Whit Stillman is a film director that can easily fall between the cracks: not quite mainstream, not quite arthouse, and certainly not cut from the standard American cinematic cloth of mindless violence and hackneyed redemption. His films favour conversation over action.
Whit Stillman may be regarded as a genteel chronicler of decline, his camera trained not on the margins or the masses, but on vanishing social species: the American WASP. His unofficial trilogy — Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), and The Last Days of Disco (1998) — offers a gently comic, faintly melancholy portrait of this vanishing class: preppy, Protestant, articulate, and exquisitely ill-suited to the modern world and the sledgehammer of late capitalism.
Stillman as WASP chronicler
Stillman’s aesthetic is one of verbal choreography. His camera lingers on drawing rooms, dance floors, and spaces where conversations happen. He can be likened to Eric Rohmer as both filmmakers understand that talk is never just talk. Dialogue reveals everything.
But where Rohmer’s characters navigate the moral intricacies of provincial France, Stillman’s are stranded in cosmopolitan limbo. For Stillman, the decline of the WASP is not merely social, but ontological. The urban haute bourgeoisie isn’t just fading, it’s mutating into something else entirely: ironic, unanchored, post-historical.
Pasoloni’s anthropological mutation
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notion of Anthropological Mutation provides an unexpected key to Stillman’s work. Pasolini argued that modern consumer capitalism does not merely change habits; it erases entire human types, replacing deep-rooted traditions with a globalised, mass-mediated sameness. Old values, dialects, gestures, and social roles were being extinguished wholesale. No resistance. No warning. This transformative process might even extend to physiognomy and demeanour, as different habits and ways of living are adopted.
The WASP, in Stillman’s lens, occupies the same endangered category as the English Sloane Ranger or the French jeune fille bien élevée: not simply out of fashion, but teetering on the verge of extinction. Stillman’s films, whether consciously or not, underline Pasolini’s thesis. The WASP, once the default setting of American identity, becomes, in Stillman’s lens, polite, erudite, and redundant.
Stillman’s films are, in essence, field reports from the scenes of that erasure. His characters are living museum exhibits, self-aware enough to sense that they are relics, yet still clinging to the scripts of their inherited world. One could quite plausibly shelve Metropolitan beside The Official Preppy Handbook (1980), The Sloane Ranger Handbook (1982), and The Young Fogey Handbook (1985). Taken together, these handbooks form a kind of transatlantic ethnography, observing the anthropological decline of a vanishing species.
Handbooks of extinction
Before Whit Stillman began filming the decline of the WASP, others had been documenting its rituals in paperback. Three handbooks from the 1980s, ostensibly satirical, mostly affectionate, serve as field guides to a class already conscious of its own redundancy.
The Official Preppy Handbook (1980) A tongue-in-cheek manual that became a bestseller, it codified everything from rowing blazers to summering on Nantucket. The WASP lifestyle, once inherited instinctively, could be itemised, purchased, and parodied in equal measure.
The Sloane Ranger Handbook (1982) The British counterpart, produced at the height of Lady Diana’s charm offensive. It depicts Sloaney girls in pie-crust collars and boys in corduroy with crumbling country piles behind them. It was equal parts style-guide and obituary.
The Young Fogey Handbook (1985) A peculiarly British guide for the retrogressive youth who dressed like a Victorian fly-fisherman while reading Evelyn Waugh. Young fogeys are the cultural avant-garde of defeat.
Metropolitan (1990)
“Now barbarism is cloaked with all sorts of self-righteousness and moral superiority.”
In Metropolitan, the plot — such as it is — concerns a group of young socialites moving between apartments during debutante season. At its quiet centre is the story of Audrey Rouget, the sweetly bookish debutante who falls for Tom Townsend, a brooding outsider with socialist leanings and no tuxedo of his own. Their hesitant romance shapes the film’s ironic yet tender tone. But the film is not really a love story or coming-of-age story so much as a cultural autopsy.
