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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