Doomed (I met Whit Stillman)

Whit Stillman, writer and director of my favorite movie of all time, was in Madison this week. Work commitments kept me from showing up for the screening of Metropolitan but I made it for the end of the Q&A and got to exchange a few words with him. I told him about the exchange that’s always stuck with me: one of the preppie college student protagonists asks a middle aged man in a bar (character name: Man in Bar) whether people from their background are inevitably doomed to failure, and the man says, “No, we simply fail without being doomed.”