Stillman introduces the concept of the “Urban Haute Bourgeoisie”; a caste whose lifestyle have become a kind of living museum of New York WASPdom. They discuss Jane Austen, Fourierist morality, and whether downward social mobility might be character-building. They waltz through debutante balls as if re-enacting a ritual whose sacred meaning has evaporated. They are self-conscious, self-parodying, and mostly earnest in their attempts to preserve a way of life that no longer commands respect or relevance.
Enter Nick Smith (Chris Eigeman), the reluctant moral centre. WASP as Wildean wit, Smith is acutely aware that his milieu is becoming culturally redundant, yet he defends them all the same. His monologues are dialectical trench warfare, deploying barbed humour as a bulwark against the encroaching chaos of the new. To borrow Pieper, he is striding with “proud disdain through the swamp of human inadmissability”.
The characters in Metropolitan exist in a state of historical suspension. They quote Austen but prefer to read the criticism; they attend debutante balls whose meaning they no longer believe in. Here Stillman finds his closest literary kinship in Evelyn Waugh. Metropolitan fuses the brittle satire of Vile Bodies — with its endless parties, glittering chatter, and ingénues grasping for significance (while sensing the void beneath the champagne bubbles) — and the elegiac undertones of Brideshead Revisited, in which a whole way of life is glimpsed precisely at the moment of its dissolution.
Rick Von Sloneker, the villain of the piece, is a signal of where the culture is heading. Less articulate, more opportunistic, increasingly hollow, Sloneker is a transitional figure. He still carries the external trappings of WASPdom, but emptied of the interior life that once gave those things meaning. He is no longer recognisably part of the old order, but not yet part of the new. He’s a pre-emptive strike of the coming monoculture. He is, in essence, the first wave of anthropological mutation.
This tension gives the film its comic melancholy. When Nick Smith declares himself “a ferocious Marxist” while immaculately attired in black tie, we witness the tragicomedy of cultural dislocation. Nick is an anachronism, unsure whether to laugh at himself or mount a last defence — so he does both. It is the performance of class that has, in Malcolm Muggeridge’s phrase, “created boredom out of its own affluence”, and in a world increasingly indifferent, and often hostile, to its codes and rituals, decided to abolish itself.
Like other fin de siècle moments — Vienna before the First World War, Paris at the end of the Second Empire, or the Bright Young Things on the cusp of 20th century catastrophe — Stillman’s Manhattan is poised between comedy and collapse.
Barcelona (1994)
“He might seem like a typical American, like a big unsophisticated child, but he’s far more complex than that.”
Barcelona follows two American cousins abroad in Barcelona, Spain. Ted Boynton (Taylor Nichols) is a timid salesman of American electrical products, and Fred Boynton (Chris Eigeman) is a brusque naval officer stationed nearby. Together they navigate love affairs, political hostility, and the awkward position of being American in Europe during the Reagan years. At heart, the film is a satire of America’s two-faced relationship with Europe: part charming guest, part unwanted occupier. Fred and Ted embody these opposing postures, and their dynamic drives the narrative, toing and froing between comedy and confrontation.
If Metropolitan staged the decline of the WASP at home, Barcelona sets it against the background of American hegemony abroad. Fred, loud and defensive, becomes the human avatar of U.S. foreign policy: uninvited, ungraceful, perpetually accused of imperialism, and yet not entirely wrong. America, in Stillman’s lens, is less an empire than a well-meaning dinner guest who has arrived brought the wrong wine.
Barcelona’s soirées and diplomatic encounters highlight the uncertainty of America’s place in the world. Much as in T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, small talk is a form of metaphysical avoidance to distract from existential unease.
The film’s most memorable comic set-piece comes when Ted tries to illustrate the global struggle with ants. Red ants, a minority, oppress the black ants, the majority. US foreign policy is to assist the black ants and restore democracy. His allegory, intended as providing moral clarity, collapses into comic absurdity as Fred confirms their worst assumptions by whacking the red ants with a stone.
