Metropolitan Bourgeoisie

Whit Stillman’s cult classic Metropolitan is an elegy for the haute bourgeoisie, the well-educated upper subdivision of the middle class that once set the cultural tone for liberal Western nations. Released in 1990, Stillman’s film chronicles the Christmas break experience of a small band of Upper East Side college kids home from the Ivies. They are the last generation to attend the debutante balls that were de rigeur in their grandparents’ New York – the done thing, for example, among the Episcopalians and Presbyterians that populate George Cukor’s 1938 film Holiday.

The young people in Metropolitan are the last batch of American elites who go to Yale and Wellesley precisely because they are elites. Born, not made. Contra Marx, this lot’s family own townhouses and opera boxes, maybe a horse; but means of production? Nah. Nonetheless, the world has them in its crosshairs and they know it, leading one of the film’s most memorable characters, Charlie Black, to obsess about downward mobility, and for good reason. Today our top educational institutions pride themselves on making prestige from the social scientistic hodge-podge of grade point averages, test scores, and most importantly, diversity. Techne begets techne against the irrelevant backdrop of old and venerable buildings that once rightly meant something on account of simply being old and venerable.

The main character in Metropolitan is Tom Townsend, who has been pushed downward before the rest of his peers as a result of his parents’ divorce and his father’s creation of a second family. Although Tom has gone to a first-rate prep school and attends Princeton, he tries to reject his class origin before it can fully reject him, espousing a brand of utopian agrarianism called “Fourierism,” after the French philosopher Charles Fourier. But as he is welcomed deeper into the small band of debutantes – the remnant Rat Pack of what Charlie brands UHB’s (urban haute bourgeoisie), Tom rediscovers an appreciation for his native social milieu. He even starts wearing the uniform, buying his formerly rented tuxedo from the famous New York menswear shop A.T. Harris. By the end of the movie, Tom and Charlie agree that life on a Fourier-style farm is not for them. Of course it isn’t. They’re wearing J. Press overcoats in a taxi cab from Manhattan to the Hamptons on account of having never learned to drive.

As for sex, the UHB’s do not particularly champion chastity, but nor are they libertines, even during what Stillman calls the “orgy week” between Christmas and New Year. The young people play strip poker at a party, but there is no evidence of the rampant “hooking up” one hears about today. The young men police themselves against caddish behavior, as seen in their disdain for the ponytailed aspiring master of the universe, Rick Von Sloneker, known for having “ruined” girls. Likewise, the young ladies still stigmatize sluts.

As for religion, the group are agnostic, but there is no great shame in isolated instances of surrender to the Gospel, which still lurks in the background of the culture their ancestors have made. The tune to Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress is our God” plays during the film’s opening credits, and a few scenes later, Charlie explains his hope for one day having a Barthian intrusion by a personal God who sees, listens, and knows all.

Within the boundaries of the Liberal paradigm after the long defeat of the Reformation, the haute bourgeoisie was a good thing, and Metropolitan should make viewers appropriately sad for its demise. Sure, there were a few phonies and nincompoops; but for me, as a product of the white-collar petite bourgeoisie consisting mostly of school teachers and non-service academy military officers, the film brings an additional tinge of sadness about not having anywhere reasonable to ascend.

In my family we never played polo or knew anybody with a yacht or attended prep schools, but such things were not impossible to imagine for future generations. And when I was a child, there were still aesthetic standards set by our betters that my well-educated, paycheck-to-paycheck relatives agreed ought to be there. I mostly listened to rock and roll, but it never occurred to me that there would come a day when there was almost nowhere to go in most cities if one wanted to listen to a live symphony orchestra.

Today, Charlie’s fear in Metropolitan about his class’s downward mobility is old news. A wealthy family may live in a bigger house than poorer people, but is it a better house? And no doubt, the mortgage can usually only be paid with two professional degrees and the incomes they command. After the bills are paid, one is just as likely to see a rich person at Walmart as at Neiman Marcus, or a new BMW parked next to an old Hyundai at the dollar store. High status now means season tickets to the Cowboys, not the ballet. Fancy folk buy their Jet Skis with cash, while rednecks buy theirs with credit. If any of this lot are Catholic, they all pile into the same Mass factory and zoom away after their fifty-six-minute weekend obligation is over with.

As the civilizing balance of the upper-mid echelon has been made to disassemble, the old-fashioned bohemian fear of bourgeois decadence has really happened. So too, the downward pressure from elite culture-makers too proud to stop going through its religious motions has completely dissipated, letting the rest of us off the hook of faith which we really felt and lived. Aside from Charlie, the characters in Metropolitan may not think enough about God, but there is no Christmas on Fifth Avenue without “O come, all ye faithful” at St. Thomas Church. There is also no society without men and women pairing up and making stable lives together. As divorce is rampant and fertility rates have completely collapsed, that norm is now gone from the world too. But once upon a time, a fruitful destiny for a world beyond the white ties and ball gowns was ultimately what the debutante parties were all about.

As for the age-old enemies of the cult that produced bourgeois culture, for better and for worse, the time has come for them to go for the jugular. The annoyances and injustices of wokeism are one thing; but the tush push of new scientism on timeless libertinism is proving a more powerful shove into the abyss than many of us could have imagined. They can and will make the world they want, with no gods watching.

This revolting revolution is the world of the Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2023 Oscar-nominated Poor Things, a wake-up call for those of us more comfortable either still dozing in dreams of naturally ordered liberty or the niche population itching for a bohemian Christian post-present-thing arrangement.

It takes little effort to critique Poor Things for its many pornographic sex scenes. Likewise, it is easy to see how the one scene where an irrelevant Christianity is front-and-center – a wedding in a black and white church – may offend viewers whose faith is important to them. But the biggest problem with Poor Things is the same emphasis on making that has replaced our old WASP’s with a new class of Epicurean fundamentalists. The film is a re-telling of the Frankenstein story, this time presenting a woman named Bella, played by Emma Stone, who has been formed and kept by the misanthropic vivisectionist, Dr. Godwin (“God”) Baxter, played by Willem Defoe. Skipping through more than two hours of raunch, the conclusion proclaims the basic Satanic credo of self-definition and, literally, making a world in one’s own image.

Lanthimos’ picture clearly aims to obliterate what is left of the old bourgeois norms; but like so much pro-feminism and anti-racism – to name just two categories of striving – the demand for real-world cultural opponents far outstrips the supply. Thus, Poor Things screams transgression, rebellion, and insurrection, but its takeaways are completely mainstream, as epitomized by the – dare I says it? – bourgeois cocktail party at the end of the movie. Whatever man Poor Thing wants to stick it to has been stuck for a long time. Instead, it is Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan that now seems like the radical statement. A paean to the bourgeoisie from 1990 turns out to have a far more bohemian sensibility than today’s tributes to godless liberation bought and paid for by scientism.

As Conor Oberst sang back in 2004, “we’ll get down there, way down to the very bottom of everything. And then we’ll see it, we’ll see it, we’ll see it.” Some people do seem to be waking up and taking a look at the apocalyptic contours of the ground beneath our feet. The Church, I fear, is largely paralyzed as the worst implications of Liberalism play themselves out in the ways one observes in Poor Things. As I often say, the Church’s leaders have more than enough to do just to keep pulling the levers on the old machine until they hit 75 or, alas, far beyond. And while it may play well enough to sound the alarm of decline from time to time on matters like abortion or gay marriage, our deeply enculturated hatred for God must not be mentioned, let alone resisted.

What a time to be walking around in the world with the indelible mark of baptism on our souls. Let’s pause and raise a glass to the UHB’s.