Welcome new subscribers! Through various identified and unidentified forces (thank you
and !), I’ve gained a substantial amount of new readers, despite not posting since the end of September.1Ostensibly Restorative Romance is about romance novels, but I find romance everywhere. I think this newest letter captures how my thinking works, typically. In the same vein, earlier this year, I wrote about how John Wick is a Reformed Rake. I try to leave you with some genre romance recommendations at the end, even when I’m talking about other media.
The Last Days of Disco (dir. Whit Stillman, 1998) follows two young women, Alice and Charlotte (Chloe Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale, for their first pairing in a Stillman project) in New York in “the very early 1980s,” the titular last breath of the disco scene.2 The film was made in 1998 and has a strange tension between the setting and the production time, given the small budget, many of the aesthetic markers collapse between the early 1980s and the late 1990s.
Whit Stillman’s affection for Jane Austen is well-documented and he directed the criminally underseen Love & Friendship (2016, reuniting Kate and Chloë ), an adaptation of the unfinished Austen novel Lady Susan. But even when he isn’t making a Regency set film, Stillman’s films involve very specific people talking about the very specific class position they occupy, like the anxious, but not aristocratic, gentry of Austen. I saw Stillman speak during a Q&A after The Last Days of Disco this year and someone asked “how do you write dialogue like that?” and his response was something like “well, people I was friends with at Harvard talked like that.” The question asker made a point to interject that well, they went to Brown. How silly (versus insufferable) you find this interaction could illuminate what your response to Stillman movies might be. Though, I’m on the insufferable side, I just love chatty movies where gorgeous people talk.
As I watched, I felt like I could see the scaffolding of Regency romance on the narrative. If Austen is the ancestor, than Regency genre fiction romance3 and The Last Days of Disco are not so distant cousins. A lot of my favorite romance reads this year involved divestment from the London ton (list to come in the new year!), but The Last Days of Disco was my best Regency romance of the year, emotionally and structurally, recreating the London ton in Midtown Manhattan.
Romantic Castings and Missteps
For Austen, the rake cannot be so sinister as to not be a viable romantic prospect for at least part of the novel. Wickham shopping in Meryton has to be a moment that *could* lead to great romance, Willoughby’s rescue of Marianne has to be believably well-meaning and grand, and even Frank Churchill’s shared rudeness to the townspeople of Highbury with Emma could be spun as a charming sympathy of character, if they were a little more discreet about it. The later revealed context is what sours the romantic gestures.
This narrative tension is one ancestral trait missing from most historical romance, where dual POV confirms who are the romantic interests, at least to the reader. But Stillman keeps the audience guessing about the morality and suitability of romantic partners, particularly for Alice, inheriting Austen’s approach to the arc of romance. It isn’t immediately clear who is a rake, given too much social credit, and who is a gentleman, not given enough. The question of so much romance is “how do they get together?,” but Stillman and Austen also share the question “who gets together?”
One of Charlotte’s consistent power plays is, like Emma Woodhouse, she establishes which men suit and are appropriate for Alice to be interested in. Charlotte seems interested in forming Alice into a person insofar it improves her social standing and gives her someone to stand next to, while looking hotter and cooler. Charlotte’s social terms shift, inscrutably, as Charlotte and Alice’s social circle has moved from Hampshire College to New York City and old pastoral connections and reputations re-form in the setting of disco, drugs and careers. Alice is initially interested in either Jimmy Steinway (Mackenzie Astin) an ad man, or Tom Platt (Robert Sean Leonard), a lawyer vaguely involved in the environment. Charlotte makes it clear she does not approve of Jimmy and encourages Alice to sex up her behavior for Tom’s benefit instead. Jimmy does seem a little skeevy and Tom seems sweet enough, plus the Robert Sean Leonard of it all helps his disarming presence.
