The Troubles of Beautiful Wealthy People: My Year of Rest and Relaxation and The Last Days of Disco

The Troubles of Beautiful Wealthy People: My Year of Rest and Relaxation and The Last Days of Disco

There are things you need not know of, though you live and die in vain:
There are souls more sick of pleasure, than you are sick of pain.

There is a stir of unquiet in the air. We have, at last, gotten through an election that is in political terms perhaps the least interesting and impactful of my lifetime--but, in symbolic reality, and, therefore, in real world effects on the psyches and emotional selves and actions of people, among the most extreme. We are living in the greatest Empire the world has ever known; an Empire currently embroiled in two astonishingly bloody proxy wars, wars that our government seems to have little or no interest in controlling or containing or bringing to any kind of conclusion, wars that at this writing continue and escalate and spiral ever downwards, killing thousands of innocents, with no end in sight.

In such a night, what do we dream of? And what troubles our dreams?

I am not going to write, today, about either wars or elections. The suffering and death of the innocent are with God; but if we are to stop the killing, and even the psychological mass-media damage caused by a profoundly silly election, we need to ask ourselves more fundamental questions. We need to ask ourselves, first and foremost, why we are doing what we are doing. For only when we know what we are doing, and why, can we choose to stop doing it.

As I have argued, in recent months, I have seen a vision of the failure of America: a failure born merely of the mainstream, of mass media, of fantasy untethered from reality. The most horrifying thing about present moment is neither Trump nor Kamala's alleged wicked plans to destroy America, but rather their utter lack of any kind of political plans at all; not any particular American hatred or greed or racism or conquest or cowardice manifested in Gaza or Ukraine or Lebanon, but rather our seeming inability to feel anything at all about the wars we pay for and enable, to take any action at all and not contradict it, to take any responsibility at all for the people we have killed and the deeds we ourselves have done: to decide if we are at war with Russia or not, if we want Ukraine to invade Russia or surrender or negotiate or advance or retreat, if we want the government of Israel to keep fighting or stop fighting or expand or retreat, to decide if we want the people of Gaza to live or die or be occupied or be ruled or merely to cease to exist: to have any relationship at all to those who, at least, fight or suffer or hate or fear or die and have some idea why. 

The most troubling thing about the present American moment for me has nothing really to do with the election or our limited choice among media figures; it is simply the inability of our rulers and would-be rulers, of all parties and all groupings and all colors, to do anything, say anything, decided on anything for good or ill. A profound paralysis in fact grips our most powerful men, a profound indecision, an inability to grasp reality, an incapacity to evaluate it on any terms whatsoever: a existential vagueness about law, morality, governance, and life itself.

Anyway, all that is to say that today's post will be about two works of art about bored unhappy wealthy attractive white women living in New York City in the past.

Philosophical Proem

Telos is more fundamental than time; and is the only conceivable basis for human action and consciousness.

The above is a philosophical claim; but let me start over with a claim about art that, properly understood, makes precisely the same point. 

If you tell a story, the ending always dominates and characterizes all other events in the narrative. Take any conceivable set of actions and/or events: for instance, man sees a duck--man kills a Polish TV executive--man gets shot out of a giant cannon on an experimental journey to Jupiter.

If this set of events is followed by an ending where the duck catches up to the man on Jupiter and violently avenges the murder of the TV executive as the dying man weeps for his wasted life, then we will very likely see this story as a cautionary story about anti-Polish prejudice, while the journey to Jupiter is seen as little more than a desperate, failed expedient at escape and/or grandeur. 

If this same set of events is followed by an ending where this same man weeps with happiness as he surveys his beautiful wife and children and reconciled father and mother in his lovely house in a beautiful, futuristic human colony on Jupiter, every viewer will see this as a positive story that positively characterizes these actions and events. Killing a Polish TV executive may not be a positive moral action; but viewed in the light of this ending, it was, at least, an excusable bump along the road to better things, a peccadillo, perhaps even a necessary learning experience. The journey to Jupiter was the important thing, a glorious achievement, one small step for man, one giant leap for, etc; and everything else in the narrative exists from and for and in light of this magnificent accomplishment.

This is a fantastic example; but a point that in fact applies to nearly every work of art. Any amount of hardship, embarrassment, awkwardness, mistakes, irresponsibility, etc, is good in a romantic comedy so long as the main couple get together at the end. Any number of dead parents and/or mentors is good in a superhero film if the kid becomes the superhero at the end. Any number of dead soldiers is good in a war film if the good guys win at the end. 

