"It was a composite. Like New York Magazine."

Please take an hour and a half of your free-time in the near future to check out Metropolitan, which is streaming for free right now on Hulu.com. It’d been entirely too long since I’d last seen the film, and this time around I noticed that what Stillman captures so gracefully is monied, intellectual (and lazy) upper-class socialites imbuing their everyday lives with a performativity drawn from the stage and literature. This incessant narrative-making and thematizing of basic activities (like Nick’s bout of fabulism when describing an enemy, from which the title of the post is derived), often with an incredibly high sense of drama, was the privilege of those with access to free time and expensive upbringings, but more from a sense of entitlement that one’s own existence merits that sort of treatment. (Now, we call it “blogging.”)

Nick is pure smirking venom, and he’s actually very likeable because he owns it, but Tom Townshend is a complete facade. I love Tom because he’s curious, I resent him because…well, watch the film. Before you go, though, read this exchange, between Townshend and Audrey Rouget (sigh), while thinking of that one guy you know, and how this is what he’s constantly thinking, if saying something else.

Audrey: “I read that Lionel Trilling essay you mentioned. You really like Trilling?”

Tom: “Yes.”

Audrey: “I think he’s very strange. He says that nobody could like the heroine of Mansfield Park? I like her.

Then he goes on and on about how we modern people of today with our modern attitudes, bitterly resent Mansfield Park because…its heroine is virtuous? What’s wrong with a novel having a virtuous heroine?”

Tom: “His point is that the novel’s premise…there’s something immoral in a group of young people putting on a play? Simply absurd.”

Audrey: “You found Fannie Price unlikeable?”

Tom: “She sounds pretty unbearable, but I haven’t read the book.”

Audrey: “What?”

Tom: “You don’t have to have read a book to have an opinion on it. I haven’t read the Bible, either.”

Audrey: “What Jane Austen novels have you read?”

Tom: “None. I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelist’s ideas as well as the critic’s thinking. With fiction, I can never forget that none of it ever happened; that it’s all just made up by the author.”