It must say something about our cultural moment that the accusation of racism is now a favored mode of attack.

I guess the delicacy on matters of race is pretty common. Don Imus got taken down by it, and Larry David routinely plays it for laughs. But it's not an accusation that accurately describes or is fair to level at the films of Wes Anderson.

I am personally a big fan of Anderson's work. I think "Rushmore" was one of the best films of the 1990s, and I am of the opinion that "The Royal Tenenbaums" and "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou" were worthy successors.

First of all, I am perplexed by the extremely widespread use of the adjective "precious" to derisively refer to Anderson's work. I was unaware that the word "precious" could be used to negatively connote affected daintiness or refinement until I looked it up after I saw it in several reviews of "Life Aquatic." This particular usage of the word seems to be fairly obscure; I have personally never seen it used to describe anything except fussiness about table manners and the films of Wes Anderson. It really amazes me that so many critics independently seized upon the word "precious" coincidentally and entirely without stealing it from someone else's review.

But, besides being obscure linguistically and cliched as a reference to Anderson, I find it inaccurate. Anderson certainly has his conventions; his characters dress themselves in uniforms that externalize their internal situation. He likes shots of characters walking in slow motion and European rock. He is fascinated with the odd material possessions of his characters and the places they inhabit.

But his films are not about these things. Rather, Anderson's films share in common a theme of protagonists who respond to the looming problem of their own mortality by attempting to control the people and things around them.

In "Rushmore," for example, Max has reduced the surrounding world down to the walls of the private academy he attends, because that is an environment where he can exert a high degree of control. The elaborate school plays he writes and directs are really an extension of his need to exert his narrative onto the world around him, and dictate how other people respond to him. It's his response to his feelings of helplessness in the larger world which arise out of his mother's death.

Similarly, the Jaguar Shark in "Life Aquatic" is an unambiguous manifestation of the fact of Death, and Zissou's response to his encounter with it is an announcement that he will hunt it down and take revenge on it. At the end of the film when he finally encounters it, he finally faces the realization that he is powerless and insignificant against it. For all the "preciousness" of the candy-colored animatronic fish in Anderson's fanciful ocean, the movie is really about the dark and terrible things that dwell there as well, and about Zissou's failure to hide from those things behind the legend of himself he has created.

All of Anderson's protagonists view women in the context of the narrative frames they are trying to impose on their own lives. Rosemary in "Rushmore" has enough to deal with without needing to be a lover/mother/romantic epiphany to Max (or Blume). Anthony imposes a similar set of illusions on Ines in "Bottle Rocket," using the language barrier as a blank canvas to paint into his ideal lover.

But if these characters take a selfish view of women and relationships, at least Anderson writes the female characters as being strong enough to walk away from them, unlike the selfish, needy arrested adolescents in most other rom coms, who the female lead always ends up settling for anyway. Rosemary dumps Max and Blume, Anthony loses Ines, Tenenbaum and Zissou are both failures at marriage. "Happily ever after" endings are about wish fulfillment, and, despite his fanciful aesthetic, Anderson is interested in precisely the opposite.

Anderson's movies are about divesting these control freak characters of their illusions, their self-aggrandizement and their denial of death. This is a painful process for them, and these guys are usually too damaged to be fully redeemed.

Royal Tenenbaum is a man who has lived a selfish, thoroughly dishonest life, and, through his selfishness and dishonesty has seriously damaged his children. However, he views himself as their eccentric, romantic screwball patriarch, and his need to perpetuate this self image continues to cause harm to them throughout the film.

Sherman is engaged to Royal's ex wife, and Royal attempts to force Sherman to behave as the kind of romantic rival Royal wants him to be, because Royal is attempting to impose a narrative on his family in which he can swoop back in, somehow patch things up with his long-estranged wife and his seriously messed-up kids, and live happily ever after.