What is true of art is also true, in a much more fundamental and pervasive way, about human life--which we also understand, inevitably, through the lens of narrative and value and telos. Our moral treatment and understanding of actions--our own and others--is very often deeply affected, if not outright determined, by our sense of the place of these actions in a larger narrative, explicit or implicit; and this narrative is in turn absolutely determined by the ending, explicit or implicit, that we have in mind. 

War is good when the good guys win; torture is good when the bomb is defused; adultery is good when the happy remarriage takes place; lying and abusing the law is good when the election is won. The imagined prosperous, secure homeland of the future justifies any number of bombed schools in the present; the present wealth justifies any number of questionable financial operations in the past. Not only that, but insofar as we perform these actions with this end in mind, we see them as good in advance; or, if we perform these actions with a different ending in mind, we very likely do not perform them at all. 

This is a far more subtle influence than any schematic statement about the ends justifying the means or the means making the end evil. Nor is this phenomenon confined merely to the unthinking assumption or the secular or irrational or unreasoned. A youthful mistake viewed in retrospect by the mature, responsible adult is seen, quite reasonably, as a valuable learning experience. A resolved conflict or faced hardship is seen, quite properly, by a happy couple as an important bonding moment. Viewed by the redeemed soul in heaven, the forgiven, expiated sin is a necessary means for greater glory.

I am not here primarily interested in morality as such; for this teleology is just as operative in almost every other part of our lives and experiences. The travel disaster makes for a grand adventure once you're safely home. Your study methods were excellent once you've passed the test. The interview prep method is a good one if you get the job. Kamala Harris' campaign is a good one if she wins. The misunderstandings and anxieties and rejections are all worth it once you get the girl.  Every suffering and failure is, in the end, justified by love.

Again, my point here is emphatically not to condemn all this, or treat it as in any way irrational. There are good and bad treatments of this principle, true and false deductions from it, rational and irrational applications of it. Yet the fundamental, underlying reality--narrative, value, telos--is simply and absolutely unavoidable--not just for human beings, but for any rational entity at all, for any being at all. Aristotle's dictum that the final cause is the cause of causes, that it determines everything else about an entity, is sufficient in itself to give the essence of an entity, is not abstruse metaphysics, but the merest common sense. That there is a directionality to things, that there is a value to things, that one thing seeks another, that one thing is for another; this is simply the necessary grounding for any and every being. Properly understood, this is the nature of God.

Nor is this principle in any way contradictory to principles or value systems typically held to contradict it. "The journey is more important than the destination" and similar platitudes merely attest to the equally obvious and pervasive presence of transcendence in human life and human goals. Considered merely qua journey, the journey is for the sake of the destination, or it would not be comprehensible; but considered qua human being, both journey and destination exist only for the sake of an immediately, imminently transcendent goal of human enjoyment and happiness--a goal that may in some cases be achieved more through the act of walking and enjoying the scenery than the act of arriving at the destination. When we say that "the ends do not justify the means," we mean that means, to be ends, must be proportionate, in keeping with, the end, and that we cannot violate a higher order for the sake of a lower one--that no number of tactical gains or increased profit margins or avoided inconveniences could possibly be commensurate to the life or happiness or rationality or morality or salvation of a single human soul. 

It is true that each entity subsists entirely based on telos and value; but it is also true that one order of value supersedes another in its totality, that one entity or class of entities is for another in its totality. It is true that to avoid suffering or prevent a terrorist attack or save a nation by destroying an innocent human life is like destroying the universe to save the letter 'h.' It is true that we can fail in every other way, as a human being, as a citizen, as an animal, even as a physical entity, and still possess God.

It is an odd fact that contemporary common-sense modernity does not really deny any of the really difficult or complex matters of Christianity or philosophy--the active involvement of God in individual human lives, say, or the value of each human life. It is not even particularly concerned with denying actual mysteries, such as the Incarnation or the Trinity or the Atonement. But it specially and pervasively denies and doubts things like telos and transcendence that are straightforward, obvious, and immediate building blocks of each and every being and human experience. 

For the last several centuries, the energies and efforts of civilization have been largely directed at denying and occluding these basic truths as much as possible. This denial is visible in many things, from our society's treatment of economics to its approach to sexuality to its treatment of advertising. Yet such denial is, in the final balance, simply impossible; it can never be actually effective in the mind or in reality, for a single moment. It can produce, at best, merely self-contradiction. And so it has.

But for the actual lives of people--living unavoidably in time, in narratives, with desires, goals, wishes, bodies, souls, hearts, all indelibly directed and defined by telos and value--such self-contradiction can and does produce perhaps many of the worst forms of suffering possible to human beings.

