Artifice in The Royal Tenenbaums

Wes Anderson’s films have an obvious artificiality about them, a very distinctive style sometimes verging on self-parody. This sense of artifice has often been criticized as twee, or simply as too artificial, and while I sympathize with the criticisms to some extent, I think Anderson’s signature style has sufficient formal strength to lift it out of its occasional plunge into cutesiness. I also think he utilizes his artifice to relate fiction and reality in some interesting ways.

In his films, the characters yearn for a kind of whimsical world of yesteryear; the films are bathed in nostalgia for a nonexistent past. This is true especially of Tenenbaums, where the characters are perpetually aware of their past glories and failures. But the form of the films insists that this wished-for world is the actual world that the characters live in. The symmetric compositions, the slow motion, the art direction littered with personal mementos, and the costumed characters all present the world as something contrived, something fictional; this effect is heightened in Tenenbaums by the narrator reading the story from a whimsical little book, and by presenting the story within an obviously fantastical version of New York. The world of Anderson’s style isn’t just any world: it has precisely the sense of a whimsical, ideal world that the characters yearn for (and which probably never existed for them); at the same time, all of the mementos and costumes encapsulate the characters—not in their entirety, but in their storybook dimensions. In a sense, the characters have secreted their desires and essences into the style of the film itself. Thus, the style surrounds the characters with the world that they are perpetually searching for, adding to the sense of pervasive bittersweet melancholy.

But the style is also extremely overt, drawing attention to itself. This ensures that we see the world not merely as it relates to the characters, but as it relates to Anderson himself. The world is presented as his creation as much as it is the ether of his characters’ wistful yearnings. But rather than the authorial voice taking precedence over the characters’ subjectivity, as in much of traditional pre-modern storytelling, here the authorial voice and the characters’ subjectivity meet in the film’s form and perpetually play off each other within it. This is exemplified by scenes like that in which Margot arrives on the bus. She comes toward the camera in slow motion, her arrival set to music; we see her as the idealized image that Richie wishes for. But the characters’ conversation (together with earlier and later events) ensures that we see this moment through a bittersweet lens; we know the characters are deeply unhappy, and that the film’s presentation of this moment is a reflection of their desires rather than a fulfillment of them. At the same time, the narration, the costumes, and the overt style insist that the entire scene is an artifice. But this artificiality is not ironic. It is not intended to distance us from the characters. It is the sincere authorial voice, which carries all the wistful melancholy of the characters themselves; it beckons us to sympathize, to wish for this artificial world even as we see it as an artifice. By making us aware of the artifice, rather than subverting the reality of the characters’ feelings, the film reinforces them.

This type of interplay between artifice and desire might not be sufficient in itself to justify the film’s twee leanings. But in addition to it, Anderson also inserts the occasional scene that breaks through the artifice. For example, in Rushmore there is the scene where Ms. Cross confronts Max with the reality of his sexual fantasies. In Tenenbaums, there is the scene of Richie’s attempted suicide. Of course, the scene is filled with an artifice of its own—it’s all blue-lighting, jump cuts, and Elliott Smith music—but the artifice is strikingly dissimilar from its surroundings, and the conveyed emotions are utterly raw. Pointedly, the scene largely consists of Richie removing his “costume”, discarding the artificial essence that tethers him to the past and the nostalgic world of the film. Scenes such as these offer a glimpse through the wall of artifice, into the emotional realities behind it; they form painfully real emotional cores around which the yearned-for world coalesces. And they make themselves felt within the artifice. They are always there, affording resonance to the whimsical melancholy of Anderson’s style.

A Lynchian Trilogy: Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., and Inland Empire; or, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Buddha in the land of the movies

I tend to view Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., and Inland Empire as retellings of the same story from different angles and with different philosophical implications. All three set up a dichotomy between the real world and the ideal world, the latter identified with or exemplified by movies in general and Hollywood (the Dream Factory) in particular. In the first two films, the ideal world is characterized as the world of love, in which the loved one embodies the lover’s ideals (and/or defines them) and the lover is the center of the loved one’s world; and in both cases the real world is one in which the loved one cheats on the lover and the jealous lover then kills the loved one. In the adulterous act the lover dissolves the ideal by removing herself from her assigned role as its embodiment; and by focusing her attentions on another, she casts the lover from his or her desired place at the center of the ideal world. Thus, the adultery acts as a perpetual rupture of the real into the ideal.

