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Consider this an All Points Bulletin for a talented film maker who made three films before disappearing from view.
Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), and The Last Days of Disco (1998) made Stillman’s "yuppie trilogy." They broke a cardinal rule of film making: they treated creatures of privilege without mocking them. What’s more, they treated preppies and yuppies without mocking them.
By the 1990s, preppies were close to becoming the "villains of the piece." In the iconography of filmland, they were the self centered, self important, self aggrandizing creatures who made high school and then adulthood a living hell for everyone else. By the end of the decade, even acts of violence against them were ok (see Heathers, 1989, and Sophie Coppolas Lick the Star, 1989).
But Stillman’s trilogy broke a larger rule of filmmaking. After all, preppies and yuppies were bourgeois, and all "serious filmmakers" were charged with an avant garde mission: epater les bourgeoisie (and what’s more shocking than mocking?).
The trilogy took up residence in the excluded middle of filmmaking. As long as film making defined itself as a commercial artform, it could be said to pander to its audience. This meant that anyone who wished to make a show of their independence and their seriousness was obliged to make very clear that they were not pandering. What better way to do this than to mock the audience for whom other filmmakers slavishly worked? In the simple minded logic of a post war culture, you were either for the bourgeoisie or against them. Stillman managed to find a middle ground. (And this is harder than it looks. With Election, Alexander Payne found this middle ground. With Sideways, he lost it.)
Stillman’s trilogy was not a celebration of preppies. In fact, it is more successfully satiric than the broadside approach. There’s a nice scene in Barcelona in which a male character is admiring himself in the mirror. He asks, "why is it you always look so much better in the mirror than in photographs?"
Your reaction (my reaction, anyhow) was to fly into a paniced reflection: what is the difference between a mirror image and a photographic one? And then you noticed that the speaker actually turns the angle of his face, as people do, so to change his image in the mirror.
"Asked and answered, your honor!" The filmmaker supplies the answer to his question: we control the image in the mirror in a way we cannot in a photograph (or film). A good deal of the Stillman trilogy is a careful, unstinting and affectionate study of this process…a photographic image of a mirrored one, as it were.
So where did Stillman go? The oeuvre has done well. Metropolitans gross is six times investment ($3 million from $430,000). Barcelona doubled ($7.2 m. on $3.2 m.). The figures for The Last Days of Disco are not clear. (It made $3 million, but the budget is not unspecified.) (All figures from www.imdbpro.com.)
The critical reception was strong. Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post said Stillman "seems like a David Mamet who actually paid attention during English class and learned a thing or two. Yet he’s always amusing in his sly way, and this film [Last Days?] is in its own way a near epic." The awards were forthcoming. Stillman won nominations at the Academy Awards and Sundance, and prizes from Deuville, Independent Spirit, and the New York Film Critics Circle.
In 1998, Stillman decided to turn his last film into a novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux published The Last Days of Disco, With Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards. This too was very well received.
And it may well be that this guy is just so obscenely talented that he can do anything he wants. But if he has decided never again to make a film, contemporary culture has lost it’s most anthropological film maker.
References
For reviews of Last Days of Disco:
http://www.killermovies.com/l/thelastdaysofdisco/reviews/
The biographic note on Whit Stillman from imdb.com, written by Matt Patay.
Whit Stillman was born in 1952 and raised in Cornwall in upstate New York, the son of a impoverished debutante from Philadelphia and a Democratic politician from Washington D.C. Stillman graduated from Harvard in 1973 and started out as a journalist in Manhattan, New York City. In 1980 he met and married his Spanish wife while on an assignment in Barcelona, where he was introduced to some film producers from Madrid and persuaded them that he could sell their films to Spanish-language television in the USA. He worked for the next few years in Barcelona and Madrid as a sales agent for directors Fernando Trueba and Fernando Colomo, and acting in their films playing comic Americans as in Trueba’s SAL GORDA. Stillman wrote the screenplay for METROPOLITAN between 1984 and 1988 while running an illustrating agency in New York and financed the film from the proceeds of selling his apartment for $50,000 as well as contributions from friends and relatives. BARCELONA was inspired by his own experiences in Spain during the early 1980′s, which was his first studio financed film. For THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO was losely based on his travels and experiences in various nightclubs in Manhattan, and posibily at the Studio 54. Written by: Matt Patay
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Economics is everywhere at work in the marketplace but normally we cant see it. It doesnt feature in Hollywood movies or popular novels. It makes no cameo appearances on the sit coms, no courtesy calls on the talk shows. The Nobel Prize recipients are mentioned briefly and with scant regard. (Its clear that the newspapers care so little about this story they have now standardized the reporting formula. “When did I get the news? Well, actually it was my daughter/wife/manservant/cat who took the call. At the time, I was out standing in my garden/garage/helo pad. Editor, choose one.) Economics is part of the infrastructure of the consumer society, everywhere at work, no where in sight. Economics doesn’t usually “show through.”