I can't imagine how Weiner can see Sherman as some kind of racist punching-bag for Royal. He's one of the only characters in the movie who is not snowed by Royal's bullshit. He doesn't "meekly endure" Royal's racist taunts; he ignores the provocation and refuses to play the role Royal wants to bait him into playing.

A fine take down of Weiner's crabby assertions about Anderson's style. What galls me through out the review was his implicit demand that nonwhites be represented with dignity and such, and is upset that black, Hispanic or Asian characters might be off-kilter, eccentric, or have expectations that defy expectation. Weiner's is so busy trying to enforce his notion of respect onto Anderson's style that he seems not far removed from Soviet Realism, a sterile attempt to make populations conform to a pretense of normative behavior.

Well, the best part of the review has got to be the line in which he asserts that minority characters represent purity -- and then reveals that one of them stabbed Royal Tennenbaum. Sure, he took him to the hospital, but stabbing someone mars the stabber's character a bit in my book.

As one who has written, in an earlier thread, something of an over-the-top polemic against the films of Wes Anderson, I'd like to say that I think Crawford makes a fine argument in those films' defense. While I don't agree with many of his/her points, I most definitely do agree that Anderson is no racist--and, more to the point, neither are his films.

On the other hand, I do agree with Weiner's more general complaint regarding the way Anderson paints all of his characters, white or otherwise--that is, rather superficially. But I won't belabor the point any more than I already have in my earlier postings.

Getting back to Crawford's posting: His/her perspective on Anderson's films is an interesting one, and the notion that the denial of death and the need for control should play such a role in Crawford's experience/understanding of these films is just about enough to make me want to rent some of them again. I do think they're almost unbearably cloying and precious (sorry--that word again), but on the other hand I also have a lot of respect for Gene Hackman, Anjelica Houston, Bill Murray, and Danny Glover, and I suppose there must be some reason these gifted actors agreed to work with these scripts.

This has been a fun discussion. I'm glad I decided to read the letters and write a couple of my own.

I think that it's easy, but inaccurate to say that Anderson's characters are shallowly drawn. He likes to give each major character a sort of uniform that outwardly manifests some aspect of who that person is, or who he thinks of himself as, or who he'd like to be. A wardrobe change will often signify some change or crisis the character faces.

Anderson also favors a conspicuous soundtrack of European rock that exposes him to credible accusations of hipsterism. He likes to use the soundtrack and, often, carefully composed slow-motion shots to underscore the emotional current of a particular scene. I think Anderson's aesthetic, the wardrobe and the props, and the music and the composition, show us the characters as they imagine themselves, and as they would want to be seen, and the business of the films is to show us the humanity beneath those facades.

Some people find the aesthetic obnoxious, and that's a fair opinion. But I think it's wholly incorrect to suggest that this is used as a substitute for character development in Anderson's movies. Even though the aesthetic suggests the characters are drawn in broad strokes, Anderson is never a director to neglect the details, and the characters are always a little more complicated than a lot of viewers and critics give them credit for.

A couple of characters really stand out. For example, Max's father in "Rushmore," is a barber. Max tells people his father is a neurosurgeon. The father knows that Max is ashamed of him, and that Max lies about who he is. He knows that Max is building a surrogate family with Blume and Rosemary Cross. The fact that this wounds him is suggested subtly in a very textured supporting performance, but the topic is never broached openly because the father would never raise the issue and Max is too self-centered to intuit it on his own.

Rosemary Cross is a similarly interesting character. Since "Rushmore" is seen largely from Max's perspective, she spends most of the film as the object of his pursuit and the catalyst of his falling out with Blume and the subsequent war between the two male leads. It's only late in the film that it is revealed that she is living in her dead husband's childhood bedroom. Throughout the film, her identity as a woman still shattered by a traumatic loss is pushed into the background because it doesn't fit the role Max has chosen for her in his narrative.

