Tuesday Miscellany.

* Sarah Palin's controversial proposal to create a "Department of Law" with the power to block ethics claims against the president is turning a lot of heads this morning.

* I really want to read 1Q84.

* Swine flu: now more popular than Viagra.

* Steve Zissou: scientist.

* Another That Makes Me Think Of from Ze.

* We Are Wizards, a Harry Potter fandom documentary, with appearances from Brad Neely of Wizard People Dear Reader fame. (via @austinkleon)

Sunday!

* Literature: no cell phones allowed.

JULIET: Fakn death. C U Latr.

ROMEO: gud plan.

Recently published narrative fiction is still uneasy about the telephone, much less cell phones or the Internet...

* In defense of The Life Aquatic: Jamie Rich defends the most unfairly maligned of all of Wes Anderson's films. (Via Rushmore Academy.)

* 'North Carolina Town Prints Own Currency to Support Local Business.' I support the effort, but I thought that was illegal...

* The Washington Post continues its efforts to make up for allowing George Will to lie with impunity on its editorial pages.

* Muppets vs. Zombies. If only it were real.

Part 2 of Matt Zoller Seitz's five-part Wes Anderson documentary is now up. The focus this time is on Scorsese, Lester, and Nichols.

If you missed the video for the first one, it should be said that the video (and not the text) is the whole link. The link to the video is practically invisible; scroll down and keep your eye on the right side of the page.

The House Next Door and Moving Image are running a five-part series on Wes Anderson, "the most influential American filmmaker of the post-Baby Boom generation." (Tarantino who?) Here's Part 1.

When I interviewed Anderson for a 1998 Star-Ledger article about A Charlie Brown Christmas, directed by the late animator Bill Melendez, Anderson cited Melendez as one of three major influences on his work, so we’ll start there. Anderson told me that he and his screenwriting collaborator, Owen Wilson, conceived Rushmore hero Max Fischer as Charlie Brown plus Snoopy. He said that Miss Cross, the teacher Max adores and will draw into a weirdly Freudian love triangle with the industrialist Mr. Blume, is a combination of Charlie Brown’s teacher and his unattainable love object, the little red-haired girl. Anderson and Wilson even made Max a working-class barber’s son, just like Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, and gave Seymour Cassel, the actor playing Bert Fischer, glasses similar to Schulz’s.

But Schulz’s impact manifests itself in deeper, more persistent ways—particularly in Anderson’s characters who, regardless of age, seem, like Schulz’s preternaturally eloquent kids, to be frozen in a dream space between childhood and maturity. Think of how Rushmore’s Blume pauses during a phone conversation to run across a basketball court and slap down a student’s would-be layup; the now-adult children in The Royal Tenenbaums navigating adult emotional minefields within the confines of a childhood home crammed with toys, grade-school art, and nostalgic knickknacks; Steve Zissou in The Life Aquatic transforming a submarine into a gigantic clubhouse and rec center; and the brothers of The Darjeeling Limited turning a supposed spiritual voyage through India into a more affluent, adult cousin of a summer camp stint.

The arrested adolescence thing is right on the money—we've talked about this before—but the Peanuts thing is strange. What a weirdly intriguing misreading of one's own film...

Tim ups the ante with Wordles of Ulysses and Paradise Lost. I'll take up his challenge with five killer Wordles: the scripts of Wes Anderson.











We see again that Wordles are both fun and smart—here, for instance, the inescapable importance of want is highlighted, as well as the crucial distinction between thinking and knowing. Yeah.

BONUS: "Hotel Chevalier."

I'm back, and I've got pictures from San Francisco—but not right now. Right now all I have time for is a quick link to the LEGO Zissou Society.



Links and photos tonight...

The Suicide of Genius: Owen Wilson and Wes Anderson in Life and Art. At 24LiesaSecond, via The House Next Door.

The subtext of The Royal Tenenbaums is one of collisions. The sanctified world of genius, creativity and art collide with the world of contemporary psychology. Diagnosis, psychosis, breakdown, and divorce emerge like a hydra in the wings of Anderson’s work. And the point of collision is Eli Cash, played by Owen Wilson. Through Cash, Anderson’s tragic-comedic vision reaches its apex and foreshadows its decline into sentimentality and self-apologetic quirk.

