’s urban haute bourgeoisie trilogy. Metropolitan. The Last Days of Disco. Barcelona. Let’s begin.
*I stood for five seconds and Shaka’d into the face of God.
If I Were a Rich Boy
Victorian literature has a funny relationship with class. 19th century texts are acutely aware of economic structures and their capacity to subjugate (or, at least, to subjugate white women), but they don’t typically prescribe the kind of morality toward affluence that so often stamps modern writing. Wealth in the comedies of manners of writers like Jane Austen—to whom Whit Stillman’s 1990 debut Metropolitan is transparently indebted—simply is, akin more to set dressing and weather phases than a reality that warrants political action. To successfully trade in Austen’s legacy anywhere within a decade of the 21st century was unlikely; to do so in earnest, impossible. Metropolitan’s miracle is its ability to split the difference between the decadence of Victorian lit with the self-awareness necessary for survival in a post-Reagan landscape. It is the rare Eve that bites the fruit and revels in its nakedness; the lacrosse player who’s cool with you smoking weed in the basement of his parent’s McMansion.
It's easier to tolerate the rich with one foot out the door. Metropolitan offers that foot in the form of Tom Townsend (Edward Clements), a middleclass Princeton student who gets swept up with a group of Upper-East-Side yuppies during Christmas break. Tom prides himself on his philosophies: he won’t take yellowcabs, he touts socialist-lite anachronisms at dinner parties. Still, there’s something about these rich kids that hooks him by the nose. School vacations stretch out into eternity when you’re young, and the debutantes, who’ve labeled themselves the “Sally Flower rat pack” after the girl who’s most generous with her Manhattan apartment, soon account for his whole world. They give Tom the full Pygmalion, coaching him on coattails and bridge rules and beating the poor from his clothes. There are love triangles, there are grievances; the nights bubble away like so much Louis Roederer.
Tom, a staunch Fourierist (after the 18th century failed libertarian socialist Charles Fourier, you pig), has reason enough to hang up his ideals in favor of a cummerbund. His Princeton flame Serena (Ellia Thompson) proves to run in similar circles with the SFRP; Audrey Rouget (Carolyn Farina) falls for Tom and offers an arm to hold at champagne parties; Tom’s father, long out of the picture, came from similar wealth, and this new scene likely lends an air of paternal familiarity. What’s more curious is why these East Egg babies are so taken with Tom.
Metropolitan’s plot is engaging and finely constructed—Tom and Audrey fall in and out of a will-they-won’t-they as Tom’s pulled back toward Serena and Audrey inches closer to de-facto villain Rick Von Sloneker (Will Kempe)—but the movie’s engine hums within its strange and dying culture. The Sally Fowler rat pack is antediluvian by design, and a specter of death hangs in the shadows of every saucer of caviar. The rich kids know their culture is inherited; they’re equally aware that their privileged upbringing has left their fingers without much callous to maintain their fortunes. Charlie Black (Taylor Nichols) wrings his hands the loudest, constantly fretting over the fate of yuppiedom—he even goes so far as to attempt a rebrand for preppies with the parodically stuffy urban haute bourgeoisie. Perhaps the group’s unprecedented interest in Tom isn’t a social curiosity as much as it is a pending vision of their own livelihoods.
If the whole thing sounds a little gross, it is. Metropolitan doesn’t apologize for its moneyed players and takes ample opportunity to expose how ridiculous ridiculous wealth can be (in the movie’s best joke, Charlie bemoans Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie for depicting the rich as neither discreet nor charming). But Metropolitan isn’t quite a satire. Whit Stillman’s early trilogy often trades in biography, Metropolitan likely the most so, and the director imbues these kids with enough love to let them hover above character assassination without ever risking hagiography for his own story. The best case study for this embrace of paradox is Nick Smith (Chris Eigeman), the Jay Gatsby to Tom’s Nick Carraway. Nick is as caddish a conservative as any of the others, tossing libel at his enemies and rolling his eyes at Tom’s pragmatism. He also demonstrates the most tappable well of kindness, taking Tom under his wing not to fill out a bridge table or as a Le Dîner de Cons requisite, but because he simply likes the guy. He is as cutting as he is silly, as generous as he is cruel, and Metropolitan doesn’t bother to split the difference—why should it? The rich, they’re just like us.
This Duck Won’t Die
By July 12, 1979, a reactionary fervor against disco music had hit a pitch loud to reach opportunistic ears. Mike Veeck, then-owner of the Chicago White Sox notorious for his wild game-day promotions, caught wind of a rock DJ named Steve Dahl who’d been holding “Death to Disco” rallies at local nightclubs. Dahl was upset that disco was cutting into his capacity to spin rock records; Veeck was impressed with the large crowds the rallies would consistently pull. Veeck partnered with Dahl and his radio station to hold a “Disco Demolition Night” to promote a double-header at the White Sox’s Comiskey Park stadium. The promotion stipulated that showing up with a disco record—to be tossed in a dumpster and blown up between the games—would get you into the park for under a dollar.
