Flasz On Film

Imagine there is probably a sizeable number of young people, who are just getting into cinema, for whom Asteroid City is their first exposure to Wes Anderson as a filmmaker. In all honesty, they are probably floored and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of idiosyncrasies this movie is teeming with and will most likely need not only some time to process what they just witnessed, but also another handful of rewatches to get the most out of the movie. After all, not knowing where to look or how to recognize Anderson’s signature patterns may lead a fresh interloper in this universe of dioramas, quirks and sight gags to miss a lot of what a seasoned viewer would pinpoint in a second.  

I can only hope that these viewers emerge happy with what they saw. They might go back home and check out The French Dispatch or The Grand Budapest Hotel and learn more about Anderson’s style. I’m sure if you then showed them Isle of Dogs and Fantastic Mr. Fox they’d understand this filmmaker’s stylistic desire to incrementally and tangentially approximate with his live action filmmaking the aesthetic, iconography and feel of a stop-motion animation. I’m sure they’d be glad to make that connection.  

Now, show them Bottle Rocket, Anderson’s 1996 debut that put him on the map. Just imagine looking at their faces when – having entered with what they thought was a good idea about what to expect – they’d just see dudes in yellow jumpsuits and pink balaclavas robbing houses. They’d see a more or less conventional movie in comparison to what Anderson’s doing now. Sure, a keen eye will definitely pick out some elements in this movie that survived to this day in Anderson’s visual toolbox, i.e. the occasional controlled camera pan or a top-down tableau shot of some kind of table or desk arrangement. However, the point still stands: if you set Bottle Rocket and Asteroid City side by side, you’d be hard pressed to recognize that these two films came out of the loins of the same filmmaker.  

In fact, over time I have developed and maintained a handful of tongue-in-cheek metaphors to characterize this stark discrepancy between how Wes Anderson started and where he’s going now. In my recent review of Asteroid City I compared his work to a banana slowly ripening in a fruit bowl. I remember also seeing his style as equivalent to a guitar player who doesn’t know his place in the mix and with each rehearsal, he increases the gain on his amplifier without telling his bandmates. Finally – and this is my personal favourite pet metaphor – you could watch Bottle Rocket and see it as an old photo of your friend, who later got seriously invested in body modification, from the time after he just got his first tattoo. It was a little dolphin on his calf. And now this friend has well over two hundred piercings, horns, black ink in the whites of his eyes, holes in his cheeks, a transplanted tail and feathers on his forearms. And there is naturally not a square inch of skin left untattooed. He looks like a demon. He’s still lovely and perfectly approachable, but when he walks into a supermarket, old ladies flee in fear thinking it’s the rapture.  

So, look at Bottle Rocket and Asteroid City and ask yourself what happened. Because something must have happened somewhere between these two extremes. At some point on the spectrum of Wes Anderson’s journey towards artistic maturation, there must have been an event that pushed him over the edge. However, this theory has some serious flaws because if you examine Anderson’s filmography in detail, you’ll see that his descent into what I can only describe as full-blown high-functioning artistic derangement was gradual. He didn’t jump straight from Bottle Rocket into Moonrise Kingdom. But you can see that Rushmore is just a little bit weirder than Bottle Rocket. That The Royal Tenenbaums is just a little bit weirder than Rushmore. And so on, so forth until he reaches full-on weirdo saturation with The Grand Budapest and jumps the shark shortly thereafter. Which is also where my banana analogy (bananalogy?) comes into play much nicer.  

Again, why? 

Well, I think the answer is in his debut, Bottle Rocket, which – when interpreted autobiographically – should bring some clarity to this issue. See, Bottle Rocket is a story about two friends, Dignan (Owen Wilson) and Anthony (Luke Wilson). Dignan is a certifiable weirdo. He’s full of beans and ideas, some of which end up getting him in trouble and some others, which if it weren’t for Anthony’s grounded influence, would have definitely landed Dignan under six feet of dirt. Dignan is without a doubt a metaphorical stand-in for Wes Anderson himself. His imagination works in such mysterious ways that nobody truly can have a scooby-doo about what goes in his cranial circuitry. His unbridled creativity is the reason why they go on so many adventures together… and become criminals… and cross even more dangerous criminals (like James Caan and his bone necklace). 

