Wes Anderson's Unbearable Whiteness

Icesickle · Post by **Icesickle** » Mon Oct 01, 2007 2:41 am

http://www.slate.com/id/2174828/

Unbearable Whiteness
That queasy feeling you get when watching a Wes Anderson movie.
By Jonah Weiner
Posted Thursday, Sept. 27, 2007, at 7:25 AM ET

Wes Anderson
The first time Owen Wilson met Wes Anderson, at a college playwriting class in Austin, the future director made an immediate impression. "He walked in wearing L.L. Bean duck-hunting boots and shorts," Wilson recalled, "Which I thought was kind of obnoxious."

In every film he's made, even the best ones, there's been something kind of obnoxious about Wes Anderson. By now, critics have enumerated several of his more irritating traits and shticks: There's his pervasive preciousness, exemplified by the way he pins actors into the centers of fastidiously composed tableaux like so many dead butterflies. There's his slump-shouldered parade of heroes who seem capable of just two emotions: dolorous and more dolorous (not that there haven't been vibrant exceptions to this). And there's the way he frequently couples songsגparticularly rock songs recorded by shaggy Europeans between 1964 and 1972גwith slow-motion effects, as though he's sweeping a giant highlighter across the emotional content of a scene. In The Royal Tenenbaums, Richie can't watch Margot get off a bus without Nico popping up to poke us in the ribs: "He loves her! And it's killing him! See?"

The Darjeeling Limited, Anderson's latest movie, showcases an obnoxious element of Anderson that is rarely discussed: the clumsy, discomfiting way he stages interactions between white protagonistsגtypically upper-class elitesגand nonwhite foilsגtypically working class and poor. The plot concerns three brothers, Francis, Peter, and Jack Whitman (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman) who set out on a "spiritual journey" across India by rail. Brody and Schwartzman stalk the film somberly, their eyes glazed with melancholy, their laconic exchanges one part deadpan, one part night of the living dead. They are zombies in fitted blazers, suffering quietly but profoundly from the same vague, paralyzing, leisure-class malaise that has plagued Anderson's heroes ever since Luke Wilson checked himself into a mental hospital for "exhaustion" in Bottle Rocket. Owen Wilson (despite his recent personal ordeal) is the trio's winningly dopey optimist, convinced that the Indian sojourn is exactly what the brothers need to get closer togetherגthey haven't spoken since the death of their father, one year earlier. The film is gorgeous to look at: The color palette is riotous, and Anderson's rapacious eye for bric-a-brac binges on the Hindu prayer altars and crowded street markets of Rajasthan. But needless to say, beware of any film in which an entire race and culture is turned into therapeutic scenery.

From the Beatles' 1968 hang with the Maharishi to the recent "Imagine India" flower show at Macy's, South Asia has long been a hotspot in the American and European orientalist imagination. But for a director as willfully idiosyncratic as Anderson, it's surprising how many white-doofuses-seeking-redemption-in-the-brown-skinned-world clich

cascarrabias · Post by **cascarrabias** » Mon Oct 01, 2007 7:51 am

Laughed.

drizzle · Post by **drizzle** » Mon Oct 01, 2007 10:59 am

watch, he's gonna surprise everybody next time out with a quirky love story about gay ganbangers (one black, one spanish) who are brought together by a korean grocer, set to the music of jodeci and boys II men

citizen · Post by **citizen** » Mon Oct 01, 2007 11:23 am

playa hatas

GM Dizzy Skillespie · Mon Oct 01, 2007 11:32 am

drizzle wrote:watch, he's gonna surprise everybody next time out with a quirky love story about gay ganbangers (one black, one spanish) who are brought together by a korean grocer, set to the music of jodeci and boys II men

stop giving the onion material

drizzle · Post by **drizzle** » Mon Oct 01, 2007 11:45 am

GM Dizzy Skillespie wrote:
drizzle wrote:watch, he's gonna surprise everybody next time out with a quirky love story about gay ganbangers (one black, one spanish) who are brought together by a korean grocer, set to the music of jodeci and boys II men
stop giving the onion material

i'm just gonna come out with my own shit, call it The Garlick. Gonna be making bank in no time. The differences are going to be subtle but profound, speaking to a demographic that the Onion previously ignored.

AREA DRUMMER FELLATED - see what i did there?

AWAE · Post by **AWAE** » Mon Oct 01, 2007 1:32 pm

you can analyze anything into gayness if thats your interest..

hey that director has a definable style i'm a genius cause i noticed that!

Trademark · Post by **Trademark** » Mon Oct 01, 2007 2:47 pm

LOL very true shit....

richard lamplighter · Post by **richard lamplighter** » Wed Oct 03, 2007 8:56 pm

eh,

i think he's aware of it/poking fun at it almost 100% of the time, certainly more than this writer thinks. but whatever.

PopeyeJones · Post by **PopeyeJones** » Wed Oct 03, 2007 11:48 pm

drizzle wrote:watch, he's gonna surprise everybody next time out with a quirky love story about gay ganbangers (one black, one spanish) who are brought together by a korean grocer, set to the music of jodeci and boys II men

review is

also.

RacquetballGangsta · Post by **RacquetballGangsta** » Thu Oct 04, 2007 3:09 pm

i couldnt help but feeling the same thing when i saw this..i was like man, he went from Pagoda in Tenenbaums to fully realizing his fetish for Indians and putting an entire movie against an INDIAN exotic background...really cheesy
but then the more i think about it, could wes anderson direct a movie with indian protaganists? fuck no..the dude is writing about what he knows...so u cant really fault him for that, can you?