Promoters had planned on a crowd of 20,000; over 50,000 showed up. By the time of the explosion, the energy in the crowd had boiled over, and people stormed the field, throwing records like frisbees, starting fights and fires, and forcing the teams to barricade in the dugouts for safety. Of course, it wasn’t just a difference in taste that fueled the crowd’s ire: Disco is a traditionally Black, Latino, and queer genre, and the majority-white crowd at Comiskey Park leapt at the chance to give voice to a fear of their perceived loss of supremacy. In a book of the same name, author Dave Hoekstra mythologized the stunt as “the night disco died.”
The Last Days of Disco, the 1998 finale of Whit Stillman’s loose trilogy, doesn’t concern Disco Demolition Night, nor does it credit Black, Latino, and queer voices as originators of the genre and heart of its culture. It’s tempting to read the omission as an erasure. To hold whiteness at the center of disco culture seems myopic at best; at worst, it falls in line with the kind of ethnocentrism that stokes events like the Disco Demolition Night. But, like Metropolitan, The Last Days of Disco concerns a culture inherited, not created—this is not Paris is Burning, it’s the story of marketing dorks so painfully uncool they need to be sneaked into the club in full costume. And, like with Metropolitan, Stillman renders his characters so affectionately that it’d be dishonest to label the movie satire; it instead reads like a photobook of styles ten years dated.
As is typically the case with Stillman, a plot exists, but the muscle of Last Days is nestled within its culture and characters. Alice and Charlotte (Chloë Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale) are ivy-league grads and juniors at a publishing house who dance off steam at a disco club after long days of wading through slush piles. They soon court Jimmy (Mackenzie Astin), the aforementioned adman square, and Des (Chris Eigeman), a coke-sniffing club employee as charming and clever as he is scuzzy. Other players enter and exit to complicate things with drugs and legal troubles and STDs; Alice and Charlotte and vogue the nights away through the best and worst of it.
The Last Days of Disco finds its roots in Stillman’s own experiences with Studio 54, which he would frequent after leaving a grueling newspaper job too late into the night to meet up with his friends. The result is the sort of tie-loosening that comes from opening yourself up to a world that doesn’t belong to you. Last Days trades the high literary references of Metropolitan for discussions around Lady and the Tramp and Bambi (though it maintains the latter’s intellectual intensity); it is faster and looser with its punchlines (Des is accused of having “a gay mouth”); it is comfortable and elastic in its modernity. Last Days’ biggest leap forward, though, might be its soundtrack, which stands among giants as the best of the last thirty years. It’s hard to imagine much of the movie’s $8 million budget went toward anything else as the needle skips from Diana Ross to Chic, from Sister Sledge to the O’Jays. Stillman may not have been born into the heart of disco, but he makes a good case that he’d found it.
Whit Stillman never plays coy with his influences: Jane Austen and F. Scott Fitzgerald fuel his scripts, Preston Sturges and Woody Allen color his direction. Toward the end of Last Days, though, an unexpected player emerges. The club has been shut down and disco-adverse crust punks crawl the streets of Midtown. Dejected, Alice, who’s left Des for the sweeter—if less stable—assistant district attorney Josh (Matt Keesler), walks with her new beau onto the subway and toward an uncertain future. But if the scene is dying, the music is decidedly not, and in a brilliant turn toward Jonathan Demme, Alice and Josh begin to dance to a non-diegetic “Love Train,” soon accompanied by the rest of the train car’s passengers. It is as lovely and optimistic as anything in Demme’s comedies and finds Stillman in full confidence and control of his abilities, straddling both sides of a novel-sharpened wit and a four-floor pounding pulse. Disco is dead, long live disco.
I Took a Pill at the Spanish U.S. Embassy (to Show Chris Eigeman I Was Cool)
If The Last Days of Disco sees the sentiments of Metropolitan in full bloom, then Barcelona (1994) is a sort of chrysalis, a corridor between the Reaganite conservatism of Metropolitan and the dancefloor devotion of Last Days. Formed after Stillman’s own travels to Spain as a young adult, Barcelona is at once the most ambitious and intimate entry in the U.H.B. trilogy, a voyage thousands of miles from its comfortable Manhattan that somehow remains claustrophobically familial.
Last Days and Metropolitan function almost as coming-of-age stories in relief. Their thresholds are built not from growing up but from a life eroding out from under its characters. Barcelona, in turn, is more structurally traditional, a faithful tale of young Americans abroad. It’s also the narrowest in scope of the three films, trading the other entries’ ensembles for two cousins, the bouncily named Ted and Fred Boynton (Stillman champions Taylor Nichols and Chris Eigeman). Ted is a Chicago salesman living in and working on a Barcelona account; Fred is a naval officer who shows up to stay with Ted unannounced on a public relations assignment. The cousins amount to a Stillmanian odd couple, a bifurcated distillation of the urban haute bourgeoisie formula: the intellectual pragmatist and the socialite cad. What could go wrong?