So, Dignan and Anthony form a symbiotic dynamic duo powered by Dignan’s torque and steered by Anthony’s down-to-earth rationality. It’s in the title even: Dignan is a bottle rocket. He’s a firework, an explosive capable of producing a loud bang and a resplendent display of colour showering his immediate surroundings. But a bottle rocket needs… a bottle. Without anything to ground it, it’s essentially a dangerous projectile capable of taking people’s limbs off, setting fires and causing material damage. Anthony is that bottle. He is what grounds Dignan and directs him towards the sky, where he is meant to go to fulfil his potential. A firework is best deployed up in the skies where it has enough space to do its thing and provide immense entertainment to onlookers. A firework deployed in your house is an emergency. Nobody claps when you accidently shoot a firework into a crowd of people. They call the cops. And rightfully so.  

Dignan is Wes, a tsunami of creativity whose understanding of the world evades definition. Who is Anthony, then? I think Anthony is Owen Wilson, which is a bit confusing because Dignan is played by him in the film. According to a pet theory of mine, Owen Wilson’s creative involvement in the early stages of Wes Anderson’s career may have provided some kind of grounding to the filmmaker’s otherwise outlandish aspirations. Now, as usual I don’t know what I am talking about, so don’t go on spreading this as though it was rooted in some kind of fact – this is just my conjecture, but something tells me it could be true. And this is because despite the fact there isn’t a clear jump-of-the-cliff moment in the timeline of Anderson’s artistic output, the biggest jump in the iconography and style in his entire career is found between The Royal Tenenbaums and Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. And it just so happens that The Royal Tenenbaums was the last movie where Owen Wilson shared screenwriting credit with Anderson. Now, Anderson has always had multiple collaborators on his projects, many of whom like Roman Coppola, Noah Baumbach, Hugo Guinness and Owen Wilson stuck around for longer periods of time. And it is perhaps reasonable to assume that these different artistic voices impacted on Wes Anderson’s filmmaking output. 

However, I believe that Owen Wilson’s creative input – on top of acting in his movies, which he continued after he ceased to co-write – was less enabling in character and more grounding. He was Anthony while Wes was Dignan. He was the guy who’d tell him to chill. To pull back. To keep things simple and subtle. Their collaborations are immensely nuanced and funny, but what they have is space Anderson’s later movies would purposefully fill with quirky stuff. Owen Wilson was a grounding force for Wes Anderson’s creativity and I honestly contend that thanks to his involvement, Bottle Rocket, Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums are such immensely complex movies that do not overwhelm or feel impenetrable, but still remain incredibly deep, layered, nuanced and rich in detail. They are fireworks displays, consistently resplendent and festive, whereas his later output – ungrounded by this outside force that would keep these movies pointed at the sky – is increasingly chaotic. Sometimes they hit where they are supposed to and produce violent displays of unchecked beauty (like Fantastic Mr Fox and The Grand Budapest Hotel). And sometimes they fire at pedestrians, passing cars or – like Asteroid City – effectively explode in the filmmaker’s hands.  

I guess what I am saying is that Wes Anderson’s recent movies (without exception) prove he needs a grounding influence, not enablers or yes-men who are happy to be on set with one of Hollywood’s most virulent minds. He needs Owen Wilson to come back and point him at the sky so that he would explode and give us entertainment of the highest calibre, consistently and without fail. Wes Anderson is a bottle rocket and a bottle rocket needs a bottle. Without a bottle, a bottle rocket is just a rocket. And a rocket on its own is no longer a firework but a weapon capable of causing terror instead of gleeful enjoyment.