The two films have slightly different approaches to these themes. In Lost Highway, the ideal world is that of a cheesy “guy movie”, and the spurned/murderous lover idealizes himself as a virile young dude. From his masculine perspective, his loved one’s adultery has the connotation of emasculation and is intimately connected to his fear of impotence. In Mulholland Dr., the ideal world is more explicitly acknowledged as the dream world of Hollywood, and the spurned/murderous lover idealizes herself as a caring, talented woman who is the center of attention. (I don’t think it really makes much use of her “female” perspective, unlike Lost Highway’s depiction of the “male” perspective.)

The two films also arrive at opposite conclusions. In Lost Highway, the real and ideal merge in the end, with the movie-world and the real world colliding, and with the ideal, virile young dude merging with the real, emasculated older male.  This presents a sort of Hegelian picture in which the real disrupts the synthetic ideal, and then the two are  combined into  a new synthetic whole that contains the contradictory elements within itself. The story is also presented as a sort of eternal return: the synthetic whole ends up back at the starting point of the story. Hence, just as in the Hegelian dialectic, we can infer an endless repetition of synthetic wholes being ruptured by a contradictory element and then being synthesized into a new whole, of a reality being forced into a set of archetypes and then erupting those archetypes.  In Mulholland Dr., in contradistinction to this, the real and ideal are irreconcilable; their difference cannot be overcome, and the irreconcilability leads to the story having a definite end: the lover’s despairing self-destruction. It’s like a Kierkegaardian critique of the earlier film’s Hegelian dialectic.

What interests me most about Inland Empire is how it retells this same story from a very different and much larger perspective, and how its conclusions act as a commentary on the earlier films. The protagonist of Inland Empire is no longer the scorned lover, but the cheating loved one; this is an immediate upheaval of the earlier stories. It forces us to completely change our perspectives and sympathies. In this story, a conflation of the real and the ideal is actually what drives the cheater to cheat; she is so absorbed in the ideal world which she is cast into that she adopts her role in it as something real. Simultaneously, we see the story of male emasculation and female cheating retold again and again in many forms, setting it up as an archetypal tale, rather than “the real” that ruptures the ideal; we see how the ideal world acts as a perversion that makes the loved one a whore; and in Dern’s monologue, we see a story told by an embodiment of the problems that “real” women face as they are forced into the roles that men wish for them. All of these aspects continually comment upon one another, and put the earlier films in a broader context.

By far my favorite part of Inland Empire is the celebratory ending. When the camera pulls back from the scene of Dern’s height of misery, the film asserts a philosophical rejection of the earlier two films: it insists that there is no distinction between the real and ideal. The miserable “real” world that always threatens to rupture the ideal world is itself a construct of archetypes and ideals. I don’t know much about Lynch’s Transcendental Meditation beliefs, but I think the film’s ending is a profound and revelatory celebration of Mahayana Buddhism’s central tenet that “There is not the slightest difference between cyclic existence and Nirvana” (in which case the earlier films can be seen in the light of Theravada Buddhism’s more pessimistic quest for self-annihilation). Being and non-being, sensuous and notional reality, are illusory. The distinction between them is the cause of suffering, the cause of the story of infidelity and murder endlessly repeating. Even the distinction between movie-reality and the viewer’s reality is broken down at multiple levels, as a woman who has been watching the movie meets Dern’s character, and as Lynch’s actors and characters have a wrap party set to a dancer lip-synching Nina Simone’s Sinnerman. As the Buddha said, “O what an awakening, all hail!”

Blue Velvet (Lynch, 1986): society is a social construct, it’s all made of dreams, and we can’t stop the robin’s dancing

At the end of Blue Velvet, there’s a scene of suburban bliss with an obviously fake robin standing on the windowsill. I love that scene. There’s a great special feature (or maybe an easter egg) on the DVD, in which the cinematographer describes shooting it. He says they originally tried to get a real bird, but when they ended up using a fake one, he kept saying to Lynch, “We can’t shoot this; it looks ridiculous”, and Lynch responded, “Yeah, it’s perfect!”

The scene is played for irony, but its artificiality does not suggest that the characters’ happiness is a fleeting illusion. I think the whole point of the movie, which is emphasized by the hokey characters, the artificiality of the suburban setting, and the obvious fakeness of the bird, is that the happy everyday life that the characters briefly leave and then return to is an artificial construct. But that doesn’t mean it’s any less meaningful; the happiness that they find at the end is real, even if it is based on artifice. It’s like an extension of Rousseau’s description of the social contract: society is an expression of the general will. Blue Velvet extends that idea to the next level, in which the very reality of the everyday social world is a social construct. The robin is a fabrication, but it is a fabricated representation of social ideals; it is built from the ideals of the everyday people such as Dern. And as long as people live in terms of those ideals, they are real. They exist even if they are constructs.

