Also, John Is Not My Favorite Beatle

2 years ago

Also, John Is Not My Favorite Beatle

WOW, YOU’RE REALLY COMPLICATED

by Tess Lynch

As many of you already know, I like very much to have people I’ve never met over to a dinner party in my imagination. I spend a lot of time thinking what I would say to these people, and what they would say to me. I like to think about what my favorite fictional characters would do in their free time. Certain figures have calling cards; other figures have yelling cards. Your opinion of this particular person’s style may be favorable, or not. Larry David is fairly Advanced for having a yelling card as well as a self-aware sense of humor about his own pronounced style. I love Larry David for this.

And you know, I could easily, so easily, so infinitely easily be the kind of person who loves Wes Anderson: I love pretty vistas, and the Kinks; I love Owen Wilson and Anjelica Huston and interior design and old suitcases. I have tortoiseshell glasses. I buy things like old globes at the flea market. I basically style my whole life after a Wes Anderson movie, but thing thing is? I’m not all that crazy about Wes Anderson movies (that said, I haven’t seen Fantastic Mr. Fox yet).

Don’t get me wrong: I like them okay. It’s hard to actively hate a movie that’s pretty to look at, features some good tunes, and has some of your favorite actors in it. It’s hard to even dislike the movie without admitting that, of course, there are some things you did like; at the same time, movies like The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou don’t, for me, always equal the sum of their parts. In fact, Life Aquatic seemed to actually add up to less than the sum of its parts. How is that even possible?

The Darjeeling Limited left me with unpleasant feelings of deja vu: all of these movies suddenly felt like the same movie. I really liked Bottle Rocket (by the way, if you haven’t checked it out, you might enjoy watching Bottle Rocket the short) and Rushmore; The Royal Tenenbaums a little less, but I still enjoyed it. After that, I felt marketed to by Anderson’s Urbane Outfitters machine of manipulation. I knew that he knew that I wanted to see a big, impeccably restored typewriter sitting on top of a Scandinavian desk with an Eames chair. He knew who and what — and what kind of wallpaper — I wanted to see in my movies. I was impressed that he knew this, but I didn’t really care. I wanted something else from my movies.

Here is something to think about: a soap opera. A soap opera is the opposite of a Wes Anderson movie. Sure, they both have characters who wistfully stare out the window, and the idea of fantasy is alive in both; there are tangled webs of relationships. This is true of most stories, so put it away for now. A soap opera often sacrifices style and attention to detail in favor of a Ripping Yarn; Wes Anderson’s process is meticulous, and it’s more about creating an inhabitable world of fantasy. I suppose both soaps and Wes Anderson movies feature lots of white people. But Days of Our Lives maintains that its intention is to fuck with your emotions, and The Life Aquatic seemed to only try to make me feel like maybe I needed to stop shopping at Forever XXI and wish that those species of fish were real.

fish

So, with all due respect, I’m going to outline some of Wes Anderson’s future projects (or at least the one he will tell me about at my upcoming dinner party):

Cassius Daniels’ Fabulous Attic (2014):

Writer-by-day, inventor-by-night Cassius Daniels (Jason Schwartzman) constructs a fleet of helpful gadgets in his attic, so that he can avoid the outside world of which he is so frightened. His landlady Dominique (Anjelica Huston) and her handyman Patton (Owen Wilson) have their own neurotic tendencies: after an ankle injury which destroyed her ballet career, Dominique has taken to squirrel-taming and endlessly crying on a chaise, while Patton busies himself with constructing an underground terrarium and attempting to genetically engineer dinosaurs. When a foreclosure agent, Ursula (Cate Blanchett), appears to repossess Cassius’ house, he begins to venture into the outside world.

Les Macarons (2015):

Victor Cavalier (Bill Murray) was nearly killed by his nanny Yvette (Catherine Keener, marvelously evil in flashbacks to 1960’s-era Paris throughout the film) when she attempted to feed him a poisonous macaron on one Sunday by the seashore. Victor and his lover, Bernice (Samantha Morton), travel by bicycle in search of the bakery which had created the infamous cookie. Along the way, they encounter a wise but mysterious band of Romanian Gypsies who sell them a medicinal potion able to cure ennui.

Avian Dynasty (2017):

Myrtle (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Hiram Cabbot (Luke Wilson) are zoologist explorers who have been stationed in Morocco, commissioned to track down and tag the elusive Mauritanian Zebra Gull. Living in a mid-century modern apartment carved into a tree, the couple grapple with feelings of je ne sais quoi when Hiram loses his lucky cashmere slipper while attempting to chase a kite. Myrtle tries to commit suicide by eating juniper berries, but is revived by a local herbal healer (Youssou N’Dour). Anderson was rumored to have created the film’s fictional Mauritanian Zebra Gulls using only the eyelashes of actual zebras.