The Andersonian aesthetic

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I’m thinking of two different movie directors. They have made some of the most memorable and acclaimed films of the last thirty years. They have each made only nine live-action films, frequently waiting several years between projects. They each often work with the same actors, cinematographers, film crews, and composers across several of their projects. They are both known for distinctive quirks of visual style, and they are both associated with specific methods of storytelling; they both create very contrived, strange, and unreal worlds in their films. They were born less than a year apart, each exactly 164 days away from October 12, 1969.

They are both men named Anderson.

2001. Sixteen years old. I get a job at a grocery store, putting people’s food into plastic bags. Two regular customers would often tell me that I looked like the main character in a movie they loved called Rushmore. “You look just like that kid from Rushmore!” they would say; “Have you seen Rushmore? You should watch it!” I found a copy of the film, saw the character in question on the front of the box, and told myself that he looked like a dork and I didn’t (which wasn’t true; I did look like him, and I was a dork). I never watched the movie because the customers’ insistence was annoying.

2004. A friend recommends a book called Hollywood Worldviews by Brian Godawa. It was an excellent book, one particularly suited to my growing concern with the philosophy inherent in any work of art. One chapter of the book was devoted to a discussion of a film called Magnolia. I had never seen this movie, never even heard of it, but from the book’s description of it I knew I wanted to watch it; I never got around to doing so at that time (there are always too many movies to watch). But it remained in the back of my mind.

2009. WORLD magazine’s Megan Basham reviews a movie called Fantastic Mister Fox by a director I’d never heard of called Wes Anderson. The review includes a picture of Anderson deftly manipulating a stop-motion model. In her review, Basham mentions that Anderson has an “occasionally elitist tone” and that “no one else is as consistent at stamping his own peculiar aesthetics on his work.” She also mentions that one of Anderson’s previous films was Rushmore. I did not watch Fantastic Mr. Fox.

2010. I start a movie club with some friends, one of whom suggested we watch a movie called There Will Be Blood. At the time I’d never heard of it so we watched it; it was quite good, as all of this friend’s movie recommendations always were. I noted the name of the director: Paul Thomas Anderson.

2016. I listen to The Cold Nose by Department of Eagles and immediately declare it one of the best records of the decade. The album’s eleventh track (bearing the spectacular title “The Curious Butterfly Realizes he is Beautiful”) contains a sample of someone saying the words “Hi, I’m Wes Anderson Wes Anderson Wes Anderson.” Later that year in a letter I refer to Wes Anderson as “that noted hipster.”

2017. My father watches Phantom Thread and raves about it to me. Daniel Day-Lewis’ character asks, at one point in the film, for Lapsang Souchong tea; this sets my father, and, under his influence, the rest of my family, on a tea-drinking binge the further ripples of which can still be detected. Again, there are too many movies, and I don’t get around to watching Phantom Thread.

2018. During this year I become increasingly aggravated by “news articles” which seem like advertisements; in particular I’m offended by the immoderate amount of hype surrounding Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs. “No movie deserves this degree of adulation,” I think to myself; “where are the contrarian reviews stating the film’s flaws?” While at the theater watching something else I see a trailer for Isle of Dogs. The film seems to be entirely composed of symmetrical shots of the characters in either profile or front-face. “Is this what Basham meant by peculiar aesthetics?” I wonder.

2019. The friend who suggested There Will Be Blood expresses admiration for Wes Anderson’s work; after I object, he encourages me to watch all his films. My wife and I watch Moonrise Kingdom. It looks exactly like Isle of Dogs to me; I am not impressed. It seems extremely conceited and artificial. I feel secure in my dislike of Anderson’s style and aesthetic and write him off as a darling of the film hipsters and nothing more.

2022. It seems as though all of Twitter is talking about nothing other than the new Anderson movies Licorice Pizza and Asteroid City. Discussion of the former of these films seems to be made of measured respect for a serious piece of artistic and well-crafted filmmaking; the latter hype wave seems like worship of the kind offered by utterly besotted fandom devotees to the new installment of their favorite intellectual property. There are cracks in the edifice, though; Allyssa Wilkinson’s review of the film for Vox seems, if read between the lines, to betray a veiled exasperation with Wes’ signature style points. Wilkinson gives me the impression that she really wants to talk about how annoying Anderson’s aesthetic is, but that if she were to do so, she would have to turn in her film hipster card.