The inherited culture at stake this round is the weightiest yet: It is American life in its entirety, and rather than eroding to the passage of time, it contests with the caustic pretensions of—gasp—Europeans. Barcelona takes place in what a title card describes as “the last decade of the Cold War,” and Spain’s attitude toward America is generously, if not appropriately, strained. The U.S. embassy is bombed within minutes of the movie’s opening, the Barcelona streets are littered with anti-NATO (in Spanish, “OTAN”) graffiti, and Ted and Fred are spat at as fascists whenever they let their American accents slip.
Until the movie’s final act, though, the biggest hurdle the cousins face in the shadow of anti-Americanism is its effect on their dating lives. Ted and Fred alternatingly chase Monserrat and Marta (Tushka Bergen and Mira Sorvino), who both carry a 90s-flavored bohemian affair with Spanish stud Ramon (Pep Munné). Ramon is the Stillmanite negative, the only figure across the three films to have hit a gym or tanning bed, and he stokes Monserrat and Marta with anti-capitalist rhetoric in a feat of inspired cockblocking.
Mercifully, Barcelona doesn’t deign to defend Ugly America, rendering itself Stillman’s least conservative—and funniest—movie. Fred wears his naval uniform like a Reaganite Dale Cooper, cartoonish to the point of being mistaken for a costume. Ted’s bible-thumping traditionalism gets the screwball skewer as he little-kicks his way through Old Testament passages. The cousins are diminished to Leave it to Beaver red-white-and-blue boys as they name-call, cling to childhood feuds (Fred had allegedly sunk Ted’s kayak when they were ten), and sheepishly defend their artless, imperial, burger-smashing homeland to the girls they chase through nightclubs and cafés.
That’s not to say Barcelona is glib with American history and the very real tensions it excites. After convincing himself that Marta had stolen money from Ted, Fred enters his apartment to steal it back, and is in return shot by one of Marta’s Spanish nationalist lovers. The bullet puts Fred into the hospital, with Ted dutifully at his side, and lays ground for Stillman to balance the bite of his satire with the affection he holds for his subjects. For as crass as the American cousins can behave, they are family, and there’s an earnest beauty in the devotion they hold toward each other, however traditional. It’s not enough to wave a flag over, but Ted’s bedside manner sobers what might otherwise have been disposable farce and lends greater credence to the pre-9/11 consciousness of America’s less-than-stellar reputation.
Like The Last Days of Disco, Barcelona ends with a deliberate nod toward its influences: this time, trading Old Hollywood for New-Wave Europe—specifically, Éric Rohmer. Ted and Fred have returned to the American Pastoral lakeside of their childhood—wounds physical and psychic all healed—with Monserrat and Marta in tow. Monserrat concedes that burgers are, in fact, pretty good; the women glide across the lake in kayaks unsunken. It’s a scene as sweet as it is ridiculous, at once a joke and a song, and unmistakably American.
Sample Draws
I caught Steppenwolf Theatre’s production of No Man’s Land, a Harold Pinter play, before it closed last weekend. It was a perfect complement to a Whit Stillman binge: erudite, naval-gazing, and extremely funny.
It feels silly to mourn what many call a glorified cover band, but I yam what I yam, and it’s been tough to accept that there likely won’t be any more Grateful Dead shows on the scale of Dead and Company. Sophie Haigney wrote a beautiful series of essays for The Paris Review on the band’s final run, which we were lucky enough to have attended, in San Francisco. It’s the best writing on the Dead since the Fare Thee Well era and faithfully reports the sweat, hurdles, annoyances, and introspection that accompany the best and worst of Bobby and the band. NFA.
I am a bona fide Nolan hater—Memento is one of the stupidest movies I’ve ever seen, and you can’t tell me with a straight face that his Batman trilogy is good—but I gotta give the schmuck his flowers for Oppenheimer, which is likely my favorite movie from this year. It’s silly the way Sorkin is silly (i.e., it remains electric even at its most ridiculous), and it rides two hours of adrenaline into a broodingly captivating courtroom drama. You get this one, Chrissy.
Barbie! Good stuff!
A note on Bruce Springsteen, on whom I wrote about giving a second shake as an adult in Blood Jump’s first issue. I remain grateful for the chance to reappraise his catalogue, and I’ve grown to love a good portion of it, but his shows at Wrigley Field left me dragging my feet. For which I can’t blame him or his band—how could I lament the opportunity to see Silvio Dante in full pirate regalia—but concerts are an alchemy of vibes, and these simply weren’t hitting. House lights too bright, sound too garbled, audience too polo’d. Maybe next time, boss.
Thank you for reading Blood Jump. If you enjoyed this issue, please encourage a friend to subscribe. For the rest of the year, Blood Jump is back on its biweekly bullshit: I will see you again the week of September 15 for the next issue.