We all live inside stories; and we need those stories to be for something. On that depends not merely the happiness of each and every human person, at each day and hour and moment, but the basic coherency of human rationality, personality, and experience. And this is what, I think, is what is really wrong with Americans in the year 2024. 

As a society we have not denied narrative and telos by actually avoiding narrative and telos and value--which is again impossible--but rather by flooding the bodies, minds, and souls of people 24/7 with nonsensical, bizarre, badly-constructed, ugly, evil, self-contradictory, and false narratives, inducing in most people most of the time a state of total value and narrative hyperglycemia rendering them incapable of in any way understanding or making sense of their own lives. 

Among the largely fake and nonsensical stories we foist on people to overwhelm and destroy their sense of value and incidentally make money off of them are, of course, stories about politics--including about the Election. As I write this, many millions of people are reading and consuming and obsessing over hundreds and thousands and millions of trivial narratives about the Election, why it happened, what it means, what it will mean, and who is to blame: to the immediate and obvious and pervasive detriment of their actual understanding of the world and ability to make sense of their own lives and prospects of achieving any value or happiness. 

The trouble with the Election narratives is in part merely a difficulty with human life more generally; that is, our inability to properly narrativize it from our own limited, human perspective in time. We can, sometimes, tell the stories of our own lives and our own in times in retrospect--though with only limited accuracy and insight. We can almost never properly tell the stories of our own lives and times as they happen.

Yet in the contemporary world, we have many, many people whose livelihoods and psyches depend, to different extents, precisely on their doing that; on telling the "story" of the present and very recent past, on telling the stories of strangers they have never met from across the world in different cultures, telling it over and and over again, in different, contradictory forms, oppositional forms, symbolically exchangeable forms, forms maximally effective for selling ad time and shoe polish and attention, and then re-writing the narratives entirely at the drop of a hat based on new events.

Before the election, journalists and smart people, by and large, wrote narratives that had in mind and were aimed at the assumed ending of Kamala Harris' victory, as well as accompanying, contradictory narratives aiming at the horrifying, impossible, dystopian results of Donald Trump winning. Now, by and large, they are writing stories about Kamala Harris' defeat, about what led to it, what caused it, and, increasingly, who to blame for it. 

An election, an event in which over 200 million people of any and every ethnicity and race and identity category pick privately between two pre-set candidates' names on a piece of paper, is a hard thing to narrativize; but for some strange reason, we have largely chosen to center our society and politics and lives and relationships and individual psyches around this event, and our economy around the consumption of ready-made stories, and so we have no choice but to come up with narratives to match.

Among the narratives presented by the mainstream media to explain simply the Bad Things Happening are the Working Class Narrative, the Race & Ethnicity Narrative, & the Gender Wars Narrative. All of these narratives are, factually, false; since while Kamala won women and Trump men, the margins in both were fairly close, as they were for Latinos and virtually every other demographic. Inasmuch as there is a Gender Wars story in America that is real, it is simply the increasing numbers of unmarried men and women in America today obsessed, to their obvious detriment, with fictitious Gender Wars narratives--with these two demographics being the only major ones to actually polarize heavily based on gender in voting. 

Still, true or false, these are all narratives that are about dividing people up into oppositional symbolic groups and declaring one group good and bad; which is, I suppose, our increasingly prevalent method of doing narratives period. 

Yet the underlying coherency of all narrative is in fact the telos, the goal, the good: not the evil. A narrative focused merely on the defeat of an enemy--without, let us say, an accompanying glorious triumph, restoration of the Republic, and/or marriage--is intrinsically a defective one. It may be in a relative sense good for evil to be defeated, but the defeat of evil is only good insofar as it serves or protects or helps achieve some actual, positive good. In the final balance, acting out of any motive other than a positive desire for the good is irrational.

Increasingly, however, our prevailing cultural narratives are narratives that are simply focused on opposition; not even narratives about the defeat of evil, but rather, narratives about its prevalence, its permanence, its inescapability, its hidden presence in our midst and in the minds and hearts of others and ourselves, even its final triumph. 

All narratives, and all actions, are focused on the attempt to achieve or gain the end, the positive good which lends value and coherency to the narrative as a whole. Not all stories have to have a happy ending; but all stories do in fact have to have an end. Tragedies, as much as comedies, are based on the conceptualization of a narrative end and a positive good--even or especially where the entire point of the narrative is about the failure to achieve that good. 

