While, in the main, these rules are to be followed, there is also power in strategically breaking them. Of special importance here are the rules of social propriety, which mandate keeping confidences, loyalty to friends, and beyond that to other members of the tribe, and observing civility in public, no matter what one may think of others in private. What school one went to, how educated you appear in conversation, what job you hold or what profession you are pursuing, these are the terms by which hierarchies are created and maintained within the group. While Charlotte may not be fully aware of all of the dimensions of this power, she is aware enough to wield it with confidence at the Club, and Stillman’s writing and direction is clearly aware of his characters’ privilege.Īmongst themselves, the main cast of characters are nominal equals, and that contributes to a particular kind of status parsing. The two women, and Charlotte in particular, understand that there is currency in being young, white, thin, and female. The audience is shown this in the opening scene where the lead characters, Alice (Chloë Sevigny) and Charlotte (Kate Beckinsdale), make their way to the club, ultimately pushing their way to the front of the line to be waved in by Van (Burr Steers). On the other hand, not all forms of style ad beauty are created equal. Neither race nor sexuality is a barrier to entry if you are beautiful enough or stylish enough. This makes the Club into a polymorphous place. Privilege, and the power that springs from it, takes many forms, and at the Club, one powerful form of advantage is style and beauty. One sign that Stillman is interested in the particular experiences of his characters, is the narrow specificity of of time and place in The Last Days of Disco, which is set in early ’80s New York, among a set of young recent graduates of eastern liberal arts colleges and professional schools, and where the action revolves around a single location, simply “the Club”, an exclusive disco where getting in is, in itself, a sign of privilege. While Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco, and his other ’90s films, Metropolitan (1990) and Barcelona (1994), would seem on the surface to be yet another work about privileged people masquerading as universal drama, Stillman’s films are better seen as rare cases of works that actually explore the lives of white, middle class individuals in their particularities and not as universal avatars. The result is that the privilege attached to these identities goes unquestioned. ![]() If a fictional everyman is meant to be taken as every man, which in this case would include women, then to look at what it means to be, say, a white male in particular makes little sense. To take a few examples, this accounts for the relative lack of leading roles for women or African-Americans, and how few Hollywood films or network television series are made from the perspective of queer individuals, or from those in the working class.Ī less obvious effect is how infrequently the privileged categories are subject to scrutiny. ![]() ![]() ![]() One effect of this privileging is in the absence or marginalization of individuals and stories that do not conform to the normalized categories. At this point it is, I think, uncontroversial to note the lack of diversity in American film and television, or to make note of how that lack has resulted in normalizing, or even naturalizing, certain categories of identity - white, male, middle class, heterosexual - and marking others as deviations. Stillman does interesting things with all of them. The characters include two young women in publishing (Chloe Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale) who find a flat together, their roommate (Tara Subkoff), an employee at the club where they hang out (the always interesting Chris Eigeman), a fledgling ad executive (Mackenzie Astin), a junior assistant district attorney (Matt Keeslar), and a lawyer (Robert Sean Leonard). Fortunately, this time around the Ivy League characters project less of a glib sense of entitlement, making them more fun to watch, and Stillman himself gives more evidence of watching rather than simply listening. It’s remarkable how over the course of just three nightlife features - Metropolitan, Barcelona, and this comedy set in the early 1980s - writer-director Whit Stillman has created a form of mannerist dialogue as recognizable as David Mamet’s, a kind of self-conscious, upper-crust Manhattan gab reeking of hairsplitting cultural distinctions.
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