{"id":28446,"date":"2014-07-20T06:13:13","date_gmt":"2014-07-20T11:13:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=28446"},"modified":"2020-10-02T14:46:08","modified_gmt":"2020-10-02T19:46:08","slug":"moonrise-kingdom-wes-in-wonderland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2014\/07\/20\/moonrise-kingdom-wes-in-wonderland\/","title":{"rendered":"MOONRISE KINGDOM: Wes in Wonderland"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

DB here:<\/p>\n

\u201cAn auteur is not a brand,\u201d<\/a> argues Richard Brody. Not always, I\u2019d suggest; but it can happen. And it\u2019s not necessarily a bad thing.<\/p>\n

Wes Anderson has found a way to make films that project a unique sensibility while also fitting fairly smoothly into the modern American industry. He has his detractors (\u201cI detest these films,\u201d a friend tells me), but there\u2019s no arguing with his distinctiveness.\u00a0 The Grand Budapest Hotel<\/em> is perhaps the most vivid example of Andersonian whimsy as signature style.<\/p>\n

In any case, before summer\u2019s end I want to look at the auteurish aspects of another Anderson film. Whether you admire him, abominate him, or have mixed feelings, I think that studying this film can show us some interesting things about authorship in today\u2019s film culture.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Toy worlds<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When I\u2019m making a movie, what I have in mind, first for the visuals, is how we can stage the scenes to bring them more to life in the most interesting way, and then how we can make a world for the story that the audience hasn\u2019t quite been in before.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Wes Anderson<\/a><\/p>\n

A film auteur is often described as having a characteristic tone, an attitude, and recurring themes. But we also find more tangible marks of authorship. One is a tendency to create distinctive story worlds. Hawks gives us milieus filled with stoic, sometimes grimly resigned professionals. Scorsese presents manic, sometimes vicious worlds that encourage his protagonists to go too far.<\/p>\n

If the auteur\u2019s story world is the what<\/em>, plot patterning and cinematic narration give us the how<\/em>. How are the actions arranged to create an arc of engagement? How are the events rendered in film style\u2014the texture of images and sounds?<\/p>\n

It seems clear that no auteur can be absolutely unique; each one works with norms and conventions given by tradition. For instance, a great many US independent films subscribe to the Hollywood convention of the goal-driven protagonist. Moonrise Kingdom <\/em>accepts it too: Sam and Suzy want to be together, and their aims propel the action. Anderson and co-screenwriter Roman Coppola even give us the classic formula of lovers, kept apart by society, who escape to freedom in the wilderness. Likewise, the film maintains the convention of multiple lines of action: it creates parallels between the idealistic Suzy-Sam romance and the pallid routine of her parents\u2019 marriage, as well as the hint of emerging affection between the phone operator Becky and Scoutmaster Ward.<\/p>\n

Like a mainstream film, Moonrise Kingdom<\/em> is at pains to build the plot toward a crisis\u2014the second elopement of the couple and the massive storm that hits the region. The film turns the storm into a deadline: It will hit, says Bob Balaban\u2019s narrator, \u201cin three days\u2019 time.\u201d And as in a classical Hollywood film, the couple\u2019s problems are solved and we get an epilogue showing their happy, if somewhat covert union.<\/p>\n

Anderson has absorbed some lessons from mainstream cinema in more specific ways, I think. Since the Star Wars<\/em> series (1977-on), we\u2019ve seen Hollywood ever more eager to try \u201cworld-making\u201d\u2014adapting the traditions of fantasy, science-fiction, and comic books to creating fairly separate realms governed by their own rules. Batman and Superman adaptations of the 1980s and after followed this line, with Lord of the Rings<\/em>\u00a0proving that world-making could sustain long-running franchises (Harry Potter, the Marvel universe).<\/p>\n

