Lost in a Dream: Thoughts on Wes Anderson

The first DVD I ever bought was of a movie called Bottle Rocket. Though it cost $27, a lot for a DVD with no special features, and I had never seen it before, I liked Owen Wilson from his small cameo in The Cable Guy, and somehow I knew Bottle Rocket was going to be an important movie in my life. From the first time I watched it, Bottle Rocket has been my favorite movie. It expresses with such comedy and poetry what it’s like to be a young man in a group of young men without women who are trying to create something bigger than themselves. I’ve followed Wes Anderson’s career ever since with the interest one may have followed The Beatles or The Rolling Stones careers in the 60s, anticipating the release of each new work, scrutinizing it to the smallest detail. I have been delighted and surpirsed to see his work get more ambitious, more idiosyncratic, his grip over the mise-en-scene has gotten more sure. As his control, his visability in the media, his popularity has grown, so has the criticism against him mounted. People seem to think he’s lost his way, he’s too full of himself. Granted, I wish Anderson would make another film like Bottle Rocket, less reliant on style and allusion and more grounded in the humanity of the characters, I would argue that his films have grown richer, more ambitious with each new release. I don’t know that he’s of the magnitude of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, but he is, in a way, one of the premiere artists of this moment. Though he is not affecting change in the way the artists of the 60s did, that may be because he is, as this generation seems to be, not interested in those sorts of things.

What Anderson seems to be interested in is creating an alternate fictional reality. He is, like Quentin Tarantino, a collage artist: assembling ideas, dialogue, fashions, songs, names, images into a new world on film. His films are drenched in the vintage, picked from the thrift bins and the boutiques. In America today, where mass-produced, ready-made corporate inauthenticity is the mainstream, it is no wonder that a section of the younger generation has pilfered their parent’s closets and record collections. Anderson has what Natalie Portman called “the best possible taste.” He picks the most refined elements of pop culture (British Invasion music, New Yorker literary tropes, foreign film motifs) and parades them in a grand pageant across the screen. On DVD commentary tracks and in interviews he freely credits the sources of his work: A line from a Louis Malle film, the look of a San Francisco tycoon, a camera move from Hitchcock. Even proper names are borrowed from a vaguely understood upper crust: Hotel Chevalier, Voltaire No. 5, the Lindbergh Palace Hotel. I don’t think Wes’ penchant for theft makes him an illegitimate artist, but perhaps a representative artist of this era. Like Picasso said, “The good artists copy, the great artists steal.” What does an artist do but steal? The work has to come from somewhere. It’s just that, until recently, most art was “stolen” from life: The painter refashioned a sunset as his eye saw fit, a writer grafted the personality of a friend onto a character, the actor stole a gesture or a walk from a person on the street. Artists today are still stealing from life, it’s just that so much of our lives are spent absorbing art. Anderson’s sensibility, his ability to orchestrate a scene, is so powerful that these stolen things become new again. One of our only frames of reference, one of the only things that unites cultures across the world in this age is popular culture. The lines of communication which people used to use to relate to each other, such as small town gossip, have been stretched until they snapped by modern technology. One of the only ways to relate in a global community is through a global popular culture. As a result of this, we are required to assemble our identities from the music we listen to, the clothes we wear, the movies we like. We use them to signal others that, since we like the same things, perhaps we think the same way, perhaps we should be friends. Wes Anderson gathers up the ribbons of culture that appeal to a certain type of mind and tie them around pretty little packages containing character and emotion. The problem is that Anderson’s films have become less about what's inside and more about wrapping paper.

What some people view as superficial: clothes, taste, style, Wes Anderson sees as external manifestations of the inner integrity of a person. The problem is that his films celebrate these things while willfully ignoring the unattractive “larger” questions of life. His characters are probably interested in things like politics, philosophy, war, poverty, etc., but Anderson seems averse to exploring these issues in his films. In The Darjeeling Limited, the Whitman brothers go on a “spiritual journey” to India and nary a word is mentioned about whether they believe in God or the specific differences between Hinduism and whatever it is that they practice. Perhaps these things were meant to be a hypocritical part of the characterization, or to be implicit, alluded to in the environments and actions of the story but not in words. It seems curious that Anderson, a philosophy major in college, isn’t interested in exploring these questions in his work. On the Criterion DVD for The Life Aquatic an interviewer asks him if he believes in the devil. His answer: “I’m not really interested in that.”