Increasingly, though, our narratives are not even, in the proper sense, tragedies--narratives about the actual failure of human beings to achieve the good. They are, rather, narratives of despair, focused precisely on the impossibility of achieving the good, the inability to even conceive of the good at all, and the impossibility of aiming at anything. Such narratives are by their nature incoherent; and end up focusing, usually, at best on the partial, incomplete requital of failure through petty acts of defiance, spite, and revenge, and at worst, mere deliberate self-destruction. If you look around us, if you read the Internet right now, you will find plenty of both.

Such narratives are always, however, defective, both qua narratives, qua the good, and qua reality, and so in the most important sense false. Indeed, they are usually false on many levels at once, as the decoherency of the end leads to the decoherency of the narrative as a whole.

To live our lives as human beings, we need stories; stories that tell us, even indirectly, even questioningly, even only negatively or by contrast, what the good is, and how we may aim at it, and how we may achieve it. So today I will talk about two stories that do just that, in two extremely contrasting ways.

Sleep Stories: My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Can you tell a story where nothing happens? Can you live without doing anything? Can you be a person without caring about anyone?

My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, strives to answer these questions (and more), giving the first-person account of a (fictional) beautiful, young, blonde, wealthy white woman in the year 2001 who sets out on a quixotic quest to spend every moment of her life sleeping alone in her apartment.

Among the other questions the novel poses, then, are: what is wrong with her? Or rather, more deeply: why does she want to spend her life sleeping alone in her apartment? What does she want out of this experience? What does she want out of life? What does she enjoy, about sleep or anything else? Who or what, if anything, does she love? And for that matter, what could she possibly love or enjoy or care about? What should she want out of life?

At the beginning of the novel's main narrative, our lead character has successfully tracked down a tremendously unprofessional psychiatrist, an aging hippy with one very simple psychiatric theory--one that on its face seems absurd, yet in fundamentals is actually quite prevalent in our society. Her problems, everyone's problems, whatever they may be, are caused by stress, lack of sleep, lack of relaxation, caused by society, value, and thinking; and the answer is medication.

Our lead character has no such grand theory, either about her problems or their solution; but she has decided that she wants to sleep, preferably forever, for which reason she has tracked down this psychiatrist as the one most likely to give her what she wants. Throughout the story, she lies to the psychiatrist about her life, her background, her life, her parents, and her problems, and is rewarded with more and more and more powerful medications to put her to sleep and keep here there. Not in the abstract, but directly and immediately and on a deeper level than the psychiatrist's theories go, sleep is all she wants.

Why? For the most part, neither she nor any of the other characters have a clear answer to this question. After all, our unnamed main character has a lot going for her. She is young, intelligent, independently wealthy, the child of a professor, well-educated, and fabulously beautiful. Nor is her situation bad; she lives alone in New York City in the glorious year 2000, having inherited a reasonable amount of money, and has a fashionable job at an art gallery.

Yet our lead character finds herself pervasively and continually bored and contemptuous and annoyed-- with her job, the art world, the social scene, her co-workers, and everyone in her life--starting with her anxious, clinging "best friend" Reva, towards whom she is alternately avoidant, dismissive, indifferent, and cruel. Reva, in her defense, is an anxious mess, constantly consuming Vogue and Oprah and television and self-help books and eating and vomiting up her food in an endless cycle, constantly consumed with her weight and lack of beauty in comparison to the lead character, with her difficult relationship with her dying mother, with her even more difficult affair with her middle-aged, married boss. Faced with this bundle of anxiety, fear, sorrow, sexual desire, obsession, self-hatred, and self-destruction, perhaps we can understand why our lead character prefers to disengage entirely, and instead drift through dreamless sleep alone in her room and then, when awake, watch endless VHS tapes of bad movies mostly starring Whoopi Goldberg. 

The connection between the two activities is obvious and explicit enough in the novel; as sleep dissolves consciousness, so this barrage of simulated narratives dissolves value. Whoopi Goldberg, in particular, is our protagonist's self-confessed "hero" precisely because of her irreverent, parodic qualities as a performer; the way in which (in our lead character's judgment) she, by her mere presence, dissolves all values and ends of the films and narratives in which she participates. How can anyone take anything in life seriously, she asks, when Whoopi Goldberg exists?

So far, so simple; the social and art world of New York City in the year 2001 is, perhaps, not the Earthly Paradise, and so our lead character prefers to focus on something else, like Sister Act, or Air Force One, or better yet total oblivion. The satire on the outwardly prosperous and glamorous, but inwardly anxious and insecure social and sexual world of the End of History, looking back from a decade or two, is fair enough; as is the satire on the pretentious, perverted world of prestige art. If this were all there was, My Year of Rest and Relaxation would work perfectly fine as a relatively low-stakes satire about how anything, even total unconsciousness, is better than fashionable upper-class life in the City. 

