Socrates: The main question I want to ask is whether a lifetime spent scratching, itching and scratching, no end of scratching, is also a life of happiness.
In The Book of Master Zhuang, an old Daoist text, is nested the Story of Butcher Ding. In this story we read of the Sovereign Wenhui, who visits the butcher Ding and is fascinated by his talent in cutting. Ding explains that, when he first began to cut beef, he saw the whole ox; later he saw only the essential parts of the ox; later still he did not need to use his eyes whatsoever, relying upon spirit to determine the exact angle and direction of the cut. His knife never touches ligament, nor tendon, nor joint, but glides through the interstitial spaces. He explains that a good cook changes his knife once a year — because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month — because he hacks. But Ding has not changed his knife in 19 years, after cutting up thousands of oxen. Ding’s mastery has somehow inverted the proposition: he is not cutting the ox, but rather cutting the hollow spaces within the ox; he is not more aware of the carcass but in fact less aware of it, guiding his blade where the carcass (or its substantial parts) are not. Psychologists might describe Ding’s experience as a flow state. A musician might imagine a pianist who plays an exquisitely complex sonata without looking at the keys, or the music, or ever so much as thinking of her hands. A task that initially required intensely specific cognitive attention has been reduced to an utter simplicity: not avoiding the gristly and bony structures in the ox, but to cut merely where one means to. Perfection of form, therefore, is an ability to eliminate all superfluous thought; repetition becomes a process of removing every unhelpful possibility from the mind. What appears to Sovereign Wenhui as finely executed skill is, to butcher Ding, a more profound realization. The ox disappears — the butcher disappears — all that remains is the knife, and the spaces between the joints.
In a discussion of cinema’s most sedulous formalist it might, then, follow that Wes Anderson’s penchant for geometric equality is not a persistent act of righting the imprecise wrongs of the natural world, so much as it has become his unconscious means of thought. The classic accusation against Anderson’s art, which has only increased in ferocity as he perseveres in it, is that he has fallen into a tendency for repetition. There is no longer a strict development in his style; he had stated his intention (in his earlier, occasionally haphazard pictures), found its perfect demeanor (in the spectacular diptych Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Grand Budapest Hotel, middled by the less spectacular exercise Moonrise Kingdom); and then fine-tuned its every shade and angle (Isle of Dogs to present). Which is to say, he first saw the ox, then saw only parts of the ox, and now deals only with the portions of the ox that are invisible. The skill of butcher Ding is impressive to witness, but would it remain so impressive on the thousandth iteration? I suspect it would. But would that certain thrill remain, seeing the thousandth ox dismembered by the thousandth identical swish of the butcher’s blade? That thrill would, for all but Ding and the finest philosophers, lay extinguished. There is therefore a faction who exhort Wes Anderson to recalibrate his artistic method; to make use of his obvious talent in formal arrangement but in a context that will surprise; to cut something other than an ox. On this basis alone there is reason to resist. There is a great tradition of artists who can only do one thing. There is, for instance, the Primitive style of Henri Rousseau. He is able to paint strangely flat beasts in strangely flat woodlands — nothing more. I would not want anything from Henri Rousseau other than a strangely flat beast in a strangely flat woodland. Not only do I think he would be incapable of leaving his particular wheelhouse, but rather that any outcome would be inherently lesser than the thing he knows exactly, and implicitly, how to do.