2024. It’s been three years since I started seriously writing my thoughts about art in a public form online and if anything has changed about me in those years, it is that I feel much more humble and less willing to let my own aesthetic judgment color my view of an artwork’s objective value. I decide it is time to seriously consider the artistry of Wes Anderson’s films. Also I get started watching all of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films because I keep hearing, over and over, about how good they are. I watch Fantastic Mister Fox with the whole family and I love it. I watch Moonrise Kingdom again, and it’s not nearly as stylized as I remember. I watch Licorice Pizza. It’s charming but puzzling. I watch Phantom Thread. It’s absolutely stunning; it makes me think about some points of Christian theology in a new light; I don’t know what the director was trying to say in it, though—why this particular story was told—and that bothers me somewhat. I watch Magnolia and Bottle Rocket on the same day. One is a philosophical epic; one is a quirky little comedy; but to my mind they are both uncannily similar in how the stories they tell do not, in themselves, bear a reason for their telling. Both are pure entertainment. And I’m not sure what to think about that. For as long as I can remember I’ve been judging art and artists by their capacity to communicate, to convey meaning, and I’m not sure what to think about art which exists simply for its own sake—art which is, as Wilde says, quite useless.

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I know nothing of the art of films, except what can reasonably be expected to have been gleaned by someone who grew up in the post-VCR era and had more or less an average amount of spare time to watch movies: I’ve seen a fair number of what are considered the good films, but I’ve never done serious study of any particular directors’ works, or the products of the various schools and styles; French New Wave, German Expressionism, New Hollywood—these are terms which I’m aware of but which I can’t define or describe. There are directors whose works I’ve come to enjoy but I couldn’t tell you why their movies strike me as particularly good. I cannot parse out the difference between “I liked that movie” and “that movie was good.” Crucially, my enjoyment of movies is highly dependent on their narratives, characterization, or sense of internal logic. It could probably be said that I approach films as if they were novels told visually; it could also be said that I love films but not film—or that my love of film only extends to the movies I’ve actually seen and I am not familiar enough with the art form to love it on its own in the abstract. I have a tendency to fall asleep in movies if I watch them late at night; this does not happen when I listen to music.

But I’m learning and I want to grow. I mention all of this generally as an exercise in critical honesty: I don’t want anyone thinking that I’m some sort of critical authority, some inerrant arbiter of what is good and bad in any particular art form; my expertise is limited by what I know and see, directly or by inference, and is by default subjective. In particular, though, I bring all of this up because the relationship between my critical beliefs and the filmography of the two Andersons, Paul and Wes, presents itself to me as an aesthetic wicked problem, one which I have no idea how to solve, and one which causes me to question the very bedrock of those beliefs.

For a very long time my feeling towards Wes Anderson has been one of disdain at what I saw as his excessive artificiality. I wanted the art of film, the craft of it, to be transparent to the story told, subservient to it—and I couldn’t figure out how Anderson’s visual quirks aided the storytelling. Consider Moonrise Kingdom for instance. There is a shot toward the beginning of the film where Edward Norton’s character is conducting a morning inspection of the Boy Scout-style camp he leads. The scene shows him interacting with various members of the camp; but the entire thing is one long tracking shot, progressing towards the right of the screen. Norton walks in a straight line; am I supposed to believe any real camp was ever laid out in such a fashion? Obviously it was a choice of Anderson’s to construct the shot in this way—but for what purpose? In the same film there is a scene where Anderson decides not to show us an important piece of the story’s action; some characters get into a violent quarrel but all we are shown of it is a still image of a scissors followed by an animation of an arrow. Why didn’t Anderson actually show the action? Did he not have a big enough practical effects budget for this scene? These kinds of things distracted my attention and caused me to step out of the film’s world and into one in which the film’s story was not as important as the fact that Wes Anderson was telling it; and this felt, to my tastes, like much too ego-driven a way of working.