Bill Murray's performance in "Royal Tenenbaums" is a similarly compelling character. He plays a psychologist who carefully cultivates a persona as a dry, dispassionat clinician. But the facade cracks when he discovers the secret life his wife has hidden from him, and you can see that he is devastated even as he tries to maintain his composure.

I disliked "Garden State" because Zach Braff used a hip soundtrack and carefully composed shots as a diversion to hide thin and uninteresting characters, and I have little affection for "Napoleon Dynamite" or "Donnie Darko," which exist with no greater end than to be weird. But Wes Anderson is doing something more sophisticated, and it's a mistake to dismiss his movies as shallow.

Crawford, your reads on Anderson's staging and on his characters is very insightful, and it is a genuine pleasure to read something so well thought out. Of course the response to Weiner's criticisms of Sherman in Royal Tenenbaums is particularly useful in this context.

I think that Anderson very deliberately shows his characters' environments almost entirely from those characters' points of view (and so, for example, Max's complete obliviousness to his father's pain nearly masks that pain for the viewer, though as you point out, not quite), and in some cases that means that we as viewers have a skewed and fairly reduced view of, for example, Indian culture in The Darjeeling Limited. But to say that means that Wes Anderson is himself racist is uncharitable and imposes Anderson's characters' perceptions onto Anderson himself. If those characters are racist (and I'm not sure that every example Weiner mentions works, for that matter), there's a very good chance that Anderson is fully aware of their racism. One of the advantages Anderson's privileged upbringing will have gotten him is access to thinkers (and I have no doubt that the University of Texas has plenty) fully aware of the meaning of terms like "orientalism," and surely he didn't just sleep through every class he took in college.

And as a side note, the fact that so many critics level the charge of "precious" at his films, usually referring to his maybe chilly meticulousness, is surprising, because there are an awful lot of artists, especially poets, but not a few film directors, who are incredibly "precious" by this standard. I can think of Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Swift, Pope, Hitchcock, Kubrick, etc. And I actually read an article the other day (in Texas Monthly) that complained about Anderson's hyper-referential nature as "precious," as if this weren't how the entire western literary tradition functioned. Harold Bloom talked about this 30 years ago in "The Anxiety of Influence."

I think "precious" is intended not only to comment on the weird detritus of the characters' lives that is given prominence in the films, as well as the meticulous organization of the films' visual compositions.

I think it's attached to Anderson as a kind of objection to things like the painting of the jellyfish, the award for punctuality, the javelina boar head, the closet full of board games, the dalmatian mice, the fish, the boat, and pretty much everything else in "Life Aquatic" and now the peacock feathers and custom luggage of "Darjeeling."

I really don't go in for that pseudo-hipster weirdness. There was a shot in "Garden State" where Zach Braff is wearing a shirt that matches the wallpaper behind him, and while I recognized that Braff was trying to say something about the character feeling like he was invisible or something, what I thought was "I hate this guy and I hate this movie." When he gave Natalie Portman his headphones so she could listen to The Shins, I thought, "I hate this guy and I hate this movie."

I also didn't really get into "Napoleon Dynamite." That movie was all surface and weird for its own sake.

But blaming the entire "quirky hipster" cliche on Wes Anderson because its practitioners rip off certain aspects of Anderson's style is unfair.

I think Crawford's take on the (by now a bit worn-out) issue of preciousness is bang-on. The examples were well-chosen, and "I hate this guy and I hate this movie" is exactly the right way to describe that visceral reaction one feels in the face of whatever it is that strikes one as overly precious—this, despite the fact that the two of us disagree pretty fundamentally about the broader issue under discussion. (Although I do agree with him about Zach Braff.)

