Here is a challenging and disturbing–if of course quite one-sided–review of MOONRISE KINGDOM.
Well, I’ve also discovered that liking Wes Anderson movies ranking very high on the famous list of things white people like. White people show their sophistication and sensitivity by tastefully appreciating Wes, although they get a bit balled up when they try to explain why. It’s true of course that sophisticated and successful (Belmont) white people, for reasons Walker Percy explains, are self-indulgent romantics in their aesthetic tastes.
The Anderson message seems to be that it’s impossible to find happiness and fulfillment in doing what you’re supposed to as an adult married with children. To be an adult is to be locked up in yourself like Hank Williams, tragically disappointed, confused, too emotionally detached to be happily in love in the present, and basically ineffectual in reaching out to and supporting those you really do love in a way. In MOONRISE, the Bill Murray character says he and his wife are all his children have, and he knows that it’s not enough. What’s enough is what the children discover on their own and for themselves, if only for a moment. Maybe this is what too many white people really think. This even what Solzhenitsyn thought about American white people. He heard the “howl” of existentialism just beneath the surface of their happytalk pragmatism.
And so this is why so many white people love Bill Murray. According to our astute and rather mean reviewer:
Bill Murray isn’t an actor, he’s the man with the world’s most sympathetic face. Bill realised years ago that he didn’t have to do anything to make people warm to him, in fact they warmed to him especially when he didn’t do anything. His face reaches new levels of immobility in this film, like a hugely loveable sofa cushion, from a childhood rec room, with the stuffing removed.
Who can’t feel for whatever it is that ails him? His wounds are deep and surely undeserved, and there’s not a mean bone in his body. This face is why the Murray character need not be developed to be compelling in MOONRISE. We’ve seen that face-and what it signifies–many times before.
So, in LOST IN TRANSLATION, what doesn’t translate into Japanese is Bill’s face. Its meaning is lost to the upbeat, non-existential, non-romantic Japanese. But the knock-out young American woman stuck in an unpromising marriage sees who he is right away. Again, we learn that it’s not that Bill doesn’t love his wife and kids, and he does remain as loyal he can to them, but… Although LOST IN TRANSLATION ain’t a Wes movie, entering the sympathetic longing which is Bill’s face doesn’t require or even suggest an overtly sexual relationship. Face time is explicitly contrasted with meaningless sex.
So I know that this “perspective” contradicts my earlier comments. But we POSTMODERN conservatives embrace the contradictions!
This concludes this homage to my whiteness through dwelling on a movie that may or may not be good for us, but is certainly tells us a lot about who we are.
June 14th, 2012 | 10:01 am
Yeah, all those self-indulgent white people going on and on about Wes Anderson can go jump off a cliff.
I’ll just be over here watching the collected works of Whit Stillman.
June 14th, 2012 | 10:49 am
Whit Stillman is nothing if not extremely white, as your point may be. That reminds me that one way we could round out of fine team of pomocon bloggers is to recruit a pomocon person of color. METROPOLITAN is the Stillman movie closest to Wes in some ways. Divide up into small groups and discuss. He too never shows any happily married people in films.
June 14th, 2012 | 11:27 am
I don’t really have a point, save that both Anderson and Stillman are in fact SWPL, and that the SWPL meme is sometimes amusing but sometimes just plain silly and pointless.
June 14th, 2012 | 12:39 pm
Brian–well said.
June 14th, 2012 | 9:05 pm
Whit Stillman, yes, but too often Wes Anderson is just too cute for comfort. I’m looking forward to seeing Moonrise, based on your descriptions, Peter, and on other positive reviews.
June 15th, 2012 | 6:08 am
I love Wes Anderson and Whit Stillman (whose “collected works” consists of three movies: Metropolitan, Barcelona, and Last Days of Disco). I find Whit Stillman to be morally clear in a way Anderson is not (a broken father/son, father/child relationship is the driving force behind most of his story-telling).
I believe good art accurately portrays the human experience, great art teaches, and the best art enobles. If there’s any truth in that amateurish summation, then Wes Anderson makes some pretty good art which is much more than we can say for the rest of the entertainment industry.
BTW: What is the meaning of SWPL?
June 15th, 2012 | 7:17 am
[...] The self-indulgence of Wes Anderson movies. [...]
June 15th, 2012 | 8:54 am
Andrew: Four movies, although you’re somewhat forgiven for missing his recent film since it sure seemed to have a much more limited release than his prior work.
Stuff White People Like.
June 15th, 2012 | 10:43 am
[...] The Very White Self-Indulgence of Wes Anderson Studies is an interesting perspective on the director’s work and his fanbase. [...]