Anderson follows Lucas in creating his own worlds, but outside the conventions of space opera. We can find more or less parallel worlds in The Royal Tennenbaums<\/em> and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou<\/em>, but Moonrise Kingdom<\/em> may be the most elaborate example. It takes place in\u00a0terra incognita<\/em>, a cluster of imaginary islands presumably on the upper Atlantic coast. The name of the primary island, \u201cNew Penzance,\u201d reminds us of the fantasy-worlds of Gilbert and Sullivan. There are make-believe Amerindians (Chickchaws) and the Khaki Scouts are parallel to the Boy Scouts, with Accomplishment Buttons instead of Merit Badges. The Scout regalia are given us in the sort of fussy detail that Anderson has long enjoyed.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Parts of the story are relayed by a gnome-like Narrator whose range of knowledge includes past, present, and future. He suggests a fairy-tale wizard or bard. An ancillary film<\/a> tells us that he\u2019s the librarian of New Penzance\u2014the tribal chronicler as small-town administrator. (The existence of this short film serves to reinforce the pretense that New Penzance exists.) Then there are the young-adult books that Suzy carries with her. They\u2019re fictitious but they get strongly tagged to aspects of the action. The books and the scouting gear take on the same solidity as retro details like Suzy\u2019s battery-powered phonograph and Sam\u2019s jar of Tang: 1965 stuff is recruited to flesh out Anderson\u2019s miniature world.<\/p>\n

Suzy\u2019s books remind us that New Penzance, like other Anderson story worlds, is redolent of childhood. The film\u2019s opening presents a family\u2019s home as a dollhouse filled with toys and games. Once we’ve seen the fabric pictures rushing past on the walls, the landscapes they preview retain a miniaturized quality.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Those landscapes themselves have a childish defiance of gravity, as when we\u2019re introduced to the poles at the tidal canals and when the Scouts build their tree house improbably high.\u00a0This motif of top-heaviness eventually yields a sight gag when we learn the implausible fate of Redford\u2019s motorcycle.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Childhood is everywhere. The music we hear in the opening is Britten\u2019s Young Person\u2019s Guide to the Orchestra<\/em>, played by three little brothers on a phonograph and narrated by a child for one of Leonard Bernstein\u2019s Young People\u2019s Concerts. Throughout the film we hear grownup music designed for kids, such as bits of Bernstein\u2019s rendition of Saint-Saens\u2019 Carnival of the Animals<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Benjamin Britten\u2019s music is central to the film\u2019s soundtrack, from his juvenilia (Simple Symphony<\/em>, songs from Friday Afternoons<\/em>) to his later opera A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream <\/em>and its chorus of child fairies.\u00a0<\/em>A performance of Britten\u2019s church parable Noye\u2019s Fludde<\/em> is the occasion of Sam\u2019s first encounter with Suzy, and it prophesies the devastating storm of a year later. Carrying this kid-friendly ethos further, Anderson designs his closing credits so that Sam’s voice-over can anatomize Alexandre Desplat\u2019s score, instrument by instrument.<\/p>\n

If Britten suggests childhood vitality, the mournful Hank Williams tunes evoke adult disappointment. They\u2019re associated from the start with the lonely, not-overbright Captain Sharp. When Sam\u2019s canoe odyssey is accompanied by the fantasy Williams song \u201cKaw-Liga,\u201d about a wooden Indian yearning for the carved woman across the street, Anderson suggests a parallel between two lonely, yearning males, and tagging it to Sam prefigures his eventual alliance with his surrogate father.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A tradition of twee<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The density of this childish New Penzance, like that of other DIY cinematic worlds, supports a tendency I talked about in The Way Hollywood Tells It<\/em>. For some time now, filmmakers have been filling their films with details that can be discovered on re-viewing, particularly on the DVD format, which allows us to stop and study a frame.\u00a0 The musical citations I just mentioned can be researched after an initial viewing, and perhaps cinephiles will notice that the therapy book\u2019s cover is a riff on Saul Bass\u2019s credit sequence for Bonjour Tristesse<\/em> (like Fran\u00e7oise Hardy, a link to Left Bank pop culture).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Still, on the first pass we\u2019re unlikely to notice that the stamp on Sam\u2019s postcard to Suzy bears the likeness of Commander Pierce.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Likewise, only after many viewings did I notice that the peculiar flaming-scissors abstraction during the skirmish in the woods is given the same design as that on the motorcycle and helmet of the despicable, and rightfully lacerated, Redford.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And in the epilogue, we might spot that Sam, having cast off his Accomplishment Buttons, has kept his mother\u2019s pin on his new Island Police uniform.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Art and commerce again: What exec could object to loading every rift with ore when it supports ancillary sales to the fan faithful?<\/p>\n