In cinema we might look to Yasujiro Ozu. He began his career with a great variety of films — he made Samurai pictures, gangster pictures, easy comedies. But when he developed his signature — a stationary camera, an elliptical narrative, a subtle family drama — it would remain for the whole of his career. The key difference within his late cinema is often that of perspective; so many of his late films are in essence remakes from a varied angles. Ozu’s obsessive (and yet, in Dinglish style, quite effortless) persistence in films of this style is not something an audience ought to regret; to insist that Ozu make a film other than an Ozu film is to rob the world of the thing only he can produce. This same prejudice haunts actors: a character actor who specializes in a single type is written-off as one-note, whereas the impressive polyglot who can embody any person is celebrated for his obvious talent, even if he could never play that special type nearly so well. There is a virtue in the persistence of these artists who know precisely their aim and their ability. There is a certain wonder at seeing a vision so consummately achieved, and so completely realized. The excitement of transformation is, however, not to be discarded. Certain artists distinguish themselves by their reinvention. Stravinsky alarmed the jangling classes with his stark new music, but perhaps he alarmed them yet more when he abandoned this new style for sweet neoclassicism just a few years later. Any acolytes to that music would then have their ears drummed out by his late shift into twelve-tone dissonance. But Wes Anderson is no Stravinsky. If one were to take away his tripod, he would surely stumble into the sea.
Previously I asserted that there is a reason to resist criticism of Wes Anderson’s repetition on the basis of Ding: that there is virtue in repetition, and in the narrow way. This was, I confess, a largely hypothetical defense. I say this because Wes Anderson does not exhibit the blind ease of our butcher Ding. Rather he has started upon very much the opposite path. It is not the case that he sees less of the ox, but that he sees more of it. In his four most recent projects, ranging The French Dispatch to The Phoenician Scheme, though in a way originating with The Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson has developed a degree of self-consciousness. But before we discuss Anderson’s later films, first we have to get there. In Anderson’s early cinema it is possible to detect a collision between his form and his substance, insofar as his substance does not always demand his form. Rushmore provides a pert metaphor, in which Max Fischer is bountifully enrolled in every given extracurricular activity, but is underperforming in his school grades. In the same way we might understand Anderson’s formal proclivities as decorating a narrative to which they are, in essence, irrelevant. My mind rests on this particular composition in Rushmore, Bill Murray reading the paper, his hotel table arranged with an exquisite array of breakfast miscellanea, and a window lookout onto green-fringed civilization. Murray is wearing a white dressing gown; the table cloth is red; the toast is serried, the honey basketed, a beaker of orange juice diffused into a tall glass of water. A small card bears the suspicious calligraphy: Enjoy your stay. This is a superb still life hidden in a film otherwise concerned; it is a fundamentally meaningless arrangement (with exception to the calligraphy, and the honey) devised for the sake of proportion, and balance, and beauty. Note that this scene, other than in its most generic contrast (this peace will soon be blasted by a million bees), is in no way dependent upon proportion, and balance, and beauty; much else in Rushmore is composed in the same way while also lacking a clear justification in being so.
Simultaneously we may, with equal force, make the opposite claim: that most films do not justify their basic coverage style beyond notions of convention and convenience. Information is conveyed legibly, in such a way that enables a smooth production process: that is the explanation. The balance of these claims means that to design a film like Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums) or Shawn Levy (Cheaper by the Dozen) is a question of which surface better appeals to the eye, and better suits the maker, regardless of what the surface happens to depict. But it is the beginning, for Wes Anderson, of an itch: an effort to find in every cinematic frame the same level of balance and control as this one; to invent a medium in which the form precedes the content. But in these early days, it might be said that Anderson, co-writing these first films with Owen Wilson, has wrapped a simple narrative into an angular, deadpan, picturebook format. Neither implies, inherently, the other. That is, until The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Here Anderon and Noah Baumbach devise a fantasy for which a conventional aesthetic would be inappropriate; Anderson’s pictorial decoration is no longer a means of dressing a film but is, itself, the visual framework. While Anderson’s essential narrative concerns are very familiar throughout his filmography — often surrogate fathers and their sons, but always families broken and mended — it is in Zissou that he first embodies the universe of things that will come to mark his fully developed ideal. Each object, and location, and costume is a component of a precisely imagined frame, producing a precisely imagined setting; where Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums are contained within familiar urban American locations, following Zissou Anderson will permanently set his films in either exotic or fantastic places. The benefit of exotic (using that word in lieu of foreign) and fantastic places is the ability to therefore separate them from reality; to use them as the basis for a wholly imaginary construction. The Darjeeling Limited (co-written with Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman), if not so obviously fabricated as Zissou, is another step in this direction; India, as a location, is an abstract whose nature is fundamentally psychological. We understand the characters against their landscape; this is not a film about India so much as it is a film about not being in America; it is a film whose formal precision is increasingly thrown up against an unpredictable terrain. It is, however, the last time that an unpredictable terrain will occur in a film by Wes Anderson.