But I also want to address the issue of the anxiety of influence. "Gajderowhat," who wrote a bit earlier in this thread, seems to me to have missed the mark—and here I'll just gloss right over the fact that he/she of the unpronouncable name feels justified in bunching Virgil, Dante, Ovid, and company together with Wes Anderson (or, for that matter, Hitchcock and Kubrick), which, let’s face it, is a bit much. At any rate, Harold Bloom's thesis, which is concerned with derivativeness in art, has nothing to do with preciousness. For that matter, one thing that even I wouldn't charge Wes Anderson with is derivativeness. He does seem to be doing his own thing, and the fact that the thing in question happens also to have attracted a crowd of less talented imitators is just the price we movie-goers pay for his popularity. (Anyone who spent time in a college creative writing workshop in the nineties will be familiar with a similar phenomenon, which we might call “Raymond Carver-itis.” I myself, I’m a bit ashamed to say, came down with a really nasty strain of it in 1996, and I wasn’t really myself again for nearly a year. It was a very long year, full of very short sentences.) Since the question of derivativeness is indeed one that troubles a lot of people, it seems worthwhile to say something about about it in general—and here I’ll diverge from Bloom’s point of view, interesting though it is, since (surprise!) I disagree with it pretty stongly. All works of art exist within a tradition; there's no way to escape this, and as far as I’m concerned no good reason to try. One can, in fact, make a strong argument to the effect that a work of art which stood outside the sphere of influence of any tradition would be effectively incoprehensible.

So the mere fact that some work of art betrays its influences (and here the word "betray" can be read in either or both of its senses) does not make it derivative. The difference can be expressed in terms of a conversation; a fruitful conversation is one in which people neither talk over one another nor simply repeat whatever their conversational partner has said right back at them. Instead, you build on what’s been said in some way. It doesn’t mean simple agreement, but rather a kind of taking-into-account. The result is something original which nevertheless continues in a certain stream. A really new idea, or a surprising take on an old one, might change the direction of the conversation entirely, and yet a path back to the start of the discussion will be discernible. A non sequitur, on the other hand, often just derails things. The same can be said of works of art. A film director might be very strongly influenced by Welles, Ford, and Hitchcock, but that isn’t necessarily to say that he is under their sway, and so unable to say whatever it is that he himself needs to say with his films. They and others too numerous to mention changed the direction of the discussion in various interesting and fruitful ways (and it’s clear that even in conversation with themselves, these three found things to challenge and reinterpret), and that conversation has been continued by similarly numerous contributors to the tradition.

So what constitutes simple derivation? That’s tough to answer, mainly because I don’t think it’s possible to come up with a strict rule for these things. But we don’t need one; like Potter Stewart, we know it when we see it. And, just for the sake of being contrary, I’ll end with this: When I said a moment ago that I don’t consider Wes Anderson’s films to be derivative, I meant it in terms of other people’s work (for that matter, when I think of obvious influences on Anderson’s work, I don’t really think of other film makers so much as I do of J. D. Salinger, who ran out of new things to say pretty quickly). But I do think, and other letter-writers have already said as much, that the guy is walking a pretty narrow line between an exploration of his personal style and worldview, and what amounts to repetition with minor variations. If the guy is derivative of anybody, it’s himself.

So what you are saying is that Anderson's plots are nothing more than shallow existentialist character studies? Wes Anderson takes 2 and half hours and 20 characters to do what a Samuel Beckett play with one man, no set, and a minimalist monologue can accomplish in 15 minutes? I'm not impressed. There's more brilliant character-studying in a 5 minute clip of "the big lebowski" than there is in all of Wes Anderson's movies combined.

"The Big Lebowski" is an example of a film that is primarily narrative driven, while Anderson's films are character driven. I think the characters in "Lebowski" are essentially drawn in shorthand. The Coens are working in archetypes and they create characters who we immediately understand, so that they can get on with the story. The Dude is fundamentally a character who is swept along by events rather than a character who drives them, so the narrative is imposed on him more or less externally.

He's one of the more original members of a long line of spoof detectives who bungle passively and ineptly through the process of solving a complex mystery. I think "Lebowski" is the smartest parody of a noir story ever made, but the Coens have made some real throwaways, like "The Ladykillers" and "Intolerable Cruelty." I admire their aspiration to be the modern day equivalent of Preston Sturges, but I think "Rushmore" compares quite favorably with "Fargo" or "Miller's Crossing."

