In addition to waxing rhapsodic about Elia Kazan in his interview with IndieWire’s Eric Kohn, Wes Anderson talked about just why he was so drawn to portraying the 1950s. As the rave reviews for the film have indicated, it’s a time period uniquely suited to Anderson’s meticulous aesthetic.
And that’s a style that fans seem hellbent on replicating themselves, via the palest of imitations, through TikTok videos that show off their creators attempting “The Wes Anderson Challenge.” Symmetrical compositions, intense color coordination, shoebox diorama-like use of the frame and depth of field. All there. All not nearly as good as anything Anderson can do himself. Each imitation is more obvious than the last: And as Kohn indicated in his piece, these imitations are not something Anderson himself ever pays attention to.
Now the director’s opened up a little bit more about his dismissal of the imitators in an interview with The Times (via The Independent).
“I’m very good at protecting myself from seeing all that stuff,” he said.
“If somebody sends me something like that I’ll immediately erase it and say, ‘Please, sorry, do not send me things of people doing me.’ Because I do not want to look at it, thinking, ‘Is that what I do? Is that what I mean?’ I don’t want to see too much of someone else thinking about what I try to be because, God knows, I could then start doing it.”
Aside from the offensiveness of fans thinking they know a director’s style better than the director (or thinking it can be so easily boiled down to AI-ready bullet points of an essence), it’s so indicative of the moment, in which poor copies of great work are thought to be entertaining of themselves. The particular concepts that have gone viral such as a Wes Anderson-meets-“Star Wars” concept called “The Galactic Menagerie” (powered entirely by AI animation of course) could not be more obvious and tired.
Believe it or not there are striking symmetrical compositions in “Star Wars” too — the opening shot of the original film, with the Imperial Star Destroyer flying overhead, practically qualifies on its own. Yes, actually, the maker of “Star Wars” had a distinct visual eye of his own, with environments he populated with characters and creatures as “quirky” as anything Anderson himself has come up with. Making bold artistic choices for how to use the frame is generally considered a foundation of filmmaking.
It’s another sign of creativity flattened as knowledge of film culture and history continues to shrink: Wes Anderson has to meet “Star Wars” because there are no other reference points the parodists are aware of. At least the parody that may have kicked off all of these, SNL’s imagining of an Anderson horror movie, “The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders,” did more than offer an algorithmic mashup.
Giving a close read to a filmmaker’s style — how they use color, lighting, framing, depth of field, blocking of the actors — is essential for film literacy. But to be film literate, it’s important to be “well read,” so to speak. There is more to cinema than Anderson (and “Star Wars”), and there is so much more to Anderson’s cinema than the tropes that some of his more literal-minded admirers keep insisting on identifying.
It’s artistic appreciation as the pinning of butterflies to a board. It’s comedy as the mere identification of tropes and adding nothing more. One’s worldview reduced to simply pointing things out like Rick Dalton sitting on his couch, beer can in hand, index finger extended in recognition to his TV screen.
When does an homage become an insult? What the imitators don’t understand is that Anderson’s work is far more irreducible than they insist it is, so much more alive than anything that could be that parody-ready. Where’s the “She’s my Rushmore, Max” moment in any of these parodies? The “but I will say, he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace”? There’s deep human feeling in Anderson’s films. You will not find that in the parodies. There’s extraordinary craft in Anderson’s films (every frame of “Isle of Dogs” was carefully lit). You will not see that appreciated in the parodies.
The tropes are not in Anderson’s films but in the lack of imagination of these “fans.”