Hereon we find the real accomplishment of Wes Anderson’s form. In Fantastic Mr. Fox we encounter a curious moment, as though we are meeting a puppeteer who had spent years attempting to ply his trade on actual human beings, and then at last discovers the salient invention: a puppet. Anderson (collaborating again with Baumbach) is no longer required to negotiate with reality; he can compose his storybook England with a confidence and precision that live-action generally precludes. We might equate this moment with Ozu’s Late Spring, in which several preparatory works have exploded into an ideal pattern that will remain, essentially unaltered, until his final film. It is perhaps unique in that Anderson has discovered the maximum potential of his live-action filmmaking in an entirely different medium; and it is altogether surprising that, upon making this discovery, Anderson nonetheless returned to live-action immediately afterwards. But the nature of his return is most crucial. I consider Moonrise Kingdom (co-written with Roman Coppola) to be Anderson’s weakest production, meeting amply the common accusations that he makes films of a twee, yellow, and quite vacant nature. But he nonetheless imposes upon the film — especially in its opening sequence — a profound degree of technical control. It is here that the attainment of Anderson’s formal ideal is no longer a question, or an objective; it is, itself, now attained.
Perhaps Moonrise Kingdom can be written off, much as the marketeers wrote off Kurosawa’s turgid Kagemusha, as a run-up to the glimmering height: The Grand Budapest Hotel. A film that embodies a great sense of charm, and nostalgia, and fragrant compositional beauty. If it is to be described as a confection, and so tempting dismissal, the dismissing hand must be stayed. This is the finest confection ever made. Eat it, and all Socratic wisdom will leak out of your left ear. You will be left a rabid hedonist, emptying cases of delicate Swiss chocolate, pouring them jealously into the open maw, but never quite meeting that same satisfaction. If we are to identify Anderson’s films, up until this trio, as an itch that is never quite satisfied — an aim at physical perfection that is never fully attained — surely we must identify this moment as that of suddenly itchless ease, the fingernail having — in motion of Ding-like grace — suddenly removed the sting, and the urge, and all impediment to permanent happiness hereon out. It is a film for which deleted scenes sound like an abstract concept; a film for which an alternate version would boggle the mind. Not that I doubt, in reality, that scenes may have been cut, or altered, or reshot; rather that the product is so finely tuned that the idea of any other version seems implicitly wrong. It is not merely a point of flawless building, but that at which the materials, and the design, and the purpose of the tower converge completely. The Grand Budapest Hotel is most directly a film about nostalgia, and about baroque beauty, and about the lost world. How better to depict it than in the form of a moving pop-up book, in pinks and purples; to remember the time not according to history, nor even in any accurate representation of Austro-Hungarian material culture, but rather according to that essential characteristic that seems to survive and then escape history. A certain kind of dream, dreamt by a certain kind of man. As much as The Grand Budapest may represent a peak, at least among those who favoured Anderson’s project, it must also signal the declivity. It is from here that opinion begins to turn; having scaled the Matterhorn, what is left but to plunge down the other side?
But if The Grand Budapest Hotel is a summit, it is also the base of a new climb. It contains something original to the Wes Anderson model: a frame narrative. Not one, but two. We begin with Jude Law’s author, who visits a now-dilapidated, Sovietized remnant of the Grand Budapest. It is easy, in such grim futures, to make romantic the past, and to find its many crowns and steeples charming rather than implicitly tyrannical. Indeed, The Grand Budapest Hotel specifically contrasts the haughty aristocracy of Old Europe with the metal-churning of 20th-century totalitarianism. We might mirror the imperial smiles of The Grand Budapest Hotel with the colonial fantasia of The Phoenician Scheme — Anderson is fond of the doomed aesthetics of a less equitable age; perhaps there is some element of his dreaming that would like to overleap the preposterous devastation of the 20th century while absorbing its many social advances. The Grand Budapest Hotel makes a defense of the refugee and the sexually diverse gentleman; The Phoenician Scheme imagines (however obtusely) a colonial afterimage without racism or nationalism. Once again it is the province of the exotic: the impression of a faraway land upon which any number of divergences can be glued and pinned.
