Popcorn Dressed As Lamb: My Beef With Wes Anderson

The Grand Budapest Hotel is imminent. I know this because my life is threaded through with Wes Anderson acolytes, who eagerly await the next instalment of the Gospel According To Wes. I tell them that they should calm down, that existing on a psychic knife-edge for weeks on end is unhealthy, but they simply cannot be reasoned with.

Sarcastic overstatement? Yeah, sure, but it does capture some of the fervent devotion that Anderson tends to attract. It’s not that I hate him, either: I really like Wes Anderson’s film. It’s well-written. It covers queasily familiar terrain for anyone that grew up under an intellectually dominant, emotionally distant patriarch. It takes seriously flawed characters and dresses them up in natty outfits and gives them stylised dialogue, thus imbuing them with a skewed sort of glamour. It soundtracks key moments with twee, understated acoustica – and I love twee, understated acoustica. It makes clever use of people with funny accents for comic relief. It’s a good and fine film. It’s exactly the sort of thing that someone like me should like.

Film-making, And The Art Of Exclusion

So why has he made it eight times (six, if you give Bottle Rocket and Rushmore the benefit of the doubt)? Well, if you received torrents of love and gratitude from people like me, who love watching their neuroses validated and romanticised, flattered to see their flatulent uncle’s travails played out by Owen Wilson, you might keep ploughing your lucrative, limited creative furrow as well. And, as I said, it is a good film, and a narrow worldview is not a sin in itself – how many films has Woody Allen made about a neurotic, death-obsessed New Yorker falling for a younger ingénue? (Topical game: try watching Manhattan without squirming uncontrollably.) To focus on one thing at the expense of the other is absolutely necessary: in fact, it is the essence of the film-maker’s craft. No one has managed to fit the entire world into a film yet, and I’m not anticipating it anytime soon.

My central issue with Anderson’s films, though, is that they are fantasy films, but with a thin veneer of psychological realism that sees them mistaken for something far more serious than they are. There is a maddening weightlessness that watermarks his output as indelibly as his slo-mo sequences and judicious use of ‘60s pop – and the thought of how good he’d be if only he had the ability to utilise his stylistic gifts (and he really is one of the very best in this regard) in service of more searching character examinations just makes it more maddening still. There’s nothing wrong with breezy, stylish popcorn fare – I, for one, love popcorn – but when popcorn wears the cloak of sophistication…well, that’s just dishonest (and a pretty weird mental image, too).

Mainstream cinema is an incredibly tightly-codified realm with limited scope for aesthetic or thematic variation, beyond the basic question of which genre one wishes to work in. Setting oneself apart by way of methods that draw attention to themselves, though – moustaches, a penchant for uniforms, gratuitous Bill Murray – has the benefit of brand recognition, which pleases devoted fans and gets your next film financed. But is such aesthetic stasis the only way to survive as a distinctive film-maker in Hollywood’s semi-mainstream? Or is it that film-makers tend to gravitate toward either character development or aesthetics, and rarely both?

The Aesthetic Repertoire Of Wes

The latter is certainly the case with Anderson, who has developed a dazzling array of methods to work around his aversion to probing the interiority of his characters, and an equally dazzling array of stylistic tics to go with it. Observe the snap pans, long dolly shots, vivid colour schemes, copious use of the futura font, overhead shots, folk and early rock soundtracks, slow-motion sequences, recurring collaborators, eccentric costumes, cross-sections, dioramas and distant, symmetrical dialogue shots: Anderson’s fluent cinematic language almost justifies the price of admission all by itself.

He style is also so distinctive, self-aware and self-referential that each film feels like part of an ongoing in-joke, more an instalment of a decades-long parlour game than a stand-alone movie. It might be argued that this is a testament to his talent as a film-maker and why don’t you just shut up and enjoy it Ed you bloody snob, but to me it begs the question: how do you immerse yourself in a film when you’re busy playing Wes Anderson bingo, marking off a checklist of his favourite moves?

Regarding the whole character-development shortcut thing: observe the way in which the psychological state of Anderson characters are embedded in their external appearance. Nothing says ‘overprotective dad’ like dressing yourself and your kids in matching tracksuits with matching haircuts (Chas Tenenbaum, The Royal Tenenbaums), and nothing says ‘precocious, pretentious kid’ like a red beret and horn-rim glasses, before horn-rim glasses were cool (Max Fischer, Rushmore). It could be argued that this is simply economical film-making, and that would be true but for the fact that there is rarely much more to the characters than their costumes suggest. They are bundles of attributes that advance the plot by bouncing off each other like misshapen billiard balls, while uttering delightfully odd dialogue.

