One of the sweeter jokes in Midnight in Paris has Woody Allen’s stand-in, played by Owen Wilson, suggest a movie idea to Luis Buñuel, on one of his nocturnal sojourns in the Paris of the Twenties. The guests at a fancy dinner party find, when it is over, that they cannot leave the dining room, and in their frustration and panic they emerge from their civilized personas as the “animals” that they really are. Buñuel shrugs and says he doesn’t get it. Why don’t they just leave? he mutters. We’re tickled because we know that when the real Buñuel made Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie in 1972, he improved on Gil Pender’s idea by backing up the problem: time after time, his six principals sit down to a meal that never appears. There are always reasons (sometimes surrealist reasons) why dinner can’t be served, and it is not the frustration of withheld dinners that exposes the bons bourgeois as animals — worse than animals, really. Gil’s idea, in short, is worked out cinematically from his one-line gag to a feature-length story. The elegance of Woody Allen’s joke is that it prompts the knowledgeable viewer to think about all of this. Buñuel’s shrugging incomprehension asks you to foresee that he will chew on the idea (for decades!) before finding a form for it that he does understand. And if you think that Gil Pender gets the credit for the idea by the time Buñuel is through with it, you haven’t been paying attention. 

Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie is of course about the supposed fraudulence of the bourgeoisie. The meal that is never served stands for the communion that the characters cannot achieve partly because they are actually engaged in narcotics trafficking but also because they are immured in the carapace of their social manners. Instead of food, they are served several courses of dreams, than which nothing could be more solitary. In the end, they have no reason to behave as properly as they do; in the movie’s terms, it doesn’t get them anywhere. The delivery of this lesson could not have been better-timed; by 1972, everyone, not just young people, was ready to consider the possibility that something was wrong with the bourgeois ideal — laughed at for nearly two centuries, no doubt, but no less eagerly pursued by those who could afford it. 

Nearly forty years later, it seems that many people still believe, paradoxically, that the bourgeois manner is both false and genuine. It’s false because it covers up all the rough stuff that’s left at home. It’s genuine because bourgeois people fall for their own cover-up, and start to deny the rough stuff that’s left at home. This second point turns out to have been what was wrong with the old bourgeoisie. As tradesmen and others worked their way into the urban middle classes, starting in the late Eighteenth Century, they were prone to expect thoroughgoing personal transformation, and to believe that they would become bourgeois. But nobody is really bourgeois. Being bourgeois is a simply a a well-articulated manner of behaving with people whom you don’t know well — or, as it may be, with everyone but the one person with whom you’re in love. Only a dolt would think that it’s hypocritical to be as pleasant as possible in the street, or to bottle up one’s furies and resentments while waiting at the checkout counter. It’s bottling things up and then letting all hell break loose in the company of loved ones that’s a problem. 

From the coordinates that I’ve sketched here, it is understandably difficult to make sense of the heart of Jonathan Franzen’s Op-Ed piece in Sunday’s Times. (“Liking Is For Cowards. Go For What Hurts.”) What’s bothering the novelist is Facebook’s appropriation of the verb “like”; unfortunately, he lets his annoyance run away with him. “The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships.” Well, yes! But who’s trying to be “perfectly likable”? On the basis of his writing, I’d venture that Franzen himself has a problem with this; he smoulders with that peculiarly Midwestern desire to be liked (which is in no way to derogates from his achievement as an artist). At the same time, like any smart fellow, he doesn’t want to be situated too far from the banks of coolness. But being cool is not on his mind at the moment; being loving is. He sees that being lovable is not the same thing as being likeable. What I don’t understand is why he thinks that being likeable makes it hard to be lovable. One wants to be liked by the world — not perfectly liked, by any means, but generally liked — and, if healthy, one also wants to be loved by a very small number of people, no two in quite the same way, and with only one love commanding one’s complete candor. I suppose that can be very hard to realize both of these desires if one situates them on the same mental plane. But they no more belong on the same mental plane than one belongs in the same clothes round the clock. You don’t wear a suit to bed and you don’t go outside draped in a towel. Perhaps it’s that simple: adjust your behavior to the outfit that you allow another person to see. If you are never to be seen without dress shoes, then it’s safe to say that you have intimacy issues. Being cool and being nice are just different personas — not so much masks designed to hide as projections designed to inspire (they do share that). Being loving and lovable means shutting the projections down as far as we can without becoming oafs. 

As recently as forty years ago, many bourgeois people felt it necessary to be shocked by the details of the sex lives of others (even when the others in question were made-up characters in novels). Now we know better, and ask only not to witness these details. What plays in the bedroom stays in the bedroom (please!); we can assume that silence does not imply inertia. Although I’ve had some pretty hot-tempered moments, I’ve never acted in a way that afterward put me in mind of an animal. This is not to say that I should be untiringly pleasant if I found myself locked in a dining room after dinner, unable to say good night to fellow guests. But it wouldn’t take me long to suggest ripping up the tablecloth to partition the room into tolerably private spaces. That’s probably where I’d have gone with Gil Pender’s idea. 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 31st, 2011 at 6:00 pm.