Three decades ago, writer-director Whit Stillman announced himself as a major talent with the release of his debut film, Metropolitan. With its portrait of preppy post-adolescents flitting between debutante balls during one rather melancholy Christmas, the film was a hit with critics and netted its maker an Oscar nomination.
Much of the film’s fascination derived from its depiction of a rarefied subculture: There was novelty in watching dolled-up young people participating in highly ritualized social gatherings, becoming entangled in assorted romances, and politely parrying with each other on issues of from status and sex. As the godson of sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, who helped propagate the acronym WASP, for “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant,” Stillman was unusually well-positioned to depict this scene.
Yet even 30 years ago, Stillman’s characters were conscious of belonging to a losing team. “I think that we are all, in a sense, doomed,” says one of Metropolitan’s lead characters, Charlie Black (Taylor Nichols). “We hear a lot about the great social mobility in America, with the focus usually on the comparative ease of moving upwards. What’s less discussed is how easy it is to go down.”
If, upon its initial release, Metropolitan appeared wistfully backward-glancing, today, it looks positively archaic. Indeed, the film was released during the midpoint of the presidency of George H.W. Bush, the last occupant of the White House to emerge from a traditional WASP background. Stillman’s screenplay references plenty of emblems of the preppy lifestyle, but how many of them retain their relevance? Today, when Brooks Brothers makes headlines, it is in connection with its recent bankruptcy filing.
Contemporaneous with the general decline of WASPs in America has been the sidelining of WASPs in film. With the exception of the sporadically employed Stillman, who has made only four movies since Metropolitan, few contemporary filmmakers consider it worth their time to document the seemingly trivial travails of trust-fund recipients. But has the fading of WASPs from movie screens been a net benefit to our cultural life?
In the 1930s, in search of easily digestible entertainment for a nation bruised by the Great Depression, Hollywood routinely turned to the manners and mores of WASPs. The screwball comedy genre is unthinkable without the presence of upper-class characters who can be compared to and contrasted with members of the larger world: Consider Carole Lombard’s heiress and William Powell’s butler in My Man Godfrey (1936).
As far as their audiences were concerned, these films did not so much mock this milieu as offer a window to it. In his recent memoir Apropos of Nothing, Woody Allen writes with breathless affection about what he calls “champagne comedies.” “I loved stories that took place in penthouses where the elevator opened into the apartment and corks popped,” Allen writes, “where suave men who spoke witty dialogue romanced beautiful women who lounged around the house in what someone now might wear to a wedding at Buckingham Palace.”
Indeed, the prevalence of WASP-centric movies resulted in the general public becoming familiar with lifestyles that would otherwise have seemed remote. Witness the popularity of a whole host of high society-type players from midcentury movies: John Kerr, Peter Lawford, Dina Merrill — to say nothing of genuine megastars like Katharine Hepburn, who injected fresh life into her struggling career when playwright Philip Barry penned The Philadelphia Story for her.
Despite the exclusivity of the class they depicted, these movies were rarely snobbish. In fact, an honorable tradition emerged of WASPs defying society’s strictures. In George Cukor’s Holiday (1938), Hepburn played the dissident daughter of an uptight family ensconced in a mansion in Manhattan; the film celebrates her for taking up with a free-thinking character played by Cary Grant. The same year, in Howard Hawks’s brilliantly antic Bringing Up Baby (1938), Hepburn played a heedless heiress intent on remaking the world in her own image, enthusiastically railroading polite society in her attempt to win over a buttoned-down scientist (Grant).
Sometimes, of course, WASPs were simply the object of good-natured ribbing. In Preston Sturges’s The Palm Beach Story (1942), singer Rudy Vallee was unexpectedly cast as perhaps the definitive penny-pinching blue blood, J.D. Hackensacker III, who maintains a handwritten record of every expense, no matter how trivial, incurred in his dalliance with co-star Claudette Colbert. Today, it would be well-nigh impossible to depict the WASP class without taking into account its privilege and prejudices.
But can we have our WASP cake and eat it too? In some ways, we already do: Designers like Ralph Lauren long ago took the superficial markers of high-end living and made them attainable to the wider public — an approach with which Stillman seems to agree. In Metropolitan, a not particularly well-off young man named Tom Townsend (Edward Clements) presents himself as a “committed socialist,” but over the course of the film, he permits himself to be charmed by debutante balls and the nice folks who attend them. Stillman has shown himself committed to the concept of cross-cultural exchange, as when the patriotic WASPs in Barcelona (1994) champion American hamburgers to their Spanish-born significant others or when the collegiate heroine of Damsels in Distress (2012) endeavors to reform the hygiene habits of frat brothers.
Our subconscious longing for WASP values — good manners, uprightness in private life, liveliness at parties — can emerge unexpectedly, as when the nation paused to watch Bush’s funeral or when some portion of it is amused by the square, strained goofiness of Sen. Mitt Romney. It may be high time to revisit a cinematic genre that found plenty to laugh at in the leisure class but also a thing or two to celebrate.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including The Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
