ARTS
6

Thursday, July 11, 2019
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

“You can never publish my love,” 
Rogue Wave chants, in the song that 
the title of this series riffs on. Maybe 
that’s true, and we can never quite 
account for our love on paper or in 
print, but we sure can try. That’s what 
this series is devoted to: publishing our 
love. Us, the Arts section of The Michi-
gan Daily, talking about artists, some 
of the people we love the most. Perhaps 
these are futile approximations of love 
for the poet who told us we deserve to 
be heard, the director who changed the 
way we see the world, the singer we 
see as an old friend. But who ever said 
futile can’t still be beautiful?
[An homage to David Foster Wal-
lace’s “David Lynch Keeps his Head.”]
1. WHO THIS ARTICLE IS 
ABOUT
To date, Writer/Director Wes 
Anderson has made nine feature 
films, four short films and three high-
ly stylized commercials. He has been 
nominated for seven Oscars — those 
being two for Best Animated Feature, 
three for Best Original Screenplay 
and one each of Best Picture and Best 
Director — though he has won none. 
A Wes Anderson piece is known by its 
unique pastel, tableaux style and its 
melancholic, deadpan humor. Ander-
son has been referred to as one of the 
few actively working ‘auteurs,’ a term 
associated with historic filmmakers 
like Mike Nichols, Luis Buñuel and 

Jean-Luc Goddard.
1(A). THE FOOTNOTE FOR SEC-
TION 1
The three directors listed as 
examples of ‘auteurs’ were chosen 
only half-arbitrarily, each of these 
three artists having lent something to 
Anderson’s films somewhere over the 
course of his twenty-six-year career. 
A hundred names of filmmakers 
from the last seventy years could have 
been swapped in or swapped out to fit 
this label. Auteur is a fairly vaunted 
title, but it’s really just a fancy way 
to describe a filmmaker who is inti-
mately involved in the entire creative 
process, from the very inception 
of the idea to the last cuts in post-
production — an artist who retains a 
near autocratic level of control over 
all aspects of the film. The term origi-
nated in the sixties during the French 
New Wave as a way to classify direc-
tors who operated outside the Hol-
lywood establishment, though this 
particular distinction has been all but 
lost over the years.
2. ENTERTAINMENTS WES 
ANDERSON HAS MADE THAT 
ARE MENTIONED IN THIS ARTI-
CLE
“Bottle Rocket” (1996), “Rush-
more” (1998), “The Royal Tenen-
baums” (2001), “The Life Aquatic 
with Steve Zissou” (2004), “Hotel 
Chevalier” (2007), “The Darjeel-
ing Limited” (2007), “Fantastic Mr. 
Fox” (2009), “Moonrise Kingdom” 
(2012), “CASTELLO CAVALCANTI” 
(2013), “The Grand Budapest Hotel” 
(2014), “Come Together” (2016) “Isle 

of Dogs” (2018)
3. THE DIRECTOR’S BACK-
GROUND AND OTHER WIKIPE-
DIA-ISH STUFF
Wes Anderson was born in Hous-
ton, Texas in 1969 to an archeologist 
and a father who worked in adver-
tising. His parents separated and 
divorced when he was eight years old, 
the event deeply affecting the young 
boy. Anderson made silent films with 
his Dad’s Super 8 camera as a child, 
using his friends and brothers as cast 
and crew. Anderson attended the 
University of Texas at Austin after 
graduating high school. There he 
pursued a philosophy degree while 
working part time as a cinema pro-
jectionist.
At school he took as many play-
writing classes as he had time for, 
meeting his future creative partner 
Owen Wilson in one of these classes 
in his second year. Anderson and 
Wilson became roommates, bonding 
over their love for directors like Cas-
savetes, Malick and Huston, as well 
as their shared desire to create. The 
duo made their first short film “Bot-
tle Rocket” together in 1993, when 
Anderson was twenty-four. The short 
made it to Sundance, word-of-mouth 
eventually landing them a five-mil-
lion-dollar deal for their first feature 
by the same name.
Anderson has an older brother 
Mel who works as a physician, and a 
younger brother Eric who works as 
a writer and artist. Eric’s paintings 
have appeared in many of his broth-
er’s films, most notably as the water-

