A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion Spine #326: Whit Still­man’s Met­ro­pol­i­tan.

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Met­ro­pol­i­tan is a movie about the Urban Haute Bour­geoisie, debu­tantes and their escorts, peo­ple who read lit­er­ary crit­i­cism but not the actu­al books, and kids who obses­sive­ly wor­ry about their own down­fall, debate the­o­ret­i­cal polit­i­cal sys­tems and don’t know how to dri­ve a car. I would detest hav­ing even the slight­est con­tact with these peo­ple, who are essen­tial­ly all talk and no fol­low-through. Yet I enjoyed Met­ro­pol­i­tan and I’m glad it made me go men­tal.

Met­ro­pol­i­tan is a movie about class, and though the only class present is the upper-class, the “UC” as the char­ac­ters so smarmi­ly refer to it, this focused approach effec­tive­ly made me exam­ine my own class sit­u­a­tion in a new light. Luc San­te’s essay, linked at the end of this post, says that Amer­i­ca pre­tends that class does­n’t exist. I think this is close but not quite. I think many peo­ple who aren’t con­sid­er them­selves to be mid­dle class. This makes sense, since mid­dle class can cov­er ground from some­one like me who makes less than $30k a year to some­one like a sur­geon, who might make twen­ty times as much. We’re still peo­ple make ends meet by work­ing for our pay. In Met­ro­pol­i­tan, dis­cus­sion cen­ters not on the neces­si­ty of work to make ends meet, but on the choic­es of pro­fes­sion that should main­tain or strength­en their sta­tus as UHB. They don’t need to work, but they need some­thing to fill the time.

The char­ac­ter that lets us [mid­dle-classers] enter in to this world is an ex-trust fund kid who, after his par­ents’ divorce, has become one of the mid­dle class. In this movie, one is nev­er poor, only “finan­cial­ly lim­it­ed.” But Tom’s finan­cial inad­e­qua­cy is bla­tant. He has a rent­ed tuxe­do and can’t afford a great­coat to keep off the chill of Man­hat­tan win­ter. His par­en­t’s are also divorced, anoth­er mid­dle class dis­tinc­tion. Yet he went to prep school and has the right pedi­gree in all oth­er aspects. In fact, just hav­ing a pedi­gree helps him enor­mous­ly. Some folks think he is a fake, but as the film devel­ops we find that, to some extent, each char­ac­ter is play­ing the role of the UHB at the price of his or her own soul, and they’re all fakes. Most impor­tant­ly we learn that Nick, who seems to be the ulti­mate UHB, is clos­er to Tom than we real­ize.

This trig­gered all kinds of thought processs­es. I real­ized that I had been watch­ing the eco­nom­i­cal­ly derived cul­tur­al aspects of the upper class, which func­tions like any oth­er cul­tur­al base, with its own taboos, rites of pas­sage and eti­quette. This in turn made me exam­ine the cul­tur­al aspects that have result­ed from my own mid­dle class exis­tence. This is the main strength of the film, by show­ing us anoth­er class try­ing to fig­ure itself out, we in turn exam­ine our own sta­tus and role. It almost seems to indi­cate that cul­ture does more to sti­fle true expres­sions of self than ease inter­ac­tion with oth­ers. Per­haps this is mere­ly an effect of the exam­i­na­tion of the strict­ly con­trolled exclu­siv­i­ty of the UHB, but I found myself relat­ing to almost every male char­ac­ter in the film. It would be inter­est­ing to watch it with a woman to see if she feels the same in regard to the debs.

This film would be a good tag team with Spike Lee’s Bam­boo­zled for an exam­i­na­tion on how class and eth­nic­i­ty are knot­ted.

Tom also serves as a reflec­tion of the movie itself, which has be appear high class while being “finan­cial­ly lim­it­ed.” I for­got to men­tion that.

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Cri­te­ri­on essay by Luc Sante
The Wikipedia on class