I am Living in a Tsai Ming Liang Movie

[Re-posted with permission from Dr. Cat Fetus]

This essay is dedicated to Keegan.

Breaking down:

• Fixation as a means of addiction

• Meditation

• What zero pussy does to a mf

Cheery Angst

This wasn’t her grandparents’ angst, but Emma Koenig, author of the book F*ck! I’m in My Twenties has accomplished what novelists and poets have done for generations: use existential angst to make a living and improve their love lives.

And Man Swooned

I've been reading a lot of Jane Austen lately, and the notion of young heroines using their beguiling manners to make a "conquest" which in those days simply meant a young, eligible bachelor falling madly and deeply, head over heels in love has been around since the Victorian era. Proust makes use of the term as well.

The "marriage plot" made popular by Ms Austin's novels was something that the women's movement was supposed to have retired long ago (hat tip to Jeffrey Eugenides). That the whole purpose of a woman's existence was to marry well was supplanted by feminism. Unfortunately, it's not the women who seem hooked on that notion in today's world, but the men. 

So what's on the menu

Why do nice guys finish last?

The question contained in the title is a recurring theme in the films of Whit Stillman, which are largely autobiographical. With the release of Damsels in Distress (covered in these articles by The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker) late last year after a thirteen year hiatus, it seemed befitting to relive some of the most memorable moments from his previous work. Even the initial sampler to Damsels, which can be viewed here, demonstrates the actual "problem" of female attraction to the dark male character. By reviewing what went before, we can probably shed some light on the topic at hand.

In this first clip taken from the Oscar-nominated Metropolitan (1990), we can get a flavor for Stillman's comedy of manners. As Nick Pinkerton in The Village Voice put it,  the film presents us with

the milieu of its writer-director—Preppie, Yuppie, Urban Haute Bourgeoisie—and treated it, not as something to be pilloried or taken for granted, but as a suitable subject for his characters' study, even defense ... It applied the emotional delicacy of the 19th-century courtship novel to the sexual revolution's aftermath—for Stillman, something more ambiguous and disorienting than the accepted version of escape from barren, pre-orgasmic Puritanism.