No work of serious social criticism was more on the minds of thinking Americans in the period preceding and during the thirties than Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class. One can take The Philadelphia Story as a head-on attempt to discredit Veblen's assessment of aristocratic culture as characterized by its conspicuousness and emulation of leisure, of consumption, of waste, which is to say, by an avoidance of productive labor and hence an ignorance of or indifference to the genuine quality of the things in our lives. To the demonstration that Tracy Lord has a horror of the conspicuous, and that one cannot imagine her wishing to emulate anyone, certainly not in what they consume, one might reply on Veblen's behalf in either of two ways: that Tracy's horror of the conspicuous is really a further proof of his point, or that if you are one of the vanishing few who have as much money as the Lords of Philadelphia, and your money is as old, then this theory of leisure may not perfectly apply to you. When Tracy, alone with George for the single time in the film, at poolside after Dexter has departed, having explained George what "yare" means, cries out, "Oh, to be useful in the world," George responds by saying that he's going to build her an ivory tower and worship her from a distance. This is an especially chilling response exactly because it understands, by denying, both sources of her heartfelt cry, that it is a wish for freedom from her condition of, let me say, enforced or virginal leisure, which she understands as a condition simultaneously of inconsequence or immaturity both in sex and in work. She finds a virginal or narcissistic leisure no longer supportable; but empirical leisure, the kind that has to be chosen for oneself, and that alternates with real work, still maddeningly beyond reach. But however we come to understand how best to join work and love in a satisfying human existence, it seems clear enough to me that Veblen's book is quite deaf to the rights of the sensuous or erotic side of human nature and that it draws too simple, or angry, a picture of the line between the necessary and the luxurious, or the join between the utilitarian and the beautiful.