Whit Stillman as test case: Can you be "conservative" and an "artist" and survive the critics?

Ross Douthat, commenting on Austin Kelly's Slate piece on the release of Metropolitan on DVD, notes an interesting phenomenon -- some critics don't know quite what to do with Whit Stillman. Douthat points out that Kelly "ties himself into pretzels" attempting "...to rescue Stillman from his conservative admirers." Like Douthat, I think you have to be pretty dense not to recognize a conservative sensibility at work in Stillman's films -- or at least a serious engagement with ideas and values often associated with conservatism. What drives the kind of rhetorical contortions on display in the Slate article, I think, is the inability to dismiss Stillman as a hack with a political axe to grind and the concomitant confusion some critics experience on being confronted with, and forced to consider, a "conservative" artist. Mel Gibson probably bore the brunt of that kind of cognitive dissonance with the critical reception of The Passion of the Christ.

I won't pretend that conservative film critics aren't often guilty of the same aesthetic confusion, but -- lately, anyway -- they've had more practice dividing the sheep from the goats, so to speak; they are arguably more used to separating great art with a liberal sensibility from a string of platitudes masquerading as social satire. Austin Kelly seems to have approached Metropolitan thus: "If I like it -- if it's good art -- it can't be 'conservative.'" His reductionist approach applies even to his misapprehension of conservative critiques of Stillman. Sure, some of the responses to Stillman's films are pedantic, but so is most "serious" film criticism. If Kelly has really read Doomed Bourgeois in Love (which I have my doubts about), I think it's less the pedantry than the putative "reactionary" attitude that he objects to. Mustn't let those conservatives -- excuse me, those reactionaries -- get too uppity with their film criticism; that's our specialty (see feminist film critiques and "the male gaze").

I had an inkling years ago of how delightfully baffling Stillman could be to those who pride themselves on their impeccable liberal credentials. One night when I was in grad school, I was out with a group of good friends -- all perfectly lovely people. Many of them happened to be European, and two of them were Spanish. Somehow the subject of Metropolitan came up, and when I confessed to loving the movie, there was a general hue and cry about how unsympathetic, how bourgeois, the characters were . . . who cares about the tribulations of a group of spoiled rich kids when there's so much oppression in the world? I might have asked them whether the same question occurred to them when they read Tolstoy, but I supposed Whit Stillman was no Tolstoy (neither is Sergei Eisenstein, but that's a subject for another day).

At the time, I hadn't yet seen Barcelona, but if I had, I would have recognized the reaction. A sophisticated European takes a drag from a cigarette, exhales smoke from the side of her mouth, and emphasizing her point with the cigarette perched between two fingers, wearily exclaims, "Spoiled rich kids, doomed bourgeois, those -- how you say -- debutante balls. It's all so . . . so facha [fascist], isn't it?"

I think Whit Stillman has understood some of his critics better than they have ever understood him.