Although some of the appeal for me of Anderson’s work lies in the frippery, the real nutrients, the stuff without which the films wouldn’t be great, is the emotional current powering the whole machine. As Martin Scorsese said, Anderson “knows how to convey the simple joys and interactions between people so well and with such richness.” This is why Bottle Rocket remains my favorite Anderson film. It is no coincidence that the film is the most stripped of the patented Anderson style. The Darjeeling Limited is a kind of update of Bottle Rocket: both were made in a sort of loose, adventurous way, both are about three guys (friends, brothers) on a freewheeling journey hoping to discover themselves, and both are insightful and inventive in their own ways, but, to me, The Darjeeling Limited, while being the more fully realized film, lacks the magic, the spark of Bottle Rocket. Don't get me wrong, I like The Darjeeling Limited very much, but the superficial elements, the clothes the characters wear, the locations they are able to travel to, the lifestyles they can afford, are a zillion miles from my reality, and so the film does not come as close to my heart. Although Anderson likens his movies to fables, of unspecified time and place, his earlier films were more grounded in reality, and this had much to do with their success. He hasn’t quite figured out how to give the story the same gravity in the flamboyant worlds he has, with his growing stature as a director, been given resources to create. He seems in love with his own style, averse to abandoning, or even modifying it. With each film he plunges deeper into his inventions, his newest film, The Fantastic Mr. Fox taking place in a world completely fabricated to the smallest detail (I have yet to see the movie, but it has gotten the best reviews of Anderson’s career thus far). Perhaps he could learn something from his heroes, say, David Bowie or Bob Dylan, who discovered that one way for an artist to stay relevant is to constantly be shedding his image, reinventing himself. In the film world, unlike the music world, this is not exactly a celebrated ideal. The ultimate accolade a film director can receive is to be recognized as an “auteur”, the complete master of his mise-en-scene. This is where Anderson takes his hardest criticism. He has, more than any other director of his generation, developed an instantly recognizable and unique aesthetic, and people seem to hate him for it. The very things that identify a Wes Anderson film are the most heavily criticized. If a director is lucky enough to develop something as hard won as his own vision, perhaps it’s best for him not to abandon it. After all, no one criticized Orson Welles for using dramatic angles and overlapping sound design for his whole career, or Jim Jarmusch for continuing to use long takes and few close-ups. I would argue that, as Anderson’s creative control has increased, as his fictional worlds have become more totally under his control, his films have started to lose their emotional impact, more closely resembling the surreal hyperbole of Max Fischer’s plays than the delicate poignancy of the film Rushmore itself. For example, when Zissou fights the pirates in The Life Aquatic, Anderson clings to the trademarks of his style even when the material demands a different technique. His wide-angle lenses, his preference for framing things at 90 degrees, the use of “Search and Destroy” to prop the whole thing up, cause the sequence to look more like a bunch of kids playing at making an action movie than anything with real suspense or danger. Then again, maybe that’s what he's going for. Anderson seems to keep anything grim at arms length. The scene in the hospital room in The Royal Tenenbaums after Richie suicide attempt is fairly dry, with little display of emotion. The characters in Anderson’s movies never explode. The melodrama is kept tightly lidded, as if it would be unfashionable, uncouth to erupt in feeling. Steve Zissou, probably Anderson’s most ambitious and not quite successful character, is too close to a caracature to really bleed through to us emotionally. We become fatigued by the fashion, are pushed so far from the characters by their eccentricity that their pain no longer seems real. It’s much easier for an audience to sympathize with a Dignan, a Max Fischer, mad dreamers whose fantasies clash so violently against the gloom of reality. Max is banished from Rushmore to a public high school. Dignan goes to jail. Dignan's yellow jumpsuit, Max's red beret certainly say a lot about who they are, but they are not smothered by them. Max’s uniform is touching, it reflects his yearning to be a part of the Rushmore elite. It is somewhat pathetic in it’s shabby impersonation of wealth, and we cannot fault him for this. In his more recent films the characters, perhaps like the man himself, no longer have any reality to bounce against, they are swept up in the absurd grandeur of the tapestry they inhabit. Anderson, unlike his early heroes, has achieved his dreams. He has an apartment in Paris, one in Manhattan, critical acclaim as a film director. Dignan and Max Fischer are trapped in a world which will not bend to their fantasies, no matter how they struggle. His later protagonists have been born into the aristocracy, they are no longer outsiders trying to get in, and their unhappiness seems more like torpor than fury. Dignan and Max Fischer are poor boys with nothing but their spunk, their moxie, to drive them to the top. When their dreams are slammed down, the audience feels this. It is much harder to sympathize with some rich has-been lost in metropolitan ennui. When Zissou’s life crumbles around him, it’s too surreal to break our hearts.