June 15th, 2012 | 11:00 am
Most of this analysis seems spot on. But isn’t there a way in which Anderson, despite his confusions, really does tap into modern dissatisfactions with the way we live that admit to our culture’s ills? Yes, one really should be able “to find happiness and fulfillment in doing what you’re supposed to as an adult married with children.” And it is simply wrong to conclude as many today do that the family or man as a social and political creature is toast. But the sentiment behind this train of thought seems to be right, namely that our culture make it profoundly difficult to be good spouses, good parents, good children and friends, and that we often don’t “get” as much out of these relations as we think we should. And so there has to be a kind of frustration at the root of this dynamic, become most such persons would never consider the possibility of a God who animates the whole with providential love: they are trapped in the absurdity of this dysfunctional modern order that they mistake for a representation of the true limits of humanity. There is indeed a tremendous amount of smug self-satisfaction in Anderson films and in the life of the sort of person who would like his films. But I do think that there’s some real disquiet underneath that doesn’t quite know that it’s restless and is seeking peace.
June 16th, 2012 | 12:36 pm
The thing about Wes Anderson films is that you remember the visuals, or the soundtracks, better than you do the plot, the characters, or the dialogue. Maybe this one gets past that.
This whole SWPL thing annoys…the guy hit the nail on the head on 70% of the stuff, so long as you remember he’s really describing a certain segment of SUBURBAN people, most of whom are white, and using certain resilient aspects of Afro-American culture to draw the contrast. And here you see how it collapses Stillman and Anderson, which Brian is right to be annoyed by.
P.S. While “Lost in Translation” may be a SWPL film, it is in fact perhaps the most hated film, especially by culturally-Red white folk, of the last few decades. I join their hatred of the film getting so hyped, even if my annoyance with the film itself did not rise to the hatred-level.
June 22nd, 2012 | 5:53 am
As a black man I never understood why there is the following acronym : SWPL. I personally like Wes Anderson films due to its sense f humor, visuals and characthers. I haven’t seen any of Whit Stillman’s works so I don’t know how similar they are to the ones done by Wes. I have many black friends who loved Lost In Translation, but also have black friends who hated it. I believe that an acronym like SWPL is ridiculous nowadays. It makes black/asian/you name it people look like they only see Tyler Perry/Bollywood/you name it movies.
June 24th, 2012 | 6:31 pm
It is always something of a fascination to watch a Wes Anderson movie.His attention to detail and visual millieau is spellbinding.It is unmistakable that every true artiste leaves their signature mark on a potential masterpiece and the genre of their medium.Anderson is a well read man.Methodical and a painstaking perfectionist. In each of his films the central protaganists are quirky,larger than life characters. Manipulative,intelligent,but endearing. But middle Americans.
A tip for up and coming film makers.Make a feauture film no longer than 1OO mins. Very old school.Some of the greatest movies of all time are this length.
This is what Anderson does and it works for him.The general rule is: the more serious the story; the longer the duration.
September 1st, 2012 | 9:06 am
Just as well your not making movies Peter.
Your comments are as useful and insightful as the act of staring at ones belly button. What’s with the white person comments? White people, blue people… yawn. I just saw the film and it was fun. Fun is fun in any language. A little whimsy is all. Lighten up, go make a cup of tea.
October 18th, 2012 | 12:52 am
To refer exclusively to the race and class of Wes Anderson’s characters is reductionist. Not every film can or should exclusively refer to the intricacies of racial, gender and class discrimination and all an artist can do at their best is give their perspective of the world through a unique lens. Wes Anderson deserves much more credit than someone like Sofia Coppola because his characters are much more fully realized and have more complex personalities with recognizable faults and strengths. He is not saying that the privileged people that inhabit his films are worse off but he depicts how the cold nature of upper middle class and upper class living creates a climate of neuroticism, mental disorders and lack of real adult maturity. He is not glorifying the childish acts we see onscreen but depicting them because he has a unique statement to make about them. And while his films have often been criticized as style over substance one only has to remember the end of each film to realize that all of the gorgeous cinematography and production design was misdirection so he could set up his cast’s genuine performances and the collective scripts’ most intimate perceptions.
January 2nd, 2013 | 9:01 am
I don’t trust anyone that uses the word whimsy.
March 10th, 2013 | 6:51 pm
Aaron (see remark above), give me a break. “…Not every film is a should exclusively refer to the intricacies of racial, gender and class discrimination…”? That’s blindly untrue. All cinema, modern and postmodern – is essentially about political and cultural ideology and its aesthetic connections to social consciousness as well as our collective “psychological” response to history.
Put simply, whether a film maker chooses to or not, he or she is making a conscious (or unconscious) decision about race and class et. al.
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