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How has Wes Anderson maintained modernity in his films through the use of nostalgia?

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How has Wes Anderson maintained modernity in his films through the use of nostalgia?

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Written by Marianna Cerini, CNN

Keeping you in the know, Culture Queue is an ongoing series of recommendations for timely books to read, films to watch and podcasts and music to listen to.

If a Wes Anderson fan were to make a list of all the things that make them so bewitched with the director's films, it might include the following: bespoke design, symmetrical close-ups, a highly saturated color palette, eccentric characters and impeccably studied outfits. But also carefully shot compositions, elaborate sets, observant human comedy and a sense for the whimsical that few other filmmakers have been able to match.

"The Royal Tenenbaums," which was released in cinemas 20 years ago today, features all these elements. In fact, it was Anderson's first movie to lay them out in the open and cement his style -- though this was his third movie after "Bottle Rocket" in 1996 and "Rushmore" in 1998.

It's no wonder that, two decades on, many consider it the most significant of his works -- the archetypical Anderson film.

"I would define Anderson's aesthetic as first and foremost that of a collector: of someone committed to bringing together disparate items, each uniquely beautiful or interesting in its own singular way, and arranging them in a kind of pristine and ordered display," wrote Donna Kornhaber, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of the book " Wes Anderson: A Collector's Cinema," in an email.

"'The Royal Tenenbaums' was absolutely the first real appearance of this aesthetic in Anderson's work. I'd argue that it is the urtext of Anderson's filmography because it is the film where his subject matter and his style are most closely in sync."

Looking back on it, it's hard to disagree.

A visual tour-de-force, "The Royal Tenenbaums" is the cult classic that informed all of Anderson's subsequent work -- and without which the Wes Anderson-esque world of books, Instagram accounts, music videos and fashion that's become so entrenched in modern pop culture wouldn't quite be the phenomenon it is today.

A movie of firsts

While Anderson's films are instantly recognizable for their hyperdeliberate style and compelling cinematography, they're also quintessentially "Andersonian" for their unorthodox plots and myriad characters.

"The Royal Tenenbaums" helped forge that path.

Split into a series of chapters as if it were a novel, the movie tells the story of the great (albeit greatly dysfunctional) Tenenbaum family, helmed by patriarch Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman), as everyone comes together during an unexpected winter reunion in their New York mansion.

A disbarred attorney, Royal has been living in a hotel, on credit, since separating from his wife Etheline (Anjelica Huston), whom he's trying to win back. His children, three former child prodigies, are to blame for his financial indigence. There's Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), who was adopted and has been a gifted playwright since ninth grade but hasn't had a hit for some time; Richie (Luke Wilson), a former tennis champion; and Chas (Ben Stiller), who was a financial speculator as a kid and is now going through a breakdown because of the death of his wife.

The offbeat, "outsider" figures that populate the film would go on to become a recurring feature of Anderson's work -- think of "Moonrise Kingdom," "The Grand Budapest Hotel" and "The Life Aquatic."

But the movie also solidified other stylistic tropes.

"The Royal Tenenbaums" was the first of Anderson's films to really merge together storytelling and visual art, taking the filmmaker's stunning attention to details to an entire new level of meticulousness (like the family's weather-beaten banner that waves gently atop their house, or the dalmatian mice that pop up on the corner of the frame every so often, which had their spots drawn on with Sharpies).

It made costumes an essential part of his characters -- a device to reveal more about their inner state than any other element. Similarly, it was the first to center on a family story ("Fantastic Mr. Fox" being the other, and, in a different way, "The Darjeeling Limited"), and to bring the director's fantasy world outside of his native Texas, where both "Bottle Rocket" and "Rushmore" had been set.

"Anderson gave himself permission to envision a whole new geography for the first time, constructing a fantastical New York City of the imagination," Kornhaber said. "Such geographic flights of fancy would become one of the signature features of his body of work, from 'The Life Aquatic' through to 'The French Dispatch.'"

'The Wes Anderson aesthetic'

The visual imprint of "The Royal Tenenbaums" didn't stop on screen.

What makes the film so eminently rewatchable today is, undeniably, the "Wes Anderson aesthetic" it ushered onto the real world -- from the clothes in our wardrobes to the furnishings of restaurants.

Think of Margot's glamorous retro ensembles and heavy eyeliner, Chas' iconic red Adidas tracksuits and Richie's chunky headband (a reference to the Borg-McEnroe tennis era).

They're all looks referenced over the past decades by both mainstream brands (H&M, J.Crew) and high-end designers, including Marc Jacobs, who featured Margot-influenced mid-length hems and plush fabrics in his 2008 Louis Vuitton spring collection; and Gucci, which has been drawing from the Tenenbaums closet since Alessandro Michele became its creative director in 2015.

Tenenbaum-chic reached its apex that year, with no fewer than six designers -- including Veronica Etro and Felipe Oliveira Baptista -- citing the film as an influence on their fall collections.

Then there's the sprawling Tenenbaums estate, where most of the film takes place. It "would go on to become among the most recognizable domiciles on film, a kind of hipster Hogwarts (or, to take a more classical Hollywood reference, a later-day update to the estate in Orson Welles' 'The Magnificent Ambersons,' which it was meant to evoke)," Kornhaber said.

That same eye-catching aesthetic -- with its whimsical pastel colors, patterned wallpapers and retro-flavored touches -- has permeated the world of 21st-century interiors.

Through all its costumes, sets and scenes -- the result of collaborations with costume designer Karen Patch and production designer David Wasco -- "The Royal Tenenbaums" was pivotal in shaping the fashion sensibilities of hipster millennials everywhere (one might even say it helped define "nerdcore" and "geek chic"), and inspired entire design subcultures.

Anderson's later movies have all followed in the same footsteps, influencing more fashion, more design and more pop culture -- and making "out of a Wes Anderson film" a common sentence in our everyday lexicon, but also a mood we keep aspiring to.

For Kornhaber, the "Wes Anderson effect" stems from the underlying sensibility of his filmmaking.

"I think Anderson's aesthetic speaks very strongly to the idea of creating beauty and order out of discord and disarray," she said. "He offers the fantasy that if we just rearrange things a little bit, we can create a new version of the world where everything is in exactly the right place, all lines run parallel or perpendicular, everything is symmetrical, all the colors are coordinated."

Ultimately, however, a fascination with all-things Anderson -- and the reason why "The Royal Tenenbaums" continues to stand as a statement movie today -- likely comes from the unique way style and substance inform one another.

"If Anderson were simply an extraordinary stylist, I don't think he would have the success as a filmmaker that he has had," Kornhaber said.

"The real power of his work comes in the purposes to which he puts that style. There's an underlying sadness to Anderson's films, a profound sense of loss at the center of each story -- a loved one gone, a family coming apart. Anderson's acute attention to visual design goes hand-in-hand with that sorrow. Style isn't purposeless in his films: it's an attempt to remediate a deep sense of loss through a willful insistence on order."

Add to queue: Irresistibly stylish films

Federico Fellini's groundbreaking 1960 satire "La Dolce Vita" is one of the most stylistically rich movies out there. Filled with dreamlike and surreal images (including that of Christ being helicoptered over Rome, possibly on his way to the Pope), it follows Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni), a handsome gossip journalist who is a hedonist, womanizer and habitué of the fashionable Via Veneto, as he drifts through life, romantic conquests and self-reflection in the Eternal City. Fellini created a gigantic full-scale replica of the Via Veneto at the Cinecittà studios for the movie -- just one of its many theatrical aspects.