If you think I’m overstating the point, consider the examples of Eli Cash (The Royal Tenenbaums) and Francis Whitman (The Darjeeling Limited), two of Owen Wilson’s characters. At key junctures in the two films, the respective characters change their appearance. Cash paints his face, denoting a transition from ‘successful charlatan’ to ‘unhinged drug addict’, while Whitman removes his bandages, denoting the transition from ‘physically and psychologically damaged’ to ‘physically and psychologically healed’. It’s a credit to Anderson’s ability that he can create any sense of characterisation at all with such restricted means, but one wonders why he continues to work with one hand tied behind his back in this way.

The Thematic Repertoire Of Wes

Allied to this hamster-in-a-wheel approach to aesthetics is an extremely narrow range of thematic concerns. Anderson’s films generally centre on neurotic, highly intelligent, emotionally damaged white men with dysfunctional families and wealthy backgrounds. There are generally estranged parents and spouses, precocious children, childish adults, addicts (cigarettes, pills, alcohol), and unrequited loves.

The non-white characters in his films tend to be minstrels (Pelé Dos Santos, The Life Aquatic), punchlines (Pagoda, The Royal Tenenbaums), or exotic scenery (pretty much everyone, The Darjeeling Limited). (This is obviously a very serious issue, which has been ably covered by Jonah Weiner for Slate.)

And yet! His films are able to affect people so very deeply. In a sense, the very weakness of Wes – his Groundhog Day approach to creative renewal – is in fact a strength: his shtick is unmistakable. If you miss some slice of characteristic Wes-ness on your first Wes, it will be comforting and familiar by your third or fourth Wes. He has created a distinct artistic voice, and has mastered the technique of providing some surface-level novelty allied to a sense of comforting familiarity – same themes, same actors, same shots, new colour scheme, new locations – and in doing so, he has extracted a droplet of some pop cultural nirvana.

Massaging The Nostalgia Lobe

This is the reason that Anderson’s obvious shortcomings as a film-maker are so readily forgiven: as well as making beautiful films, Anderson is a master at massaging the viewer’s nostalgia lobe.

The most affecting art generally visits upon the viewer a sudden revelation, a recognition of something achingly true about the human condition that the viewer might have always vaguely felt, but which has suddenly been brought into the light. Good and valid and thought-provoking and topical though it may be, most art can’t attain such a rarified level, and Anderson’s films are no different. What they can do, though, is trigger the release of goop from the nostalgia lobe, a neurochemical function which creates a feeling not unlike the familiar-yet-strange feeling of the aforementioned revelation*. The work gains an added complexity, arguably a false complexity, by engaging with the viewer’s psyche and insinuating itself into their deepest psychic tableaux. Such an operation is generally incidental, as when a work reminds the viewer of other, greater works (for example, any band that’s ever sounded like Joy Division), or when a work reminds the viewer of their childhood or youth (for me, The Blues Brothers and Wayne’s World respectively). Alternatively, a work can quite deliberately remind the viewer of the artist’s previous works, creating a hermetic universe; a closed loop of nostalgia. This might be described as the Anderson Method.

*This is not an actual neurochemical function.

Much of Anderson’s work is timeless, in the sense of not obviously belonging to a specific time. His films are peppered with anachronistic touches that confuse any sense of period, and they make no mention of historical events or the world at large (The Grand Budapest Hotel stands to be a potential digression in this regard); even place names are scattered few and far between, and are frequently fictitious. The filtered light and perspectives that he favours tend to have the surreal quality of garbled, composite memories – first-person experiences that have been buttressed and altered in countless retellings and conflicting accounts – and he tends to investigate what might be described as primal, Freudian states of being: traumatic parental ruptures and fraternal tensions. Not only do his films deal with the psyche, they deal with its deepest-lying undergrowth.

Even though Anderson’s films work in a frustratingly shallow and stylised manner, they are still effective: all they need to do is agitate that psychic undergrowth a little, reminding the viewer of childhood, of previous Wes Anderson films, and the time in their lives when they watched these previous films, the whole thing congealing into something sticky, dreamlike, and deeply felt. This is just a theory, but it would go some way to explaining why The Wes is such a polarising figure: if you haven’t seen his previous films, or if you didn’t see them at significant life junctures (those who have come of age with Wes’ films seem much more affected by his work), then you just won’t get it. If you get it, it’s possible that you just won’t be able explain why, and to what extent.

What I’m trying to say is that while Wes may be twee, a smidge superficial, maddeningly repetitious and emotionally stunted, he’s also exceedingly stylish, and he’s gently tugging at the levers of your id as we speak. Check mate.

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The Grand Budapest Hotel is in Australian cinemas April 10.

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Edward Sharp-Paul is a writer from Melbourne. He mostly likes talking about music, politics and the sportz, and his words can be found at FasterLouder, Mess+Noise, Beat and The Brag. He also runs his mouth off under the cunning alias @e_sharppaul.