Some people find an inward-turned world like this to be fey, coy, twee, infantile, precious, or self-indulgent. It seems to me, though, that Anderson’s work from The Life Aquatic<\/em> onward links up with a literary tradition we associate with J. M. Barrie and G. K. Chesterton. These writers employed childhood fantasy in an effort to imagine a richer, livelier realm behind prosaic reality. Another kindred spirit would be Winsor McCay, like Anderson an obsessively meticulous stylist who gives heft and lilt to dream worlds. In cinema we might recall Greenaway\u2019s The Falls<\/em> (1980), as obsessive and precious a project as can be imagined.<\/p>\n

Indeed, why not mention the most famous figure of all? There is a trace of Lewis Carroll in Moonrise Kingdom<\/em>\u2019s looking-glass world\u2014its strangely safe tree house, its deadpan absurdity, the habit of lawyers talking as if always in court. Like Carroll, Anderson doesn\u2019t shrink from cruelty; the death of Snoopy is as perfunctory as that of the oysters on which the Walrus and the Carpenter tearfully dine.<\/p>\n

Significantly, modern efforts to reenchant the world are often framed by loss. Wendy comes back from Neverland, Little Nemo awakes with a thump, Alice must return to lazy and boring afternoons. Anderson too evokes the fading of enchantment. Moonrise Kingdom<\/em> takes place at the onset of autumn, and Suzy\u2019s family lives at Summer\u2019s End. Unlike other modern explorations of faerie, however, this one lets its characters wake up in something approximating their dream life.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Day by day, with interruptions<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In accord with the child-based story world, the plot of Moonrise Kingdom<\/em> provides something of a modern fairy tale. A runaway orphan who retains a token of his parentage heads out for the wilderness. A princess imprisoned in a tower scans the horizon for her rescuer. Lovers exchange messages before they escape into a realm of danger and death. They are rescued by a beneficent authority who will allow them to stay together.<\/p>\n

Of course it\u2019s a meta-exercise, since its authors and audiences are self-consciously deploying fairy-tale conventions. But as Barrie and Chesterton and Carroll show, enjoyment of artifice is central to art. Anderson accordingly stylizes both his plot structure and his narration.<\/p>\n

He has long been drawn to block construction<\/a>, building his plots out of big chunks that are often signaled explicitly. In Moonrise Kingdom<\/em>, the chunks divide up in unusual ways\u2014part, again, of this auteur\u2019s cinematic signature.<\/p>\n

At first we might think we can just track the adventure day by day. On 2 September 1965 Sam goes AWOL from scout camp and Suzy sets out with her belongings. On 3 September the couple fend off their pursuers\u2014the battle of arrow, BB gun, and scissors\u2014and make camp on Mile 3.25 Tidal Inlet. There they swim, dance, and spend the night. On 4 September they\u2019re captured and separated.<\/p>\n

But that night the scouts help them escape again, and all head for New Lebanon. The \u201cmarriage\u201d of Sam and Suzy on the 5th leads to their flight to Saint Jack Wood Island just as the storm hits. Before they can make a lovers\u2019 leap from the church steeple, Captain Sharp rescues them and arranges to be Sam\u2019s foster parent. These four days are sporadically marked by changes from day to night and some remarks, as when Scoutmaster Ward dictates into his tape recorder. An epilogue is reserved for 10 October.<\/p>\n

Running athwart the day-by-day divisions are other blocks. Actually, the first day is shown us three times, via shifts in narrational attachment. First we\u2019re with Scoutmaster Ward, his charges, and Captain Sharp, all of whom are searching for Sam. After Ward dolefully ends his audio diary entry (\u201cLet\u2019s hope tomorrow is better\u201d), Anderson cuts to Sam in the stolen canoe.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

You might think this scene of Sam paddling is taking place the next day, but actually it skips back to the morning of the 2nd, when he sneaked off. Thereafter we\u2019re attached to him when he meets Suzy in the meadow and they share their first day on the run. Then the plot skips back again to earlier that night, when Mrs. Bishop calls Suzy to dinner and discovers that she\u2019s gone.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The 2 September section is even more complicated than I\u2019ve suggested. When Suzy and Sam rendezvous in the meadow, their encounter is interrupted by a flashback to their first meeting a year earlier (signaled by a title).\u00a0Later, the Bishop-centered evening section is interrupted by another block, a flashback montage triggered by Mrs. Bishop\u2019s discovery of the couple\u2019s love letters.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Here Anderson provides important backstory paralleling the two kids\u2019 reasons for running away. Sam is bullied by the older boys in the foster-family-compound run by the Billingsleys, and Suzy blows up at her parents and schoolmates. By the end of the third iteration of 2 September, all the major forces in the drama have been delineated.<\/p>\n