Designer Tom Ford's directorial debut is a triumph of color-saturated set design, great characters, captivating cinematography and detail-driven storytelling -- including sumptuous 1960s props and hairstyles to the charming locations. It's a day-in-the-life tale of George Falconer (Colin Firth) -- a gay and deeply depressed British university professor living in '60s Southern California, who is grief-stricken by the recent loss his lover. As he plans to take his own life, a series of encounters slice up his day and keep getting in the way.

A man (Harry Dean Stanton) with no recollection of his recent life stumbles into a dead-end town at the edge of the Texas desert. He's taken to a clinic, and eventually reunited with his brother (Dean Stockwell). As he begins to remember the life he led, and the fact he turned his back on his wife and child, he embarks on a journey to reunite with his family. Directed by Wim Wenders, it's a visually poetic, highly atmospheric portrayal of America, with compelling performances and a music score that has stood the test of time.

Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), an aspiring photographer, falls in love with an older woman, Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett), who's going through a divorce in 1950s New York. The two develop an intimate bond, which isn't without difficult consequences. Directed by Todd Haynes, this lush emotional melodrama is a lesson in stylized cinema, with a subdued color palette, characters glimpsed from voyeuristic angles in POV shots, and highly studied outfits, courtesy of costume designer Sandy Powell -- including fur coats, slim-fitting Hattie Carnegie-style suits and dresses, and luxe accessories.

"Amelie," by French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, tells the story of a shy Montmartre waitress (Audrey Tautou) with an active imagination, who decides to change the lives of those around her for the better while struggling with her own loneliness. It's a whirlwind of visual effects and creative flourishes, stylistic quirks and fantastical flights of fancy.

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'the royal tenenbaums' at 20: how the cult classic defined wes anderson's style - cnn

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'Royal Tenenbaums' at 20: How the film that established the 'Wes Anderson effect' is still making its mark

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Written by Marianna Cerini, CNN Keeping you in the know, Culture Queue is an ongoing series of recommendations for timely books to read, films to watch and podcasts and music to listen to.

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VIDEO ESSAY: Wes Anderson's Directing Style Explained

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A complete guide to Wes Anderson style, the director's filmmaking techniques, and how you can develop your own unique cinematic voice like Anderson.

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https://cherwell.org/2018/04/21/wes-andersons-films-are-nostalgic-for-the-present/

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Wes Anderson returned to the big screen in April with the release of Isle of Dogs, another fine film from one of the most distinctive auteurs in modern cinema. Anderson's style is unmistakable: his frames are symmetrical, his palette is filled with vibrant colours, and his sets are painstakingly crafted down to the tiniest details.

His stories are madcap capers, but they are presented with a striking emotional detachment, matched by the impassive movement of the camera and the monotone speech of his characters. Anderson's stylistic virtuosity means that it's easy to regard his films as shallow and superficial, but his unique style disguises a surprising emotional depth. Anderson's worlds, seemingly so joyful and beautiful, are actually deeply lonely places. Almost all of his characters are repressed or incapable of connecting with the people around them.

In The Royal Tenenbaums, Margot locks herself in her bathroom and refuses to talk to anyone due to a failing marriage. The same movie sees Richie exile himself to the other side of the world, and Chas proves himself unable to come to terms with the loss of his wife. In Moonrise Kingdom, Suzy and Sam are misfits without any friends, Suzy's parents sleep apart in a loveless marriage, and Scout Master Ward leaves his thoughts in an audio diary since he has nobody to talk to about them. In Grand Budapest Hotel, even the seemingly happy and sociable Mr. Gustave has to eat his meals alone, in a bare room every night, while Zero has lost his entire family to war. This is where Anderson's detached style truly comes into its own. Often criticised as draining all emotion from his movies, he actually does the exact opposite, highlighting and reflecting the detachment of his characters. The long, silent, static shots of Gustave eating alone or Margot locked away in her bathtub capture their loneliness perfectly.

Despite his overly complicated plots, Anderson's main interest is in how his characters manage to find a connection in a detached and lonely world. We may rejoice when Mr. Gustave and Zero finally prove their innocence and gain their fortune, but the emotional height of the film only comes when they are chatting with Agatha in a train car, completely at ease in a place where they truly belong. Similarly, the conflict with Social Services in Moonrise Kingdom is the centerpiece of the plot. However, the story's narrative arc is only reached when Sam and Suzy are relaxing in Suzy's house at the end, free from all the troubles that everyone else brings. But Anderson can never leave it at that - his endings are rarely unequivocally happy. In The Royal Tenenbaums, the narrator nonchalantly tells us that 'Royal died of a heart attack at the age of 68' while Chas and Royal are still laughing together on screen, following their reconciliation. In exactly the same way, the narrator of The Grand Budapest Hotel informs us that 'in the end, they shot him' just after the scene in which Mr. Gustave is shown happily talking to Agatha and Zero in a train car. We are then told, briefly and bluntly, that Agatha died of disease a few years later. In all of his films, Anderson is quick to remind us that all good things must come to an end. At the very beginning of The Grand Budapest Hotel, he shows us a glimpse of the future - a future in which the hotel is ruined, Zero is a lonely old man, Agatha and Mr. Gustave are probably dead. Even the setting is a reminder of how quickly things can change; we are well aware that the grand old Europe which Anderson celebrates will soon be destroyed by fascism and communism.

The ending of Moonrise Kingdom is just as bittersweet. We know Suzy and Sam will manage to live happily together for a while, but Anderson constantly reminds us that they too will grow up and become the adults they so despise. The symbol of their youth, their Moonrise Kingdom, is washed away into the past by a storm. Sam and Suzy are left with no more than memories, which Sam crystallizes in the form of a painting.

Anderson celebrates the joy and beauty that shared humanity can bring in a lonely world. But he is quick to remind us that every happy moment is half-gone before it has begun, doomed to last an instant before disappearing into the distant past. Wes Anderson is, in other words, nostalgic for the present.

Thank you!

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Wes Anderson's films are nostalgic for the present - Cherwell

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Wes Anderson returned to the big screen in April with the release of Isle of Dogs, another fine film from one of the most distinctive auteurs in modern cinema. Anderson's style is unmistakable: his frames are symmetrical, his palette is filled with vibrant colours, and his sets are painstakingly crafted down to the tiniest details.

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https://thedailyfandom.org/the-whimsical-nostalgia-of-wes-andersons-filmography/

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For years now, Wes Anderson has been making his mark in the film industry. His movies are instantly recognizable in their use of symmetry, colors, whip pans, and many other motifs that viewers have begun to expect. This coming summer, Anderson's newest film, The French Dispatch (2020), was set to be released. Like many of his previous movies, the trailer seems to depict an evocative story centered around bygone times. This fascination and utilization of the past is something Anderson is also known for; he often creates imagined worlds with events and aesthetics familiar to those watching his movie. To style his films in a way that so many audiences are familiar with today, Wes Anderson consistently utilizes nostalgia in his world and character building.

Historic Storytelling

One of the most obvious forms of nostalgia that Anderson utilizes is historical. This nostalgia is present throughout almost all of Wes Anderson's films, in many different forms. Anderson may use physical settings of his stories, such as the American 60s in Moonrise Kingdom (2012), or more subtle artistic flairs, such as monogrammed luggage in The Darjeeling Limited (2007). The historical nostalgia Wes Anderson uses creates a sense of longing for the past; in physicality, aesthetics, memory. This longing for and sometimes even romanticization of the past is seen best in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014).

