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New York debutantes love to boogie down to "Cotton Eyed Joe." They are also drunk.

I’ve commented from time to time (usually when on the subject of Woody Allen) that I feel like I know New York City.  Rather, I know “New York,” the fairyland construct of my own imagination and the stories of filmmakers like Allen and Martin Scorsese – people whose vision of the city is pitiless and romantic.  Every film is a love letter gilded with disappointment, neuroses, and grit, hemmed together by iron fire escapes and that unmistakable skyline.  I’ve never actually been to New York, New York, but the millions of stories in that naked city have provided me with countless hours of resonant drama and breathtaking images.

Filmmakers for a couple generations now have been keenly aware of the independent existence of Celluloid NYC; if memes exist, this version of what many of its cinematic apostles proclaim the greatest city in the world is certainly one of the most persistent.  In 1990, first-time filmmaker Whit Stillman produced one of the most successful independent films of the decade, a Jane Austen-esque comedy of manners titled Metropolitan.¹  From the outset, Stillman pursues the construction and enshrinement of that New York City of the mind², deliberately setting the scene more as a fairy tale than the typical New York picture.  NY, NY is a great place to pass the New Year in film.  The merest suggestion of winter chill lends the frames an illusory crispness; nothing seems more momentous than flipping over the calendar page in a city whose residents so famously stretch their waking hours from night to day to night again.

Time is timeless in New York, yet no other city in the United States reminds you so eloquently that by the time you see the images on screen, it is already history.  There’s a sense of scale even in the drawing rooms of the well-appointed apartments in Metropolitan that dwarf the characters, making their small cadre and fleeting camaraderie even more poignant.  They’re so small, and obsess over such small things, yet the size and harshness of the urban landscape give Stillman permission to romanticize these foolish things — it’s a small kindness only the New York of popular consciousness could grant.

Not only does Stillman love New York City, he wants to eulogize the passing of a particular subculture of the city — the untitled aristocracy. Symbolically, the narrative takes place over the course of winter break, as a group of debutantes takes a townie into their fold as a sort of charitable act.  As one year passes into the next, a handful of our protagonists grow up a bit, and time marches on past this dying breed that thrives on good breeding.

Like any other students, the young adults of Metropolitan’s city of yesteryear animatedly debate art, literature, and philosophy.  Our primary hero, Tom Townsend, is  an upwardly-mobile academic who is more concerned with thinking the right things than thinking for himself.  Consistently exposed as the biggest hypocrite of the group, Tom somewhat despises the privilege and wastefulness of the debs’ parties (and after-parties), yet eagerly dons his tux when his adoptive mentor, Nick Smith, requests his presence.  Audrey Rouget, our heroine, fancies Tom because he is such a work-in-progress.  She probably expects that she could change him; she’d settle for him even noticing her in that way.  Then there’s Charlie, who seems to have absentmindedly wandered out of a crowd scene in Hannah and Her Sisters.  Charlie loves Audrey, but he’s too much of a stumblebum to do anything about it.  These four comprise the dynamic quartet within the larger group, and long after Nick departs for the country (leaving a dire plea that if nobody hears from him, to let the police know his stepmother probably killed him), the triad remains intact.

Somewhat resembling a pre-lapsarian Henry Crawford with a moral compass, ³  Nick is a fascinatingly vain ringmaster, a voice of mischief in his group, throwing things into diverting chaos but also the center of gravity around which the group coheres.  As much as he teases them, Nick is a necessary force; in his absence, the group crumbles and drifts apart.  Besides offering the lone voice of moral authority (even as he smugly cops to his own dalliances), Nick’s “bromance” with Tom is the most significant relationship dynamic in the film until he boards a departing train to the strains of “A Mighty Fortress (is Our God).” ⁴  Though the larger group flies apart, the quartet of Nick, Tom, Charlie, and Audrey soon retrenches; Tom and Charlie, at loggerheads over Audrey throughout the film (unbeknownst to Tom, though, since he was too self-obsessed to recognize or return her feelings), find that a mutual desire for constancy, and a protective impulse toward Miss Rouget, bind them together despite their philosophical differences.

Stillman doesn’t truly upturn the conventions of a romance by the end, but he subverts them in a more constructive manner.  Neither Tom nor Charlie rides in on a white horse to save Audrey from the licentious advances of Rick von Sloneker; as it turns out, she doesn’t need “saving.”  She’s her own woman, despite her heavy-sighing preoccupation with love and the inattentive Tom Townsend.  Our two heroes, traditionally pitted against each other in a winner-take-all contest for the young lady’s affections get the wind taken out of their sails a bit with Stillman’s chronicle of their unexpectedly expensive ride out to von Sloneker’s seaside cottage.  The clueless cavaliers have buried the hatchet, and while Audrey doesn’t seem to romantically favor one or t’other by film’s end, the final shot of the three hitchhiking home suggests the far more poignant, powerful seeds of a deep friendship sown.  As a coming-of-age story, it gently ribs its protagonists, but never indicts them for being the products of their upbringing or too young to know any better than they do.

Though their motives remain obscure, these young people decided to use their dinner party to recreate the narrative of James Joyce's "The Dead," only to realize too late that Joyce's dense, layered prose translates very poorly to dinner theatre.

As a New Year’s tale, the final shot is especially affirming: it freeze-frames the trio, an old technique, immortalizing them like an aged photograph. ⁵  It captures them in media res, neither at the beginning of their individual stories, nor the end.  Perhaps it is merely the beginning of a beautiful friendship.  Yet it is the prevailing elegiac tone of the film that lends this final scene its power.  Since Stillman is explicitly frames this way of life — a certain code of behavior and its attendant psychology — as a panegyric, not only has the New Year passed, but we may very well be looking at the last surviving specimens of the untitled aristocracy that drove so much of New York, New York’s rise to prominence as a cultural and industrial center.  These young, indolent friends are  pinned into cinema frame like butterflies, but the conscious attempt at preservation only serves to remind us of the entropy picking away at the lives they’ve known.  As such, this negative presence also suggests the impermanence of the friendship we’ve witnessed blossom.

Seasons are, by definition, cyclical.  So are the rise and fall of classes and fashionability.  The doleful fate of these characters was to come of age in the downswing of their class’s relevance to American life and stature.  They are walking home to a city that has already begun to leave them behind, just as their other friends left them.  Stillman wants to suggest that friendship will see these three through, even as the Sally Fowlers of the world go their own itinerant ways.⁶  This purposeful dispersion is emblematic of tales from New York.  We would like to toast the ringing in of the new year, absent friends, the ebb of life, and the love that we carry with us day to day.  Perhaps within the confines of a rigorously regulated social network, that may be possible. Rituals could be followed; familiar faces could be hailed as they pass by, and pleasantries exchanged.  But the raw architecture of the city does not permit these familiar interactions between strangers.  The city abides while the people live their separate lives, and without the structure — the metaphorical “architecture” of social strata — these lives are as empty as Sally’s penthouse, once her rat pack has dissolved into the cracks on the pavement.

That’s why films like this are so potent.  They create, uphold, and perpetuate an intimacy that transcends and transforms the brutal cold of the big city.  I don’t think I’d make it in NYC.  Milwaukee, the closest metropolis to my current residence, gives me the jitters; winding my way through landscapes crowded with towering cement and steel, gutters full of rubbish, and people permanently hunched like dodo birds sets me at unease.  For me, the Big Apple functions far more successfully as a malleable metaphor – adaptable to any story – that corresponds eerily well to my own psyche.  Living in Actual New York would destroy me; living with Movie New York consoles, moves, and touches me.  I’m at home there.

Edited by Tracy McCusker.

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