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inner life and wes anderson
Last week, Cathy H. forwarded on this article to me, which critiques hipster culture by way of critiquing the films of hipster posterboy Wes Anderson.
The most interesting part of this article, for me, is the way it looks squarely at the "casual racism" of Anderson's films. I've seen each of Anderson's films as they've come out, and I'll confess to being won over by their substantial charisma and charm, but I think this criticism is spot-on. Over Christmas break, I was talking to people about The Life Aquatic and I said "I liked it, but I wish it didn't feature a black character who does nothing but hang around playing guitar." I mean, I like a Portugese David Bowie cover as much as the next guy, but I have a pretty serious problem with straight-up minstrelsy.
That said, I'm not sure that I agree with all of the examples that the article raises—it seems obvious to me that the scene (in The Royal Tenenbaums) where the pre-redemption Royal Tenenbaum calls Henry Sherman "Coltrane" is meant to illustrate Royal's racism rather than being an expression of racism on Anderson's part. On the other hand, I think the article's point about Tenenbaum's Pagoda being "pretty much bereft of any individuality" is spot-on. To me it comes down to "inner life": the goals, desires, feelings, or anything resembling what we'd traditionally call "subjectivity" that a character in a movie gets accorded. If a character is granted little or no inner life then they're really functioning as a prop, not a character, and although the Belafonte is nothing if not ethnically diverse, only the Caucasians are characters; the rest are props.
Rushmore's Margaret Yang and Bottle Rocket's Inez are, for me, borderline cases—although they're both stereotypes (it's hard to think of cultural types more "stock" than the Asian whiz-kid and the Hispanic maid) the movie does grant them some degree of inner life, although this inner life is limited, almost exclusively, to a desire for / interest in the strangely irresistible Caucasian protagonist. Seems fake to me—and while an argument can be made that all of Anderson's films are really about the comfort of the fake or imaginary, and while I'm sympathetic towards this theme, I still can't help but wish that the fantasy of Anderson's world(s) didn't seem so goddamn colonial.
The magazine this article comes from, N+1, looks pretty good to me: check out their annotated table of contents (links to the actual articles themselves are, somewhat confusingly, stored on a different page, so you need to sort of toggle from one page to the other to really make sense of what you're doing). Labels: media commentary, race |
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
5:15 PM
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