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) predominantly takes place at an imaginary early 20th-century European hotel in the fake Republic of Zubrowka. Even when the hotel is shown from the narrator's perspective in the 'present', the outfits of the concierge, comments by characters about architecture and so on all evoke a sense that the heyday of the hotel, and its more illustrious past, have gone by. Through the conversation between Zero Mustafa and the Author in the baths, Anderson suggests that modernity has begun to erase the uniqueness of the Grand Budapest Hotel, but the memories Zero associates with the hotel still bring him joy.

This feeling, a longing for an idealized past and golden age of The Grand Budapest, is at the core of this film and evoking nostalgia . The way the Author and Zero discuss the hotel, makes the viewer want to learn more about what it looked like at its most busy and illustrious, effectively keeping us intrigued as to what will happen next in the film.

The Author: The thermal baths are very beautiful.

Mr. Mustafa: They were in their first condition. It couldn't be maintained, of course-too decadent for current tastes. But I love it all just the same, this enchanting old ruin.
The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

This intrigue pays off as viewers are given a whimsical, nostalgia packed story narrated by Zero about his adventures with the hotel concierge, M. Gustave. We are taken through a fast-paced murder, art heist, and love story all set during a European war that, for viewers, seems reminiscent of World War One and World War Two put together. The movie's history, while not factual, brings viewers' minds back to their knowledge of the 1930s and the World Wars - allowing them to have a better understanding of the events that unfold and the changes seen because of the encroaching war.

The Republic of Zubrowka, the war, the murders, and the love story between Agatha and Zero may not be real in our world, but through the color schemes, speech style, and cinematography, Anderson evokes a sense of nostalgia that makes the story personal and engaging for viewers. Wes Anderson relies on the assumption that his audience knows enough about our own world history so that even amidst the imaginary and whimsy of the film's story, we relate to the struggles and achievements of the characters.

Childhood Memories

Besides creating fantastical historical worlds, Wes Anderson is also well known for the child-like spirit in many of his films. This is seen throughout The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), through the family dynamics of the Tenenbaum siblings, and is also at the center of Moonrise Kingdom (2012). Childhood nostalgia in Wes Anderson films is exemplified by a romanticization of what it means to be young, specifically the adventure that comes with being a child. In Moonrise Kingdom (2012), viewers are taken on an adventure to experience the budding romance and love between Sam Shakusky and Suzy Bishop in a, once again, imaginary setting: New Penzance, a coastal Maine island in 1965.

The foundational premise of this film is based in summer childhood activities. The boys of the Khaki Scout Troop resemble what might be considered a typical sleep-away Boy Scouts camp and in a flashback, Suzy is seen performing in a summer community theatre production. From the opening scrolling scene of the morning activities of the Khaki Scout members, viewers witness a series of childhood, albeit stereotypically male, memories: making a lanyard (poorly), building a treehouse, lighting ants on fire, and riding around on a mini motorcycle. For a lot of people watching, whether they are teens, young adults, or middle-aged, they can probably in some way relate to these characters and the nostalgia of summertime as a child.

This childhood nostalgia and the whimsical storytelling of young summer love draws viewers into the story and encouraging them to become invested in Sam and Suzy's adventures. Viewers are reminded of what it was like to be a child at camp themselves and possibly even what having their first serious crush or romantic experience was like. These are memories shared across generations . and even though the 1960s setting may have more cultural nostalgia for older members of the audience, Wes Anderson's heartfelt narrative allows people to participate in collective remembering of summer and the innocence of youth.

Nostalgia And Film

Wes Anderson is not the only director and writer to utilize nostalgia to build intriguing and memorable movie worlds. It is a very common tactic deployed in movies and it makes sense as to why - it allows viewers to reflect on their own knowledge and lives, making movies about far off and imaginary people, places, and times deeply personal.

Footnotes

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The Whimsical Nostalgia Of Wes Anderson's Filmography - The Daily Fandom

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For years now, Wes Anderson has been making his mark in the film industry. His movies are instantly recognizable in their use of symmetry, colors, whip pans, and many other motifs that viewers have begun to expect. This coming summer, Anderson's newest film, The French Dispatch (2020), was set to be released.

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https://www.st-artmagazine.com/fashion-1/2020/11/15/the-enduring-charm-of-the-wes-anderson-wardrobe

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Again, Moonrise Kingdom provides an example of this with Suzy's pastel, floral palette contrasted with Sam's green and yellow ensemble. These provide a striking distinction from both each other and the background.

The Wes Wardrobe goes beyond the screen, with fashion designers across the globe, employing his unique aesthetic to their pieces. Designer Orla Kiely, based in London, emulated Suzy Bishop's pink beret look in her spring/summer collection back in 2014.

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The Enduring Charm of the Wes Anderson Wardrobe - ST.ART MAGAZINE

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by Fiona Golden One of the defining memories of past Thanksgivings I have is the repeated screenings of Wes Anderson's 2009 film Fantastic Mr. Fox. Between the snappy dialogue and quaint scenery, my cousins and I became thoroughly attached to the stop-motion animals. The most charming aspect in

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https://www.watershedblog.com/single-post/2016/10/25/wes-anderson-analog-nostalgia

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Wes Anderson's fictional worlds are outside of history. Or rather, they are mostly beside history. My personal favorite, The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), shows 2001 dates in the frame several times, but the material world of the film can't be historically identified. It's obviously a New York City film, but unlike some film presentations of the city (say, the obsessively accurate period scenes of Madmen) it is not a historical Manhattan; rather, it is one made of second-hand impressions gleaned from children's books and back issues of the The New Yorker. It contains non-places like "the 375th St. Y" and "111 Archer Ave." The costumes could fit in from the 1940s to the 2000s. Anderson's subsequent film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), makes an homage to 1960s Jacques Cousteau but blends it with nearly modern appliances (e.g. computers and an automated espresso machine stolen from Jeff Goldblum's character). Moonrise Kingdom (2012) stands out for taking place over about a week in the year 1965. But it takes place on a fictitious island called New Penzance, somewhere in New England, while a storm which never occurred bears down. 1965 is a fictional year as much as The Royal Tenenbaums fictional New York City.

Of course, this modification of real places and real history is not unique to Anderson. It's common to all stories in one degree or another. Yet Anderson's films offer particular attention to the worlds of the films. They are material places, vividly imagined and then built. According to published interviews, his process involves both drawing on the films and books that have influenced him (J.D. Salinger, Stefan Zweig, the films of Francois Truffaut, Orson Welles, and Steven Spielberg) and creating drawings and watercolors. He insists on finding actual buildings (Royal's house on 111 Archer Ave. is actually on the corner of Covent Ave. and 144th street in Harlem). Sets are meticulously built--even the improbably teetering tree house of the Khaki Scouts in Moonrise Kingdom. The Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) takes this impulse to its logical conclusion: stop motion animation with puppets (The Life Aquatic featured stop motion animation as well). And of course Anderson shoots on actual film, in CineScope--an old fashioned large format camera.

