Anderson’s artistic presentation of his texts’ artificiality places the audience at a remove from the events of the film, compelling us to engage with the formal elements as much as the characters and themes. But if we look beyond the mere formal reasons for this, it’s notable how many of Anderson’s characters create novels, plays, films, or paintings diegetically (or, within the fictional world of the film) in addition to Anderson’s narratives being presented extra-diegetically (or, to the film’s audience) as novels, plays, films, or paintings. It’s clear that making sense of the world through art is an imperative common to Anderson’s characters and Anderson himself.
To make sense of his own work, Anderson frequently leaves us in the hands – or rather, the voice – of a narrator. This narrator is usually a complete outsider to the story, such as the disembodied voice of Alec Baldwin recounting the events of The Royal Tenenbaums, or the unnamed author of The Grand Budapest Hotel, who is merely a conduit for Zero Moustafa’s story, 30 years later. While the use of a narrator is a formal quirk which can allow for quick, extra-diegetic exposition, using this kind of outsider as the narrator also allows the audience to read his presentation of events as more objective and reliable than if it had been recounted by a character involved in the story itself. Just as Anderson distances us from the events of the story from the outset by drawing attention to its status as a work of fiction, so, too does the narrator distance us from the characters in this way.
It’s noteworthy that even when the narrator does appear in the film, his function remains the same. He’s there to set the scene and catch us up, not to pass judgement or get emotionally involved. Bob Balaban appears as the narrator in Moonrise Kingdom, speaking directly to the audience about the geography of New Penzance, the island on which the film takes place. However, unlike the other previously-mentioned narrators, this character turns up in the film for one scene. As the parents and guardians of the two runaway sweethearts, Sam and Suzy, clash on the pier in New Penzance over their kids’ whereabouts, he appears from out of nowhere to advise that, as Sam’s cartography tutor, he has a hunch as to where they may be headed.
It’s interesting that the other characters in this scene merely absorb this information, and do not engage the narrator in conversation or any kind of dialogue. They are just as in thrall to him as the audience of Moonrise Kingdom. This moment also provides some neat thematic commentary: while the pre-teen Sam and Suzy know exactly where they’re going – and are miles ahead of everyone else in the film, in every sense – the adults are decidedly at a loss as to what to do before the arrival of Balaban’s character.
This is a common thread that can be traced through Anderson’s films; their central characters typically suffer from a lack of direction or guidance. From Max Fischer in Rushmore; to the Royal Tenenbaums, to give them their full family name; to the three Whitman brothers in The Darjeeling Limited, there is a recurring sense of dislocation and disorientation, of arriving at a particular point in your life and being unable to traverse it, physically or mentally.
Often, this lack of direction, or search for meaning, is linked to the absence of a parent or mentor. While this theme can be observed directly in the storyline and dialogue of almost every one of Anderson’s films, we can also see the ghosts of his own cinematic influences haunting the formal structure of his films, just as his characters’ lives are shaped by a missing mother (Rushmore); father (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou); or both (The Grand Budapest Hotel; The Darjeeling Limited; Moonrise Kingdom).
Going beyond the nods to cult crime thrillers like Mean Streets, Heat and Witness in his early work, Anderson draws on a range of influences in structuring his films. Photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue, who worked with filmmakers such as Robert Bresson, François Truffaut and Federico Fellini, directly inspired a number of shots from Rushmore. The work of oceanographer and documentarian Jacques Cousteau, and the structure and format of his documentaries, clearly informs the ancillary films-within-a-film in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, while The Grand Budapest Hotel notably borrows its mannered humour and old-world nostalgia from renowned German director, Ernst Lubitsch. Anderson has also spoken about the influence of the legendary Indian director Satyajit Ray on his work. While this is most apparent in The Darjeeling Limited, a film set in India, shot in a widescreen format, with a noticeably more muted palette than his usual fare, a 2008 interview with The Statesman reveals that Anderson adopted other qualities of Ray’s work into his own:
‘His films (which were usually adapted by him from books) feel like novels to me. My favourites are the Calcutta trilogy […] which are very adventurous and inventive stylistically, and ‘Days and Nights in the Forest’ (‘Aranyer Din Ratri’), which I relate to the kind of movies and books that completely captured my attention when I was a teenager, with soulful troublemakers as heroes.’
Anderson’s adoption of these formal structures and genre tropes may function as a sort of meta-framing, a way in which he borrows from his own mentors and influences to guide his own narratives and characters. Indeed, we see in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel that, by adopting the habits and skills of their respective mentors, Steve, Sam and Zero respectively attain a certain level of professional competency and success. Though, even adhering to these guidelines is not enough to achieve personal or emotional
30 CinÉireann / April 2018