But we must return to the frame narrative, and to Jude Law, and to the remnant of the Grand Budapest. Here Law meets Mr Moustafa, who we discover is the now-dilapidated, Sovietized remnant of Zero, the bellboy and co-protagonist in the film-proper. Moustafa decides to tell Law the tale of how he came to own the Grand Budapest, and of his mentor, the debonair M. Gustave. This question of transmission is essential. The pastel pink romp that makes up the film-proper is no longer a direct representation, but one filtered through two interlocutors, both (perhaps) liable to a level of fantastic thinking. The myth of the Grand Budapest Hotel is therefore built into its manner of telling; Anderson’s aesthetic can be understood as part of this layered arrangement, insofar as we hear from Moustafa, through Jude Law, through Wes Anderson. The nature of the story is determined by the line and detail of its transmission. Perhaps The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is the first Wes Anderson film to explicitly question the creative process — in that it is about a film director, and based upon the apparent contradiction between the nature of his art and the nature of his personality. And perhaps Anderson’s tendency to insert stage-plays into his cinema (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, Moonrise Kingdom, The French Dispatch, and Asteroid City all contain staged productions) speaks to an inherent interest in the work-within-a-work, or the obviously contrived. But only with The Grand Budapest Hotel does Anderson place the main narrative itself at a meta-remove; only with The Grand Budapest Hotel does Anderson situate the storyteller within the film. Almost all of Wes Anderson concerns the question of (surrogate) fatherhood, but perhaps this particular obsession morphs, or takes on a new attitude: not merely a question of family, but of creation. It is therefore not only a relationship between characters, but between the maker and his work.
Anderson’s subsequent film, Isle of Dogs, appears something like a sharp turn at this junction. It is a return to the animation of Fantastic Mr. Fox, and another example of Anderson’s tendency to exoticism. The Japan of Isle of Dogs is not, in any real sense, a representation of Japan, but rather a study in various aesthetics inspired by Japan. The colors red and white; haikus; logography; and the syntax of the Japanese language. I use the word syntax specifically: the Japanese of Isle of Dogs is untranslated; it appears that Anderson is interested in the sound and shape of the language much before he is concerned with its particular grammar, and (therefore) meaning. It counts as a degree of abstraction, much as animation and Anderson’s peculiar live-action style count as abstraction. The truth of the matter is morphed into something else. It is a shell within which a hermit crab has taken residence. Not, then, the humble seasnail. The French Dispatch is, however, more instructive on the notion of layered narratives. It is itself the record of a magazine, titularly named, and of several important articles in its final edition. The outermost layer depicts the unfortunate death of the magazine’s founder and editor, and the contractual requirement to therefore shutter the operation. In composing an obituary for the editor, his top writers recall their last contributions. We step, therefore, one layer deeper, in which we encounter the editor — still living — as he commissions and discusses these various articles as they are put together. From here we then take another step forward, to the writers themselves, who narrate their articles. But this narration, in several cases, is itself a step removed. Anderson imagines situations in which each writer may have had cause to repeat the story in another context. J.K.L. Berensen delivers her piece at an art conference, while Roebuck Wright remembers his article — word for word — in an interview much later down the line. We therefore make the final step, and see the dramatization of the detail of the article, in most cases featuring the writer in an active role, all monochrome. By the time we have reached the substance of the thing, we have travelled so many layers into it; if The Grand Budapest Hotel teases a simple two degrees of separation, The French Dispatch is instead an experiment in how many degrees can be exposed between an event and its publication. One story even features a further, staged version of itself nestled in the dramatization — another iteration of the same thing. And we must not forget the implicit final extreme, which is to say, Wes Anderson himself, who invents and arranges all of these stories with the assistance of his storywriters (real and imagined).