The two expository flashbacks give us more reason to care about Sam and Suzy in the following scenes, particularly during their skirmish with the Khaki Scouts squadron. Redford\u2019s bullying ways, ignoring Ward\u2019s orders to avoid violence, earn him a lumbar thrust from Suzy\u2019s scissors, and it\u2019s a mis-aimed arrow that wipes out poor Snoopy.<\/p>\n

The couple\u2019s idyll, presented as more or less another block, becomes the center of the film. It ends, at the midpoint of the running time, with Suzy reading: “Part Two.”<\/p>\n

After they\u2019re captured, Mr. Bishop vows to keep Suzy from Sam. Worse,\u00a0 Captain Sharp learns that Sam is headed for an orphanage and maybe shock therapy. This will encourage Sharp to defend and rescue the two kids at the climax.<\/p>\n

With this crisis looming, the plot gives us a sort of nocturne on the evening of September fourth and the dawn of the fifth. In the night, all the players mull over what has happened: Suzy and her mother, Sam and Captain Sharp, Mr. and Mrs. Bishop, and Scoutmaster Ward. But this isn\u2019t merely downtime. The Scouts in their treehouse decide they\u2019ve treated Sam unjustly and set out to help the couple. This decision propels the climax.<\/p>\n

By the morning of the final day, Sam and Suzy are reunited and ready for their mock marriage. All that remains is for the storm to disrupt things (even giving Sam some shock therapy by lightning), but also to set things right. The epilogue shows the new stable state of the story world, tying together the plot action neatly. Scoutmaster Ward, reinstated from disgrace, has replaced Captain Pierce’s picture with Becky’s. Sam has a foster father, and he can covertly see Suzy every day.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The magic power of binoculars<\/strong><\/p>\n

Narration involves the moment-by-moment flow of story information, organized around the key question: Who knows what, when?<\/p>\n

A simple example: Early in the film Suzy finds a letter in the family mailbox. She takes it to the bus shelter and reads it.\u00a0When she\u2019s done, she looks up resolutely at us and slips the letter into a shoe box.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

What was in the letter? The narration has suppressed that information, stirring up curiosity and preparing us for what, many scenes later, Mrs. Bishop will reveal when she finds it: Sam\u2019s final message about their rendezvous. Moreover, the narration flaunts its suppressiveness: She looks at us as if insisting that the message is private.<\/p>\n

Unlike the letter scene, which suppresses information, the opening tours of the house give us a fair amount, but we\u2019re not yet in a position to understand it. This applies to our glimpses of the scissors and the New Penzance locations, but there\u2019s also the vertically rising shot showing Suzy\u2019s suitcase in the attic along with her cat peeping out of the fishing creel.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This becomes significant only later, when we realize that Suzy is preparing to bolt.<\/p>\n

The narrational process mobilizes film style, both visual and auditory, to engage us in a constant process of expectations\u2014stated, prolonged, fulfilled, or cheated. Consider Suzy\u2019s binoculars. Early in the film we see her looking through them, but we don\u2019t see what she sees. What is she looking at? Or looking for? Soon enough we\u2019ll see that she manages to learn of her mother\u2019s affair with Captain Sharp.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Once we\u2019re set up for the binoculars device, Anderson can use it elliptically. In the meadow we see Sam through binoculars, so we\u2019ll assume that Suzy is looking at him, even if Anderson doesn\u2019t show the customary head-on reverse shot of her.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In effect, this image of Sam is the answering POV shot that has been missing in the early sequences.<\/p>\n

But at the climax, when Sam rushes back to camp to fetch Suzy’s binoculars, he\u2019s again caught in their field of view. This immediately leads us to ask: Who\u2019s watching him? Anderson has stuck to Sam in the scene, so we get a gratifying surprise when we learn that the odious Redford has grabbed the glasses and is watching Sam\u2019s search.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Or consider the film\u2019s opening as a narrational gesture.\u00a0 The toy world that the tracking shots present is packed with story information. The very first image shows a fabric version of the Bishops\u2019 house, flanked by Suzy\u2019s left-handed scissors; the picture will soon be echoed by an establishing shot.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Shot by shot, the film channels information in order to set up expectations, to prolong them, to confirm them, or to deflate them. This is how cinematic narration can engage us.<\/p>\n