But thats changing. I give you the label on Honest Tea:
It doesnt take an econ Ph.D. to brew teabut Barry has one and sometimes it actually helps. Heres how. Sugar, like most goods, has a declining marginal utility. One teaspoon takes away teas bitterness. Another adds a nice sweetness. Thats where we stop. More sugar add calories but not much more taste. By the time youve got teaspoons per serving, its liquid candy. Green dragon Tea is organic and just a tad sweet. Honestly yours, Seth and Barry.
Here economics is helping to make the USP and to build a brand! Oh baby.
This is a real measure of how far weve come in the world of marketing. I want you to imagine this pitch at the Coca-Cola Company. “Yeah, and I want the label to talk about marginal utility! This brand is proud of its difference, its difficulty, of the fact that it departs, in packaging and formula, from the cola standard. The USP (unique selling proposition) here is a USD(ifference).
Brand difference of this kind has always worked well in the CSD (carbonated soft drink) category. Many of the most successful brands have come up by “pushing off against the mainstream player, Coca-Cola. Thus did Pepsi, Gatorade and Snapple find a place on the shelf. Given the brand typography of the CDS category, difference sells.
There are of course lots of different differences to choose from for branding purposes, and Barry and Seth chose carefully. There is a little New Age spirituality, tea vs. coffee gentleness, wisdom sourced from other cultures (Asian and aboriginal), a “savor the moment pitch (tea as an experience vs. coffee as a stimulant), naturalness sourced from an organic positioning, a little authenticity (in the naming and packaging), a whiff of Seattle in the packaging, all of this done in a design approach that is has a certain gentrified aplomb and grace. It is, in sum, a well balanced brand portfolio, and it gives Honest Tea depth, breadth and mobility.
But the piece of meaning management that really caught my attention was the diminishment of sugar and the dialing up of taste. Many drinks in America are “liquid candy and all liquid candy tastes the same. By dialing down the sugar content, Barry and Seth opened up some interesting taste experiences at just the moment that Americans are, thanks to Alice Waters, among others, spending more time with smaller portions that have been very carefully managed to maximize the intensity and variety of tastes in play. This allows Seth and Barry to evoke a new set of meanings, and then to build these back into the brand. Hey presto, there is now a more real and sensual connection between brand and consumptions, and, more to the marketing point, a powerful set of meanings for the brand.
One Honest Tea (and sorry I cant remember which one) puts you in mind of the Denver airport. By dumping the sugar, Barry and Seth have made the taste much larger, airier, as if, somehow, filled with light. It provoked a kind of synesthesia (a perceptual confusion in which the sensations from one sense are perceived as those of another, e.g., seeing sounds or hearing colors). Taste buds now operate like eyes and ears. Hey, presto. The consumer is happier and the brand is richer. I believe this is what they mean by win, win.
All the best consumer experiences, with food, clothing, automobiles, domestic architecture and interior design, movie making, graphic design, all of these are getting richer and more nuanced. (Virginia Postrels book The Substance of Style shows how and why.) This is good for the consumer, but it is also, as I say, good for the marketer. It means we have new, and more powerful sources of meaning emerging from the moment of consumption, and we may use these to confirm, revise, renew, rework the meanings of the brand as communicated by our opening moments of contact (advertising, direct mail, etc.). The question is whether we have the research methods and conceptual models for this new and promising aspect of the meaning management process and I think the answer is “no.
Marketer, heal thyself.
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Bill Gates did an interview this spring with Peter Jennings (February 16, 2005). My favorite outtakes:
On the state of contemporary culture where even majesty, installed base, and very smart people wont protect you from dynamism:
that’s one thing I like about the Microsoft culture is that we wake up every day thinking about companies like Wang or Digital Equipment, or Compaq, that were huge companies that did very well and they literally have disappeared. Got bought up, you know went into a direction that was a dead end for them. So we have that lesson and we are always saying to ourself we have to innovate. We got to come up with that breakthrough.
And evidence that we might finally see Microsoft come up with a PDA capable of delivering text. This was one of the early promises of the digital world, and still languishes.