Consider how that ties in with the role of blue velvet in the film. The blue velvet is vividly colored, but more importantly, it is textured, and Hopper pointedly feels it in the rape scene. It is a representative of the raw, visceral, tactile existence underlying the social construct. The robin, though a realization of Dern’s dreams, is artificial; the velvet you can feel between your fingers. Also consider the fact that the town is a logging town: it removes the wildness of the forest, uncovers the darkness hidden there (a theme returned to in Twin Peaks), and turns the trees into tools for human construction. The movie does a great job of setting up and showing the interactions and attractions of both worlds: the artificial world built of common ideals and phony robins, and the mysterious, raw world built of primal and personal deviance and populated by Frank Booths.

Also, the “In Dreams” scene is the greatest thing ever: a profound mixture of absurdity and melancholy, ideality and kitsch, propelling the film past the foundations of social reality and into the quagmires of the Self and the swooning horrors of obsessive love.

The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005): love, logos, and the history of the world

Immediately upon experiencing an object or event, we have made it known, forced it into a conceptual framework, equated it with a Platonic form or a part of our sociomonomythical notions of life as a story. But this process of knowing requires a differentiation, a positing of each thing as a thing-in-itself, separate from all other things and, in particular, separate from our consciousness of it. This separation of things from our consciousness thus includes a positing of our consciousness as a thing. Inevitably, then, we become subject to our own process of ratiocination; we define and judge our “selves” just as we do all other things. And once this process has commenced, it cannot be undone: we cannot discover the bare objects beneath our notions of them or our bare experience beneath our awareness of it. We might seek mystical conceptions of a pure, scintillating reality that is obscured by our “reason,” but this is merely another layer of conceptualization. And yet the immediate manifold Being of things, their ineffable particularity and interdependence that cannot be subsumed or revealed by our knowledge, forever lingers. Perpetually, at every moment, we are aware of this Being, even as we are simultaneously aware of our separation of it into defined, discrete parts. Hence, we cannot rightly say that humanity has fallen into a state of knowing; ‘tis better to say that human existence is a perpetual fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronn-tonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoo-hoordenenthurnuk!).

The New World recasts the familiar tale of Jamestown and Pocahontas as a mythical return to Eden, and in so doing it becomes an examination of our perpetual fall. It opens with a panning close-up of still, mirror-like water that slowly becomes textured with vegetation and reflections, gradually complexifying the initial purity. A voiceover says “We rise from out of the soul of you,” the tranquility of ambient birdsong segues into the ominous strains of Wagner’s Rheingold prelude, and the still water is replaced first by lithe swimming Native Americans and then by the towering man-made forms of European ships. Here, in this brief sequence, lies the film in microcosm: The appearance of modern man is presented as a revolution, a portentous emergence from the original purity of still water, born of a movement toward increasing complexity. America is cast as Eden, pure and unsullied by humanity’s pathological differance; the Europeans arrive dreaming of a return to life before the fall, simple and undifferentiated. The remainder of the film expands on this opening in two ways: firstly by imbuing the same broad process into the movement between the open American wilderness, the European colonists’ small settlement, and the city of London and environs; and secondly by imbuing it into the movement between Pocahontas’ romantic relationships with two Europeans.

To the first of these movements: The film is divided in four. In its first section, upon the Europeans arrival and during John Smith’s early romance with Pocahontas, America as Eden is firmly established. The style is elliptical and dreamlike. Voices and scenes bleed into one another with no obvious temporal or spatial relationship; frequent jump cuts further disintegrate any sense of continuity or geography. Objects and arms drift into the frame and the camera drifts its own response. Shots of surfaces of water punctuate this section, entangling nature’s mood with the characters’: the drops of water on a dim, still surface portending coming melancholy. America is a tone poem, an undifferentiated ether. The field of tall, waving grass spreads to the horizon, filling all the world. And Wagner’s Rheingold is always near.