The gnome-like narrator is another source of information. Anderson has compared him to the Stage Manager in Our Town<\/em>, who can address the audience but also interact with other characters. His opening explanation supplies factoids about this imaginary landscape, while foreshadowing things explicitly (the storm) and implicitly, as with this image that looks forward to Sam and Suzy\u2019s interlude at Mile 3.25 Tidal Inlet.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Narration doesn\u2019t just pass along information; sometimes it suppresses it. It can point out when it’s hiding something, as when the film refuses to show us Suzy\u2019s letter. Sometimes information is noticeably incomplete, as when only bits of Suzy\u2019s and Sam\u2019s correspondence are relayed to us. Another instance is the elliptical handling of the Khaki bullies\u2019 attack on the couple, with a glimpse of an arrow and Paul-Sharits-ish<\/a> flashes of scissors. Only quite a bit after the assault do we see the damage.<\/p>\n

At other moments a film\u2019s narration can create an informational gap that it doesn\u2019t fill, only to do so later. During the central idyll\u00a0Moonrise Kingdom<\/em> omits a crucial piece of information and puts it in place only at the very end.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Down the aisle and face to face<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cinematic narration involves stylistic choices as well, and here again Anderson has sought an identifiable look and feel. In an earlier entry on The Grand Budapest Hotel<\/em><\/a>, I talked about his adherence to planimetric images, the tendency to fix the camera at right angles to a background plane and then arrange figures either horizontally, like clothes on a line, or in profile.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Likewise, Anderseon employs what I\u2019ve called compass-point editing. He usually puts the camera between the characters so that they face us in shot\/ reverse-shot.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Or he films the action from straight-on, straight-back, or at a right angle.\u00a0This geometry can be extended to camera movements: moving lateral and parallel to the planes of the shot, or panning at right angles, or zooming along the lens axis. Another extension is the straight-down angle, which is another variant of shooting at a different right angle to the action.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Planimetric shots and compass-point editing aren\u2019t absolutely new<\/a> with Anderson, but he uses them more thoroughly than most other filmmakers do. They govern his staging to the extent of pushing him away from realism. How plausible is it that all the Khaki scouts would line up on one side of the picnic table? Or that Ward wouldn\u2019t notice, in a later scene, that all of them are gone?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Anderson\u2019s use of such imagery evokes silent-film comedy, especially the compositions of Keaton, but these shots also suit a fairy-tale world. The stylized naivete of these compositions recalls children\u2019s drawings, which tend to spread figures out against a flat background. (This was prefigured in the squashed perspective of the Bishop house as portrayed in the fabric picture.)<\/p>\n

When a director commits to a particular style, he or she may have limited choices on other fronts. A good example is the climactic confrontation of all the adults in the St. Jack Wood church. Anderson might have staged this in many ways, but his stylistic preferences make the central aisle the most feasible arena. So we get the groups facing one another, in reverse-angle depth, moving from one planimetric composition to another, the cutting being either 180-degree reverses or simple axial cuts (zero-degree changes of angle). Sometimes the actors pivot to provide foreground profiles and frontal faces in the distance.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Once you the filmmaker embrace such a marked style so thoroughly, how can you signal special moments? In Moonrise Kingdom<\/em>, Anderson does this by reverting to more commonplace technical choices.<\/p>\n

When Suzy and Sam meet in the dressing room in 1964, we get straightforward 180-degree reversals.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And when they re-meet in the meadow, we get a mixture of profile and head-on shots.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

But then Anderson starts to exempt them from the usual spatial strictures.\u00a0The correspondence montage, for instance, retains the perpendicular framing but decenters his protagonists in mirror-image fashion.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As they get to know one another on their camping trip, the facing-front staging becomes less severe, more modulated.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And finally, when they admit their love to each other, Anderson gives us conventional \u00be views of faces and over-the-shoulder angles. These setups are reiterated when they embrace and dance.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

At an emotional peak, Anderson sharply violates the film\u2019s intrinsic norm by bringing in a common technique\u2014which now gains a force it doesn\u2019t customarily have.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Summer’s end<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The epilogue recapitulates both narrative and stylistic features. There’s another lateral tracking shot of the Bishop house, but now Sam is painting in a space that was empty at the start.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Again Suzy is using her binoculars, but now, dressed in cheery yellow, she has something worth seeing.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