One of the common, and reasonably fair allegations raised against The French Dispatch is that is often a shallow, or meager, narrative offering. But it occurs to me that Anderson’s fascination has directed quite profoundly away from developing a narrative concern. Instead, he has made a film where the form, in particular, is the subject. If Anderson’s early cinema is composed of a universe of things, here he zooms into one particular thing — an invented magazine — and imagines every detail about it. The editor, the bylines, the articles, and the incidents these articles describe. In one sense, this is scratching the same itch that has always persuaded Anderson to deck his sets with such detailed and particular decoration. But more importantly, this is a film that follows a story (in reverse order) from its final edition to its original idea, not in search of contradiction (which might be the critical interpretation), but rather so as to understand the way in which such varied transmission in fact flattens a work. Whatever the event, it must be filtered through the writer’s lens, and then each individual writer is filtered through the tastes of the editor, and this editor is himself, inevitably, filtered through Wes Anderson (unless we are to make the rather judicious identity between the editor and Wes himself). This represents, in some sense, the apparent conflict in Anderson’s intensely collaborative from — there is no film on which he does not share a writing or story credit. Despite this revolving door of attendants, every Wes Anderson film resolves to a similar mood and timbre; and if we are to include Anderson’s fictional cast as collaborators of their own (another judicious identity), we must then acknowledge the way in which Anderson (as editor) determines the exact detail and emphasis of their stories, according to the shape of his film/publication, and according to his own aesthetic tendencies. The stories that make up The French Dispatch are not unified enough to create a general, accompanying analysis — beyond their contribution to Anderson’s dictionary of exotic nostalgia — but in the first story we encounter an imprisoned artist who seems only able to do one thing (sometimes in a manner that peeves his imprisoners); and in the third the story hinges on a chef who, thinking he had exhausted the world of flavors, finally tastes something new. It is this final detail that the editor determines is the most important part of the third story, Wright himself having decided to cut it.
The French Dispatch is therefore something other than a perfectly crafted, but rather lightweight travelogue; it represents, after the turn of The Grand Budapest Hotel, an intensely self-conscious tendency in Anderson’s cinema. He is no longer satisfied with the default reality of his formal predilections — which is to say, the manner in which he makes a film is simply what is most obvious to him — but rather interested in the way form itself conveys a narrative, the narrative not itself indicating the vessel, but the vessel indicating the narrative. In the same way a magazine demands articles, a film demands scenes of a certain kind. The French Dispatch is very plainly influenced by the films of Jaques Tati, whose project approaches modernism in a similar way. In Mon Oncle (directly referenced) and more obviously in Playtime, Tati is inviting an audience not to engage with a traditional narrative, but rather to observe the world one step removed. To look at all the paned glass; to hear the strange plastic squelches; to blithely observe. Tati invites us to question the form of the modern world. Anderson invites us to question the form of storytelling. It is a new taste. It is a new kind of itch.
In this respect, Asteroid City is a gratuitous scratch. It is itself posed as a 1950s television production, in which a theatre show is invented so as to “present an authentic account of the inner-workings of a modern theatrical production.” We are therefore witness to various (enactments) of theatrical meta-business, with writers and directors arranging the cast, and the sets, and the production. Interspersed in this meta-drama are then scenes from the fictional play itself, produced in the manner of a feature film (and far beyond, implicitly, the 1950s televisual frame). This film contains the same (meta-)cast we encounter in the (pseudo-)frame narrative; at one point an actor leaves the “film” and finds himself backstage of the “play,” which we must understand as an entirely fabricated sequence for the benefit of the supposed television program. Where, precisely, each of these layers begins and ends is not always clear. At one point the television host appears to be on-set in the “feature film” portion; and there is no strict attempt to mirror vintage production processes anywhere in the production, beyond black-and-white photography for the meta-narrative sections. It is also worth noting that, within the central “Asteroid City” drama is an actress who herself is starring in another film, scenes from which she practices with a neighboring photographer, Steenbeck. The film is ostensibly a study of the creative process, but it is as much a study in abstraction: how the same drama is repeated and rehearsed by maker, and by actor, and then by the very characters themselves. The photographer and the actress, who mirror the writer and the actor, who mirror Wes Anderson and his cast — the film is, both in its inner narrative and outer structure, a recursive device, in which the same problem is repeated on so many levels.
