"This lame duck of a movie pretends to be a sardonic melodrama about overweening ambition in the Reagan era, with John Cusack as a corrupt political go-getter and James Spader as his idealistic best friend, a lawyer for the Justice Department. It’s actually a rallying cry for the Wasp élite. Cusack is an underprivileged ethnic type who tries to pass for a preppy; even after he’s exposed, he succeeds at ingratiating himself with all the genuine blue bloods in Spader’s circle (including Spader’s lover, Imogen Stubbs, and her senator father, Richard Widmark). They’re all too trusting—they can’t believe just how bad Cusack is until he blackmails or betrays them. In effect, it’s a reactionary movie: Cusack, the grabber, spouts populist cant, while Widmark, whose parties are 'The National Review come to life,' emerges as an honorable man. It would all be offensive if it weren’t so shallow. The true color of this film is lily white."
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
True Colors (1991 Movie)
I searched the New Yorker website for the term "preppy." The results included a very short article on the movie True Colors, short enough for me to include it entirely:
"This lame duck of a movie pretends to be a sardonic melodrama about overweening ambition in the Reagan era, with John Cusack as a corrupt political go-getter and James Spader as his idealistic best friend, a lawyer for the Justice Department. It’s actually a rallying cry for the Wasp élite. Cusack is an underprivileged ethnic type who tries to pass for a preppy; even after he’s exposed, he succeeds at ingratiating himself with all the genuine blue bloods in Spader’s circle (including Spader’s lover, Imogen Stubbs, and her senator father, Richard Widmark). They’re all too trusting—they can’t believe just how bad Cusack is until he blackmails or betrays them. In effect, it’s a reactionary movie: Cusack, the grabber, spouts populist cant, while Widmark, whose parties are 'The National Review come to life,' emerges as an honorable man. It would all be offensive if it weren’t so shallow. The true color of this film is lily white."
Sounds like a text for the reading/viewing list, albeit secondary.
"This lame duck of a movie pretends to be a sardonic melodrama about overweening ambition in the Reagan era, with John Cusack as a corrupt political go-getter and James Spader as his idealistic best friend, a lawyer for the Justice Department. It’s actually a rallying cry for the Wasp élite. Cusack is an underprivileged ethnic type who tries to pass for a preppy; even after he’s exposed, he succeeds at ingratiating himself with all the genuine blue bloods in Spader’s circle (including Spader’s lover, Imogen Stubbs, and her senator father, Richard Widmark). They’re all too trusting—they can’t believe just how bad Cusack is until he blackmails or betrays them. In effect, it’s a reactionary movie: Cusack, the grabber, spouts populist cant, while Widmark, whose parties are 'The National Review come to life,' emerges as an honorable man. It would all be offensive if it weren’t so shallow. The true color of this film is lily white."
"Prepsterdom" in the Urban Dictionary
Definition:
"Noun. The state of being preppy."
Used in a sentence:
"Pink and green grosgrain ribbons are a hallmark of prepsterdom."
Not the most creative entry, but definitely serviceable. Direct access here.
"Noun. The state of being preppy."
Used in a sentence:
"Pink and green grosgrain ribbons are a hallmark of prepsterdom."
Not the most creative entry, but definitely serviceable. Direct access here.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
A Disclaimer
To forestall any misunderstandings: I may associate the phenomenon of prepsterdom with artifice at times, but doesn't mean that I consider those who describe themselves as preppy to be vapid. Most people who describe themselves thus emphasize traditional values such as respect of others and their opinions. So I am definitely not in the prep-hating camp.
The Hamptons. Surrey.
I stumbled on this gem in the property section of London's Evening Standard, which had a feature article on the development. And yes, the shutter houses, manicured lawns, and landscaped trees and fountains look absolutely pristine. "You don't have to cross the Atlantic to find cute clapboard homes," the author, David Spittles, raves. "It could be a film set for a Ralph Lauren fashion shoot."
Couldn't it just?
But that may be exactly where the problem lies. I can already hear the critics sighing about the soullessness and artifice of it all, the Pleasantville two-dimensionality. And the deeper you look, the more substantive this argument becomes. Even the Evening Standard article – which is laudatory - coyly adds: "Covenants are in place preventing residents from painting the exterior of their homes a different color." (At least I think it’s laudatory; I might be misreading British irony and the author actually considers the project an abomination.)
