Columbia: Doomed, Bourgeois, In Love.
- Miles Conn
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
Whit Stillman makes dialogue-rich comedies that are secretly coming-of-age dramas. His characters socialize with one another while quoting famous authors, poets, and social theories. Underneath all the chatter lies a genuine fascination about what it takes to grow up, ethically, romantically, and emotionally, within the realm of college life. Across Stillman’s trilogy, Metropolitan, The Last Days of Disco, and Barcelona, he follows eager young minds that are caught within a pivotal period in their lives as they transcend adolescence but still do not quite reach adulthood. Seen together, these three films illustrate a journey that many Columbia students, past and present, will recognize all too well: arriving full of borrowed ideas, testing the bounds of freedom in the city, and then confronting the unknowns of the adult world that follows graduation.
Metropolitan is the perfect Christmas break movie about returning home after your first semester away and suddenly existing in an entirely different world. The “Sally Fowler Rat Pack” gathers in Manhattan apartments and event spaces to dissect novels and social theories with confidence wildly out of proportion to the number of times they have most likely actually engaged with the text. Stillman captures that exact undergraduate conflict: a student returns home, sure they have cracked the code to everything, only to find their revelations are old news. For Columbia students, the parallel is all too forward. The film’s discussions of honor, goodness, and society sound as if they have come straight out of a Lit Hum discussion and migrated into a Park Avenue living room. They talk about big books they have barely read, yet still land on fundamental truths about anxiety and wanting to be morally good. This depicts freshman year in a nutshell. Students learn ideas like languages and find that they only make sense when they speak them. Stillman also nods to class: no matter your background, college pulls off any mask left on upon entering. The most moving aspect of the film is its gentleness towards error. The characters’ overconfidence is funny, yet Stillman is not making fun of them per se; instead, he is documenting the stage that exists where reading turns into thinking and thinking turns into action. That encapsulates freshman year; you talk like you have written a dissertation because you feel one forming, even if the footnotes are at the moment all but imaginary.
The Last Days of Disco exemplify the latter years when Columbia students have learned their way around the city and discovered that friendships and social circles are as complicated as any class. The film is not about college, but it is about being in New York City at an age familiar to that of soon-to-be-graduated students. Romance becomes less of a philosophical question than a pattern of real choices. Stillman applies a similar framework to the club in this film as he did in Metropolitan; it is a social institution with rules, hierarchies, and moral quandaries. The humor revolves less around who has read what and more around how status shifts between people in the politics of NYC nightlife. Columbia echoes this notion in the instance that friendships go through stages of evolution; the city eventually takes its toll on its inhabitants, in one way or another. So much can happen in one night, only to start anew in the morning and repeat all over again. This film knows that the second half of college is not just an ending; it is practice for adulthood. Stillman inserts a brief moment that masterfully bridges all three films together, as members of each cast bump into each other in a nightclub. It is such a subtle cameo, yet it provides so much insight into what he was going for when making these movies. This fleeting moment in the middle of the three stories serves as a hint; who you were in one particular moment will inevitably show up in the next.
Barcelona depicts the unknown that comes after graduation. The film follows two American cousins working abroad in Spain, navigating employment, romance, and political strife. This is the post-grad stage that Columbia students imagine with both excitement and fear: a new city, a real job, and the dawning realization that charm and dissertations do not always translate when entering into the real world. Stillman uses this setup to turn a comedy about manners into a question of meaning. Work life has its own rules and language, just as messy as freshman-year theory or senior-year nightlife. The cousins keep tripping on social and language gaps, mimicking the mistakes one is bound to make after entering a world without school for the first time. The movie also suggests something comforting: that post-grad life is not the exile students make it out to be; it is just another seminar with a different atmosphere. The film provides valuable insight into the idea that adulthood does not erase youthful tendencies; it merely gives them consequences and new dimensions.
Part of the magic of these films is recognition. Each cast contains a character that you can relate to, as well as someone that you may be terrified of becoming. The films understand the specific kind of narcissism that is found in early adulthood; the idea that the conversations and debates had with friends are more important than anybody else, and the sudden realization that everyone else, in fact, has had them as well. Each generation of college students finds itself in a cycle that everyone before and after them will also face. For Columbia students, this is no different. The curriculum trains you to think in big ideas while the city pushes you to show them off by applying them. Stillman understands the thrill of sounding like the most intelligent person in the room, yet at times, performances of intelligence hide real questions or feelings. Stillman allows the characters to display this sort of bravado but also lets the conversations go until the showy, performative stuff burns off and something honest can surface.
Although each film stands alone, they share a syntax: long, elegant scenes that prioritize dialogue, casts built on friction rather than wild plots, and a tone that can command both satire and sympathy at once. Seen together, they map an education of sorts: first, you think; then, you test yourself; then, you learn to translate those ideas into life. Growth is not linear, freshman insecurities still show up next to senior-year confidence, and both follow you into your first job. Stillman treats manners as scaffolding for ethics, essentially a way to care until more profound convictions take hold. He believes that books matter even when misquoted, that city nightlife forces the evolution of stagnant friendships, and that entering the adult world is not a straightforward step. These are perfect Columbia films, even though they are not about “school.” They capture the sense of being almost formed; the feeling of rapidly maturing in a city as daunting as New York, an experience few get to experience truly. This brilliant trilogy illustrates the habitual process of maturing in New York City, thinking you know everything, learning you do not, regaining confidence, and then using those experiences to pave a new road ahead in life; every individual student at Columbia experiences this, year after year, decade after decade.
Miles Conn is a staff writer at Double Exposure. He is a third year at Columbia College studying Film & Media. His top four favorite films are Metropolitan (1990), American Graffiti, A Summer’s Tale, and Rushmore.