Asteroid City, the place (a somewhat meaningful repetition: “Asteroid City” is the name of the film, the television show, the play, and the location) is a stopgap, a nowhere-land that gathers people who do not know where exactly they want to go. An abandoned road is visible, half-built. It has a frustrating, even latently depressive, quality, despite the quirk and bounce that remains locked to Anderson’s cinema. It is a place that goes round in circles; the play begins and ends with the same nuclear test, and the same train running by. Even the film’s most remarkable event is repeated: an alien appears, and purloins the asteroid after which the “city” is named. Later he reappears, and replaces the asteroid. In a sense, nothing transformative has happened; but everything is different. These wandering souls may now leave Asteroid City, in that moment of bleary contemplation, and continue their lives. All ties made there will be broken. The question, then, is what this invisible change represents. As we move up the narrative ladder, to the theater story, we notice that the actor playing Steenbeck is himself experiencing the same existential worry as his character, and he is reassured by his director that he is doing exactly the right thing, whatever that thing might be. In the play, Steenbeck thinks back to his deceased wife, and we see a photograph of her; the actor playing Steenbeck will later encounter the actress who posed for that photograph — and who was cut, much like Mrs. Steenbeck — from proceedings, and between them will be a moment of ghostly spirit.
Here the incident in the play is the mirror of reality; in a strange causal reversal the real moment is in fact indicated by the false moment, which is to say meaning has not been planted into the play, but rather emerged out of it. The surrealistic mantra repeated in the film’s third act — you cannot wake up if you do not go to sleep — is then essential in unfurling this particular carpet. The sense of art, and therefore of form, is hereby justified. That certain revelations regarding reality are impossible to perceive without first entering the dream of art; that one must fall into layers of abstraction and fiction in order to encounter the truth in its fullness. Art therefore miniaturizes life, and takes from it its unessential parts; art is Ding’s unlucky ox, reduced to the pathway of the knife. If Asteroid City is in some regards a standard narrative with a rather elaborate framing, it is more essentially a film that asks the dramatic question, and then asks how — and why — this question is posed. If the play “Asteroid City” represents a search for meaning, then the film Asteroid City expresses the way meaning is discovered, not (merely) in the narrative of that internal play, but rather in the means of staging and producing it; the play is, itself, the solution to its own problem. The question is the answer. The form is the content.
This formal predominance follows into Anderson’s next project, a tetrarchy of shorts based on the works of Roald Dahl, later edited into the anthology feature The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More. Described at a distance, these are extraordinarily faithful adaptations which maintain not only Dahl’s narratives, but the vast majority of his actual prose, narrated by onscreen characters. Each story is framed by the presence of Dahl himself, acted by Ralph Fiennes, sitting in a recreation of his writing hut. He begins the narration that will be carried by his characters; immediately the transmissive sense of The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch, and Asteroid City is continued. We are not to imagine these stories as stand-ins for reality (which is often implicit in the moving picture), but rather as explicit fictions, all distending from a single authoritative figure. If every Wes Anderson film indicates the search for a father, it is in Roald Dahl that we find him, each story representing his progeny. It is again an overlap between the patriarchal and the creative figure; Dahl is the maker, and is therefore responsible for each of these works.