I am meeting with our tablet people about the idea of carrying text books around. They’ll have just a tablet device that they can call up the material on. That’s been a dream for a long time, we’re making progress there. So review of the software projects and encouraging them in terms of what they are doing well and telling them who else they need to work with. That’s the primary thing on my schedule.
References
McCracken, Grant. 2005. It can’t read! (Microsoft’s PMC illiterate?) Post on this blog, um, some time ago here
Full interview
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The Chudnovsky solution finds the Unicorn problem in the first instance by leveraging the Chudnovsky narrative. Word of mouth builds until it becomes word on page.
But eventually we move from cultural matters to quasi economic ones and now the logic of transmission changes. Once the Chudnovsky brothers hit the pages of The New Yorker, they become a token in a larger exchange system. A real estate magnate steps up and invests in them. With a gift of $400,000, he endows an institute for the brothers and so becomes, in our post Medici era, their patron. In return for this investment, the magnate now has a capital of some value.
Please dont misunderstand me. I am not belittling the beneficent effects of the institute. The magnates gift supported two worthy mathematicians and some interesting math. There is a latter day inclination to suppose that generosity is corrupted by additional motives and “returns on the dollar. This was almost precisely the Renaissance bargain and anyone who believes public gestures must be utterly selfless is living on the wrong planet. (Someone get the shuttle ready.)
In NECS III, I noted:
In return, he got at least at least one mention in The New Yorker, a philanthropic project that differentiated him from other real estate magnets (of whom there are, I believe, several in NYC), elevated standing in the social world of NYC, a claim to “getting and supporting what is peculiarly New York about New York. (
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In sum, the magnate converted $400,000 into a pretty substantial body of social and cultural capital. (
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At the very least, the investment brought him: more profile, more invitations, broader social access, higher social access, and finally a larger business network. This, in turn, gives him access to more and loftier real estate deals. This, in turn, will improve the financial resources with which he can fund subsequent philanthropic “gestures that the spiral may continue upward.
The real estate magnate even started to loan the Chudnovsky brother capital out. A friend of his, the fund manager, paraded the brothers at a party. Now the fund manager is using capital to make a social capital of his own, and, in return, he pays the magnate the “interest of acknowledgement.
This is an interesting, perhaps unexpected, twist to the story. It turns out that the fund manager is also leveraging other, more conventional, sources of social capital. He is on the board at the MET. Why does he bother with the kind of capital the Chudnovsky brothers make available. The anthropological brow furrows. Hmmm.
And its hear that we are obliged to note that New York City has its own quite catholic idea of what counts as interesting and buzz worthy. Indeed this is a city known for the intensive cultivation of difference and then silo-bursting moments of intersection.
Tom Wolfe gave us one moment here with his account of Leonard Bernstein holding a soiree for the representatives of the Black Panthers. It is as if the city, even its capital managers, have an artists interesting in mixing media, genres, and social types. Bernstein was high culture, with moments of modern and pop culture, and here he was feting revolutionaries! How very daring, how very New York.
Who knows, maybe this is a city status strategy. After all, if we manage to work into conversation the fact that we just had lunch with someone who sits on the board of the MET, its kind of obvious and a little crass. Meta-pragmatically, we are playing a small status chip and our conversational partner is entitled to say, to themselves, “oh, please, just spare me. But its much more interesting to say, “You will never guess who was at the [MET] lunch, these most marvelously Russian mathematicians. Brothers! This story is just entertaining enough to move the listener to grant our bid for status.
So the narrative angle pops up again! Its there at the beginning, to get the solution launched, and its there at the end, to see to the final dissemination of the meme.
But heres the thing that makes this part of the story as troubling as the first. You would have to trouble persuading me that fund managers in other American cities sit on the boards of prestigious cultural institutions. It would be surprising, though, if they were keen to invite Russian mathematicians for exhibition. I just dont think this happens in Tulsa or New Orleans or even Los Angeles. Furthermore, I think it is improbable that a real estate magnate from another city would see value in the Chudnovsky brother “investment. In most American cities, silos stay siloed. Cross over between domains doesnt happen.
LA magazine might pick up the story about ‘two crazy Russians but chances are it would not. (And thats because in LA, the Chudnovsky brothers would look more Russian and more crazy, whereas in New York
well, in New York, they look “a lot like the rest of us, only more interesting.) And even LA magazine coverage does not set the rest of our New York chain in train.