Perhaps my favorite part is that the Surrey Hamptons aren’t just about bringing a Long Island feel to the Isles, but that the settlement conveys a synthesized New England experience. "Providence Place, where life is complete," the homepage boasts - a more-likely-than-not allusion to Providence, Rhode Island. It reminded me of the surprisingly postmodern Babe 2: Pig in the City where "the city" is an amalgam of famous landmarks from various metropolises (image taken from from here):
Or the scene in The West Wing in which White House Communications Director Toby Ziegler rants against the Jamestown Mayflower Daughters of the American Revolution Preservation Society – "Jamestown was the sixteenth century. The Mayflower landed at Plymouth in the seventeenth century. The fathers of the Daughters of the American Revolution fought in? The eighteenth century!" (The exact quote is from Television Without Pity, which I strongly urge you to steer away from unless you possess a very high degree of self-discipline).
As for the prep dimension: prepsterdom, as argued before, harks back to an idealized New England (discounting Southern Prep for the moment, which is a phenomenon unto itself). And, of course, the name in itself speaks volumes. To state the obvious: the Puritans had a habit of naming their cities upon hills after English precedents - including Southampton, Hampshire, after which the Long Island Hamptons take their name. And now, The Hamptons have been re-imported to the UK, as an airbrushed caricature of the New England lifestyle (i.e., prepsterdom). A lifestyle which in itself owes so many things to rebelling against but at the same time emulating the original, not unlike the way children rebel against their parents but still end up resembling them. And there's more than a hint of artifice about the development - "like a theme park," as Mr. Spittles argues.
The greater meaning of The Hamptons, Surrey? Though showrooms have barely opened, the properties are selling like hot cakes - "Young couples and growing families are driving demand […] the Worcester Park address is seen as a good value, child-friendly location." So for now, I’ll leave it at "Certain British people like the thought of living in a community which looks like a perfected cliché of New England, pure and clean without the potential complexities of 'real' communities. Which is ironic because New England was founded by British settlers who either had to leave or wanted to escape England and what they perceived as decadence and spiritual corruption, 'a country that's nothing more than the dried husk America came out of.'" (Just quoting.)
Check out The Hamptons, Surrey here before for your own slice of the American dream. But beware: "Close inspection of the earlier phase of houses shows that supposedly wooden façades are in fact clad in manmade grainy boards that will never mature into the faded elegance of authentic New England architecture."
And fun fact of the day: according to my good friend Wikipedia, "the name 'Hampton' may come from the Anglo-Saxon words 'Hamm,' meaning an enclosure in the bend of a river, and 'Ton,' meaning farmstead or settlement."
Couldn't it just?
But that may be exactly where the problem lies. I can already hear the critics sighing about the soullessness and artifice of it all, the Pleasantville two-dimensionality. And the deeper you look, the more substantive this argument becomes. Even the Evening Standard article – which is laudatory - coyly adds: "Covenants are in place preventing residents from painting the exterior of their homes a different color." (At least I think it’s laudatory; I might be misreading British irony and the author actually considers the project an abomination.)
Perhaps my favorite part is that the Surrey Hamptons aren’t just about bringing a Long Island feel to the Isles, but that the settlement conveys a synthesized New England experience. "Providence Place, where life is complete," the homepage boasts - a more-likely-than-not allusion to Providence, Rhode Island. It reminded me of the surprisingly postmodern Babe 2: Pig in the City where "the city" is an amalgam of famous landmarks from various metropolises (image taken from from here):
Or the scene in The West Wing in which White House Communications Director Toby Ziegler rants against the Jamestown Mayflower Daughters of the American Revolution Preservation Society – "Jamestown was the sixteenth century. The Mayflower landed at Plymouth in the seventeenth century. The fathers of the Daughters of the American Revolution fought in? The eighteenth century!" (The exact quote is from Television Without Pity, which I strongly urge you to steer away from unless you possess a very high degree of self-discipline).
As for the prep dimension: prepsterdom, as argued before, harks back to an idealized New England (discounting Southern Prep for the moment, which is a phenomenon unto itself). And, of course, the name in itself speaks volumes. To state the obvious: the Puritans had a habit of naming their cities upon hills after English precedents - including Southampton, Hampshire, after which the Long Island Hamptons take their name. And now, The Hamptons have been re-imported to the UK, as an airbrushed caricature of the New England lifestyle (i.e., prepsterdom). A lifestyle which in itself owes so many things to rebelling against but at the same time emulating the original, not unlike the way children rebel against their parents but still end up resembling them. And there's more than a hint of artifice about the development - "like a theme park," as Mr. Spittles argues.
