On elephant journal, I explore what happened to the aspect of Wes Anderson’s older films in which a white male undergoes a transformation to a new paradigm of living:
About a decade ago, acclaimed director Wes Anderson started taking some flak for what critics perceived as repetition of childish content, or content he had imagined in his youth. I didn’t agree with the Hollywood echo chamber at the time, but I also never really got Anderson’s films until “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” (2004). Despite being a twentysomething, I related far too much to Bill Murray’s rendition of a man in mid-life crisis.
As I reacquainted myself with Anderson’s back catalogue (and discovered his feature debut, “Bottle Rocket”, from 1996), I started to notice symbols, character types and traits that reappear in a seemingly intentional way: the overachieving kid, the has-been adult, the disgruntled wife, ex-wife, or widow and even the pregnant woman. Then there are the inanimate ones, like jumpsuits on a team of men.
Certain of these have continued in Anderson’s later films—some as central as children living with an adult level of emotional complexity, and some as peripheral as a triangular tent.
But no character type stood out more to me than the contemporary white/Western man in a state of failure, disgrace or disillusionment.
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(Image by Arvind Grover on Flickr, used by CC permission.)
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