111 Archer Avenue: 144th Street and Covent Avenue, Harlem. Photo Credit: Max Zahradnik

This insistence on stuff seems like gross materialism. Perhaps it's a sort of curatorial consumerism transposed into art. Wes Anderson is beloved of hipsters, sure. But somehow, despite seeming to fit perfectly into the consumer-narcissist narrative--all perfectly-styled and filtered images meant to signal the achievement of some ever-receding cultural desire--his movies are not like Instagram. They are stylized, and they rely on the deep desire to belong, but unlike the social media that imitates them, they are insistently non-networked. They present worlds that exist pretty much without the Internet. [1]

Why? For Tenenbaums the answer could still plausibly be that the Internet wasn't culturally important enough yet. Facebook and Youtube were still several years in the future. Amazon and Google were barely older than toddlers. Maybe it just wasn't on Anderson's (or his co-writer Owen Wilson's) mind. But by the time the later Wes Anderson movies were made, all set more and more squarely in a fictive past, this coincidental explanation of the analog nostalgia seems unconvincing. So what is the nostalgia doing?

Jaime Brunton has argued on this blog that nostalgia can be damaging when it is used as a tool of exclusion. Nostalgia's danger lies in its resemblance to "false consciousness," and the ease of warping reality. Jennifer Ladino rehearses further charges:

Nostalgia's scapegoat status stems from a range of admittedly problematic traits: its easy cooptation by capitalism, which critics like Fredric Jameson say generates a postmodern cultural paralysis in which old styles are recycled and marketed without critical effect (or affect); its ubiquity in the media and the arts, which signifies a lack of creativity, alienation from the present, and complicity in consumer culture; its tendency to romanticize the past through imagining an origin that is too simplistic; and its reactionary bent- the use of nostalgia by right-wing forces to gloss over past wrongs and glorify tradition as justification for the present. (5-6)

But such condemnations of nostalgia seem too easy. It's easy to feel self-righteously cynical and congratulate ourselves on "realism" and "sophistication" whenever narratives of the past take on golden hues. Yet at the same time, it seems to me obvious that there is a danger in going too far. Surely there are things about the past worthy of affectionate memorial. Surely the heart cannot be faulted for harboring desires that point backward. This is especially true in the realm of things. As Ladino goes on to point out, nostalgia rests on "material components." Because, quite literally, the past sticks around. Strictly speaking, it makes up all of the world around us.

The damning interpretation of the nostalgia in Anderson's meticulously crafted sets and costumes could be called the "retro critique." This is the idea that late capitalism is cannibalizing the past for profit--and Wes Anderson is one individual churning out a niche upmarket product for graduates of liberal arts schools. From the perspective of a populist on board with the status quo, this makes the films elitist and annoying. In the critiques most radical version, from the far left, the desires fanned by such obsessive control are machines for the control of selves and are weaponized by the state and/or capital in order to achieve hegemony in every corner of culture, emptying it of the potential for resistance. That might be correct, but it doesn't leave much room for me to justify my enjoyment--the viewer has no way out, and I would have to retreat into an endless mirrored hall of guilt.

A more hopeful reading gives me an out through a seeming paradox. Wes Anderson's movies direct attention to the analog world and in doing so are trying to build a type of story that is not networked but analog. His films are thickly layered with connections to other texts: allusions and visual quotations abound. Particularly to books. Suzy ( Moonrise Kingdom) carries around a suitcase full of stolen, invented library books. Most of the characters in Tenenbaums have authored books (shown in mosaics which fill the screen and required the creation of a dozen copies of each fictional title). The films even present themselves self-consciously as books. The Royal Tenenbaums opening sequence is an invented book of the same name being stamped with a due date (by Anderson's hands in a sort of directorial cameo) as it is checked out of a library. The Fantastic Mr. Fox begins with the book being held up. The Grand Budapest Hotel starts with the authors tombstone and a book, only to go deeper into the narrative frame within that book. Even the physical DVD case of The Royal Tenebaums is made to look like a book.

Wes Anderson's cameo. Image Credit Buena Vista Pictures.

Why all this bookishness? Why so much focus on the the book as object? In a digital world, the very meaning of "book" has enlarged to mean not just the physical thing, but somehow the immaterial "content." The boundaries that kept a book physically in space have been seemingly dissolved--we can carry around thousands of eBooks on a Kindle. We are left with information, always in motion, always pointing outward through links, through the ubiquity of The Internet. It's a type of intertextuality that is both virtual and literal--though not, phenomenally speaking, physical.

After watching Werner Herzog's new documentary on the internet, Lo and Behold: Reveries of a Connected World, I was discussing the film with a friend. After ninety minutes of wry Teutonic profundity, I was still trying to pin down a definition: what is "The Internet?" I offered an analogy: Could we imagine a library? Servers and other computers hold the "information" just like books, web protocols help us navigate the "stacks" to find them, something like the Dewey Decimal system. And "the internet" could be the architecture of the library itself--the building that houses the books and the "hardware" that supports them? Users (even computer programs or robots) can arrive and navigate connections within the building to find and extract information. My interlocutor said no, that's not how it works. The analogical path I'd tried to build was a failure. But I started to look down it in the opposite direction, into the past. What did my analogy tell me about how I understood libraries? Books as things?

I don't understand the internet. I just don't get it. But I do know that before I was conditioned by the total presence of digital information, I had a different relationship to stuff, to places, maybe even to time. When I am able, despite addict-like cravings, to unplug, I can unearth traces of that prior relationship. To the way I used to interact with stuff, with the world. I used to check out books from the public library, and they were mine only after the stamp thumped down into them, and the blue ink dried on the due date card. The book had weight, and it had covers. It had edges. Sure, it also had all sorts of connections--but those connections relied on me and other people for their reality. Even the connections and connotations that existed prior to me, that I found (given as a "free gift from nowhere" to use Hannah Arendt's phrase), were only realized through the communal experience of them, the hard-to-focus-on thing that is neither individual nor apart from individuals.

The digital world reifies connection. Digital things aren't really things so much as vectors--cables, routers, modems, etc. The connections themselves are made physical. The contents--what is being connected--are less stable, and certainly not physical in the same way as a book. When I check out a book on my Kindle, I simply "click" a "button" on a "screen." But, of course, that's only what appears to happen. And the "book"--or at least, the contents of a book--appears in the list on my Kindle, where it will disappear again when the lending time is up. The connection itself is the book, and controls the book. Google and Wikipedia lock us into the connections created by search algorithms and hyperlinks. I can find books from the library that are available from Amazon, having been paid for. There isn't a history to how they came to me, or a column of stamps above mine showing the last time another person took the book home with them. The digital, for all its seeming emancipation, locks users into limitations, and away from certain types of connections.

Offline, in the analogue world, connections are more nebulous, more human. Things endure, and they are inseparable from their content and ultimately unique. A letter typed on a typewriter can't be instantly replicated or stored safely in "the cloud." The letter is not reducible to the paper, but the letter wouldn't exist without the paper, either. Destroy the paper, and you've destroyed the letter. And it is full of the traces of its becoming--corrections, errors, periods delivered with gusto that punched through the paper. Of course, the complexity of a typewriter is orders of magnitude less than a laptop. A paper letter is flawed in ways that make it difficult to use. It doesn't have the "affordances" of an email. But I am more in awe of the little hinges and levers of the typewriter than the invisible and inscrutable guts of my Macbook. I can comprehend the Royal Standard's mechanism. And the historical connections that surround the typewriter are held to it with something more like gravity than pathways. These gravitational connections aren't purely subjective--they don't just come from me, but arise from the cultural world that I have been thrown into. And nostalgia is one affect possible while affirming that history.

I think that my nostalgia in using a typewriter now and then is something like Wes Anderson's nostalgic stories. It is not merely a temporal longing, but a spatial one. I don't want to inhabit a romantic past, but I do want to be unable to leave the task of writing, to be stuck where I am. Anderson doesn't set his movies exclusively in an analog past, but in an imagined place that is analog. The stories put characters into a structure of relationships that are analog in being resolutely non-fungible. Instead they are idiosyncratic, bodily, material. The physical traits--color, texture, sound, position--are intensified. And the histories and affects of the things cling to them in that strange, human-activated way. The artifice of the representation points toward the reality of the inherited (analog) world.

