MICHAEL CUTHBERTSON
Arts Writer

I feel a kinship with Wes Anderson’s nostalgia.

Before him, hip kids had happily forgotten British invasion music, green velvet suits and barber shops. Sadly, people who follow Anderson often miss his message. They interpret his dated world as ironically cool, but not really a better place. To them, calligraphy and passenger trains are just cute aesthetics. To Anderson, the past is that beautiful, simple world we can never return to (not unlike childhood).

Still, I often hear things like “his movies are fluff.” Even my friend’s film prof declared, “He art directs his films to death.” But under Anderson’s mise-en-scene, lies a truly perceptive psychology. His characters bicker like petty children, which, in my opinion, is all too realistic.

So it’s no suprise Anderson’s world is filled with childlike adults. His characters may be hopeless romantics like Steve Zissou in The Life Aquatic or inexperienced lovers like Max Fischer in Rushmore. Looking at them, haters say, “But no one’s like that in the real world.” But Anderson pits his idealists against reality — often with great comedic effect. When Max gets put in public school, he leaves Anderson’s world and enters the real world. Here, teens don’t fence or wear blazers or make speeches to their classmates.

In Darjeeling Limited, Francis tells his brother Peter not to use their dead dad’s razor saying, “I just don’t want you to think you’re better friends with him than we are.” All through Anderson’s cinema, adults show the maturity of eight-year-olds. Likewise, Anderson doesn’t show us sex (for good reason). By showing a world without sex, Wes puts his viewer under a spell. We see the world as a virgin sees it: filled with mystery and hope and the expectation that pure happiness is on the horizon.

Anderson’s films are undeniably deadpan humor. That is, the kind of humor par excellence that sneaks by you — humor delivered with no emotion or body language. It also doesn’t hurt using Bill Murray — the finest deadpan comedian — in most of his movies. Murray was made for Andersonian jokes. Like when Raleigh St. Claire, upon reading documents showing his wife’s raunchy infidelities, simply mutters, “She smokes?” in The Royal Tenenbaums. Rewatch any of these films and you’ll feel different each time you rehear the same “joke.”

Musical montage — featuring slow motion and FUTURA titles — is perhaps the most “Andersonian” film technique. Standout examples are “A Quick One While He’s Away” in Rushmore and “Hey Jude” in The Royal Tenenbaums. These perfectly capture capture the kind of fantastic worldview only a kid sees. Or more aptly, the way adults romantically see their youth.

His montages are like rehearing a song from the past, the one you listened to every day one summer. You close your eyes and remember that glorious time. This is just how Anderson montages look, probably because the Kinks and Rolling Stones music he uses are monuments to his youth.

While I love the whole Anderson canon, I must acknowledge the aptness of the criticism that he is “tiring out his old formula.” Aware of this, Anderson made Fantastic Mr. Fox, based a Roald Dahl novel filmed in stop animation. Ironically (or maybe intentionally), it still had all the composite elements of an Anderson film: ’70s outfits, ’60s rock, Bill Murray and so forth. But his next film — an adaptation of the 2006 French film Mon Meilleur Ami — promises to be uncharted territory.

For as long as he films, Anderson will divide audiences. But can we really doubt that he was the freshest voice in cinema this last decade? Really, who was he up against: Michael Bay? James Cameron? Hollywood hacks! Hacks, I say!

And even if you hate Anderson’s films, you can’t deny his cultural impact. So all of you hip kids out there with your typewriters, nerdy glasses, ironic moustaches, Kinks LPs and so on, remember where you’d be without Wes Anderson.