Alex, I wouldn't go so far as to compare Anderson to Welles, but Roger Ebert name-checked "Citizen Kane" and "The Graduate" in his review of "Rushmore."

By the way, if you want to talk about race in film, how about Welles painting Charleton Heston brown and casting him as a Mexican in "Touch of Evil"?

I think what distinguishes Anderson from his imitators is that his thematic and narrative aspirations aren't limited by his aesthetic. Wes Anderson's characters are obsessed with control, and the films are about the things they can control and the things they can't. So the aesthetic, particularly as applied to the way the characters look and the places they live, is about what they control, but the things they can't control are always bubbling up through the cracks in the facade.

I think it's powerful. There's a sort of tension between the regimented beauty of the internal worlds of the characters (the slow motion shots are about their idealized perceptions of themselves. See also, Max Fischer's plays and Steve Zissou's documentaries). But the world beyond their control is beautiful as well, and they have to lower out of their constructed defenses to experience it (Think about Margaret Yang, the Jaguar Shark, India).

That's why Anderson's characters and his movies are interesting. By contrast, Napoleon Dynamite and the "Garden State" guy are more or less blank characters. For Anderson, disaffection is a defense mechanism. To many of the other hipster filmmakers, it's a defining character trait or even a virtue to which they aspire.

Alex: 1) the "j" is silent; the rest is as it looks, though it isn't a real name, anyway. 2) you can certainly gloss right over my lumping Virgil, Ovid, Hitchcock, et al in with Wes Anderson, but you're completely misunderstanding my position. My point is absolutely not that they share in a level of mastery of their respective artforms; my point is that they are all...so...ridiculously...fast­idious. If, for example, Virgil's Aeneid doesn't grab you that way, read it again, and then again, or else try The Eclogues or The Georgics. The Eclogues is a really good example of what I was getting at with the Harold Bloom reference, too: it's the classic hyper-referential poem that points everywhere except the obvious, which I guess would be the experience of sitting on a hillside watching sheep. It becomes much more a poem about the history of poetry prior to Virgil than anything. So it's all about its own place in a tradition, much more than anything else. But if I gave off a vibe of "Wes Anderson = Virgil" or whoever else, oops, my bad.

My train of thought was then going to Harold Bloom, whose point is that authors can't help taking a place in the literary tradition. He sees this as a good thing; the negative test case for him is Oscar Wilde, who disingenuously or fatuously claims he has no debts to any previous authors. But what's your read on Bloom--I think we're coming up with two different understandings here?

Anyway, and here's what I was getting at, since Bloom, there's been a lot of interest in what's called intertextuality, which is the way that authors appropriate/steal from/reference other works as a way of contextualizing and enriching their own work. And I think again that this is hardly a matter of being "derivative" in the usual negative sense; being derivative from the intertextual perspective is a plus. The article I mentioned from Texas Monthly (by Christopher Kelly, in the Oct 07 issue btw) attacked Anderson quite a bit on this point, saying essentially, "oh, here's Anderson's paean to his own taste: he loves Harold and Maude; he loves music from Charlie Brown specials and stuff by Nico, Dylan, Paul Simon, etc.; he loves Bill Murray." I've taken a lot of the things Anderson sticks in as being means of grounding his movies in the culture he sees himself as part of, and some of these things are actually references to cultural items: Max Fischer's dad is a barber in Rushmore just like Charlie Brown's dad (and Charles Schulz's dad); a lot of Rushmore does play like Harold and Maude, as the author of that article said; there are a lot of Jacques Cousteau references (well, obviously) in Life Aquatic. To some people, that's derivative, and I suppose that's true of Christopher Kelly. To me, this is just the way that people usually situate their art (true more often than not, I think), and it adds a lot of texture--especially if you can miss a reference once and catch it on a subsequent go-through, so that it serves both as an internal and as an outward-pointing element in whatever you're talking about.