Accompanying Tom back to his apartment after dancing at the club, Alice deploys Charlotte’s more direct advice (“whenever you can, throw the word ‘sexy’ into your conversation”) by awkwardly landing on “there’s something really sexy about Scrooge McDuck” in response to a cartoon in Tom’s apartment. They dance to “More, More, More” and have sex.
Tom is revealed to be the red herring rake: he is still dating his college girlfriend, though they were on a temporary break when he and Alice slept together, and has given Alice two STDs. During a confrontation about Tom’s pulling away, Tom manipulates the conflict as her fault because of Alice’s promiscuity. This is a total projection by Tom; Tom’s the first man that Alice has ever slept with. In the meantime, Charlotte has started dating Jimmy Steinway, the ad man she encouraged Alice to brush off in favor of Tom.
The pattern of Charlotte pushing Alice away from romantic interest in an effort to protect/control her continues, but Alice, like Harriet Smith, begins to see the self-interest and self-doubt which shape Charlotte’s manipulations, to Alice’s eventual breaking from Charlotte’s control. After Alice’s embarrassment over Tom, she muses to Charlotte about their generation’s prospects of romantic unions:
Alice: I don't know, I'm beginning to think that maybe that old system of people getting married based on mutual respect and shared aspirations and then slowly over time earning each other's love and admiration worked the best.
Charlotte: Well, we'll never know.
Alice gets the closest approximation of that romantic arc. The most appropriate and kind suitor for Alice is Josh Neff, another lawyer (unfortunately a prosecutor), who is friendly enough with everyone to be invited occasionally during group outings, but who has bipolar and suffered from a manic episode during his time at Harvard. Three characters warn off Alice from spending time with Josh, but all of their own selfish reasons. Josh is like Harriet Smith’s Mr. Martin, widely accepted as unsuitable, but the only character in alignment with her interests. They only become a couple after multiple scenes where they are united against a group consensus on a topic of conversation.
A Country Ball/A Disco Hall
Obviously in a movie centered around a group of young people attempting to have sex with each other with disco in the title, there is lots of paired off dancing. Romances starts with dancing. Jimmy Steinway’s disinterest in dancing with Alice is what spurs her to attempt to sleep with Tom. She’s able, with uncharacteristic confidence, flirt and charm Tom on the dance floor. Josh seems viably fun and game on the dance floor well before Alice gives him a chance, despite her friends’ malicious advice.
Access to the dance floor is the second great anxiety of the film (tied with access to sex). Charlotte and Alice open the film being so worried about getting into the club that they arrange a taxi for a block to seem cooler when they arrive. Jimmy is always risking his ability to get into the club at all by sneaking in his advertising clients, who are decidedly older and less interested in disco. Josh is introduced ranting in a diner with Tom about how excited he was during in law school at the prospect of finally being in New York, to be able to go to discos, only now they are all impossible to get into.
Des (Chris Eigeman), a friend who dropped out of college to be a club manager, s the access point for this crew to the disco. But his giving access to his yuppie friends frequently gets him berated by his boss. When the group gets kicked out of the club because the owner holds a grudge against yuppies who work in advertising, they go to a bar with wood panelling and red gingham table clothes (clearly contrasting the club and signaling “not a disco”). There Charlotte complains that they can’t dance there, but the power of “The Oogum Boogum Song” overpowers Charlotte and Jimmy and they dance while discussing the nature of dancing in bars.
Jimmy: You know this is the way people used to dance in bars in the old days.
Charlotte: Did people ever really dance in bars? I thought that was a myth.
Jimmy: People my older brothers age, they did.
Charlotte: Your brother must be a lot older. Before disco, this country was a dancing wasteland. You know the Woodstock generation of the 1960s that were so full of themselves and conceited? None of those people could dance.
Characters romanticize the disco as a newly invented third place to meet new people and discuss new ideas and listen to the best music in the world. The disco is part salon, part chamber concert, part ton ball and all designed for the facilitation of the pairing off of couples.
Are the shades of Midtown to be thus polluted?