The formal nature of these films is something akin to a pocketwatch with the face taken off. We do not see the hands pointing out the time, but all the cogs, wheels, and ticking pendula whose combined action result in the time being told. Anderson’s long soirée with the theatre is here most distinctly consummated — keeping in mind that Asteroid City uses a mostly cinematic grammar — in a series of extraordinary set changes that resemble most of all technical stagecraft. The key distinction between stagecraft and screencraft is typically the question of abstraction, by which the stage can typically afford a less realistic (and a more obviously contrived) mechanism, whereas the illusion of cinema allows an artist to hide all the whirring machines that enable his work. There is no question in these Dahl films that anything we are seeing is, per se, real. In The Ratcatcher, Anderson will lean on a theatrical convention in which the key prop — a rat — is not even visible. Its presence is mimed by the eponymous catcher, and all other actors follow suit. In The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, levitation is achieved by sitting upon a box that is painted to resemble exactly the background. But no efforts are made to truly hide the box; it is, in fact, essential that the box remain visible despite the nature of the illusion being played.
In each of these films the purpose of the illusion (say, the hedgewall in The Swan) is evident, but equally so is this illusion broken (a set door that opens directly through the hedgewall). Anderson is therefore not merely borrowing from the illusive grammar of the stage, but indicating specifically at its unreality. We are supposed to notice all those things designed to be least noticeable. Consider also that most literary impulse: an onscreen narrator, who recites Dahl’s prose line-for-line. Perhaps this is another strictly uncinematic device, translating quite literally one medium into another. But it achieves a similar effect: it draws attention to itself. The many consecutive “he said,” “I said,” “he said” exchanges do not convey any information beyond the literary convention; we are to be reminded constantly of the nature and origin of what we are watching. And it is curious that the Roald Dahl wraparound is not, itself, representative of “reality.” His segments are equally contrived, with visible lighting changes on cuts in the shed; and similarly fabricated backdrops in the great outdoors. Dahl delivers his lines directly to camera — he is in the toybox, looking out. Anderson is not fooling us with the illusion of the story versus the reality of the storyteller; both are layers of fiction, styled differently, but laid upon one another. I suspect the motivation is again reductionist; a realization (primed most obviously by Asteroid City) that the strength of art, of the story, is not in its ability to obscure the mechanism, but rather in the mechanism itself.
The quality of these four chosen Dahl stories is that they, in themselves, simultaneously express two contrary aphorisms. Things are not as they seem and Things seem the way that they are. In the first case (The Wonderful Story), we may first suspect Imdad Khan of in some way faking his sight-without-sight, and certainly Henry Sugar of being tied to his material destiny; in the second (The Swan), we might be surprised as the transfiguration of boy into swan; in the third (The Ratcatcher), the descent from vermin control to vermin feasting is certainly unpredictable; and in the fourth (Poison), we had thought the doctor to have saved the soldier, when in fact the snake (if ever there was a snake) had long departed. But in every case we also encounter something apparently and implicitly obvious. In the first case, that the means of acquiring sight-beyond-sight would necessarily supersede the basely acquisitive motivation in doing so; in the second, that this boy does belong to a different order, and that this boy ought to fly above these bullies; in the third, that this man resembles a rat in his mood and gait more than he does a man; in the fourth, that regardless of the fact, this doctor is a good man, and a good practitioner. These same phrases can be jerrymandered into an explanation of Anderson’s formal consciousness. We are first distinctly aware that what we are seeing is, in some degree, untrue. But it is the case that the truth of the matter speaks out despite, or indeed because of, this seeming falseness.