My point? If contemporary culture is a place of ever greater intensification, where the differences become more different and the absolute culture space continues to expand, solutions will remain estranged from solutions unless and until narrative force or the pursuit of social capital drives stories up out of their obscure little nocks and crannies out into the broader world where they may be embraced by someone who needs them. Last time, we speculated that the stories may now be beginning to fail us and, if this post is accurate, it may be true that social capital drivers are, outside of New York City, insufficiently active, too.
Now the question is this: the expansion of cultural spaces may be outrunning the traditional sources and forces of dissemination. Now it falls to the new media to take up the diffusion task and see to the intersection of new problems and solutions.
Already we have seen this new channels help like find like. It is also good at helping unlike find like. But surely really “unlike” almost never finds really “unlike.” This is another way of sayng there are solutions out there for our problems but we cannot begin to imagine the key words that would google them in for us. Oh, the search engines will get better. We will get ever more Boolean in our search skills. But all the while the world will encourage more difference. It is finally a little like trying to get a rocket ship to the edge of an expanding universe. You can get better but you can never win. We are living Zenos paradox
or something like it.
But, hey, that’s just the pessimism talkin’.
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Ok, so its a miracle that the Chudnovsky brothers found the MET Unicorn photos. But is it merely miraculous or are there miracle mechanicals at work here?
Word of mouth
In order for the solution to find a problem it could solve, it would have to travel first by word of mouth. And it could not travel very far unless it was embedded in a narrative–a story that people wanted to hear, and even more to tell. (We could think of these narratives as little PR shills that recruit interest for the solution.) This is, probably, the only way something really obscure stories (and their client solutions) rise to public attention in the early days. Everything else remains trapped in the wash of daily conversation, forgotten virtually upon hearing.
As to the mechanicals: this is hard to figure. How many problems and solutions are estranged, that is, unlikely to find one another through conventional channels, thanks to conventional agents? How many conversations are actually devoted to transmitting little stories? I am guessing that there are many more solutions and problems that need connecting than there are word-of-mouth mechanicals capable of doing so. (How to figure? Lets say we have 3 conversations a day = 21 a week but only 6 of them are story-bearing x 300 million Americans / 2 (or more) to allow for conversation overlap, dont know how to figure this) = around 1 billion conversations a week. There are, by this reckoning, lots of delivery vehicles out there at any given time. Really commanding stories commandeer ever greater share of conversations. More and more people come to know the narrative, and the solution it contains. The chances that an obscure solution will reach an obscure problem go upward steadily. How quickly a narrative commandeers its share of conversation will depend, as we have seen, on the force of the narrative, and this is really hard to calculate, but not perhaps impossible.)
An expanding cultural universe creates a problem of its own. Part of the power of Chudnovsky narrative comes from the fact that it appeals to many New Yorkers. But as the world becomes more various, it will become harder and harder to find narratives with this kind of reach. There is a solution here and the Chudnovsky story exhibits it. This story is about the New Yorker approach to things and to this extent it can speak to the great diversity of New Yorkers. Presumably, someday all problem-carrying narratives will have to speak to form, not content. But even when they do, it is not clear that they can have the narrative punch that problem-delivery demands of them. This, then, is grounds to wonder whether cultural space is expanding faster than the networks that would allow them to communicate. The narrative delivery device may fail us.
As the world becomes more various, two additional problems emerge. Our problems, some of them, become more exotic. I am keenly interested in finding out something about the supply of talent in Hollywood. We know how many big name celebrities are chosen. I would like to know how many people are called. How many people say, “hmm, Id like to be a star. In between is a hierarchy: those who get some kind of training, those who get some a role or two, those who get a SAG card, those who win several parts in C films, B films, A films, how many get an agent, good agent, great agent, how many get a career, good career, great career, and so on. This is an obscure problem. Lots of people might be interested in the outcome, but you and I are the only ones who are looking for an answer.
Now there is someone in Hollywood who knows the answer. I need that rare person who covers the entire waterfront, the full scope of the recruiting system. I think there are lets say 20 people who could answer my question. And in a desultory way, Ive tried to find them. (I wrote SAG, Screen Actors Guild, with no results. Of course, they have a deeply vested interested in making sure these numbers are never revealed. Their revenues depend upon people clinging to an illusory hope: next year, stardom!) This small effort failed, and chances are word-of-mouth mechanicals, even with a narrative gale behind them, will not find me. My problem is too obscure. There are lots of little problems like mine out there but not even IMDb can find an aggregated way to speak to them. This is a way of saying that there a “demand aspect to the “long tail (thank you, Chris Anderson) that even a very dynamic marketplace cannot keep up with.