In a Regency romance, class is depicted primarily in living arrangements and the characters parsing the narcissism of small differences in their little upper-middle class circle. All of the people in this film (and all Stillman films I have seen) exist at a high level of economic privilege. Just as a daughter of an untitled landed gentleman might feel so lowly compared to someone with a rank, a yuppie with a small allowance from their parents feels less privileged than a yuppie with a large allowance. All the characters in the film either attended a small, private liberal arts college or an Ivy League institution. But Alice and Charlotte, initially, are staying in what amounts to a women’s boarding house before they go in on a railroad apartment with another girl, Holly. New York, even the vague early 80s, is expensive on a publishing house assistant’s salary.
The boarding house puts a damper on their social life, given its no guest policies, but the railroad apartment also means they have little privacy from each other, given the layout of the sleeping arrangements. But a co-worker quips to them that he is surprised at their complaints about lack of private housing, assuming that they get large allowances from their family. Charlotte retorts the allowance is “not big at all.”
This co-worker, Dan, signals his working class interests by referencing organizing efforts in the office, which makes Charlotte roll her eyes. When Des complains about the label “yuppie” as ill-defined, saying no one claims to be a yuppie, Dan is the one to point that Des and Jimmy are absolutely most people’s idea of a yuppie. Des provides two logically opposed arguments in his defense: he doesn’t feel being a club manager is exactly a “professional” category, and anyway: young, upwardly-mobile and professional are all good things, so who wouldn’t to be want to be a yuppie?
Even when the characters lose their jobs, for ineptitude, bad judgment or routine layoffs, they are blasé in response: this is an opportunity for growth. They are dispossessed gentry, but certainly still gentry nevertheless. The lack of awareness of the characters could be extended to the film itself, as a navel-gazing exercise of the upper middle class, which surely is part of it. But there are lots of palpable hits at the characters. For example, Charlotte, when she hears the news that the publishing house that she and Alice are working at, has been merged with Simon & Schuster and there will likely be layoffs, she references it might be good because the company will be able to “cut dead weight.” Charlotte is clearly talking about Alice, with whom she is in a petty spat at the moment of this revelation. But Alice is the employee who we have seen do and enjoy her work the most between the two of them, and she is rewarded with an editorial position at the new office. Charlotte, who has had her foot out the door of the office the whole movie, wishing she could work in television, is the one who is laid off.
Charlotte at the unemployment office is not a total comeuppance; she’ll be fine and she knows it. But we are laughing at her a little bit.
Disco will never be over
An itchy thing about The Last Days of Disco as a movie about disco, instead of as a movie that is really a Regency romance, is so much of it is actually hollow and unspecific to the second half of the 70s or the culture that allowed disco to thrive. We start even with a vague date of the early 80s, though at least one scene places our firmly at one time: Stillman includes news footage of “Disco Demolition Night,” the White Sox baseball game that included a promotion to destroy disco records, but devolved in disorderly conduct. But even this is off! Disco Demolition Night happened in 1979, not the early 80s. And the quick timeline, referenced by a character near the end of the movie, of the bottom dropping out of disco in a matter of weeks happens that summer, in 1979. Characters obsessed with disco in the early 80s would be squares! And this is born out on the soundtrack: the songs are hits from mostly 1976-1979. It doesn’t take a disco devotee to know Good Times by Chic or More, More, More by Andrea True Connection. The soundtrack of hits signal pedestrian consumption, not vanguard tastemaking.
The costuming also has clear 90s bent. As much as I love how everyone looks in this movie, I’ve been rewatching a lot of Friends lately and Alice and Charlotte dress more like Rachel, Phoebe and Monica than any photo I’ve ever seen of Studio 54. And the men’s suits fit like it is 1998! This may have to do with Stillman’s indie budget (possibly spent on getting all those disco hits into the soundtrack), but more than anything: these heterosexual, white ad men, lawyers, and publishing assistants are not the group who made disco fun or famous, nor do they bear the brunt of judgment or vitriol from society’s anti-disco contingent. The movie follows the provincials in the city: Frank Churchill getting his haircut, Marianne Dashwood uncouthly writing a letter to Willoughby, Mr. Elton overpaying for frame. But while Stillman focuses on yuppies with backgrounds similar to his own, the establishing shots of each club scene are full of people of color and couples expressing queer affection, all of whom are dressed much more appropriately for a Studio 54 stand-in setting.
