Blow my DILZ, Wes Anderson

I want to like Wes Anderson. In fact, I feel an almost pathological need to justify his work. His films hinge on a total aestheticization of their content; indeed the content becomes merely a staging ground for a refined, highly contextualized, highly specific, and explicitly referential aesthetic practice. As I have definitively proved, according to a strict, logical theorem derived from a synthesis of the work of analytic philosophers A.J. Ayer and John Rawls, aestheticization of narrative and emotional content -- a rewriting of the form/content dialectic where form not only subsumes content but destroys any independent existence of the latter and in which the former becomes not a transcendental category but itself a contingent, material expression of contemporary life -- is one of the only viable and 'genuine' ways of producing art today. Thus Anderson, bird-lipped, pale, and kitted out in slim bespoke 2-button suits, with his anal-retentive framing technique, his hipster color palette, his exquisite eye for the perfect juxtaposition of "quirky" though always self-consciously stylized subcultural details with the obvious constraints and influence of wealth, power, and the culture industry, would seem a perfect hero, a Baudelairian "painter of modern life."

No, Wes, no. I'm sorry. Your art is bullshit. First clue: wearing LL Bean duck-hunting boots and shorts, in Austin, Texas, bespeaks a failure to understand that, ironic or not, self-aestheticization must be firmly rooted in, indeed must grow out of, a deep contextual understanding, that is to say, it must contain an element of reflexivity. This outfit suggests rather a simple affirmation of the "preppy tradition" in defiance of circumstance, as if Anderson is intent on proving the transcendental ethical virtues of WASPiness. Second clue -- and this follows from the first --: the pleasure in each of his films, but especially this recent celebration of hipster colonialism entitled Darjeeling Limited, derives not from a self-reflexive awareness of the contingency of the aesthetic and emotional content; rather, this pleasure derives from a regressive defiance of this contingency, a forceful, childish insistence that these things are pretty, sad, 'cool,' regardless of - almost in ignorance of - their circumstance.
In "Hotel Chevalier," a short which precedes Darjeeling Limited, we get a little tableau that encapsulates all his work. Indeed, having seen this, there's hardly need to see anything else of his. There is a quite beautiful scene which consists of a slow-mo of Natalie Portman, posing exquisitely, awkwardly, nude, Jason Schwartzman covering her up with a bathrobe, and the two of them walking to the balcony of their fancy-but-not-cheesy, aristocratic-but-quirky, hotel room. Why is this scene pleasurable? Because Natalie Portman looks hot. She looks anorexic, but powerful - short hair, self-conscious self-eroticization. Because Schwarztman looks cool - long hair, ironic mustache, but rich. Clearly rich. Because the hotel is dope, and Paris is beautiful, and the idea of a life of young, attractive, ironic, anorexic leisure is decadent and appealing. And it is appealing, and one does not need to deny that. We should, however, try to problematize it; without this, Wes Anderson might as well be doing socialist realism (late capitalist realism?).

How, then, does this differ from the most conservative/affirmative of cultural production? Only in that Anderson is playing to a different (richer, younger, more 'aware') demographic. The ideology, the impulse behind it, is the same. Everything here, all the impossibilities of this scene, are staged not as a sort of beautiful nostalgic failure (as in, I would argue, Miami Vice) but as something real, a "really" beautiful "lifestyle." Anderson's cultivation of a very specific aesthetic is a question of instituting his own self-production as a model for others; he is saying, look at how beautiful this lifestyle I've thought up is. Wouldn't you like it? Or, at the very least, wouldn't you like something equivalent of your own? The problem is, it is completely un-self-aware, and the embededness of his aesthetic with the usual suspects - capital, social class (here obviously fictional, yet still operative as an ideological category), and race (i.e., how blacks and Indians are always props in his films) - is not thematized at all, only valorized and itself aestheticized.