Movie Quote of the Day (‘Metropolitan,’ on Jane Austen)

[Two of the more intellectual members of the “Sally Fowler Rat Pack” of debutantes and their dates are discussing novels they’ve recently read.]

Audrey Rouget [played by Carolyn Farina, right]: “By Tolstoy, War and Peace and by Jane Austen, Persuasion and Mansfield Park."

Tom Townsend [played by Edward Clements, left]: "Mansfield Park? You've got to be kidding.”

Audrey: “No.”

Tom: “But it's a notoriously bad book. Even Lionel Trilling, one of her greatest admirers, thought that.”

Audrey: “Well, if Lionel Trilling thought that, he's an idiot.”

Tom: “The whole story revolves around, what? The immorality of a group of young people putting on a play.”

Audrey: “In the context of the novel it makes perfect sense.”

Tom: “But in the context of the novel, then nearly everything Jane Austen wrote is near ridiculous from today's perspective.”

Audrey: “Has it ever occurred to you that today, looked at from Jane Austen's perspective, would look even worse?”— Metropolitan (1990), written and directed by Whit Stillman

I couldn’t help feeling amused by last week’s conjunction of events: Turner Classic Movies’ scheduling of Whit Stillman’s movie during the holiday season, and this past month’s 250^th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen.

But I really chuckled when I heard this exchange. In a 2017 appearance at Arizona State University, Stillman disclaimed any notion that his first film, an indie movie darling set during Christmas break, was an adaptation of Mansfield Park, let alone that Austen had “inspired” this film.

Whatever. Given that the filmmaker's last movie to date, Love and Friendship (2016), was an adaptation of Austen’s unfinished epistolary novel Lady Susan, I don’t think he would deny that she was a formative influence on his sensibility.

Take another look, then, at the above sample from Stillman’s unabashed talkfest. What a slyboots he is—ribbing the very book that furnished the ethical conflict of his own movie.

I must confess that when I first saw this comedy-drama 35 years ago, I felt deep ambivalence. 

My upbringing was blue-collar ethnic, not WASP upper class, and if I spoke the way that Audrey and Tom do here (let alone their earnest philosophical friend Charlie about “Fourierism”), my friends would have handed my head to me. 

In fact, I wondered back then how many students even at elite college campuses talked about such subjects in their dorms instead of their classrooms.

But the more I thought about this movie’s young people, the less removed they seemed from my own experience.

Pampered and privileged as these preppies were, they shared many of the insecurities of my lower-middle-class set: clinging to one’s social circle, longing for someone who may or may not like you in return, wondering where the money would come to pay for the clothes and activities that would keep you in your clique, and making sense of your parents (or, as the cynic Nick says, “The most important thing to realize about parents is that there is absolutely nothing you can do about them”).

The very thought of it might puzzle my group—and the Sally Fowler Rat Pack subset of what Charlie christens “the Urban Haute Bourgeoisie”—but the values that Jane Austen extols in her social satires apply as much to all classes and regions in modern America as in the novelist’s Regency England: sincerity, thoughtfulness, and decency.