In light of these experimental devices, The Phoenician Scheme may seem a reasonably anticlimactic film to end this otherwise chronological report. It does not feature, after all, any metanarration. It does not expose its inner working parts; it does not concern itself with the transmission of stories; nor does it contain any storyteller of the literal kind. The film is best representative of the aforementioned exotic style, in which Anderson has decided on a Tintin-Orient as the stencil around which he will sketch another fantastical study. The Phoenician Scheme inherits from the Dahl tetrarchy a penchant for the overhead shot, though otherwise it might have been an appropriate follow-up to Isle of Dogs. Both feature a significant character named after a luminary of international cinema — Kobayashi (hailed by all), and Korda (hailed by old British men). But it may be more instructive if we consider The Phoenician Scheme’s contribution on a metaphorical register. We must return to that abiding theme across Anderson’s filmography: the surrogate father. The film revolves around such a man who does not know that he is such a man. Zsa-Zsa Korda, who presumes himself the father of Liesl Korda. Liesl Korda remains Liesl Korda, of course, but her father is not Zsa-Zsa. On discovering the fact of his being, in truth, or likelihood, an uncle, Zsa-Zsa nonetheless reasserts his fatherhood. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou features almost the same drama, only in that film Zissou is unaware.
Self-consciousness may be the crucial theme of late Anderson. Zsa-Zsa is not merely a father of dubious report, but also a businessman of dubious report. His titular scheme is to lay upon the unitary Phoenician state a bevy of infrastructural schemes. Tunnels, dams, railways. The postcolonial civilizing mission, in other words. Zsa-Zsa, as a crook, first understands this scheme as a high-risk means of profit extraction. He will raise his great works with slaves, and take his customary 5%. A cabal of corporate enemies therefore launch their own Phoenician Counterscheme to stymie his ambitions. But the film embodies a curious turn. As Zsa-Zsa persists in this ambition, surviving an unlikely string of assassination attempts, the exact nature of his motivation seems to morph. He becomes considerably less interested in the (quickly diminishing) profit potential of his scheme, and more committed to its achievement for some other reason. It appears as though Zsa-Zsa commits to the production of his mad ambition for its own sake; to prove to his semi-daughter that he is a man above mere finance, and therefore a man of great ideals. It is evidence of belief, in something, however fantastic. In fact, in the final phases of the film, the Phoenician scheme becomes an ideal means to lose money; Zsa-Zsa trades his entire wealth to prove a certain commitment to his progeny.
That he is a surrogate, and not a genetic, father is essential in this reflection. Here we meet again the creator-father who has appeared in all of Anderson’s later pictures. How is the film director, or the film writer, better described than a surrogate? Such artists do not typically literally produce a film; they instruct or indicate to professional craftspeople the things that must be done, and the way they ought to be. A certain layer of abstraction or detachment is essential in this division. I do not intend to claim that The Phoenician Scheme is a straight metaphor for film production. But contained within it is a certain degree of anxiety: the question as to why one ought to produce a work, and how, and to what end. This anxiety is perhaps one that would naturally follow the formal disintegrations of Anderson’s previous films. The anti-Ding, who — while minimizing the ox to its cutting line — has become extremely concerned with where the ox ends and the table begins. As Anderson persists in scratching, it appears the itch itself is malforming; Anderson is no longer scratching so as to resolve the itch, but rather to better understand it. It is not so much a question of whether or not to itch, but why satisfaction comes at all from itching and why, despite that fact, that satisfaction is never final.
This is a question as much of art as the artist. There is a curious detail in The Phoenician Scheme that sheds light on this matter. Liesl, who has attempted to take the cloth and join a nunnery, is advised by the mother superior to forgo that path. Most cynically this is because Liesl’s not being a nun will likely enrich the convent substantially. But the mother superior’s reasoning is interesting. She claims that, despite her moral reformation, Liesl has been unable to do away with her taste for the ostentatious. Gemstones line her dagger, and her pipe. It seems these things, regardless of her intention, are attached to her personality. She can only be exactly who she is. She may examine the reasons for this; she may attempt escape; but the long road curls home. She is not, therefore, a woman wedded to Christ. This revelation is not a comfort — it is not framed as though Liesl’s self-abnegation is finally relieved and she can take up a series of scepters and orbs. Rather, there is a capsule of angst. That one may reform, but not completely. That one is doomed to repeat oneself forever. We must, as ever, make the best of it.
Callicles: Well, I’d say that a life spent scratching is a pleasant life.
Comments are closed.