Our lead characters' boredom with and contempt for her social world, though, is not the heart of this story; indeed, it is not even true. As the story unfolds, we learn, gradually but definitively, that our lead character does not merely feel contempt for her friends and family and social world; and that that is in fact the whole problem. 

After an initial successful phase of mixing medications and watching movies and avoiding all emotion, our hero is not yet satisfied, has not yet overcome herself. So she begins taking the strongest drug yet, a fictional psychoactive compound with a peculiar effect: after she takes it, she wakes up days or weeks or months later, remembering nothing. Yet when she does wake up, she finds that she has not been passive in her sleep, not withdrawn and contemptuous; she has been, rather, active, desirous, desperate for human contact and affection and sex, ordering clothes and lingerie, bombarding her ex-boyfriend and total strangers with texts and calls and pictures, going to parties, watching pornography--and, perhaps most terrifying of all, choosing to show up, very much against her conscious wishes, at Reva's mother's funeral. 

At all this our hero feels, understandably, betrayed; and we begin to gradually understand what she has been trying to get away from.

To begin with, there is her "boyfriend" Trevor, a slimy finance guy a decade her senior with whom she has periodically hooked up since college. Trevor is contemptuous of her, deriding and breaking off their relationship again and again in an endless loop for her lack of intelligence and maturity; she is contemptuous of him, and also of herself in relation to him; and yet she continues to obsess over him, his indifference, his sexual perversions, and desperately beg, consciously or unconsciously, for his attention. In a telling touch, this non-couple has never had actual intercourse--merely various non-copulative sex acts. It is difficult to think of a better summing-up of the novel's basic ethos.

Then there is our lead character's (head) parents; her distant professor father and neurotic, vain, alcoholic, self-obsessed mother, a former student of his who blames her daughter for ruining her life. In the past, her mother had mostly ignored her other than when the two of them were asleep, and while awake drank and talked about herself and withdrew; her father had passively suffered her mother's various antics for decades and then died of cancer; after which the mother herself committed suicide with a mix of alcohol and pills. A psychiatrist might say that our lead character is simply starved for human contact and relationship and affection, and desperate to get it anywhere she can, waking or sleeping.

Yet what is the good of a diagnosis like this if our lead character cannot feel it? At various points in the narrative, she reflects on her life, her lack of friends, her lack of human affection, Trevor, Reva, her parents deaths, and assorted other sufferings and lonelinesses and hardships, and attempts to feel sad about them, or indeed anything at all about them. At other points in the narrative, she reflects on these things, and attempts to not feel anything about them; wishing them to merely seem to her like, distant background noise in sleep. Some part of her, a buried, unconscious part, is desperate for love; but that part of her is buried, hidden, and her conscious self feels for it a mix of contempt, hatred, boredom, and fear. What she wants, on some level, is precisely what she does not want, what she desperately wants to avoid, on another level. Love may be the solution; but it is also the problem. 

The predicament of our hero, then, is a highly human one--and a highly modern one. She, like all of us, is a human being; and so in need of love, and defined by desire for and delight in the good, and by the value and narrative and telos that embodies and acts as a means to it in human life. Yet all her actual experience of desire in her own life is tied to disappointment and perversion and pretentiousness and failure and disconnection and alienation and rejection and cruelty and contempt, both from other people, and from herself. Meanwhile, she has been bombarded, all her life, by endless meaningless narratives, mass-media narratives, grounded precisely in that contempt--the proverbial Whoopi Goldberg of modern media, parodying and simulating and looking with endless contempt on value and narrative and the good itself. 

The choice, such as it is, is obvious; and she chooses Whoopi Goldberg. Her good is the escape from the good; to be free from all value and narrative, to get away from other people, feel nothing for them but contempt and indifference, dissolve in herself all desire and consciousness. For after all, consciousness itself, properly understood, is a relation between self and reality, an orientation of mind towards truth, of desire towards the good. It too must be destroy.