color movie-poster for Anderson’s 
second film, “Rushmore.” Anderson 
married Lebanese writer Juman 
Malouf in 2010. The couple had a 
daughter, Freya, in 2016. Anderson 
has lived in Paris for many years.
4. THE PART THAT WAS SUP-
POSED TO BE THE WHOLE ARTI-
CLE
“Fantastic Mr. Fox” came out 
when I was ten years old, and I prob-
ably saw it a year or two afterward. 
I remember finding it to be mostly 
strange and off-putting. The taxider-
my-like puppets and their off-kilter 
family banter was a departure from 
the easily comedic Aardman Clay-
mation film’s I’d adored as a kid (spe-
cific devotion paid to “Chicken Run” 
and “Wallace and Gromit: A Grand 
Day Out”). And though I don’t think 
I immediately got it, “Mr. Fox” had 
my curiosity piqued. I got the sense 
that this kids movie trusted me a little 
more as a viewer, that there was more 
to this fantastical 
forest than I could 
then see — there 
was a dramatic tex-
ture to the movie 
that most family 
flicks go without. 
Having 
gorged 
myself on two “Toy 
Story” movies and 
a “Shrek” sequel, 
I was left forever 
waiting for the “Mr. 
Fox” sequel that 
never came.
I ran into Ander-
son next at the 2015 
Academy Awards, where “The Grand 
Budapest Hotel” was nominated 
for nine Oscars, winning four. I was 
reluctant to stay up late, knowing I’d 
be tired at school the next day, but I 
couldn’t pull myself away from the 
screen. What was this funny looking 
pink-and-purple comedy that kept 
getting nominated next to “Whip-
lash” and “Birdman?” Considering 
myself to be a high-brow ticket-buyer 
at the time, I stuck to Iñárritu and 
didn’t explore “Grand Budapest” any 
further.
Two years later, during my senior 
year of high school I made a docu-
mentary for a C-SPAN student com-
petition. My team and I were struck 
by how creative the previous year’s 
winner had been with her film (my 
then, and continued, understand-
ing of C-SPAN as synonymous with 
parched). Convinced we needed to 
spice our direction up a bit, we hunt-
ed for fresh inspiration. It was a piece 
of algorithmic, targeted-marketing, 
divine intervention that brought to 
my YouTube feed the H&M commer-
cial “Come Together” that Anderson 
had made that year (that week, even). 

I was instantly enamored, watching 
“Come Together” and his previous 
Prada advertisement “CASTELLO 
CAVALCANTI” on repeat the rest 
of the school day. I showed both the 
films to my documentary co-conspir-
ators and suddenly we had our muse. 
That was a Monday. By Saturday 
night I had watched every Anderson 
film, short and advert to date.
4(A). WHY THIS TYPE OF ARTI-
CLE MAKES ME UNCOMFORT-
ABLE
I’ve found trying to nail down 
exactly 
why 
something 
is/was 
important to me is a tall order. I was 
surprised by this. I didn’t think it 
would be all that different to what 
I’ve written before, but designing 
this article was difficult, a frustrat-
ing process for me. I think the exer-
cise of repackaging into tight, punchy 
sentences my admiration for an art-
ist that has sprawled out of control 
makes me nervous that I’m going to 
leave 
something 
out, or not do that 
admiration justice. 
I pity my friends, 
family and associ-
ates who had to live 
through my Ander-
son phase, as it was 
all-consuming. 
It 
was 
quotes 
and 
Wes-only chit-chat 
and a subconscious 
structured in plani-
metrically framed 
dolly slides — I fan-
boyed to an embar-
rassing 
extent. 
Wrapping that all up into a nice little 
article-essay feels like a mountainous 
task, fear of misrepresenting both the 
artist and the late 2016/early 2017 ver-
sion of myself always looming large.
I also have doubts about how 
worthy of an article my affection 
is. When planning this article out, I 
was anxious about the threat of hid-
ing the artist too much, when, really, 
I think this should be about them. I 
feel much more comfortable writ-
ing a piece about the reasons for my 
affection toward a work of art rather 
than the affection itself. The end 
goal, I think, is to motivate some-
one else to give it a try. So, maybe, if 
they’re lucky, they’ll have a similar 
experience to mine. Then the purest, 
most sincere version of this article 
is probably one line: Go watch “The 
Royal Tenenbaums.” Experience 
it for yourself. Walk into it with an 
open mind, and maybe you’ll find 
your entire sense of what a movie is/
can be changed by the time you read 
“Directed by Wes ANDERSON.” 

A ten-part ode to Anderson

FILM NOTEBOOK

DESIGN BY KATHRYN HALVERSON

STEPHEN SATARINO 
Daily Film Editor

That was a 
Monday. By 
Saturday night, 
I had watched 
every Anderson 
film, short and 
advert to date.

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