He finds both virtue and vice, friendship and betrayal, moral strength and moral weakness, beings capable of loving and being loved (and so of hating and being hated), and what one character astutely calls big, healthy, and bikini-sized personalities. Just beneath the surface of UHB or yuppie uniformity, Stillman discovers a fascinating variety of human types or natures. As beings given language by nature, the UHB are-like all human beings-singularly perverse, wonderful, and pathetic mixtures of self-consciousness, biological desire, and more. They may be almost equally clueless, but nature gives them all at least some guidance.
In a Socratic fashion, Stillman treats his subjects’ opinions, manners, and other modes of expression as revelations of their natures or characters. But we have to listen closely in order to laugh. These disproportions are the source of much of the film’s humor. But there is also a disproportion between their bragging about living on the dark side and the tameness of most of their actual experiences and aspirations. Stillman’s most troubling-and hopeful-observations concern the disproportion between the pretentious banality of their language and the depth and complexity of their longings.
Their words don’t really correspond to their longings and anxieties. They really are close to clueless, and they are so insecure or lost in the world that they rarely dare speak of their insecurity.īecause the UHB talk dumb, they act dumb. They know of no duties specifically associated with their class, and they are in no strong sense citizens.
The last days of disco full#
Stillman shows us a New York full of churches and allows us to hear church bells, just to make clear that the “uhbs” of Last Days never really see or hear them (except, significantly, Des). And with a couple of disquieting, rather disconnected exceptions, they associate traditional Christianity, the religion of their class, with reactionary propaganda and insanity. Their points of intellectual pride do not take them beyond Disney, Scrooge McDuck, and J.D. Their formal education and their tradition have not provided the content required to have a genuinely thoughtful or revealing discussion about human types. A pompous rejoinder in the midst of a conversation about the male view of the female breast is “It is more complicated and nuanced than that.” Their higher education allows them to go beyond common opinion to notice that Disney’s Lady and the Tramp is not really about dogs, because the dogs all “represent human types.” In their amusingly erudite, sentimental, and shamelessly self-serving discussion of this cartoon, they cannot see that the types they discover are merely their simple-minded caricatures of themselves. The members of the UHB, “uhbs,” sometimes speak with an intellectual snobbery that points in the direction of liberal education. Their education and breeding have given them fairly good manners and the language and style for clever conversation, but they have not really learned how or what to think about or to believe. Their status does not guarantee them good jobs or housing, or even admission to their social club of choice, the disco. The members of that class are privileged in terms of opportunities easily gained and in their unprecedented freedom, but they really have not received much of an inheritance at all.
Stillman’s Last Days of Disco is about the odd and amusing mixture of class-consciousness and self-consciousness of socially, but not extraordinarily naturally, gifted young people in a decadent, democratic time. The UHB distinguishes itself from yuppies: Its members do not define themselves by their professions, and they fear downward far more than they hope or work for upward mobility. Its world is defined by elite New England colleges-Harvard and Hampshire-and Manhattan. That class was named in Metropolitan, his first film, the Urban Haute Bourgeoisie (UHB). Stillman knows his challenge is to do the same for his class and time. But that’s not because he does not appreciate Jane Austen’s unrivaled ability to discover the truth about human nature or human types in the forms and formalities of her particular class and time. He told a Psychology Today interviewer that he turned down an opportunity to film Sense and Sensibility because he found it unchallenging. Only occasionally does he allow us to glimpse the extent of his ambition. For an audience that for the most part possesses none of those qualities, he presents his insight lightly and indirectly.
Whit Stillman’s films, which he both writes and directs, are rather Socratic, Christian, and at least ambiguously conservative.
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