Except, of course, the simple truth is that it cannot be. When our protagonist totally dissolves all memory and consciousness, what remains is merely desire--a desire unhindered by her conscious self's fearful, contemptuous ideas and choices. In her sleep, to her horror, she gets a pedicure and a waxing, orders a great deal of clothing and consumer goods, is a smashing success on the New York social scene, has further unfulfilling non-sex with Trevor, and even manages to go a long way toward healing her masochistic relationship with Reva. There is, quite simply, no escape

In the end, then, our hero elects one final trial. She gives away all her earthly belongings (her clothes, her makeup, her haircare products, and all her pills) to Reva, who is overjoyed to finally have the facsimile of the life and self she always wanted, then makes contact with a (gay) art-world acquaintance, and makes a deal with him; he will lock her in her apartment for months while she takes the consciousness-dissolving drug, without phone or Internet or television, and periodically bring her food and water. In return, he can draw her as an art project. 

What she gets from this final trial is not explicitly stated; but the point is, I think, fairly clear. Our hero divests herself entirely of the material and sexual and mass-media perversions of her life so far; and for a time exists as she is, a lonely bundle of desire and need. This desire and need is, as before, at first wholly unconscious; but gradually, almost imperceptibly, it becomes conscious as well. In her sleep, she makes some final contact with a comforting presence--perhaps another human being, perhaps God. Her fear turns into desire, conscious desire, for the first time unaccompanied by fear, hatred, and contempt. For the first time, she wants to live. When she emerges at last back into normal consciousness, then, she has gained some basic acceptance of herself and the world; she is, for the first time, able to walk down the street as herself, and interact with human beings without experiencing overpowering fear or contempt. It is not precisely happiness; but it is a start. For after all, before we can achieve the good, we first have to accept the fact that we want the good; and perhaps, get away from some of the distractions and deceptions that prevent us from doing so.

Reva, meanwhile, has taken the opposite path; she has followed her neurotic desires and obsessions to their increasingly incoherent endpoint, continued to watch television, diet, vomit, go the gym, adopted her beautiful best friend's clothes and lifestyle (and possibly, drugs), continued her affair with her boss, been promoted by him to a job in the World Trade Center, gotten pregnant, gotten an abortion--and then died in the 9/11 attacks.

It is in the contrast between these two arcs, I think, that the book's final message lies. Reva is in a sense a more active character, more honest about her insecurities and sufferings, more accepting of her desires; but her desires are tragically twisted, molded out of shape by the magazines she reads and the television she watches and her bosses' predations and her best friend's contempt and her job's stresses and her own, overpowering insecurity and fear. As our lead character again and again notes, everything Reva says seems taken from a movie or a self-help book--even her most genuine emotions. In desperately seeking and following these desires, which in fact in the final balance are more fears than desires, since they aim not at achieving the good but merely at avoiding the evil of failure and shame, she is brought to do harm to herself and others--and then, in a topically ironic twist, has her life cut short by a totally external force. In the novel's strange, dreamlike perspective, the 9/11 attacks are both logical culmination of the 1990s world of excess and twisted desire, and a blessed cutting-short of it.

Our hero, meanwhile, while at first defined entirely by fear and avoidance of her desires and her self, has by means of her attempted escape (and the proven impossibility of actual escape) in the end achieved both a break with the perverse desires of the world around her, and a measure of basic acceptance of her desires and self. She has achieved, if not happiness, at least a shot at a life as a human being.

When our hero emerges once and for all, from her state of unconsciousness, her constant untethered life of desire, she has nothing, is nothing; and soon after, Reva is dead. And yet, the ending is both hopeful and oddly tender. Reva is dead, our hero is alive, and there is mercy in both. Something has finally happened; the End of History has ended; and the woman is finally awake.

Love Stories: The Last Days of Disco

Taken merely on the surface, The Last Days of Disco, a romantic-comedy film released in 1998 from failed-auteur filmmaker Whit Stillman about the "very early '80s," has little in common with My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Stillman is famously mannered and gentle in his style, a devotee of Jane Austen; My Year of Rest and Relaxation is aggressively uncouth and bizarre. The Last Day's of Disco is about beautiful, well-groomed people dancing in discos; My Year of Rest and Relaxation is about one unkempt woman sitting alone in her room. Most of all, The Last Days of Disco, like all Stillman's films, is in essence a romantic comedy, ending with true love and marriage, while My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a mostly narrative-less art piece ending with two planes flying into the World Trade Center. 

Yet for all that, the connections between the two films are manifold; going well beyond the fact that both films are set in the young social scene of New York City and center on a beautiful blonde protagonist with a neurotic brunette sidekick and a problematic wealthy boyfriend. Among other things, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, released in 2018, is a novel set in the turn of the millennium, when Last Days of Disco, itself a film set in the early '80s, was released. 

On a deeper level, though, both films are reflections on the problem of human desire and narrative; and the many, many, many problems into which it can get people. 

