Asteroid City
what even is a repressed emotion. like ontologically. I'm really asking
Hello and thank you to the new subscribers who have shown up as a result of my Know Your Enemy appearance yesterday. Bless those guys. This is my most recent attempt at describing what the hell I do here. Also, I have unlocked (and consolidated) (and slightly updated) the big fall-and-winter book preview I did a few weeks ago.
Wes Anderson is one of those artists I can’t have a dispassionate conversation about. It’s actually hard for me to watch his best movies around other people — if I’m watching The Royal Tenenbaums I’m going to do a certain amount of unattractive heaving and sobbing, which looks stupider and weirder than ordinary crying. (I can’t really cry in a sustained way, but I can, if sufficiently messed with, sob. It is bizarre. I look like a freak. It happens, unfailingly, every time I see Margot at the bus station, and the instant “Needle in the Hay” starts playing.) To have that profound of an emotional experience and then emerge into a daylight where people want to talk about how mannered he is, and how self-indulgent, and it’s all so white, makes me feel so alienated from other people that I almost get physically ill. It’s as though someone wanted to talk about whether the sun wasn’t a little bit of a showboat. It seems like confirmation that the profound isolation of his characters, which makes them so painfully real to me, is also — as they all seem to have accepted — our only possible condition. (One of the first real fights Ashley and I had was about whether Life Aquatic was racist or not.)
That doesn’t mean that I think he’s a perfect or unassailable artist, or even the best filmmaker kicking around right now, in this somewhat denuded moment for movies. The first film of his I saw was Rushmore, sometime in 1998 or 1999 (on video), and I didn’t like it at all. I noticed and remembered it but I didn’t like it. And Ashley was right: I don’t think I’d call Life Aquatic “racist” but it leaves itself open to being read like that, and Anderson could have closed off that reading with not much effort. He’s not thinking about it and he should be. So, close enough. I didn’t think French Dispatch was very good. His masterpieces, to me, are Tenenbaums and Moonrise Kingdom (a film that realizes so accurately what I wanted my life to be when I was in sixth grade that it hurts to watch), followed probably by Bottle Rocket and Grand Budapest, then I suppose Aquatic and Rushmore thought I am still a little resistant to the charms of the latter, and then I don’t care. (I never got around to Darjeeling Limited, for some reason. I’m probably subconsciously saving it, the way I sometimes do with favorite authors.)
I’m still making my mind up about Asteroid City.