Another point about Wes Anderson’s visual style which grates on my sensibilities is his near-constant deploying of carefully crafted stages or environments for his characters to inhabit. Again, Moonrise Kingdom provides an example: in the opening scenes the camera follows the Bishop family around their house, with each room appearing like some sort of tableau or diorama, some sort of doll’s house setup. This doesn’t appear naturalistic at all. In several of his other films he relies heavily on either profile shots or full-face shots, quite often symmetrically arranged. Is this how Wes Anderson sees the world? Why can’t he get his camera into the kinds of angles in which regular life is lived?

In sum, Wes Anderson’s work felt to me too fluffy, too frivolous, too cute, like a person who was being intentionally silly and knew it, and knew we knew it. He was breaking the fourth wall with his visual style, and I didn’t like it.

That was my impression circa 2021. Then Licorice Pizza came out, and I watched it and Fantastic Mister Fox and Phantom Thread and Magnolia and Bottle Rocket and The Master and The Royal Tenenbaums and Punch-Drunk Love—and now I don’t know what to think. I see visual trademarks all over Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies that, if they were in a Wes Anderson film, would annoy me. Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love, in particular, are full of exactly the kinds of full-face shots that drive me crazy in the other Anderson’s works. Paul Thomas Anderson uses long tracking shots very frequently. These kinds of shots are quite obvious to me and take me right out of the cinematic experience altogether; my disbelief is no longer suspended and all I can think of is “how did they do that?” . . . but I’m not ready to dismiss the conceit of tracking shots as I am regarding Wes Anderson’s knolling or dollhouse sets. Why do I prefer one of these visual styles over the other? I have no idea. but I feel as though I ought to know, else what kind of a critic am I?

The visual style of these two directors is not their only point of congruence; they share a common mode of storytelling as well. They both tell stories of strange, confused, bumbling weirdos, people on the fringes of society, people who aren’t really sure of their own selves. Their plots never have the kind of resolution that a redemptive story arc requires; they quite often leave the viewer hanging, with only a mild assurance that everything will be okay. Both Andersons are telling non-stories, stories which don’t say anything . . . stories which aren’t meant to present a moral or illustrate a theme . . . stories that are, as Oscar Wilde says, quite useless. If Wilde is right about utility and uselessness, these films adhere to the highest standards which any art can attain. And both Andersons deal in unreality, whether in the heavily contrived alternative worlds of Fantastic Mister Fox or The Royal Tenenbaums, or the equally artificial worlds of high fashion (Phantom Thread) or Los Angeles (Licorice Pizza).

Let’s pause for a moment and think on the concept of unreality in films. The whole history of the last hundred years has been an increased striving for verisimilitude in the actors’ craft, while at the same time being, for cinematographers, an ongoing quest for more and more artificial ways of telling a story. Rare is the film, like You’ve Got Mail, where not a single special or practical effect or makeup trick is used to tell the story—where everything you think you see really happened. These days, even romantic comedies have to have makeup effects (Will Smith’s shellfish allergy in Hitch); serious psychological dramas have to include surrealistic impossibilities (the hallucinatory “flying” scene in First Reformed), and auteur-driven art films have swirly colors and strange visual effects (The Tree of Life, The Fountain). And let’s not even talk about all the CGI / green screen / digital wizardry present in just about every other kind of film.

But that’s not a bad thing! Really, it’s all pretend, all unreal; if we wanted real life we wouldn’t be watching a movie. Film is artificial in every sense of the word. I know that for many people, a film isn’t good if it’s not “believable,” if the characters aren’t “true to life”; I myself have even complained in those ways about films I don’t like. But the more I think about the art of film, the more I’m convinced that such an attitude is unfair. Doing so seems to be trying to force the art of film into a broader category of the art of narrative; and while it’s certainly true that films are narrative-based it is also true that they are visuals-based. They’re also sound-based, and they have a time element, like music. Films are . . . films. They are their own kind of art. They’re still rather new; people have been writing books with stories in them for thousands of years but films are only about 140 years old. We really haven’t figured out the art of film yet, what it can really do, what its best strengths are. Whatever they are, they aren’t the same as other kinds of art; their way of telling stories has got to be different from that of novels or epic poems.