While My Year of Rest and Relaxation is practically narrativeless, The Last Days of Disco has a narrative that is relatively easy to tell, though not without a large number of twists and turns and character nuances. Our hero, Alice, and her cruel, witty college frenemy Charlotte, have graduated college and are living in New York City trying to make ends meet; on the weekends, they go to the Disco to dance and meet members of the opposite sex. Among the members of the opposite sex they meet are the insecure ad man Jimmy, the slimy disco-manager Des, and the innocent, naive lawyer Josh. Jimmy is dragooned into a relationship with Charlotte, but ultimately breaks up with her and leaves town in disgrace, while Alice, after losing her sense of self in a failed relationship, is talked into dating the unsavory Des before the Disco scene collapses and she ends up with Josh instead. Cue credits.

Yet the interest is, in fact, mostly in the details; and in particular in the ways in which the naive, hapless Alice is manipulated by Charlotte, Des, and the broader social scene of Disco into doing and saying and believing things that she does not, in fact, want. When we first meet her, Alice is interested in Jimmy, but is talked by Charlotte and by Jimmy's insecurity into instead directing her attentions towards the tall, dark, and handsome Tom. As it turns out, Jimmy was in fact interested in Alice; and Charlotte was extremely interested in Jimmy, and manipulated her hapless companion to this end. 

Charlotte presents herself as Alice's friend, who merely wants to help her overcome her inhibitions and embrace sexual desire so as to not be seen as a "kindergarten teacher," find someone who will actually like her back, and avoid college when "everyone hated her" and she could not find a date. In fact, Charlotte alone hated Alice in college, and actively worked to sabotage her life and prevent men from dating her; and her comments about the wonderful new world of disco, the nature of male desire and how to manipulate it, and Alice's alleged inhibitions and shortcomings are similarly little more than a mix of spite and misdirection, with tangible, disastrous results. 

To prove to Charlotte (and herself) that she is not an inhibited "kindergarten teacher," Alice rushes disingenuously into a one-night stand with Tom (declaring along the way that she "lives dangerously" and thinks "there's something really sexy about Scrooge McDuck"); only to discover that Tom is in fact in the middle of a break with his long-term girlfriend, has been sleeping around to cope, now thinks of her as a slut, and has consequently decided to get back together with his girlfriend. Also, as it turns out, Tom has given her both the clap and a permanent case of herpes which she will have to live with for the rest of her life. With her sense of self all but destroyed, Alice takes up with Des, a cocaine addict who cheats on her constantly while feeding her false narratives about how he has changed, how he is not an addict, but a "habitual user," how he is not a womanizer, but "hates womanizers," and how his "problem is that he just falls in love a lot."

What has gone wrong with Alice's life? For that matter, what has gone wrong in the lives of many more of the characters, whose attempts to find love and happiness through disco result over the course of the film in broken hearts, hospitalizations, assaults, sexually transmitted diseases, drug addictions, and criminal charges? 

While less prominent, the film does highlight the role of mass media, both music and film, in shaping and distracting the desires of its characters. In the film's most famous scene, the assembled characters debate their lives and romantic connections through a highly charged discussion of the Disney film The Lady and the Tramp. Josh, the romantic protagonist, harshly attacks the film for "programming women to adore jerks," feeding small children the false idea that "delinquents recently escaped from the local pound are a good match for nice girls from sheltered homes"; Des, meanwhile, insists that Tramp, like him someone who "in the past wasn't always honest with members of the opposite sex," has through the "beneficent influences of marriage and fatherhood" truly changed and become "a valuable member of that rather idyllic household." For Des, the narrative of Lady and Tramp allows him to make the case to Alice that he has changed or at least might possibly change in the future; for Josh, this narrative is false and destructive and must be suppressed.

What the film is more focused on than mass media in the form of film, however, is mass media in the form of music and social pressure. The characters in the film are all taken in by the disco craze, with its promise that from henceforth there will be amazing places "where you can go when it's time to have a social life," places where beautiful women can "be in control" of their romantic destinies and meet beautiful men and dance and converse and get to know each other and make their choice and find their one true love. Natural human desire dictates "a certain degree of pairing up" between men and women; and disco provides the one true path to that end.

Of course, in reality, discos are havens of crime and vice resulting in drug addiction, one-night stands, broken hearts, and epidemics of sexually-transmitted diseases as much or more than true love; and our characters suffer all these consequences in spades. By the end of the film, the public has turned against disco music and the law has come down hard on the criminal activities of disco owners. As the film's bouncer declares, all disco people are now strung out or tired or in prison or suffering from sexually transmitted diseases, and have consequently decided to stop going out at night. Disco is dead.