The greater meaning of The Hamptons, Surrey? Though showrooms have barely opened, the properties are selling like hot cakes - "Young couples and growing families are driving demand […] the Worcester Park address is seen as a good value, child-friendly location." So for now, I’ll leave it at "Certain British people like the thought of living in a community which looks like a perfected cliché of New England, pure and clean without the potential complexities of 'real' communities. Which is ironic because New England was founded by British settlers who either had to leave or wanted to escape England and what they perceived as decadence and spiritual corruption, 'a country that's nothing more than the dried husk America came out of.'" (Just quoting.)
Check out The Hamptons, Surrey here before for your own slice of the American dream. But beware: "Close inspection of the earlier phase of houses shows that supposedly wooden façades are in fact clad in manmade grainy boards that will never mature into the faded elegance of authentic New England architecture."
And fun fact of the day: according to my good friend Wikipedia, "the name 'Hampton' may come from the Anglo-Saxon words 'Hamm,' meaning an enclosure in the bend of a river, and 'Ton,' meaning farmstead or settlement."
Monday, April 5, 2010
Consider me Schooled.
"Let me school you about preppies" - thus Sam Allis in this 2009 Boston Globe article. It's a wonderfully succinct overview of the phenomenon. This excerpt captures the core of it:
"Whatever allure in preppies there may be now is anchored in the past. It speaks to an old world of exclusion and exclusivity, of final clubs and blackballs, of pumps with black tie and the Social Register. (Whatever happened to the Social Register anyway?)
"Whatever allure in preppies there may be now is anchored in the past. It speaks to an old world of exclusion and exclusivity, of final clubs and blackballs, of pumps with black tie and the Social Register. (Whatever happened to the Social Register anyway?)
"There is a wistfulness to this whole preppy thing that reminds me of Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s great fake who stared into the night at the green light at Daisy Buchanan’s dock across the bay, aching for the woman.
'The reigning king of preppy wistfulness remains Ralph Lauren, born Ralph Lifshitz in the Bronx, who has created the ultimate illusionary preppy world. His efforts are nothing if not about a yearning for a past he never knew. His ads relentlessly portray a life of white flannel, wooden tennis racquets, and elegant old cars."
Prep as an aspirational illusion - of course. An American archetype, like The Frontier and Baby Boomers, which may well fall apart upon closer examination. But I do enjoy the unraveling.
And now I tweet
Work is confidential, family off-limits, but for the purposes of The Prep Project, it's perfect!
http://twitter.com/theprepproject
http://twitter.com/theprepproject
The Crux of it?
If this were a traditional dissertation/essay/whatnot (and right now I strongly wish I'd made prepsterdom the subject of my American Studies Masters Thesis five years ago!), my thesis might be thus:
Prepsterdom is about retaining class distinctions in American society, where social mobility is considered more attainable than anywhere else.
I expect this to be polished and refined as I delve into the literature and expand my research.
Related to this is the Preppy/WASP issue. I'm going to write about Preppies and WASPs in the future - my theory at the moment is that people would sooner describe themselves as Preppy (even if they are both) because it's less elitist - at least on a superficial level. For whereas you can become at least outwardly preppy, WASPism is like Hinduism: you have to be born into it. (And note that it's about essence and not nomenclature - for instance, my Caucasian British Anglican husband is not and couldn't be a WASP. So no cute comments like "What if someone's born a WAS of another faith and converts to Protestantism?")
Prepsterdom is about retaining class distinctions in American society, where social mobility is considered more attainable than anywhere else.
I expect this to be polished and refined as I delve into the literature and expand my research.
Related to this is the Preppy/WASP issue. I'm going to write about Preppies and WASPs in the future - my theory at the moment is that people would sooner describe themselves as Preppy (even if they are both) because it's less elitist - at least on a superficial level. For whereas you can become at least outwardly preppy, WASPism is like Hinduism: you have to be born into it. (And note that it's about essence and not nomenclature - for instance, my Caucasian British Anglican husband is not and couldn't be a WASP. So no cute comments like "What if someone's born a WAS of another faith and converts to Protestantism?")
