"Metropolitan" @ 30 and "Grey Gardens" @ 45

American society venerates wealth.

We love money. We are a capitalist and Calvinist people -- we believe that accumulating dough is a smart and moral thing to do; that people who have "made it", who have "lived the American dream" possess not only intelligence and talent but also a kind of virtue, an inherent goodness -- because, of course, all of their wealth came from "hard work."

Yes, this is the big lie we tell ourselves when it comes to wealth in America -- that it is mostly gained through effort and diligence, through "grit" and perseverance -- not luck or privilege or anything else. As a relatively young country, we Americans love to hold ourselves apart from other older nations and societies where wealth was attained so long ago that no one remembers how it was gotten in the first place and that is simply passed down from century to century without merit. No, in America we earn our money -- and anyone who doesn't recognize our "hard work" and virtue in attaining it, any government that seeks to tax it, and anyone who dares criticize it is "anti-American." 

Case closed! 

What's also, I'm sure to some, "anti-American" is losing wealth, of having all your hard-won money and its residual privileges fade away. No, in America we believe that wealth should beget more wealth (it often does), that making more and more and more and more money is the only way to go -- it's not enough to live the American dream once, oh no, you and your family must keep living it over and over and over again ...

The America dream, this virtuous pursuit of wealth, is endless -- and exhausting. 

So at the risk of seeming "anti-American", at the risk of going against our country's mythology, I will state proudly that I love stories about decaying wealth and privilege -- of fallen status, of dissipation. Why? Perhaps because I have a tragic sense of life. Perhaps because stories of failure are, in so many ways, more interesting and revealing about human nature than stories of success.

This is a long way to say that this troubled year marks the odd anniversaries of two very different but nonetheless brilliant films about decaying American wealth and privilege -- the documentary Grey Gardens from 1975 and the comedy Metropolitan from 1990.

Both are about white people who grew up in wealth and have seen or are seeing it slip away. Grey Gardens is about Jackie O's cousins the Beales, a mother and daughter living in squalor in their once gorgeous Hamptons home. They spend their days remembering their time as grande dames of New York society, anger and rage and confusion at their plight popping up every so often. Metropolitan is a much more genteal but nontheless honest look at NYC debutantes who are increasingly aware that the wealth and privilege they grew up in, the glowing world they expected as children to inherit, might not always be there for them -- and they don't know what to do about it (one character says he'll solve it by marrying a rich woman).

Although both films are over a quarter, and almost a half-century, old, in this age of deep income inquality, of white rage and diviseness, of institutionalized racism and sexism finally being held to account, of the horizon of the American dream shrinking, they feel more prophetic and relevant than ever before about how wealth and privilege ultimately lead to a kind of insanity and misery. 

I've blogged about both before so, instead of doing so again, I'll include links to my previous posts as well as recent profiles of the films and people involved here and here and here and here.

This is anti-Americanism as its very finest -- and funniest. It's the dark and darkly comic side of the American dream, of the emptiness of money and materialism and status, and of how the gaping whole of need that exists within all of us can never be filled by them.