Anderson seems to have anticipated, and in part facilitated, an entire generation’s collapse into adolescence. As Richie and Margot and Chas Tenenbaum remain petrified, like some living exhibit to their own glory, their most honest, childhood selves, so do many of the current 20-somethings in America. Childhood was a pretty wonderful time for us. It was probably the only time in our lives we were allowed to be honest, impulsive, without fear of society lashing us into conformity or obedience. We were celebrated as children, our creativity was encouraged, our dreams were fostered. It is a time before our parents were divorced, when we liked TV shows or videogames because we liked them, not because it was hip to like them. We enshrine this part of our lives. This is the Catcher in the Rye mythology, the struggle to retain innocence against the demands, the hypocrisy of modern adulthood, and Anderson’s work is a kind of refinement, an update of this myth. The Tenenbaums, Max Fischer, Dignan all resonate with us because we see ourselves in them, or at least fantasies of ourselves. We would like to believe that we are beautiful disasters, neglected, maudlin, gifted; that we were on the path to greatness but somehow our glory vanished along the way. We have become lost in tangly beards and irony and shield ourselves from emotional battery behind headbands and sunglasses and blase expressions. Our generation inherited the world left behind after the 1960s, when all the ancient struts propping up notions of identity, truth, beauty, politics, spirituality were torn up and strewn about for us to reassemble. There are a lot of questions that we don’t know how to answer, and, in a way, we have chosen not worry about them. We don’t know if we care one way or the other if there’s a God. We aren’t much concerned with politics. We certainly don’t want to work in cubicles. We see ourselves as creative. We aspire to be geniuses, rock stars, auteurs. We strive for our dreams, but as they pass us by, we champion our failures, which is what Wes Anderson’s characters do. We believe, we were told, as they were, that we had all the potential in the world, but life didn’t lift us where we thought we’d go. Rather than make films that are discourses or arguments about politics or philosophy or spirituality, Anderson’s films deal more directly with the problems of a child whose development was arrested when he was seven years old and his parents divorced. The recurring conflict in his films is between that of a young dreamer or idealist and a brash, insensitive father-figure. Anderson is most specifically interested in the question: What does it mean to be a man? Royal Tenenbaum is a send up of certain type of old-fashioned, perhaps antiquated, notion of manhood: an ascot wearer, highball drinker, litigator, womanizer, who smokes his cigarettes in a long ebony holder and emotionally roughhouses with children all on tiptoes reaching for his love; Steve Zissou brandishes his physique in a bathrobe and a speedo, belly bending out, sipping a Compari or dispatching an entire band of Filipino pirates with a small handgun, his entire crew vying for his approval. The most appropriate metaphorical image in Anderson's work for this generation seems to be that of Eleanor Zissou lying, dreamy eyed, possibly stoned, in the observational bubble of the Belafonte as Ned Plimpton’s body sinks into the water before her, buried at sea. She certainly is aware of the funeral taking place on deck, and she’s not being insensitive by not attending, it's just that the pain would just be too much for her. It’s not that we young people are oblivious to the pain and suffering going on around us in the world, it’s not that we’re apathetic, it's that we've been left with this huge pile of questions to sort out, and rather than deal with them we wallow in ennui. We grieve in our own way.