On the soundtrack we hear Britten\u2019s \u201cCuckoo\u201d song, a reiteration of the summer\u2019s-end motif. The cuckoo, born in spring, enjoys the summer but must eventually fly. As we hear this over Sam\u2019s departure through the window, Anderson\u2019s camera slides down to reveal that Sam\u2019s picture presents a landscape that has now vanished.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Here is the big ellipsis that Anderson didn’t flag in the central idyll. When Sam was painting a stretched-out Suzy at Mile 3.25 Tidal Inlet, they had agreed that the name of the place was insipid. She says she\u2019ll think of a new name. But we’re told no more about the matter. In the epilogue, when we see Sam\u2019s picture, we realize that they have given the place a better name: Moonrise Kingdom, inscribed in white on the shore.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is our land!\u201d Sam had shouted when they looked out at the inlet. Like Anderson\u2019s imagining of a parallel world of childhood, Sam has recreated, in the manner of modern fairy tales, something that is gone.\u00a0As if in sympathy with the gesture, the film’s closing shot updates one that was given us during the scenes on the shore, with the yellow pup tent now pitched as the mist rolls in.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Did the couple really write MOONRISE KINGDOM on the shore during their stay? Hard to say. What matters is that, provoked by Sam’s picture, the film’s narration concludes by asserting the power of imaginative artifice.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Selling directors<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Floating Real Scarab Beetle Earrings<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Thinking about auteurs has always obliged us to focus on the interchange between industrial demands and artistic aims.<\/p>\n

In general, I don\u2019t see an inevitable conflict between market demands and artistic expression. (I argue for this here<\/a> and elsewhere.) True, often producers and executives and censors mangle creators\u2019 efforts. But some directors know how to do what they want with what they have. For example, Hitchcock\u2019s artistry benefited from his status as a celebrity director. He won substantial budgets and greater control of his work. And sometimes the suits\u2019 demands improve a film (as I suggest here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Historically, it isn’t easy to separate auteurs from their brands. Let\u2019s assume that a branded auteur is one who is known to a broad public for certain qualities of his or her films. A simple measure would be an ordinary viewer saying \u201cI like X movies,\u201d where X is the name of the director.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Hitchcock is nearly everybody’s clear-cut example of an auteur, but by the time the Cahiers du cin\u00e9ma<\/em> critics were forging their conception of cinematic artistry, Hitch was a brand too. How else to explain the 1940s-1950s book collections bearing his name, or The Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine<\/em>, or the tag, \u201cThe master of suspense\u201d? Hitchcock participated in this image-building with his jokey interviews, his walk-on appearances in his movies, and his reputation as a bland-faced prankster. Few directors today foster such shameless self-promotion. Also branded were Chaplin, Disney, Welles, and Cecil B. DeMille. Among the cinephilic public there was recognition of Huston, Sturges, and a few other hands.<\/p>\n

Of course many of the auteurs discovered by the Cahiers<\/em> critics were unknown to the public at large, and they didn\u2019t make profitable pictures. In 1940s Hollywood, the successful Lang was Walter, not Fritz. But as the film industry developed, and as auteur criticism became prominent, directorial distinctiveness became a marketing angle. By the 1970s, the movie brats, along with older hands like Altman, were presenting themselves as having \u201cpersonal visions\u201d carried by their films.<\/p>\n

More recently, US independent cinema has come to depend on several appeals (sex, social comment, and the like), but surely authorship is a central one. The indie scene exploits the signatures of directors as different as Lynch, Jarmusch, and Paul Thomas Anderson. The emergence of younger talent like Nicholas Winding Refn and Kelly Reichardt conforms to a similar pattern; people follow and support emerging directors, and distributors publicize the films that way. No wonder James Schamus, founder of Good Machine and late of Focus Features, once remarked: \u201cI\u2019m in the business of selling directors.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is just a fact of life for ambitious independent filmmakers. Wes Anderson\u2019s cultivation of a distinct style is probably partly a genuine reflection of his personality and partly a matter of willed self-presentation. But of course we\u2019re all indulging in self-presentation, using Goffman\u2019s \u201cimpression management,\u201d<\/a> every time we interact with others.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Like an indie band, Anderson has created a marque unusual enough to let the fans feel they\u2019re in on something keyed to their nonconformist tastes. He has provided the usual panoply of ancillary items, like soundtracks and bonus DVD tracks, but he has allowed others to participate in his world. Amateur videos comment on his style<\/a>; graphic artists render their own versions<\/a> of his posters. There are dozens of unlicensed\u00a0Moonrise Kingdom<\/em> tchotchkes<\/a>. Anderson\u2019s willingness to permit all manner of “tribute” memorabilia fits the handmade quality evoked by his films.<\/p>\n