Of course, as an unrepentant Wes Anderson fanboy, I don't agree that his later works are failures in this or any other way—but the thesis is interesting. And I think there's something to Lasky's idea that Anderson shifts in Tenenbaums from a model of autonomous, tragedy-laced genius towards a comparatively more hopeless one of psychological and psychochemical dysfunction:

Genius, in their early work, is ineffable, resplendent with the trappings of depressive, rumple-haired Nietzschean eccentricity and Faustian striving and discontent. Anderson as writer/director and Wilson as writer/actor depict the creative spirit that defies diagnosis as it is ratified by its own insatiable drive, as it rebels against social pressures and cultural environments. Conversely, the therapeutic imperative of our contemporary society is to contextualize and diagnose, to encourage radical self-assessment in hopes of propagating permanent stability and happiness. As of late, Anderson’s original vision has been compromised by this imperative: his idea of the troubled genius has lost its romantic cache. Its integrity as a thing of heroism and beauty has been ostensibly diagnosed.

This may go a long way towards explaining why Rushmore is so much better-loved than Zissou.

New York Magazine has a long feature on America's greatest living folk hero, Wes Anderson, on the eve of Darjeeling. The latter half of the article deals with the lukewarm reception for the (much, much underappreciated) Life Aquatic, as well as Anderson's reaction to the reaction—as well as what all this means for the new one:

Still, Anderson was tense at the premiere in Venice. It is the same at all premieres—Anderson worrying about how his movies, crafted in something of a parallel universe, will play in the world at large. “Mostly it’s just a process of steeling oneself for what’s going to happen. I’m sitting there thinking, Is the movie gonna be received with a lull of silence? Or with a boo?” says Anderson. “That’s a common thing in Europe, you know? They boo here.”

For the record, they did not boo. The early reviews were mainly positive, much more so than with Aquatic, though there was the requisite grumbling that the movie was “good but more of the same,” as Anderson puts it, shaking his head, after reading what Variety had to say. But the director does not seem particularly hurt or defensive this time around. “It’s probably not a good idea to put too much of your self-esteem on something like this, because, really, you can make a bad movie and it can be well received, and you can make a good movie and it can be badly received,” he says. “I think people who’ve done it a lot have learned, like the Coen brothers, for instance. My impression of them is that they really aren’t that vulnerable to what comes back at them. And they could get anything from any of their movies. Like The Big Lebowski, the first time I saw it I thought it didn’t quite work, but the second time I saw it I thought, Oh, I didn’t get it. I just didn’t understand it. And I really loved it then.” He adds, “You know, everyone’s limited. You can only do so much. I think in the end all I can do is say, Let me live the moment. I can still do what I want to do. I’m lucky enough to be able to do these movies so far.”

Much more on Wes in the next couple of days, no doubt...

Shoot the Projectionist has declared September Wes Anderson month, as all months should be. I was all prepared to take issue with his first post when I saw the link from The House Next Door ("Wes Anderson, Nostalgia, and the 11-Year-Old Point of View"), but I wound up mostly agreeing with it, though I would have phrased the central point rather differently. It's not that Wes Anderson chooses to shoot things from the perspective of an eleven-year-old because he's hung up on childhood, but rather that (at least for the characters he's focused on thus far, Bottle Rocket definitely included) there simply is no other perspective from which to film. For Anderson, the same tragicomic feelings of surreality, anxiety, and time-is-running-out impermanence that characterize childhood characterize the entirety of all our lives; the differences between the two states are differences in content, not form.

This is to say that, for Anderson, childhood is the form adult life takes. We never grow up. We can't. There's nothing to grow up into.

Anderson's entire project is predicated on this centrality of entropy, loss, and nostalgia in human life, and the ways in which we learn to live with them. If you don't buy that that's what life is like, you're not going to be a Wes Anderson fan. I buy it, and so I am.

UPDATE: I really like what Ed has to say in his follow-up to my comment:

Those of us that love--and recognize ourselves in--Anderson's movies, are not necessarily obsessed with our childhoods so much as we see no difference between childhood and adulthood. I've been told I was a crotchety old curmudgeon since I was a child, and now, as an adult, I'm often referred to as child-like. This is an element of the Salinger association that I considered bringing up but left out for fluidity's sake. In Salinger, all of the kids act like grown-ups and all of the adults act like children. Think of "Rushmore"'s Dirk Calloway and Mr. Blume.

But, for me, when things start to get really profound is in "Tenenbaums" when these twin impulses are merged into single bodies: each of the Tenenbaum children is a prodigy, the very definition of a precocious child. As an adult, though, each of them is in stasis, and therefore child-like. By the fact of exhibiting the same behavior that once read as "adult," they are now childish.