I Always Wanted To Be Wes Anderson

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

I Always Wanted To Be Wes Anderson

I’ve thought about Wes Anderson a lot lately.

I think there’s a trough, as your age becomes equidistant from Max Fischer and Steve Zissou, where it’s important that you act all better than Wes Anderson. At least, it seems to be an important rite of passage for most of my friends and contemporaries. It was probably most acute for people exactly my age (I’m twenty-seven) who were in high school when “Rushmore” and “Tenenbaums” came out, then went away to college only to discover that what made you unique in high school (you liked the films of Wes Anderson) made you the very opposite of unique at your hippie-dippie art school, or in the hippie-dippie arts clique at your gargantuan state school. It was there you discovered that dudes who, like me, probably did not realize Max Fischer was more of an anti-hero than someone to be revered the first time they saw “Rushmore,” so blinded were they by the cool blazer and ambitious auteur school plays and girls whose highest aspiration was to be a third-rate Margot Tenenbaum were a dime a dozen and still overpriced. In fact, Wes Anderson fandom was merely the tip of an entire iceberg of things that had set you so gloriously far apart from your peers in high school that, in college and then in your twenties, would only serve to make you so painfully like everyone else sharing in the well-educated-hipster mono-opinion.

But to front on Wes Anderson, as I have, passionately, deliriously, running as far away from that opinion monolith as my skinny white legs will carry me, is to A) front on how important he was to you and to B) front on how, you know, great he is. But I’m not here to defend Wes Anderson to you. I’m just here to point out something I thought was interesting that I realized after recently seeing “Rushmore,” “Tenenbaums,” and “Life Aquatic” again on the big screen at The New Beverly here in Los Angeles (which is, by the way, the best place in Los Angeles). This thing has probably already been observed a million times, but to my knowledge, never so hastily or so ill-researched, so it’s worth doing for that reason alone. There may be more examples of the thing I’m about to describe in “Bottle Rocket,” but I haven’t seen it in a while, I only saw “Mr. Fox” the one time, and I’ve never seen “Darjeeling,” as it fell smack dab in the middle of my Anderson Effrontery Trough (or A.E.T. if you’re trying to save time while hitting on someone in a bar by passing this observation off as your own.)

In “Rushmore,” Max Fischer says “I guess you’ve just gotta find something you love to do and then… do it for the rest of your life. For me, it’s going to Rushmore.” To him Rushmore represents transcending his humble origins as the son of a barber, and to be there, to be doing a million clubs and activities, to be wearing blazers and pins and berets, means more to him than anything, including the good grades that will actually keep him there.

In “The Royal Tenenbaums,” Eli Cash confides in Royal, “I always wanted to be a Tenenbaum.” He’s spent his entire life orbiting this weird dynasty and its over-achieving offspring, but all the critical acclaim in the world will not retroactively put him on the cover of “Family Of Geniuses.” He can be as miserable and neurotic as a Tenenbaum, but he’ll never actually be one.

In “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, Ned Plimpton finds out that he is (supposedly) the only son of his childhood hero and is granted immediate placement on the once-mythic Team Zissou, though in truth he’s only given the red cap and speedo because Steve is looking to inject new life into his film franchise, and because it would be nice to have someone around who still views him as the man he was. Ned abandons his career (and ultimately, his life) in pursuit of his 11-year-old self’s wildest dream.

Something tells me Wes Anderson, or at least my imagined Wes Anderson, always wanted to go to Rushmore, always wanted to be a Tenenbaum, always wanted to be on Team Zissou. He’s a kid from Houston, Texas. I’m a kid from Phoenix, Arizona. When you are in the middle of sprawling dusty too-hot suburban nowhere and you are too smart for your own good, everyone involved in making the culture you consume seems leagues cooler than you could ever be. And yes, you pursue a life of making culture for others to consume because the act of doing it is fun for you, but you also do it because you think someday, if you have kids in the middle of sprawling dusty too-hot suburban nowhere looking up to you and you get to be the subject of Zissou-style Q&As at film festivals, you will at last feel cooler than you ever thought you could be. (You may have already attempted to look cooler. You may have invested in blazers and berets. If wearing these articles actually makes you feel like anything but a fraud or a phony, you may actually be a fraud or a phony.)

At every stage of life there are in-crowds and cliques and “classes” and “generations.” We are always, on some level, certain that once we are granted admission to one of these in-crowds, we will at last feel AUTHENTIC. We will finally know with certainty that we are an author or a filmmaker or a comedian, and not just a kid from middle America whose bag of tricks no one has gotten wise to yet. I have been lucky to get to achieve a couple things my high school self was convinced would surely trigger the irreversible segue into A Real Cool Life Free Of Mundanity And Uncinematic Moments. I am here to tell my high school self, you two most common emotional states are still “Angsty” and “Paunchy.”

My imagined Wes Anderson (who may in fact have nothing to do with the real one) has always wanted to be French, and more importantly, wanted to be French in the 60’s. I have always wanted to be in New York in the late 70’s, or one of that first class of California film brats in the 60’s, or be any British person at just about any time in history. Some of us were never any good at science, yet all we want to make are time machines. I actually think I had the privilege of being around at an artistic place and time that future children-of-nobody-and-nowhere will pine for (UCB in the mid-2000’s, one of the dorkiest, unsexiest artistic times-and-places ever, but still a pretty cool one, as they go) and all I could think when I was there was how it wasn’t CBGB.

(Again, we’re all guilty of taking on affectations, be it in our art, our speech, or on our bodies, because we think if we seem more like that which we emulate, we’ll feel more like that which we emulate. And again, I think the only true phonies are the ones who actually feel different, or better, when they do this. They are the ones who put a black eye on the game and they are, unfortunately, the only ones who never feel the hollow superficial clank of their own phoniness.)

This is not to say we shouldn’t do the things we are doing that are secretly motivated by our desire to wake up one day transformed into gods of European cinema. Just that we should stop expecting them to transform us into gods of European cinema, and realize that we’ve won, with the highest score possible, if all they ever do is transform us into a truer, kinder, better version of ourselves.

All of us are, as Esteban so eloquently put it, “the Zissou.” And it is, as Steve ultimately realizes, an adventure. But your adventure isn’t for you to admire and pine for. You will never feel the way about it you felt about someone else’s adventure you watched from home as a kid in whatever Texas or Arizona you grew up in. Mostly you will just feel tired, confused, underappreciated, and paunchy. Why anybody would ever want to be on your team will be a mystery to you. The most truly miraculous thing that can happen to you is not an award or an accolade but merely that you keep doing whatever it is you do in spite of everything.

I always wanted to be Wes Anderson, so much so that for a long time I thought it was cool to reject Wes Anderson. Now that I know with complete certainty I will never be Wes Anderson or feel like what I thought it would feel like to be Wes Anderson, or feel like what I thought it would feel like to be any of the people I admire, I am trying to content myself with the fact that the speed of my mundane life will never ramp down into beautiful poetic slow-motion, and The Kinks will never start playing suddenly out of nowhere, and it will always feel the way it feels, and I will always do the things I do.

And Margaret Yang has always been perfect for me, it just took me a while to realize it.