Taken merely objectively, all this (and much else that happens in the film) is as dark as anything that happens in My Year of Rest and Relaxation. If it does not come off that way, if The Last Days of Disco retains its reputation as a charming romantic comedy, it is for a few, highly instructive reasons.

First, there is Whit Stillman's famously gentle, famous humorous approach to character and dialogue and human beings. Stillman has the uncanny skill of actually portraying people (or at least certain types of people) as they actually are. He is known for his "stylized dialogue," but in fact his dialogue is far, far more realistic in portraying college-educated young white people than any filmmaker or author I have ever encountered. And the truth is, when we in fact look objectively at how such people come across, how they think, how they speak, what they talk about...it is, objectively, extremely odd, and extremely funny. And it is hard to feel the full darkness of the human condition when you are laughing at someone.

On a deeper level, though, Stillman does not only laugh at people; he likes them. In fact, he laughs at them because he likes them; because he delights in the ludicrous personalities and actions of human beings as they are. On paper, Charlotte and Des are the film's villains; both are fundamentally selfish and self-serving liars, both do a great deal of unsavory things, and both cause a great deal of damage, to themselves and others. Yet in Stillman's world, there are no villains; and even villains may have their hearts broken, as both Des and Charlotte do. At the end of the film, Charlotte and Des decide that they merely have "big personalities," and that obviously they were meant for each other all along; and the film wishes them all the best.

The deepest reason of all for the basic positivity of Whit Stillman's worldview and filmography, however, is the basic conceit with which I began this overly long essay. In his heart of hearts, Stillman knows that all these people, good and bad, are acting out of fundamental human desire, the desire to love and be loved and know and be known; and he knows that this desire is good, because it aims at something good, at two people, a man and a woman, getting to know each other, talking and laughing and dancing and falling in love and getting together and getting married. Along that path of desire, people may make any number of mistakes, say and do any number of stupid and foolish and awkward and dishonest and cruel and nonsensically hilarious things, commit any number of sins and even crimes--but for all that, they are aiming at the target, just like everyone else. However silly they may be, however wicked they may be, they are, at base, no different than each of us. Because they, like us, are desiring the good, and, like us, generally doing a very bad job of achieving it, we can sympathize with them as much as laugh at them, affirm them far more than condemn them, and be gentle with them even when we correct them.

And most fundamentally of all, everything is ultimately alright because the ending is happy. The difference between a comedy and a tragedy, in Shakespearean terms, is whether the film ends with a death or a wedding; and all Stillman's films end, literally or implicitly, with a wedding. In The Last Days of Disco, disco collapses; but our romantic hero and heroine, Josh and Alice, overcome all deceptions and degradations and get together, and dance happily together on a crowded subway. That to get to this point Alice was deceived and tricked and lied to and slept with the wrong men and got herpes is, in the end, less important than the fact that she got there in the end. 

This is, I think, fundamentally the correct attitude to take towards life and human beings; and the only possible pathway to take in the face of the growing incoherence of our world and our society. Mass-media narratives may pound on us like waves upon the shore--but in the end, there are real human beings, who one and all, good and bad, Republican and Democrat, male and female, Kamala and Trump, are fundamentally beings of desire, defined and driven in every aspect of our lives and psyches by the positive aiming at the objective good. In this, we are all the same, immediately and ultimately; and for all of us the most important thing, the only important thing, the thing that will determine whether the story of each life and of all our lives is in the end a comedy or a tragedy, is how it ends.

The only question, then, for every person to ask in every situation, is what the good is that we are aiming at, immediately and ultimately; and how we are going to achieve it. In this grand quest of human life, religion has a central part to play; as does philosophy; as does, even, politics in a genuine sense, all of which give us stories, values, goods to aim at and paths to get there. Even fictional stories have their place--often a very important place, provided that they, too, present us with positive goods, and pathways to get to them.

Yet as I have emphasized in this piece, we have, in a very real sense, no choice. We cannot finally escape stories and values and desires and consciousness and our own selves; only lie to ourselves and live in false, incoherent fantasies. And that is, quite simply, a bad story, with a bad ending.

If we can know what we want, and why we want it, we can act, and choose, and live in the real world, and achieve goods small and great, human and divine. If we do not, we will not cease to act, or even to act for an end; but we will act at random, irrationally, in deception and self-contradiction and destruction, and, finally, lose in a far more consequential sense than any fictional story can tell.