In the film’s second section, the European’s settlement, Jamestown, has grown into a world of filth and chatter. The score ceases as the camera passes through the town gates, replaced by the harsh voices of yammering children; pure, still water is replaced by decrepit buildings and a palette of dun. The citizenry bicker and struggle for power, floundering like Cain and Abel at the gates of Eden. The film’s third section then sees Jamestown transformed into a stable community, in which people have learned to live in harmony, not according to the unspoken unity of the natives, but according to well-defined social values. Soft browns and greens fill the screen, bathed in warm, golden sunlight, evoking a homely calmness. The camera is more stable and shots are held for greater lengths, providing a sense of continuity that mimics the continuity provided by the community’s defined and accepted notions. Work is constantly being shown: the settlers are no longer aware of the world as a confused, indistinct unity, as they were in the first section, nor as something at odds with them, as in the second, but as a collection of things with specific properties to be utilized in specific ways.

This progression reaches its apex in the film’s final section, in which Pocahontas voyages to London, which appears as a revelation as great as was the Edenic America. The city is a soundscape of voices and bells, an artificial geography of great stone facades and manicured gardens. All natural forms, smooth and simple and melding one into another, have been replaced by human constructions, all sharp angles and clear delineations. Although the film has a unified style (characterized by its startlingly gorgeous, naturally-lit cinematography and its voiceovers that drift beneath the images rather than offer exposition over them), each of its sections has a distinct substyle and mood that distinguishes it from the others. When combined, they leave the impression of having surveyed human history as a whole, from the world of Genesis untainted by the fall, to modern man’s consuming techno-logical self-creation, all condensed into the story of Jamestown.

Now, to the second movement: on love and its existential ramifications. The first two sections of the film are centered on Pocahontas’ relationship with John Smith; the second two sections, her relationship with John Rolfe. The first love precipitates the fall. The love between Pocahontas and Smith is presented as an aspect of the overwhelming unification of the first section: they are lost in one another. The camera dwells on their swooning interactions as if there were nothing else. But this process of unification is predicated on a simultaneous separation, as their love annuls their roles in their respective cultures. Each is overwhelmed by the other’s subjectivity, the fact that the world exists for the other—in voiceover, Pocahontas says “A god to me he seems”—behind which normative reality fades into meaningless convention—“All else is unreal” and “That fort is not the world,” says Smith. But in being drawn out of their social substratum, each is born anew under the other’s gaze: Pocahontas intones “Two no more. One. I am.” When Smith eventually returns to Jamestown, he returns to the forceful reality of society and its mores. And from that perspective, his love is illusory: only logos, the Word, is real. He returns to his society’s notional reality, and without his gaze to support her sense of Self, Pocahontas falls as only the heartbroken can fall: into a state of existence with no fixed meaning, as one adrift at sea, with nothing stable, nothing fixed to hold onto.

However, this fall, as all others, is a fall into new meanings. As Jamestown develops into a functioning community, Pocahontas is married to John Rolfe. Rather than being overwhelmed by him, seeking unity and definition in his eyes, she learns to love him for his particular characteristics. She learns to think of him as an object with a particular fixed meaning: a Good Man. But rather than lessening him by thinking of him as such, she realizes that this is the truth of him; as much as he is a Subject for which the world exists, he is equally a particular man in that world. Conversely, she realizes that she does not require the overwhelming gaze of another in order to truly exist, for society’s notional reality is reality; the artificial structures of London have precisely the meaning that man has provided them, and Pocahontas truly is what she makes of herself within such structures. Notional definitions are her own. By embracing them she creates them. The final discovery, accompanied by the final portentous strains of the Rheingold, is that the American Eden exists in the European world. Our conceptualizations simultaneously constrain our experience and make it real, and the unity of existence lies not in some pre-conceptual reality, but in the scintillating unity of that reality with our notions. Throughout the film, Pocahontas speaks to Mother nature, the ineffable Being of Eden. (Smith, by contrast, speaks to God, the Word.) Finally, frolicking jubilantly through a castle’s garden, she intones “Mother, now I know where you live.” She realizes that Eden is something we carry with us, a trace that exists only as something behind our notions. It is constituted as something fallen from. It is born of our fall.

…

The overarching tale of social development inherent in the film’s movement from America to Jamestown to London is mirrored by Pocahontas’ personal movement from thoughtless unity with others, to an awareness of her alienation from them and their notions, to a knowing embrace of human notions as her own. As far as we can reduce our experience to a succession of moments, our perpetual fall is a pointlike process, occurring at every instant. In contrast, the development of human society is a process that can only be distinguished after the accumulation of many lifetimes of instants. However, The New World conflates these timescales, blowing up the pointlike existential process and contracting the overarching historical process to the scale of an individual human’s lifetime. And what is revealed in the resulting dreamlike miasma is that these processes are all the same, that humanity is self-similar on every scale…and always falling.