Whit Stillman's Cinema and the Existentialist Freedom of Bourgeois Nothingness

In this article I consider the films of Whit Stillman through the lens of existentialism to highlight ideas around freedom in contemporary society. I concentrate on the films of the Doomed Bourgeois in Love trilogy, Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994) and The Last Days of Disco (1998) to show that these films offer us sympathetic understanding of a privileged class who struggle with questions of purpose, identity and absurdity in a world that seems to have no meaning. Jean-Paul Sartre's conception of nothingness underwrites the possibility of radical freedom and Stillman's films show how such freedom might look in the real world. I also offer a novel way of considering the difference between Sartre and Albert Camus's conceptions of the absurd.