Response to Wes Anderson

 

"In the past, previous generations were very aware that if you want to change things people in power hold onto power and they talked about power. In our age we live in a Wes Anderson movie, its like we are all happy and we are all twee…. Bill Murray is sitting in his submarine with lots of other like cute little Wes Anderson people and I think he expresses the ideology of our age, which is that we are all a bit crap, but that's ok. OH THAT'S IT.  Well actually no its not…."

– Adam Curtis

 

Ok I was gonna write something more considered but anyway I'll just say a few things, from the position of someone who is very disappointed by the unfulfilment of Wes' initial promise, and as somehow who feels a tad jilted.

 

(1)  (1) Patriarchy and Institutions – in every film we have a pretty formulaic version of some sort of faux-crisis in the patriarchal order:

a.     the wealthy industrialist, the barber's son and the private school;

b.     the father above the law, the child geniuses and the new york upper class family dynasty.

c.      the police officer bachelor, the orphan and the boy scouts;

d.     the absent father adventurer, the neglected aeroplane pilot son and National Geographic magazine;

e.     the dead father, three sons with a crisis of masculinity, and the spiritual journey (perhaps this should be read as a crisis in US geopolitical hegemony as the colonialist train ride over India is now made to read American spirituality-of-the-self orientalism, the Other is mere backdrop to American self-important psychologising, faux-struggles, and then a reaffirmation of human experience as universal).

(2) Disembowelling Ashby – As Curtis points out, those crises are always resolved in a really glib simplistic way. So in taking all the dialogical and editing comic tropes from Ashby, Anderson transports them from the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction real world of Ashby to a miniaturist escapist world.

a.     In Ashby we have Chauncy Gardiner in Being There (actually a prototype for David Brent because it is about how beyond explanation the power of white male dominance is);

b.     In Harold and Maude we have some sort of dialectic between love and trauma that is constitutive of the subject, then made to play out wrt history and cultural memory and previous generations etc etc.

 

(3) The Gaze of the Child – All Anderson's films are told through the gaze of the child, and this is their central charm and aesthetic pleasure. He does this by taking on the art direction and stylisation of Children's Books (miniaturist sensibility; the trademark front on angle like illustrations; the uniform costumes that signify character traits; the names: Mr Littlejeans, Bob Bambalam, Applejack etc etc). In this sense his interest in making Fantastic Mr Fox is telling.

Now I think actually this is such a good stylisation to mine for an artist or film-maker, because it gets at something quite primary and formative in the acculturation of people, being a sort of zero level base language on which most of us have built a more complex cultural forms.

(4) So before I go on to mention the taking up of Wes Anderson in culture, it really remains to be seen how he accounts for this crisis in the patriarchal order – is it related to the 1970s decline of manufacturing America as we would all first guess? – probably not even that. Perhaps it is only Wes playing out his own childhood dynamics without being able to extrapolate out more generally.  But to Wes it is always played out through the local institutions and the family – so maybe he would make an interesting comparison with Mike Kelly (same archive).

The other comparison I would want to draw is actually with Tarantino, who also makes second-order pastiches (second-order in the post mix sense – I don't want to say pomo because I mean it more precisely) - but basically to paraphrase Tarantino "my films are the films that characters in films go to watch when they go to the movies." Hence the caricaturising of all the characters in both directors' work.

(5) BUT you can also see here that with the storybook childish gaze there is the massive risk in this strategy, which has lead to its uptake by the twee, hipster/start-up culture: its nostalgic infantilism. This is the aesthetic of the generation that rejects the aesthetics of adulthood, formality and in turn, political engagement.

While I do think that hipsterism sucks, it is only for its lack of criticality, because I think more so than any aesthetic for a long time, this is an aesthetic very strongly caused by material conditions outside of their control (liberalised work force, decline of middle class and manual jobs, decline of nuclear family, super capitalism etc etc) and they are often blamed for it too unfairly ("how to deal with lazy Gen Y in the workforce").

So yeah while Anderson may have started this twee US folk nostalgia, one would be unfair to draw no distinction between his work and the terrible spin offs such as artisanal anything (apropros to children's home made craft activities especially around the house eg cookies, family unit, mum at home etc), banjo baby voice songs (Wes used a whistful nico as emblematic of romanticised new york, he used The Who and John Lennon to talk about turbulent adolescence – they weren't just formal choices) and stylised adds (start up culture > being so tech driven > being so nerdy aspergery unsocialised teenage male drive > being the most infantilised working culture ever).  

(6) So with Wes I feel Rushmore showed a bit of promise because it was a little bit less stylised and a bit grittier, it dealt with some real ideas and issues and had some sense of being grounded in reality. Then Tennenbaums a more Boroque version but still strong because to me the milieu, the characters (especially the family dynamics – I absolute oppose those readings that see it as just a random assemblage of zany characters, for eg the child orderings were very well correlated with their characters and family roles), the issues all fit together and were a fair miniaturist rendering of society New York, which is also an important story of America. So for me it resonated up to here, but then after this it becomes mannerist and becomes formulaic, in the most literal sense, he just transposes the forms.

(7) So I would say at that point Wes could have either (a) driven himself to improve by challenging himself and changing style etc, or (b) if he was to stay with his aesthetic then become more critical and deal with interesting issues.

One way he might have done the latter would have been to take more widely from children's culture. There is nothing inherently apolitical about children's culture at all, if anything it can be more subversive owing to its lack of realism, not being taken seriously, and the increased openness of thinking that allows children to think in metaphors or by logic of sense or whatever. So there's no shortage of opportunities to draw from children's books but without Disney endings.

Or not even that, he could have just not done things like trivialise cultural difference in India as some sort of collection of 1 billion individual idiosyncrasies (although that is kinda a funny lost-in-translation cultural gap to think about!!!)

(As an aside, it is strange he likes to tie things up so nicely because not even historically were children always entitled to a sugar coated version of things, so I'm not sure if it come from Victorian era invention of childhood or from US style Disney / Hollywood culture.)

(8) So basically I am saying that Wes makes children's books, which is not necessarily a bad thing in principal.  But in his case, he has let it spawn a culture of nostalgic infant-adults who want to be told time and time again that everything works out well in the end, that all the problems of the world are just idiosyncratic neuroses, and that they can go on making cupcakes at home just like when they were little and everything was so nice and perfect and abdicate politics forever. A real director would see this and rise to the challenge, and not let them all get off so easily.