All in with Wes Anderson
Asteroid City might be the most Anderson of all his films, and I came to it like an acolyte who is doubting the mystery.
Image courtesy of Focus Features
After more than 20 years, I still exchange lines from Wes Anderson’s first film Bottle Rocket (1996) like a private code with some of my closest friends. My husband and I have taught our children to make the bird cry the main characters use as a signal in their heist schemes (“ca-caw, ca-caw”) so we can find each other in crowded spaces. Every time a first-generation college student ends up in my office, I want to quote them Bill Murray’s chapel speech from Rushmore (1998): “Take dead aim on the rich boys. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down.” When I asked a friend from divinity school to baptize our second child, she sent me back a scene from Moonrise Kingdom (2012) as her affirmative response. In 2014, I wrote a book chapter on the exuberant authenticity of Anderson’s films as an anecdote to modern bureaucratic dread. I have been, at least for periods of my life, all in on Anderson’s films.
Being all in is a good description of Anderson’s filmmaking. His visual style is so recognizable that the phrase “like a Wes Anderson movie” can be used to describe memes, clothing choices, buildings, interior design, or even accidental moments of life when the precise, idiosyncratic, unique, or precious coalesce. By his third movie, The Royal Tenenbaums (2001, perhaps my favorite), his hallmark visual style asserted itself as the most “Anderson-y” thing about his work: highly stylized sets and carefully constructed worlds that draw attention to their own artfulness.
In many of his films, his own carefully crafted style expresses something about the moral commitments of his characters that I find deeply attractive. Resisting the soul-crushing demands of late modern life—to be constantly productive, to succeed in narrow monetary terms—Anderson heroes double down on commitments that are always a little ridiculous, verging on absurd. They are committed but unsuccessful thieves, consummate school club captains but horrible students, lauded professionals in minor or neglected fields (underwater exploration, hotel management). But these commitments can never be undertaken alone, and the Anderson hero is always surrounded by friends and by family of birth and choice. In the lives of his characters, Anderson’s beautiful props, settings, and costumes are signs of commitment to something that can’t quite be measured.