In Stillman’s Barcelona, the US and Spanish relationship is tense. Sailors brawl in bars, protests erupt against American presence, and there is paranoia about the CIA presence. Yet the comedy never quite sours into cynicism. The film treats the gap between Americans and Spaniards as a series of comic misapprehensions, which is captured in dialogue that is deadpan, precise, and often riotously funny. What emerges is less an attack on empire than a finely tuned study of misaligned cultural worldviews. We have the American instinct to simplify meeting the European impulse to qualify.
The Last Days of Disco (1998)
“Getting seriously involved with someone really just means ruining your nightlife.”
If Metropolitan staged the last cotillion of Anglo America and Barcelona hinted at the waning of American influence abroad, The Last Days of Disco offers the last dance.
Set in early 1980s Manhattan, The Last Days of Disco follows the intertwined personal and professional lives of Alice Kinnon (Chloë Sevigny) and Charlotte Pingress (Kate Beckinsale), two assistant editors at a struggling publishing house by day and regulars at a fading nightclub by night. Their friendship becomes the film’s emotional backbone, as they navigate relationships and office politics.
Swirling around the nightclub dancefloor are a group of young professionals negotiating romance, and relevance. The nightclub embodies the ephemeral nature of culture: you inhabit it as though it were permanent, invest your identity in its codes and rhythms, and then — suddenly — it vanishes. The lights go up, the club closes, and you are left without the tableau against which you defined yourself. Guy Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle (1967), argued that life itself had become performance, a series of images that dissolve the moment they are experienced. Stillman’s disco represents a culture of surface that ends when the music stops.
Chris Eigeman returns as Des McGrath. His commentary is no longer merely defensive wit but something closer to resignation. His dryness is the only honest register in a culture high on glamour but otherwise running on empty. And yet, there is always someone watching from the edge of the frame who suggests what comes next. If Eigeman’s characters articulate the end of something, then it is often the women in Stillman’s films — Audrey Rouget in Metropolitan, Montserrat and Marta in Barcelona, Alice and Charlotte in Disco — who gesture toward a beginning, however tentative. They are not necessarily wiser or more virtuous, but they are willing to move on, adapt, survive. They take jobs, make choices, end things. If the men are caught preserving a vanishing world, the women are already halfway into the next.
The Fitzgerald touchpoint in The Last Days of Disco is unavoidable. Like Gatsby’s parties, Stillman’s nightclub dazzles with surface glitz. The characters orbit each other on the dance floor much as Gatsby’s guests circled the pool, glamourous and distracted, but unwilling to admit the party is already over.
If there is more cynicism here than in Stillman’s earlier films, it stems less from the filmmaker than from the scene itself. Disco was always a culture of excess and exhaustion, brilliance and burnout. Stillman’s characters may be deluded or directionless, desperate for self-invention, but he isn’t here to mock. This is a portrait of people who built their identities around a cultural moment, only to watch it dissolve beneath them.
Eigeman as Anchor | A Chorus of Disenchantment
Across all three films, Chris Eigeman’s characters offer more than wit. They function as the emotional barometers of Stillman’s world. They are the ones who see the absurdity most clearly, and who articulate it with devastating charm. In Metropolitan, Nick Smith is defensive and Wildean, a self-aware museum piece. In Barcelona, Fred Boynton is inflated and absurd, projecting American overconfidence and earnestness with deadpan brilliance. In The Last Days of Disco, Des McGrath is resigned. The irony has given way to melancholy. Taken together, they embody the trilogy’s central theme: how to conduct yourself when the culture that formed you is evaporating in real time.
A toast to the deleted
Whit Stillman’s trilogy is a triptych of decline. Each film stages the end of an era. Rituals that once signaled continuity are revealed as ephemeral. Stillman manages to capture, gently and precisely, what is in the process of being lost with wit, grace, and a flair for the bon mot. WASP deletion doesn’t look like revolution. It looks like a man in a navy blazer, negroni in hand, trying to discuss Maistre to a bored bimbo while the disco beat drowns him out.
As Eliot once wrote: “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.”
