Well, I managed to miss this fantastic essay last week. But I am glad for that, as I encountered it after just stumbling across Christian Lorentzen’s crucifixion of Wes Anderson as hipster messiah. I often recall with glee the end of The Life Aquatic, in which our holy moment becomes curated by none other than a wonderfully cartoonish fish. As it turns out, this great metaphysical bait and switch is the punchline to which the entire film had been leading, and Lorentzen’s devaluation of this experience rings hollow.
And I think Paul Jaussen’s essay explains why.
For starters:
However, viewing Anderson’s work as childish fantasy doesn’t take into account his very grown-up commitment to depicting our often tragic experiences and inevitable losses. The Life Aquatic, after all, was shot on location at sea, conveying a physical presence reminiscent of the Lumières’ train. Similarly, the film’s moments of understated violence are both fact and glimmer, somewhere between embedded reporting and a John Wayne picture. To accuse Anderson’s films of pure fantasy misses his much more interesting struggle between animation and death.
And commenting on Mr. Fox:
Anderson’s love of ships, Victorian architecture, classic automobiles, and Indian trains makes Boggis, Bunce, and Bean International Supermarket a surprising location to end the film. Indeed, the nearest precedent might be one of the last shots in Bottle Rocket, when Owen Wilson’s character marches off into the gray landscape of a prison yard. The world of upper-class objects, with patina and history and physical beauty, has been replaced with mass cultural simulacra, the cheap and often unhappy imitations which do not as readily capture our imaginations or the tender gaze of a camera. The contemporary supercenter is not exactly the stuff dreams are made of.
Or is it? In Fox’s final speech, he offers a toast celebrating the joys of the artificial. Bean’s famous hybridized apples may look fake, he admits, “But at least they’ve got stars on them.” And indeed they do. All the more reason for the Foxes to raise their juice boxes in honor of their “survival.” In a ravaged world, chased from their holes and their trees, animals, like human beings, adapt. Dahl’s world of country manners and home cooking may be gone, or, as many critics contend, increasingly available at the farmer’s markets of the wealthy few. The rest of us will survive, thanks to the inexpensive goods of the industrial supply chain. Anderson here seems to mark the ironic reversal of our situation, in which synthetic, artificially animated things inevitably usurp a natural past. Perhaps the reality of contemporary life is fantasy, but at least it is a fantasy wherein we can survive.
Alas:
And there is something fantastic about that, like cinema itself. The train and the trip to the moon are ultimately inseparable, and they always have been. Both are equally magical, equally realistic. Anderson’s wit is to show us that a children’s story, far from affording a retreat from the adult world, illuminates it. Movies sculpt in time, and our time, for better or worse, is already, inescapably, covered in make-believe stars.