I don't think this analog nostalgia is reactionary or necessarily conservative. At the least, it seems to me that it twists away from the neoliberal mode of increased exchange velocity--which does seem to be the default tendency of the digital structures in our world. The internet functions based on free flowing (and accelerating) information, massive aggregation of individuals into data, the separation of bodies and meaning, of experience and information, and it disciplines us to desire within various marketing categories--all packaged as a supposedly liberatory experience that at the same time forecloses all possibilities other than the ones that can be captured by the "affordances" of programs or code.

Anderson's analog stories highlight not statistical models or the flow of global capital, but the physical relationships--the laws of geometry over the rules of algebra; the possibilities of a sheet of paper not the limitations of a Word document; the untraced privacy of a letter rather than the searchability of an email. In his films, artificial and allusive as they are, Anderson uses idiosyncrasy and embeddedness in history and place--especially invented places and histories that depend on a long, given tradition--to turn the viewer's attention from the screen into the physical world. They are, for all their artifice, intensely human stories. And, despite (because of) their fiction, they push viewers, or me at least, back into the material world.

Perhaps this analog nostalgia and digital futurism can be distilled with an image of two screens. The digital screen creates its own light, and forms a lonely window pulling its viewers out of the world around them and into a fragmentary narrative of anxious desires, even when it links them with those who are absent. The analog movie screen reflects light back onto a group, uniting a present crowd of viewers who come together to share a common story. Walter Benjamin saw this communal aspect of film as containing revolutionary potential. Wes Anderson seems to push into this potential, nostalgically, yes, but not emptily. The fakeness, the stylized image, the winks and nudges of these films point warmly to something both communal and individual: the experience of living as a unique body amidst a world of bodies. He is not out to start a revolution--unless valuing physicality itself becomes a revolutionary act.

Notes

[1] The short film "Hotel Chevalier," which is a sort of prologue to The Darjeeling LImited (2009), is an exception. The short features the Apple iPod, which Jason Schwartzman's character uses to play "Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)" a 1969 song by British singer-songwriter Peter Sarstedt. Despite great critical reception, this scene has always struck me as odd. I remember being perplexed at the time. Apple allowed users to download the short for free for one month from the iTunes store (I did). Perhaps one reason this short was so well loved was that it appeared to play by more of the commercial rules with this type of product placement, instead of one for imaginary brands of typewriters or bazaar slippers. Still the short was unfunded, and the actors worked for free. This messy example muddies my argument, but I think it's the exception, not the rule. The Darjeeling Limited itself features a personal assistant who takes care of all the technology (Brenden, who suffers from alopecia). He seems to serve to distance technology from the plot, as well as implying that engagement with it can be somehow pathological and deleterious.

Works Cited

Anderson, Wes. Most of his films.

Ladino, Jennifer. Under the Sign of Nature : Reclaiming Nostalgia : Longing for Nature in American Literature. Charlottesville: U Virginia P, 2012.

#danielclausen #film

Wes Anderson's fictional worlds are outside of history. Or rather, they are mostly beside history. My personal favorite, The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), shows 2001 dates in the frame several times, but the material world of the film can't be historically identified. It's obviously a New York City film, but unlike some film presentations of the city (say, the obsessively accurate period scenes of Madmen) it is not a historical Manhattan; rather, it is one made of second-hand impressions gleaned from children's books and back issues of the The New Yorker. It contains non-places like "the 375th St. Y" and "111 Archer Ave." The costumes could fit in from the 1940s to the 2000s. Anderson's subsequent film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), makes an homage to 1960s Jacques Cousteau but blends it with nearly modern appliances (e.g. computers and an automated espresso machine stolen from Jeff Goldblum's character). Moonrise Kingdom (2012) stands out for taking place over about a week in the year 1965. But it takes place on a fictitious island called New Penzance, somewhere in New England, while a storm which never occurred bears down. 1965 is a fictional year as much as The Royal Tenenbaums fictional New York City.

Of course, this modification of real places and real history is not unique to Anderson. It's common to all stories in one degree or another. Yet Anderson's films offer particular attention to the worlds of the films. They are material places, vividly imagined and then built. According to published interviews, his process involves both drawing on the films and books that have influenced him (J.D. Salinger, Stefan Zweig, the films of Francois Truffaut, Orson Welles, and Steven Spielberg) and creating drawings and watercolors. He insists on finding actual buildings (Royal's house on 111 Archer Ave. is actually on the corner of Covent Ave. and 144th street in Harlem). Sets are meticulously built--even the improbably teetering tree house of the Khaki Scouts in Moonrise Kingdom. The Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) takes this impulse to its logical conclusion: stop motion animation with puppets (The Life Aquatic featured stop motion animation as well). And of course Anderson shoots on actual film, in CineScope--an old fashioned large format camera.

111 Archer Avenue: 144th Street and Covent Avenue, Harlem. Photo Credit: Max Zahradnik

This insistence on stuff seems like gross materialism. Perhaps it's a sort of curatorial consumerism transposed into art. Wes Anderson is beloved of hipsters, sure. But somehow, despite seeming to fit perfectly into the consumer-narcissist narrative--all perfectly-styled and filtered images meant to signal the achievement of some ever-receding cultural desire--his movies are not like Instagram. They are stylized, and they rely on the deep desire to belong, but unlike the social media that imitates them, they are insistently non-networked. They present worlds that exist pretty much without the Internet. [1]

Why? For Tenenbaums the answer could still plausibly be that the Internet wasn't culturally important enough yet. Facebook and Youtube were still several years in the future. Amazon and Google were barely older than toddlers. Maybe it just wasn't on Anderson's (or his co-writer Owen Wilson's) mind. But by the time the later Wes Anderson movies were made, all set more and more squarely in a fictive past, this coincidental explanation of the analog nostalgia seems unconvincing. So what is the nostalgia doing?

Jaime Brunton has argued on this blog that nostalgia can be damaging when it is used as a tool of exclusion. Nostalgia's danger lies in its resemblance to "false consciousness," and the ease of warping reality. Jennifer Ladino rehearses further charges:

Nostalgia's scapegoat status stems from a range of admittedly problematic traits: its easy cooptation by capitalism, which critics like Fredric Jameson say generates a postmodern cultural paralysis in which old styles are recycled and marketed without critical effect (or affect); its ubiquity in the media and the arts, which signifies a lack of creativity, alienation from the present, and complicity in consumer culture; its tendency to romanticize the past through imagining an origin that is too simplistic; and its reactionary bent- the use of nostalgia by right-wing forces to gloss over past wrongs and glorify tradition as justification for the present. (5-6)

But such condemnations of nostalgia seem too easy. It's easy to feel self-righteously cynical and congratulate ourselves on "realism" and "sophistication" whenever narratives of the past take on golden hues. Yet at the same time, it seems to me obvious that there is a danger in going too far. Surely there are things about the past worthy of affectionate memorial. Surely the heart cannot be faulted for harboring desires that point backward. This is especially true in the realm of things. As Ladino goes on to point out, nostalgia rests on "material components." Because, quite literally, the past sticks around. Strictly speaking, it makes up all of the world around us.