Prep-related Resources (a starting point)
Articles - Popular Newspaper & Magazine
Blogs (celebratory)
Texts on the subject generally fall either into the category of sociology (understanding the phenomenon) or etiquette (which I'll call conforming to the phenomenon for the meantime - though it's a bit more subversive and extensive than that). Over the next weeks, I'm going to read and assess these books on the basis of their contribution to the understanding of prepsterdom (and I'll have a few things to say about their literary and scholarly merits, no doubt).
The basics
(I got these books from the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" section on TPH's Amazon site.)
- "Rejoice, Muffy and Biff: A Preppy Primer Revisited." Motoko Rich. NYT online. 4 Apr. 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/books/04preppy.html
Blogs (celebratory)
- Summer is a Verb. http://summerisaverb.blogspot.com/- mentioned in 04/04 NYT article
- An Etiquette Grrl Strikes Back. http://etiquettegrrls.blogspot.com/ - run by the author of two prep-heavy etiquette books, Things You Need to be Told and its sequel (see below)
- Her Southern Charm. http://hersoutherncharm.blogspot.com/
- Sweet Preppy Mama. http://www.sweetpreppymama.blogspot.com/
- Monograms and Manicures. http://www.kappaprep.com/ - mentioned in 04/04 NYT article
- Prep: A Novel. Curtis Sittenfeld. New York: Random, 2005.
- Mating Rituals of the North American WASP. Lauren Lipton. 5 Spot, 2009.
Texts on the subject generally fall either into the category of sociology (understanding the phenomenon) or etiquette (which I'll call conforming to the phenomenon for the meantime - though it's a bit more subversive and extensive than that). Over the next weeks, I'm going to read and assess these books on the basis of their contribution to the understanding of prepsterdom (and I'll have a few things to say about their literary and scholarly merits, no doubt).
The basics
- TPH - starts at around $50 on amazon.com/£50 on amazon.co.uk (this means that immediate purchase it isn't on my priority list)
- True Prep. Lisa Birnbach and Chip Kidd. New York: Knopf, 2010. - the sequel, to be released Sept. 7, 2010
(I got these books from the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" section on TPH's Amazon site.)
- Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. Paul Fussell. Touchstone, 1992.
- Lessons from Privilege: The American Prep School Tradition. Arthur Powell. Cambridge: HUP, 1998.
- Things You Need to be Told. Leslie Carlin and Honore McDonough Ervin. Penguin, 2001.
- Tipsy in Madras: A complete guide to 80s preppy drinking. Matt Walker and Marissa Walsh.
- Preppy Must Haves. http://preppymusthave.com/
- Wikipedia
- Urban Dictionary
- Yahoo Answers (etc.)
- WikiHow
Understanding Prepsterdom
It started with seersucker. I jotted down some innocuous thoughts on how I'm not quite sure what I think of seersucker suits (pros: resilience in tropical conditions; cons: resemblance to pyjamas). Only a few hours later, I stumbled upon the NYT article "Rejoice, Muffy and Biff: A Preppy Primer Revisited": The Preppy Handbook ("a piquant bit of mockery" of prepsterdom, which "ended up being adopted as a kind of guidebook for those who wanted in," thus the NYT) will be updated for the 21st century.
All this got me to thinking that the phenomenon of prepsterdom deserves an in-depth analysis. What is it? Where does it come from? What does it mean? Are there scholarly articles and books on it? Are there non-scholarly articles and books on it?
And thus a project was born. Expect articles on the history of prep, dissections of websites and blogs devoted to preppieness (or is that preppyness?), prepsterdom outside the US, the proliferation of prep - musings that will surely spawn into further entries.
Disclaimer: I imagine that getting ahold of TPH (I'm probably going to be referring to this book a lot, hence the abbreviation) will be difficult after the NYT article (which was a top 10 emailed article yesterday and has been picked up by the Daily Beast with more to follow, surely). But I'll give it a shot.
All this got me to thinking that the phenomenon of prepsterdom deserves an in-depth analysis. What is it? Where does it come from? What does it mean? Are there scholarly articles and books on it? Are there non-scholarly articles and books on it?
And thus a project was born. Expect articles on the history of prep, dissections of websites and blogs devoted to preppieness (or is that preppyness?), prepsterdom outside the US, the proliferation of prep - musings that will surely spawn into further entries.
Disclaimer: I imagine that getting ahold of TPH (I'm probably going to be referring to this book a lot, hence the abbreviation) will be difficult after the NYT article (which was a top 10 emailed article yesterday and has been picked up by the Daily Beast with more to follow, surely). But I'll give it a shot.
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