I. Research on Wes Anderson: His approach and philosophy to filmmaking Nearly all the authors who write about Wes Anderson, whether they view him positively or negatively, remark on his unique ability to create a miniature version of the world that is somewhat removed from reality. In this world, he has complete control, creating characters that while perhaps are simple, also reveal basic truths that are representative of the real world. Michael Chabon praises this quality in his article “The Film Worlds of Wes Anderson,” writing that all art is a distilled version of a piece of the world. The best works of art are able to “be faithful maps, accurate scale models, of this beautiful and broken world.” But while Anderson’s work may only be a model of something more real, it is not without gravity. Chabon writes that Anderson’s “miniatures span continents and decades. They comprise crime, adultery, brutality, suicide, the death of a parent, the drowning of a child, moments of profound joy and transcendence.” Anderson is able to take the emotions that occur in real life and apply them to simplified, fictional situations, situations that are carefully crafted for the sole purpose of conveying that emotion, that one thought, that feeling. Brendan Kredell views Anderson differently, and thinks that his simplicity simpli city is in fact an oversimplification. In his article “Wes Anderson and the City Spaces of Indie Cinema,” Kredell argues that Anderson typifies the attitude of the “urban gentrifying class” that rose to prominence during the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. He believes that these gentrifiers ignore history and culture to their detriment, extracting only superficial qualities from cultures that they mine. “The cinematic city is abstracted and aestheticized, presented to the viewer as a romanticized and essentialized space rather than an organic environment inhabited by real people,” he writes. The city is abstracted “in the name of an ‘urban lifestyle’ that casually (and sometimes willfully) ignores the historical and cultural specificities of the neighborhoods that it transforms.” It is certainly easy to see how one could take this view; Anderson does purposefully leave out a lot of details about the context of his films. But perhaps this is the point: in making a model of the world, one cannot then but back every realistic detail into the model. In order to clearly and accurately convey the feelings that Chabon describes, maybe some things are better left out, and maybe these things include cultural and historical details that ultimately have no bearing on the story. Chabon addresses this point, writing that the world in its realistic state is too large of a scope for a film to handle. “Grief, at full scale, is too big for us to take it in; it literally cannot be comprehended,” he writes. “But distance does not– ought not– necessarily imply a withdrawal… With each of his films, Anderson’s total command of detail– both the physical detail of his sets and costumes, and the emotional detail of the uniformly beautiful performances he elicits from his actors– has enabled him to increase the persuasiveness of his own family Zemblas, without sacrificing any of the paradoxical emotional power that distance affords.” Chabon sees Anderson’s ignoring of selected contextual elements as a positive, a tool that allows him to create more powerful, specific work, and that the addition of precise details is the way he makes up for the
lack of more general information in the film. In addition to Anderson’s philosophy and framing of his films, there is also debate about the role of architecture in them. Anderson tends to zero in on one location, whether it is a hotel, boat, school, or private home, and much of the action occurs in this place. Kredell once again takes issue with this, arguing that the focus of the singular location diminishes the power of history and culture that a realistic neighborhood affords: “Anderson prevents the city from its own identity, choosing instead to treat it as a location within which to construct his own social universe.” However, many films do this– perhaps shooting in one city and labeling it as another– and Kredell acknowledges this. He takes special offense not to the fact that Anderson misconstrues the surroundings, but that he almost completely ignores them: “Anderson does not simply shoot his film in a house in Harlem and represent it instead as a location in Brooklyn, for instance. Rather, he obliterates the very space of the house… itself. He shoots in Harlem, but his film belongs to nowhere.” Once again, perhaps Kredell is missing the point. In his article “Wes Anderson: The Architectural Film-Maker,” Steve Rose describes the careful consideration that Anderson puts into these made-up locations of his. “Anderson takes pains to show you that he is not cheating… Instead of edits, he prefers zooms, whip pans and especially tracking shot.. They are not only demonstrations of his technical virtuosity, they also reinforce the continuity of his painstakingly constructed filmic space.” Anderson’s films do not belong to “nowhere,” as Kredell puts it. They belong to an imaginary place, a place that Anderson has created, a place that is brought into being for the sole purpose of supporting the film. These places are not random, and this is why Anderson does not want the implication that a site has interfering with them: they are just right as they are, as he imagined them, as he designed them. Rose writes of him: “Liberated from the constraints of function, Anderson can use architecture to manifest psychology.” The places that were constructed manifest the psychology of the characters in the film, the characters that Anderson created. It follows naturally that if he created the characters, only he should know of the place that brings out their most important qualities as well.