The damning interpretation of the nostalgia in Anderson's meticulously crafted sets and costumes could be called the "retro critique." This is the idea that late capitalism is cannibalizing the past for profit--and Wes Anderson is one individual churning out a niche upmarket product for graduates of liberal arts schools. From the perspective of a populist on board with the status quo, this makes the films elitist and annoying. In the critiques most radical version, from the far left, the desires fanned by such obsessive control are machines for the control of selves and are weaponized by the state and/or capital in order to achieve hegemony in every corner of culture, emptying it of the potential for resistance. That might be correct, but it doesn't leave much room for me to justify my enjoyment--the viewer has no way out, and I would have to retreat into an endless mirrored hall of guilt.

A more hopeful reading gives me an out through a seeming paradox. Wes Anderson's movies direct attention to the analog world and in doing so are trying to build a type of story that is not networked but analog. His films are thickly layered with connections to other texts: allusions and visual quotations abound. Particularly to books. Suzy ( Moonrise Kingdom) carries around a suitcase full of stolen, invented library books. Most of the characters in Tenenbaums have authored books (shown in mosaics which fill the screen and required the creation of a dozen copies of each fictional title). The films even present themselves self-consciously as books. The Royal Tenenbaums opening sequence is an invented book of the same name being stamped with a due date (by Anderson's hands in a sort of directorial cameo) as it is checked out of a library. The Fantastic Mr. Fox begins with the book being held up. The Grand Budapest Hotel starts with the authors tombstone and a book, only to go deeper into the narrative frame within that book. Even the physical DVD case of The Royal Tenebaums is made to look like a book.

Wes Anderson's cameo. Image Credit Buena Vista Pictures.

Why all this bookishness? Why so much focus on the the book as object? In a digital world, the very meaning of "book" has enlarged to mean not just the physical thing, but somehow the immaterial "content." The boundaries that kept a book physically in space have been seemingly dissolved--we can carry around thousands of eBooks on a Kindle. We are left with information, always in motion, always pointing outward through links, through the ubiquity of The Internet. It's a type of intertextuality that is both virtual and literal--though not, phenomenally speaking, physical.

After watching Werner Herzog's new documentary on the internet, Lo and Behold: Reveries of a Connected World, I was discussing the film with a friend. After ninety minutes of wry Teutonic profundity, I was still trying to pin down a definition: what is "The Internet?" I offered an analogy: Could we imagine a library? Servers and other computers hold the "information" just like books, web protocols help us navigate the "stacks" to find them, something like the Dewey Decimal system. And "the internet" could be the architecture of the library itself--the building that houses the books and the "hardware" that supports them? Users (even computer programs or robots) can arrive and navigate connections within the building to find and extract information. My interlocutor said no, that's not how it works. The analogical path I'd tried to build was a failure. But I started to look down it in the opposite direction, into the past. What did my analogy tell me about how I understood libraries? Books as things?

I don't understand the internet. I just don't get it. But I do know that before I was conditioned by the total presence of digital information, I had a different relationship to stuff, to places, maybe even to time. When I am able, despite addict-like cravings, to unplug, I can unearth traces of that prior relationship. To the way I used to interact with stuff, with the world. I used to check out books from the public library, and they were mine only after the stamp thumped down into them, and the blue ink dried on the due date card. The book had weight, and it had covers. It had edges. Sure, it also had all sorts of connections--but those connections relied on me and other people for their reality. Even the connections and connotations that existed prior to me, that I found (given as a "free gift from nowhere" to use Hannah Arendt's phrase), were only realized through the communal experience of them, the hard-to-focus-on thing that is neither individual nor apart from individuals.

The digital world reifies connection. Digital things aren't really things so much as vectors--cables, routers, modems, etc. The connections themselves are made physical. The contents--what is being connected--are less stable, and certainly not physical in the same way as a book. When I check out a book on my Kindle, I simply "click" a "button" on a "screen." But, of course, that's only what appears to happen. And the "book"--or at least, the contents of a book--appears in the list on my Kindle, where it will disappear again when the lending time is up. The connection itself is the book, and controls the book. Google and Wikipedia lock us into the connections created by search algorithms and hyperlinks. I can find books from the library that are available from Amazon, having been paid for. There isn't a history to how they came to me, or a column of stamps above mine showing the last time another person took the book home with them. The digital, for all its seeming emancipation, locks users into limitations, and away from certain types of connections.

Offline, in the analogue world, connections are more nebulous, more human. Things endure, and they are inseparable from their content and ultimately unique. A letter typed on a typewriter can't be instantly replicated or stored safely in "the cloud." The letter is not reducible to the paper, but the letter wouldn't exist without the paper, either. Destroy the paper, and you've destroyed the letter. And it is full of the traces of its becoming--corrections, errors, periods delivered with gusto that punched through the paper. Of course, the complexity of a typewriter is orders of magnitude less than a laptop. A paper letter is flawed in ways that make it difficult to use. It doesn't have the "affordances" of an email. But I am more in awe of the little hinges and levers of the typewriter than the invisible and inscrutable guts of my Macbook. I can comprehend the Royal Standard's mechanism. And the historical connections that surround the typewriter are held to it with something more like gravity than pathways. These gravitational connections aren't purely subjective--they don't just come from me, but arise from the cultural world that I have been thrown into. And nostalgia is one affect possible while affirming that history.

I think that my nostalgia in using a typewriter now and then is something like Wes Anderson's nostalgic stories. It is not merely a temporal longing, but a spatial one. I don't want to inhabit a romantic past, but I do want to be unable to leave the task of writing, to be stuck where I am. Anderson doesn't set his movies exclusively in an analog past, but in an imagined place that is analog. The stories put characters into a structure of relationships that are analog in being resolutely non-fungible. Instead they are idiosyncratic, bodily, material. The physical traits--color, texture, sound, position--are intensified. And the histories and affects of the things cling to them in that strange, human-activated way. The artifice of the representation points toward the reality of the inherited (analog) world.

I don't think this analog nostalgia is reactionary or necessarily conservative. At the least, it seems to me that it twists away from the neoliberal mode of increased exchange velocity--which does seem to be the default tendency of the digital structures in our world. The internet functions based on free flowing (and accelerating) information, massive aggregation of individuals into data, the separation of bodies and meaning, of experience and information, and it disciplines us to desire within various marketing categories--all packaged as a supposedly liberatory experience that at the same time forecloses all possibilities other than the ones that can be captured by the "affordances" of programs or code.

Anderson's analog stories highlight not statistical models or the flow of global capital, but the physical relationships--the laws of geometry over the rules of algebra; the possibilities of a sheet of paper not the limitations of a Word document; the untraced privacy of a letter rather than the searchability of an email. In his films, artificial and allusive as they are, Anderson uses idiosyncrasy and embeddedness in history and place--especially invented places and histories that depend on a long, given tradition--to turn the viewer's attention from the screen into the physical world. They are, for all their artifice, intensely human stories. And, despite (because of) their fiction, they push viewers, or me at least, back into the material world.

Perhaps this analog nostalgia and digital futurism can be distilled with an image of two screens. The digital screen creates its own light, and forms a lonely window pulling its viewers out of the world around them and into a fragmentary narrative of anxious desires, even when it links them with those who are absent. The analog movie screen reflects light back onto a group, uniting a present crowd of viewers who come together to share a common story. Walter Benjamin saw this communal aspect of film as containing revolutionary potential. Wes Anderson seems to push into this potential, nostalgically, yes, but not emptily. The fakeness, the stylized image, the winks and nudges of these films point warmly to something both communal and individual: the experience of living as a unique body amidst a world of bodies. He is not out to start a revolution--unless valuing physicality itself becomes a revolutionary act.