The solutions I can supply become exotic too. I am interested in predicting cultural trends, and I have worked out some ways of doing this. Many people are interested in this problem, but because I live outside the academic and the industrial world, mostly, my “solutions are obscure and will strike many solution seekers as wrong headed. Chances are the word-of-mouth mechanicals will not reach the people who find my solution useful. Here too diversity threatens network.
Now, there are happy moments of congruence/confluence. Some of the diverse solutions “out there eventually trade in their exoticness and become the generic way of solving problems. Marc Andreessen came up with a solution (Mosaic-Netscape) that was exotic in the early days, but as we wrapped our heads around it, we began to see that it was the solution to a great warehouse of problems, some of them anticipated, many just in time. (Andreessen didnt just make new solutions possible. He make new, “generative, problems possible too.) At first glance, it appears that an Internet browser will outstrip problems. (The Internet becoming in effect the solution to almost all network problems and the problems that networks help solve.) But again, the Andreessen solution had the effect of underwriting a new profusion of problems, so the congruence/confluence was fleeting. The cultural space that contains problems continues to expand, and the moments that Humpty Dumpty is brought together again are brief. (Mr. Dumpty always turns out to be an anarchist and not really a “wall sitter at all.)
Word of net
Our little story is an old fashioned one because news of Chudnovsky brothers moves from word-of-mouth to a big media player in one big leap. This is the world BI, before internet. This is a world in which the solution had to be wrapped in a sensationally interesting narrative because it was going to have to leap the grand canyon between all those people talking and a mere handful of newspapers and magazines.
So the good news here is that word-of-net decreases the amount of narrative power a story actually needs. In a word of mouth word, solutions need quite large narrative sails to move between conversations. In the word of net world, a small (i.e., 2 h.p.) outboard of curiosity will do.
Furthermore, the internet is, as we know, disaggregated, non hierarchical, less constrained by gates, less controlled by gate keepers. This means narrative power can drop again.
Finally, narrative itself may mean less. I think its probably true that the internet hosts lots of talk that is purely informational, where people talk about things because, thanks to the net, they can find that critical mass of people who find news of certain individuals and innovations intrinsically interesting. No narrative is needed to catch our attention and conscript our word of mouth.
Word of net fills in the gap between word of mouth and the media outlets. Now passage into the jet stream of public opinion is less frictionful. Solutions need less narrative oomph to make the transition. But in other cases, word of net supplants the big media outlets all together. And now there is a steady stream of intelligence moving from obscure origins to obscure destinations without the aid of much aggregation, narrative, or gatekeeping. (I apologize for belaboring what is well known. This was a ground up, “what do I have to think to think this exercise, and hey presto, I just found the path to illumination taking me through a little town called the “obvious with a stopover in a suburb called the “indubitable, with a sharp turn through a drivers ed parking lot filled with startled beginners for whom the obvious is actually a big surprise.)
Media coverage
But media coverage still matters more often than we thought it would. Some solutions will find real exposure only when upward ascend brings the story container to the attention of the media. Narrative still counts. The Chudnovsky solution came wrapped in a humdinger of a narrative (and in NECS II, we tried to show why.) People liked it so much they repeated it and repeated it till it reached the New Yorker magazine. This is the balloon hitting the jet stream. Now were really getting somewhere. Media coverage will also adds new credibility (unless the medium in questions happens to be The National Enquirer). You and I will talk about it with the assurance that ‘this is something. And we are now more likely to put this back into word-of-mouth circulation, sometimes reaching those who exist outside the original word-of-mouth and media ambits.
And the really good thing about this media coverage is that it fights the effects of diversity. It helps form and inform a “main stream. It allows for the possibility of broadcast, when word-of-net is mastering the idea of narrow cast so effectively that we are tempted by the notion (see the one-to-one marketing literature here) that narrow cast is all we need. Lets hope not. Thats the path to a culture of great diversity in which many of the differences are sealed away from other differences.
Peace out
Ok, thats enough for today. So far this is pretty pessimistic. My conclusion appears to be that networks are not expanding fast enough to keep up with cultural spaces in which we live. There are several reasons for this, but the chief of these is that every solution to the problem is itself an incitement of the problem. Andreessens solution to the problem of a disaggregated culture actually serves further to disaggregate the culture.
But tomorrow, the final installment here (I promise). There is a still larger, more daunting problem here, a deeper reason to think that Chudnovsky solutions cannot hope routinely to reach Unicorn problems. This is another way of saying that it is entirely possible that the miracle mechanicals cannot be relied upon and we will be forced to rely mere miracles after all.
