WHOLE-WHIT:

A Great Conserative Filmmaker (Julia Magnet, Winter 2004, City Journal)

In 1991—a bad year for culture, what with grunge, Oliver Stone’s JFK, and Boyz N the Hood—American filmmaker Whit Stillman, then 39, quietly released Metropolitan, the first of three witty, articulate social comedies that will prove as immortal as Hollywood’s golden comedies of the 1930s. Invoking the nineteenth-century social novel—where the drama lies in the nuance of etiquette, and words and conversations matter—these three comedies of manners articulate a coherent worldview: conservative (in the way that Jane Austen is conservative), rooted in traditional Western values and social attitudes, and elaborating a good-humored critique of the 1960s social revolution. Never curmudgeonly or didactic, Stillman is gently devastating on the folly of that era’s cult of personal, especially sexual, liberation. His is a humanistic, but withering, critique of a utopian modernity that would jettison the traditions of the past and remake the world anew.

The strongly marked young adults who people Stillman’s films have an intensely moral inner life, as they earnestly try to define the good and behave correctly. And that good consists of civility, restraint, thoughtfulness, and the conventions of social life. Stillman’s own moral code, recognizably descending from Alexander Pope or Jane Austen, is not grand or metaphysical but fitted to the human realm of social interaction; it transforms atomized individuals into a civil society. For Hollywood, such a code is deeply countercultural, and it makes Stillman—writer, producer, and director rolled into one—a filmmaker conservatives can love.

It is, of course, no coincidence that the three films--especially Barcelona--are very funny.

MORE:
Nor is the lack of a sense of humor on display here a coincidence, Nothing Funny About It: Canada's new prime minister is not laughing. (Rob Anders, 1/12/04, National Review)

Humor is one of Canada's most important exported cultural commodities: Canadians are proud of Mike Meyers, Leslie Nielsen, and, of course, the late, great John Candy. Recognizing humor, like hockey, is a Canadian value shared from coast to coast, it is strange to see the fury with which the federal Liberal party has descended on a previously unnoticed Paul Martin parody website.

Threatening to sue the creators just before Christmas, the Liberal-party lawyers claim this satirical website chronicling Paul Martin corruption has stolen the Liberal party's personal intellectual property.

Liberals should be aware that satire is one of the oldest forms of criticizing government policy. The nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty" is actually coded criticism, when tyranny not freedom was the norm: "all the Kings horses and all the Kings men couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again."

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 12, 2004 2:43 PM