Notes

[1] The short film "Hotel Chevalier," which is a sort of prologue to The Darjeeling LImited (2009), is an exception. The short features the Apple iPod, which Jason Schwartzman's character uses to play "Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)" a 1969 song by British singer-songwriter Peter Sarstedt. Despite great critical reception, this scene has always struck me as odd. I remember being perplexed at the time. Apple allowed users to download the short for free for one month from the iTunes store (I did). Perhaps one reason this short was so well loved was that it appeared to play by more of the commercial rules with this type of product placement, instead of one for imaginary brands of typewriters or bazaar slippers. Still the short was unfunded, and the actors worked for free. This messy example muddies my argument, but I think it's the exception, not the rule. The Darjeeling Limited itself features a personal assistant who takes care of all the technology (Brenden, who suffers from alopecia). He seems to serve to distance technology from the plot, as well as implying that engagement with it can be somehow pathological and deleterious.

Works Cited

Anderson, Wes. Most of his films.

Ladino, Jennifer. Under the Sign of Nature : Reclaiming Nostalgia : Longing for Nature in American Literature. Charlottesville: U Virginia P, 2012.

#danielclausen #film

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Wes Anderson's fictional worlds are outside of history. Or rather, they are mostly beside history. My personal favorite, The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), shows 2001 dates in the frame several times, but the material world of the film can't be historically identified.

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https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/culture/.premium-wes-anderson-film-s-fashionista-1.5328032

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Sahar Shalev

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Adidas tracksuits from the 1970s, nostalgia-inducing sneakers, fur coats, monochromatic business suits, tweed jackets, hats, bags and preppy Ivy League styles - just some of the collective wardrobe usually making an appearance in films by the American filmmaker Wes Anderson.

For a generation of hipsters, Anderson is one of the only directors who manages to tell magical stories of far-off worlds and eccentric characters. Aside from that, he also excels (perhaps too much) at illustrating current stylistic wishes, provoking nostalgia for clothes that carry hidden significance and illustrate that the way we dress is a central part of our lives - we submit to the rules of fashion, and we enjoy breaking them.

Watching Anderson's films is reminiscent of that immortal Oscar Wilde quip, "It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances." For Anderson, outward appearances, style, home decor and music are almost as important as the actions of his characters. As in life.

Throughout his long career, Anderson has repeatedly been able to highlight the most prominent icons of the period.

In "Rushmore" (1998), he predicted the hysteria about preppy style - the same Ivy League fashion that heralded the revolution in men's fashion from the turn of the millennium, complete with thick glasses and school uniforms, classic oxford shirts and ties.

In "The Royal Tenenbaums" (2001), it was long-forgotten red Adidas tracksuits worn by Eastern European Olympic basketball teams that sparked vintage stores in big cities throughout the world to take all of their old sportswear out of the attic.

With "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" (2004), Anderson created an obsession with Adidas sneakers and "beanies" - hats that became a favorite fashion item for men around the world.

In "The Darjeeling Limited" (2007), he meshed Eastern and Western fashions in a profound clash of cultures, adding eccentric accessories like sweatbands and plastic glasses to his characters clad in 1960s and '70s British suits and vintage Louis Vuitton bags (not to mention wearing suits while barefoot).

Wes Anderson at the New York premiere of 'The Grand Budapest Hotel.' (AFP)

For "Fantastic Mr. Fox" (2009), Anderson made tweed jackets and pajamas essential items for any fashion-conscious man (almost simultaneously pajamas could be seen on fashion runways around the world).

And in "Moonrise Kingdom" (2012), he brought back the nostalgia for Boy Scout clothes and raccoon tail hats.

This list of items could easily be a shopping list for your average hipster: a combination of tailored and pop sportswear items; nostalgia pieces from vintage shops; and expensive, almost unobtainable items like school or professional uniforms, topped off with eccentric accessories that turn a mundane look into something extraordinary - for Anderson's male heroes, at least.

In this respect, Anderson knows how to express the current look, and how to find it, too (by cooperating with big brands like Prada, Adidas, Louis Vuitton and others).

But aside from all that, it seems that he has succeeded - more than any popular men's magazine - to pinpoint the connection shared by current men's fashion, history and tradition, as well as pop culture, and the fact that men, while clothing defines their uniqueness, are made to conform by a world that would seek to control them.

But really, uniforms are Anderson's true clothing, more important to him than sneakers or accessories.

From left: Tom Wilkinson, Tony Revolori and Owen Wilson in Wes Anderson's 'The Grand Budapest Hotel.' (AP)

Most of the time, he himself wears a kind of timeless uniform: corduroy or tweed suits, textured ties and Wallabee suede shoes from Clarks - something between casual tailored and preppy, an American uniform that has come out of his movies.

But for Anderson, uniforms are part of the ancient game of dressing like everyone else but trying to stand out: to be part of the system while desperately trying to break free, by adding a strange hat, headband or glasses. All of us, Anderson is saying, are kids that want to be loved, even if our shirt is stained.

In Anderson's new film, "The Grand Budapest Hotel," we see yet another link in his repertorial chain.

His latest movie isn't intrinsically different from his earlier work, but this time the plot is set in Europe between the two world wars, in a grand old hotel, with uniforms worn by doormen, bellboys and concierges, scenic views, train stations, and restaurants that could only exist in the movies. Most of Anderson's characters wear the almost-ridiculous hotel uniforms, old world garb in purple colors, while others wear old tuxedos or gray soldiers' uniforms.

All of these comprise a nostalgic world that itself is longing for the past. The plot is a kind of story within a story, one of a lost world, "Faded Glory," the kind that tour guides tell tourists upon visiting cities that were, at one time, grand. So the clothing highlights the desire for an organized, regulated world, for a hierarchy that used to be much clearer cut, for people who fulfilled their duties and knew their place, and a simpler elegance, before postmodernism.

But as in all of Anderson's films, these dreams are just that: dreams. The old world wasn't really perfect, and behind all of the grandeur and glory, war was brewing.

"The Grand Budapest Hotel" is, in certain regards, a summary of the nostalgia inherent in all of Anderson's films, an expression of longing for the old, better world, that if it didn't really exist, exists in every one of us.

Here, Anderson manages to capture the spirit of a time that was much better than choosing the right sneakers or jackets, because he strikes that part of all of us that wants to live in a perfect dream world, if only temporarily.
"The Grand Budapest Hotel" opens in cinemas nationwide on Thursday.
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Wes Anderson: Fashion guru for a generation of hipsters

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Sahar Shalev Get email notification for articles from Sahar Shalev Follow Adidas tracksuits from the 1970s, nostalgia-inducing sneakers, fur coats, monochromatic business suits, tweed jackets, hats, bags and preppy Ivy League styles - just some of the collective wardrobe usually making an appearance in films by the American filmmaker Wes Anderson.

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Analyzing the costumes in Wes Anderson movies 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 🌙 🏨

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Wes Anderson on Moonrise Kingdom | Film4 Interview Special

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The word "nostalgia" comes from two Greek roots: νόστος, nóstos ("return home") and ἄλγος, álgos ("longing"). I would define it as a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one's own phantasy. Nostalgic love can only survive in a long-distance relationship. A cinematic image of nostalgia is a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images-of home and abroad, of past and present, of dream and everyday life. The moment we try to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface.