But the thought that someone would find that an annoying quality was surprising to me, that's all. Though of course it can be done to excess...like in Virgil (ah ha!!)

Aside from that (and now I'm talking to Crawford), I can see that there are plenty of things that would drive people crazy about the other aspects of Wes Anderson's "preciousness," and I'm not sure how to come at those things. Some of it's just a matter of extreme self-consciousness: the consistent color schemes, the "uniforms" (good word for it) worn by the characters, the pop music slow-mos. These are all part of Anderson's anal scene-setting: it's like he wants to create this effect that takes his audience out of the experience somewhat and give everything a sort of manufactured sheen. That gives the audience the chance to respond to situations intellectually rather than emotionally (I also think of parts from the movies where characters' emotions are underplayed, like when Gene Hackman sort of deadpans his line to Gwyneth Paltrow about she shouldn't care about his dead mother since she isn't Gwyneth's real grandmother, which is of course an awful thing to say--but then the response to that has to be the audience's internal response, not the response that appears on film, because there really isn't one). I think that a lot of the time Anderson gets carried away with his flourishes, and this must account for the dalmatian mice and the punctuality award (and perhaps he was on drugs for Life Aquatic). I don't know; I think these things are just ridiculous for the sake of being ridiculous, though often they're shading the proceedings--the dalmatian mice say something about Ben Stiller; the punctuality award says something about Max Fischer. And sometimes ridiculous for ridiculous' sake works, and sometimes it doesn't, or maybe it does for some people and doesn't for others.

Zach Braff's shirt that matches the wallpaper is just smarmy (so is the gas station pump that's stuck in his car's fuel tank); the handoff of the Shins headphones is just too obvious a name-drop. With Anderson these kinds of silly things come across as organic to me. I understand they don't to everybody, and that's why a lot of people hate his movies, I guess. But I just don't.

But anyway, racist? No, as I said.

Oh, wait a minute. I don't mean to imply that Harold Bloom invented the idea of intertextuality; far from it. Julia Kristeva came up with the term, anyway, and obviously people had been noticing it for millennia before that (or else Virgil, Catullus, Horace, Callimachus, etc. wouldn't have written the way they did and might not have written at all). But I think that there is an intersection between Harold Bloom's theory of anxiety and Kristeva's intertextuality (though they're hardly synonymous)--so often artists make a reference to another work only to twist that reference and change its significance. I think that The Anxiety of Influence kind of gave intertextuality a boost in this country, because it showed a particular way that intertextuality, or anyway awareness of one's literary context, could manifest itself.

Anyway, I think it's clear that there are "intertextualities" in Wes Anderson's movies (so, much of Life Aquatic is a parody of Jacques Cousteau documentaries, while part of it is Moby-Dick; Rushmore is in some ways an anti-Graduate or even an anti-Peanuts, etc). And I guess Anderson's movies do kind of do this Bloomian thing where they carve out space for themselves in a tradition. Life Aquatic certainly misreads the character of Captain Ahab, turning him from this driven, demonic captain into a desperate bumbler. Rushmore (in part) turns the pathetic, submissive Charlie Brown type of character into a more or less pathetic, intense control freak. So I'd say the Bloom thing works, too. But I guess that previously I was thinking Kristeva and saying Bloom. My point was the same either way: both of them were concerned with the importance of artists' conscious situating of their work in a tradition--if they do it well, it shouldn't be a bad thing. Anyway, I'll shut up now!

Why do people persist in using the trendy and grammatically ignorant phrase "My bad"?

Whatever happened to "My mistake"?

"I disliked "Garden State" because Zach Braff used a hip soundtrack and carefully composed shots as a diversion to hide thin and uninteresting characters."

I, too, vehemently disliked that movie and that guy. Ugh! Thank you for putting your finger on why.