What is the nature of film storytelling? The only way I know how to answer that question is with tautologies: good film storytelling is what happens in good films. And who decides what films are good? The box office? If so, then Avatar is the greatest film ever made (by the same metric, Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” is the greatest song ever made). What about critics—do they decide what is the best? That seems rather unwarranted—especially since I don’t trust my own critical judgment anymore.

Are Wes Anderson’s films good? They certainly are memorable, with a unique visual idiom—the knolling, the profile / full face shots, the dollhouses / dioramas, etc. Their storytelling mode is understated and mostly concerned with what could possibly happen in everyday life. Wes Anderson’s films often feature the same situations and plots: more-or-less awkward misfits are thrust into complicated situations and have to come to terms with whatever life throws at them. Dysfunctional families predominate; children often have more agency than might be expected. Plans go south in Wes Anderson films with an alarming frequency. There is no magic, no superheroes or cutting-edge technology, and, with the important exception of his two stop-motion animated films, no fantastical or impossible elements.

But Paul Thomas Anderson’s films also have a distinct storytelling style, and—shock!—it’s quite similar to that of Wes Anderson. Misfits (Magnolia, The Master, Licorice Pizza); complicated situations (Magnolia, Phantom Thread); dysfunctional families (Magnolia, Licorice Pizza, There Will Be Blood, Punch-Drunk Love).

There is a deeper similarity, though, between the films of these two Andersons. My first reaction after seeing nearly every one of the films of either if these directors is “huh, what was that about?” Neither one of them is trying to tell a moral or preach a point in their movies; the stories they tell are presented as entertaining, amusing, enthralling, fascinating—but never edifying or illuminating. There is no point to any of these movies, no takeaway, no moral. They are quite useless; they have no goal or motive, no reason for being told other than for their own sake.

Why does any story need to be told, and who gets to tell it? It can’t be true that filmmakers tell better stories or are better at telling stories than the average person; therefore the core of the filmmaker’s art must be in how the story is presented visually—and along those lines I can imagine that there could be a film aesthetic of no story at all; an aesthetic of vibes alone. The films of the Andersons fit splendidly within this category; Licorice Pizza and The Master are both vibe films more than anything—certainly they are not moralistic tales. Perhaps they are simply character studies. Perhaps they are meant to be nothing more than pretty.

I’m not ready, as a critic, to preach a gospel of vibe-forward cinema. I still have much to learn and there are so many movies I haven’t seen. But if I were to do so, the films of Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson would be the foundational texts of that gospel, and my sermon would be made of examples like these: John C. Reilly and William H. Macy in Magnolia—both of them are tragic characters but both have a charm about them that endears them to me. The interaction between Ash and Kristofferson in Fantastic Mr. Fox, and the way everyone wiggles their hands any time they describe Ash as “different.” The whole visual aesthetic of Licorice Pizza: after watching that film I’m convinced the seventies were beautiful. Also the Haim sisters in that movie are especially perfect—there’s a moment toward the end, in the arcade, when Este Haim gives Cooper Hoffman this smoldering look and it’s so full of tension and weight. The scene where Mordecai the hawk flies away from Richie to a cover version of “Hey Jude” in The Royal Tenenbaums—it’s a beautiful scene. The narrator in Moonrise Kingdom. How, in Moonrise Kingdom, Suzy Bishop calls Captain Sharp a “sad dumb policeman.” The thick relational tension between Reynolds Woodcock and Alma Elson at the end of Phantom Thread. Philip Seymour Hoffman in Magnolia and in The Master; in both movies he plays a character who tries to calm people down—but he’s a saint in Magnolia, the most virtuous character in the film; whereas in The Master he is a force of evil. The scene, in Punch-Drunk Love, where Adam Sandler meets Emily Watson at the hotel to the tune of Shelley Duvall singing “He Needs Me.” The “escape” at the beginning of Bottle Rocket. Also the bumbled heist in that movie is supremely funny. All of these movies are so beautiful and gorgeous and good.

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