In spite of its Greek roots, the word "nostalgia" did not originate in ancient Greece. "Nostalgia" is only pseudo-Greek, or nostalgically Greek. The word was coined by the ambitious Swiss student Johannes Hofer in his medical dissertation in 1688. ¹ (Hofer also suggested monomania and philopatridomania to describe the same symptoms; luckily, the latter failed to enter common parlance.) It would not occur to us to demand a prescription for nostalgia. Yet in the 17th century, nostalgia was considered to be a curable disease, akin to a severe common cold. Swiss doctors believed that opium, leeches, and a journey to the Swiss Alps would take care of nostalgic symptoms. By the end of the 18th century, doctors discovered that a return home did not always cure the nostalgics-sometimes it killed them (especially when patriotic doctors misdiagnosed tuberculosis as nostalgia). Just as today genetic researchers hope to identify genes coding for medical conditions, social behavior, and even sexual orientation, so the doctors in the 18th and 19th centuries looked for a single cause, for one "pathological bone." Yet they failed to find the locus of nostalgia in their patient's mind or body. One doctor claimed that nostalgia was a "hypochondria of the heart," which thrives on its symptoms. From a treatable sickness, nostalgia turned into an incurable disease. A provincial ailment, a maladie du pays, turned into a disease of the modern age, a mal du siècle.

The nostalgia that interests me here is not merely an individual sickness but a symptom of our age, a historical emotion. Hence I will make three crucial points. First, nostalgia in my diagnosis is not "antimodern." It is not necessarily opposed to modernity but coeval with it. Nostalgia and progress are like Jekyll and Hyde: doubles and mirror images of one another. Nostalgia is not merely an expression of local longing, but the result of a new understanding of time and space that made the division into "local" and "universal" possible.

Secondly, nostalgia appears to be a longing for a place but is actually a yearning for a different time-the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time as space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition. Hence the "past of nostalgia," to paraphrase Faulkner, is not "even the past." It could merely be another time, or slower time. Time out of time, not encumbered by appointment books.

Thirdly, nostalgia, in my view, is not always retrospective; it can be prospective as well. The fantasies of the past determined by the needs of the present have a direct impact on the realities of the future. Considering the future makes us take responsibility for our nostalgic tales. Unlike melancholia, which confines itself to the planes of individual consciousness, nostalgia is about the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory. While futuristic utopias might be out of fashion, nostalgia itself has a utopian dimension, only it is no longer directed toward the future. Sometimes it is not directed toward the past either, but rather sideways. The nostalgic feels stifled within the conventional confines of time and space.

In fact, there is a tradition of critical reflection on the modern condition that incorporates nostalgia. It can be called "off-modern." The adverb "off" confuses our sense of direction; it makes us explore side-shadows and back alleys rather than the straight road of progress; it allows us to take a detour from the deterministic narrative of 20th‑century history. Off-modernism offered a critique of both the modern fascination with newness, and the no less modern reinvention of tradition. In the off-modern tradition, reflection and longing, estrangement and affection go together.

Modern nostalgia is paradoxical in the sense that the universality of longing can make us more empathetic toward fellow humans, yet the moment we try to repair "longing" with a particular "belonging"-the apprehension of loss with a rediscovery of identity and especially of a national community and a unique and pure homeland-we often part ways and put an end to mutual understanding. Álgos (longing) is what we share, yet nóstos (the return home) is what divides us. It is the promise to rebuild the ideal home that lies at the core of many powerful ideologies of today, tempting us to relinquish critical thinking for emotional bonding. The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home with an imaginary one. In extreme cases, it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill. Unelected nostalgia breeds monsters. Yet the sentiment itself, the mourning of displacement and temporal irreversibility, is at the very core of the modern condition.

Outbreaks of nostalgia often follow revolutions: the French Revolution of 1789, the Russian revolution, and the recent "velvet" revolutions in Eastern Europe were accompanied by political and cultural manifestations of longing. In France it is not only the ancient régime that produced revolution, but in some respect the revolution produced the ancien régime, giving it a shape, a sense of closure, and a gilded aura. Similarly, the revolutionary epoch of perestroika and the end of the Soviet Union produced an image of the last Soviet decades as the time of stagnation or, alternatively, as a Soviet Golden Age of stability, national strength, and "normalcy." Yet the nostalgia that I explore here is not always for the ancient régime, stable superpower, or the fallen empire, but also for the unrealized dreams of the past and visions of the future that became obsolete. The history of nostalgia might allow us to look back at modern history as a search not only for newness and technological progress, but also for unrealized possibilities, unpredictable turns and crossroads.

The most common currency of the globalism exported all over the world is money and popular culture. Nostalgia too is a feature of global culture, but it demands a different currency. After all, the key words defining globalism-"progress," "modernity," and "virtual reality"-were invented by poets and philosophers: "progress" was coined by Immanuel Kant; the noun "modernity" is a creation of Charles Baudelaire; and "virtual reality" was first imagined by Henri Bergson, not Bill Gates. Only in Bergson's definition, "virtual reality" referred to planes of consciousness, potential dimensions of time and creativity that are distinctly and inimitably human. As far as nostalgia is concerned, having failed to uncover its exact locus, 18th‑century doctors recommended seeking help from poets and philosophers. Nostalgia speaks in riddles and puzzles, trespassing across the boundaries between disciplines and national territories. So one has to face it in order not to become its next victim-or the next victimizer.

Instead of a magic cure for nostalgia, I will offer a tentative typology and distinguish between two main types of nostalgia: the restorative and the reflective. Restorative nostalgia stresses nóstos (home) and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home. Reflective nostalgia thrives in álgos, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming-wistfully, ironically, desperately. These distinctions are not absolute binaries, and one can surely make a more refined mapping of the gray areas on the outskirts of imaginary homelands. Restorative nostalgia does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt.

Restorative nostalgia is at the core of recent national and religious revivals. It knows two main plots-the return to origins and the conspiracy. Reflective nostalgia does not follow a single plot but explores ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones. It loves details, not symbols. At best, it can present an ethical and creative challenge, not merely a pretext for midnight melancholies. If restorative nostalgia ends up reconstructing emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and specialize time, reflective nostalgia cherishes shattered fragments of memory and demoralizes space. Restorative nostalgia takes itself dead seriously. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, can be ironic and humorous. It reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, just as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment, or critical reflection.

The 20th century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia. The optimistic belief in the future has become outmoded while nostalgia, for better or for worse, never went out of fashion, remaining uncannily contemporary. ² Contrary to what the great actress Simone Signore-who entitled her autobiography Nostalgia Is Not What It Used to Be-thought, the structure of nostalgia is in many respects what it used to be, in spite of changing fashions and advances in digital technology. In the end, the only antidote for the dictatorship of nostalgia might be nostalgic dissidence. Nostalgia can be a poetic creation, an individual mechanism of survival, a countercultural practice, a poison, and a cure. It is up to us to take responsibility of our nostalgia and not let others "prefabricate" it for us. The prepackaged "usable past" may be of no use to us if we want to cocreate our future. Perhaps dreams of imagined homelands cannot and should not come to life. Sometimes it is preferable (at least in the view of this nostalgic author) to leave dreams alone, let them be no more and no less than dreams, not guidelines for the future﻿. While restorative nostalgia returns and rebuilds one's homeland with paranoid determination, reflective nostalgia fears return with the same passion. Home, after all, is not a gated community. Paradise on earth might turn out to be another Potemkin village with no exit. The imperative of a contemporary nostalgic: to be homesick and to be sick of being at home-occasionally at the same time.