Queerness does come up directly, but with our two most morally suspect characters as the butt of a joke connected to their claiming proximity to queerness. Des twice in one night gets out of relationship obligations to women by falsely coming out as gay. Charlotte calls him on this habit, but it is clear that her motive is to indicate that Des’ behavior is embarrassing and uncouth, rather than cruel or inappropriate. When she says “you're not fit to lick the boots of my real gay friends,” she also becomes an object of the joke—Charlotte has no gay friends! She is barely friendly with her closest connections in the film. She’s claiming proximity for moral authority. I’m picturing a Regency heroine having one scene where she delivers currant buns to the townspeople to show her “goodness.” She’ll marry the Duke without qualms and not ask him about his financial interests in the West Indies.
The halcyon days of disco made way for Ronald Reagan’s 80s, a change that will presumably materially benefit most of the characters of The Last Days of Disco. But a film made in 1998, with a backward looking flattening of this finite period and specific place, has a relationship to disco like a genre fiction romance has to Regency London. The first backward looking Regencies romances may have taken longer to arrive than media romanticizing disco did, but even the Regencies closest to Austen’s period, like Georgette Heyer’s, collapse and project some contemporary assumptions onto the period. The result makes for a project that is maybe a paper-doll version of veracity about either period, flat and in a vacuum. More favorably, we can read The Last Days of Disco as a historical romance, playing in a sandbox of a time period, to tell a story of two people working their way together, by negotiating social demands and private wants. That, to me, is Regency romance. All the flirting while dancing helps too.
Recommendations: If you want an Emma Woodhouse story, my number one recommendation is always The Earl I Ruined by Scarlett Peckham. If you want more Chris Eigeman (who doesn’t), watch his Criterion Closet. If you want a Regency romance with great dancing as romance scenes, The Secret Mistress by Mary Balogh, is a new favorite. If you want great dancing, watch Gregory Hines do a tribute to Sammy Davis, Jr that makes me cry every time.
The only thing I can guarantee in 2024 is something about War and Peace. Or lots of things about War and Peace. I’m really into War and Peace right now.
The Last Days of Disco is about as good a spiritual adaptation of Emma by Jane Austen as I’ve ever experienced. I love when authors pick up Emma Woodhouse as a character type and place her in different scenarios (Emma Woodhouse experiences a consequence). There’s not exactly a one-to-one character aspect of the adaptation, but in a grafting of Emma onto the character map of Last Days, Alice is the Harriet and Charlotte is the Emma.
Traditionally, “Regency romance” and “historical romance set during the Regency” meant two different things. Regency romances are in the mode of Georgette Heyer, with an emphasis on clean romance and “historical accuracy.” Never mind that that historical accuracy, while based in research, also comes through Heyer’s Victorian projection of Regency morality. And emphasis on a very narrow set of the Regency population (there were 300 to 600 times more black people in Regency England then there were dukes). “Historical romance set during the Regency” can either mean more historical accuracy through social realism or characters with “modern sensibilities.” I’m acknowledging the distinction here, but collapse them when I talk about them. Mostly because I think the distinction is silly! But remember: I’m just some guy. Keep them siloed if you like!
"How silly (versus insufferable) you find this interaction could illuminate what your response to Stillman movies might be."
Which reminds me of the time when I saw Metropolitan with friends and found this line hysterically funny and they did not: "I don't read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelists' ideas as well as the critics' thinking. With fiction I can never forget that none of it really happened, that it's all just made up by the author."