I realized recently that I’ve been referring to The Phoenician Scheme as, “Wes Anderson’s latest confection.” I think the inclination comes from his movies always being pretty as a pastry! There’s certainly no denying the look of a Wes Anderson confection film: the colors are saturated, the scenes are stylized, and regardless of whenever the story is set, there’s a retro feel to the worlds he conjures. Over the course of Anderson’s career, so much of our lives have moved online. For some fans, this has given them the opportunity to celebrate, as The Guardian called him, “the world’s chief auteur of cinematic whimsy.” There’s the Wes Anderson Palettes Tumblr that highlights central colors from movie stills. Or the Accidentally Wes Anderson Instagram handle that features snaps of real-life locales that could be easily confused for Anderson compositions. Yet not at all surprisingly, Anderson himself has resisted the gravitational pull towards the internet and social media. But he has been made aware of these online tributes, and commented on them in a new interview with Kristy Puchko at Mashable:
While interviewing Anderson about The Phoenician Scheme, I asked what he makes of the online fervor around his films’ looks. I specifically mentioned Accidentally Wes Anderson, as Focus Features teamed up with the Instagram account for a pair of advance screenings of The Phoenician Scheme.
Of that account, Anderson said, “Well, the Accidentally people, they tend to [post] landscapes and objects and things. And they’re all these kind of great pictures. I see them, and I get it. I understand the connection, and I’m interested. I’d like to visit this place or that place. They’re just good.”
However, he’s less fond of other attempts at capturing his style. “If it’s somebody who’s imitating me [and my work], but making the people just stoic, dead expression,” he said, “I don’t feel that’s what I do. I wouldn’t print [that] take, right?”
Anderson went onto explain he’s not very online, saying, “I’m on, like, Wikipedia, and I do a ton of emails. I mean, we do so much work by emails, but I don’t have any social media. And if somebody tells me, look at this thing [on social media] — I can’t even. It doesn’t even tell me how to get into that. I don’t have any password.” His awareness of the online memes and accounts about his work is something he is mostly aware of because of friends sending him screenshots.
Still, he mused about such fan reactions, “But then I think, ‘Well, what is it that I’m doing that makes you think that’s what I like?’ But I get, I understand. There are things that maybe if you reduce them a little bit? But whatever it is, mostly it’s nice to have people be interested.
“If somebody’s inspired to make something because of something I made, I like that. Because I’ve been inspired to make things by things other people have made. That’s my main reaction, and beyond that, my main reaction is, I never look at any of this stuff.”
First of all, Wes Anderson uses email?! Not a typewriter to print out messages that then get dispatched via a messenger pigeon whose left wing is recently injured from an accident related to a reunion with a newly discovered long lost relative so he (the pigeon) travels by miniature bicycle instead during his prolonged convalescence? I’m shocked, shocked I tell you! All jesting aside, Wes got lucky with his date of birth, establishing himself before social media blew up, so he could afford not to get involved with it all. The line that killed me, though, was “I have no password.” Password. Singular. Like the rest of us aren’t storing eleventy billion passwords on our phones. But what about something like accessing medical records? Doesn’t he need a password for that?
As for the tributes, I feel for Wes, here. On the one hand, he doesn’t want to insult people identifying as big fans, nor stifle their budding forms of expression. On the flipside, I can totally understand him bristling against all his work being reduced to just a visual style. He’s had to rebuff that notion before, saying “even if the form is essential, a film is first and foremost a script, a cast.” Similarly, I think it’s a real misrepresentation to say his characters are stoic. If anything, I think his characters usually reflect people who are bursting with emotion but inept at dealing with it. And of course the kicker is at the end, when after responding in detail he says, “I never look at any of this stuff.” Sure, Jan! And here’s something else I can’t believe: not one of these tribute sites has coined the name The Film Aesthetic with Wes Anderson.
Photos credit: Marion Curtis/StarPix for Focus Features/INSTARimages, Julie Edwards/Avalon, Olivier Huitel/Avalon