Call it Geek Chic if you want, but it exemplifies an important and potentially valuable part of modern popular culture. For such reasons, I don\u2019t see anything inherently bad about being an auteur with marketing possibilities. People don\u2019t seem to object to David Lynch\u2019s coffee<\/a> and his nightclub<\/a>. With eccentricity, spontaneous or willed, all is permitted.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

My argument assumes that the term \u201cauteur\u201d picks out something neutral. For some people, though, it\u2019s not a description but a compliment; there can be no bad auteurs. But \u00a0I think we can have both weak auteurs\u2014filmmakers distinguished only by technique or tone or narrative strategy\u2014and downright bad ones as well. I have my own list.<\/p>\n

\n

This piece is based on a talk I gave earlier in July at the Hochschule f\u00fcr Fernsehen\u00a0und Film in Munich. Thanks to Andreas Rost and Michaela Kr\u00fctzen for arranging my visit.<\/p>\n

In the New Yorker<\/em> column<\/a> I mention, Richard Brody develops an argument along a different line than mine. As I understand it, he’s replying to critics who claim that the auteur approach overrates individual creativity at the expense of collaborators. He’s also objecting to the expanding search for ever more auteurs, who turn out to be minor artisans at best. My remarks are focused on different issues.<\/p>\n

For much more on Moonrise Kingdom<\/em> consult Matthew Zoller Seitz\u2019s indispensable The Wes Anderson Collection<\/em>.<\/a>\u00a0Michael Newman’s Indie: An American Film Culture<\/em><\/a> examines Anderson’s cinema as a development of the “Quirky Indie.” The fan-generated merchandise exemplifies what Henry Jenkins, in his book Textual Poachers<\/a>, called “participatory culture.”<\/p>\n

The three-part anatomy of film narrative I use here is explained in greater detail in this chapter<\/a> from Poetics of Cinema<\/em> and this blog entry<\/a>.<\/p>\n

My stills showing Sam’s painting and the extreme long shots of the shore can’t do justice to the originals; I tried bigger proportions, but the MOONRISE KINGDOM inscription remains hard to see. I have to assume that most readers have seen the movie, or will. The image below will have to do.<\/p>\n

P.S. 21 July 2014: <\/strong>One sign of a distinctive authorial approach is that it can be parodied. James Fiumara<\/strong> writes to recommend the Saturday Night Live<\/em> parody<\/a> of Anderson, applying his style to domestic horror. “I frequently show this to students in discussions of both auteurism and genre conventions. The students all laugh at the parody and then I get them to try to recognize what the parody depends on (namely, their recognizing recurring styles and patterns distinct to Anderson films, recognizing the conventions of the horror home-invasion subgenre, and of course seeing the incongruity between Anderson’s films and the horror genre).” Thanks to James for the link.<\/p>\n

P.P.S. 12 September 2014:<\/strong> Guillaume Campeau-Dupras writes to point me toward\u00a0his 2012 blog on the film<\/a>, which looks at the film from a perspective related to what Kristin and I have written about (but with many original ideas of his own). I think readers interested in Anderson would benefit from his entry.<\/p>\n

P.P.P.S. 2 October 2020:<\/strong> The branding continues! See this story<\/a> about Anderson-style buildings around the world. Here is a filmmaker who has truly changed how people see their environment.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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DB here: \u201cAn auteur is not a brand,\u201d argues Richard Brody. Not always, I\u2019d suggest; but it can happen. And it\u2019s not necessarily a bad thing. Wes Anderson has found a way to make films that project a unique sensibility while also fitting fairly smoothly into the modern American industry. He has his detractors (\u201cI […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[204,58,59,41,54,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-directors-anderson-wes","category-technique-editing","category-technique-staging","category-independent-american-film","category-narrative-strategies","category-readers-favorite-entries"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28446"}],"version-history":[{"count":54,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45533,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28446\/revisions\/45533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}