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“In the nineties, everybody was just nutty about super-violent films,” says Whit Stillman, whose debut, the agitated comedy of manners Metropolitan, and its follow-up, Barcelona, both arrived during the rise of gunfire artists such as Abel Ferrara, Quentin Tarantino, and Robert Rodriguez. Tarantino alone transformed the nature of “Indie” from the contemplative, deliberately paced, sometimes even spaced-out fare that Jim Jarmusch, Steven Soderbergh, and early Richard Linklater offered to the shoot-a-guy-then-quip thrill rides that were really no different from big-budget action franchises like the Die Hard and Terminator movies—just more clever and helmed by someone with a better record collection. Stillman, a Harvard grad with a background in advertising, was, in his own words, “totally on the outs.”
Well, not totally. Metropolitan, which concerns the social lives of upper-Manhattan debutantes and the formally dressed escorts who love and use them, met with rave reviews and garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay in 1990. Still, the film seemed out of place somehow, a throwback to the gentler age of Bill Forsyth’s early-’80s fare, before bombast was a requirement. The actual Manhattan of the late 1980s and early ’90s was at its druggiest and most crime infested under Mayor David Dinkins. In life, New York felt more like Midnight Cowboy, Mean Streets, The Panic in Needle Park, and Cruising and less like a Rankin/Bass snowy Christmas spectacular—but in Stillman’s world, as in Woody Allen’s before him, the streets were safe. It was the psyche that was in danger, not the body.
His camera lingers lovingly on “old New York” touchstones like Scribner books, Henri Bendel, the Doubleday building, the Plaza Hotel, and, of course, the tree at Rockefeller Center. Stillman’s characters, rosy cheeked and clad in Brooks Brothers and J.Press when not in tuxes, don’t talk like WASPs with sticks up their asses. They rant and whine just like Woody Allen heroes. This endeared them to a loyal but small audience, and set up one of the crucial tropes in Twee cinema: relatability. It also, unsurprisingly, left others at a loss. They are films that require the patience of a novel-reader.
There’s a pivotal scene in Metropolitan in which Chris Eigeman’s Nick Smith walks with a pal down a city street at night, dressed in the full formal wear he and his young compatriots have grown comfortable in: top hat, tails, the works. This being a Stillman snow globe, there’s no chance of being mugged. Nick looks both elegant and ridiculous, not quite a man despite his attire, and not quite an overgrown boy dressing up, either, but rather stuck in between. As he goes, he and his pal happen upon a box left out on the sidewalk for sanitation pickup. Nick stoops to inspect the contents and is mortified to discover that what he considers treasure has been deemed refuse: Steiff stuffed animals, an Aurora model car set, and a pristine Derringer pop gun.
“Do you remember the Derringer craze?” he asks his pal. “It’s incredible the things some people throw away! The childhood of our generation is represented here and they’re just throwing it out!”
Twenty years later, the same emotions are visited in the Oscar-nominated blockbuster Toy Story 3, only this time from the point of view of the discarded toys themselves. “We’re all just trash waiting to be thrown away, that’s all a toy is,” says Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear.
The passing of time, without religion (and if these characters have a religion, it’s pop culture itself, which prizes, as we know, all things young), can make people wise, but it can also make them mean. The marginal popularity of these films, beyond certain critics, comes down to the fact that their auteurs are unafraid to create a character who is, quite simply, a dick—from Eigeman in Metropolitan to Ben Stiller in Baumbach’s Greenberg nearly twenty years later.
“When I read [the script], I always thought of that character as just the kind of guy who threatened me in high school,” says Eigeman. “The unbreakable resilience of his arrogance. The dominance of his personality. In a way, Nick is a bully. This is a guy where you kind of want to be in his orbit, but you’re also kind of scared to be in his orbit, because he could turn on you just as quickly.”
Hence, the way these characters express themselves—in Stillman’s films and later in many of Baumbach and Anderson’s—can be construed as snappish. “Generally, they’re kind of arch,” says producer Joel Kastelberg, who worked on Baumbach’s first two films, Kicking and Screaming (1995) and Mr. Jealousy (1997). “It can be off-putting to people who want a little more sugar in their experience. There’s a wry, knowing quality to those guys in person and in their work, and it might be offensive to some people.” These are characters in serious pain, well aware that an actual time-machine-style return to their childhood is no cure. Grade school, junior high, and high school were cruel too.
If there was an antidote to the perils-of-adulthood subgenre, it came from an unlikely place in the mid-’90s. Fast Times at Ridgemont High director Amy Heckerling wrote and directed a smash in the form of the aforementioned Clueless in the summer of 1995. It depicted a new kind of enlightened, post-Heathers, post-Nirvana popular kid: Cher Horowitz, played by Alicia Silverstone, and her best friend Dionne (Stacey Dash). Both characters were named for “great ’60s singers who now do infomercials,” as Cher says in her voice-over narration. Cher has her hormones in check and her shit together despite a dead mother and an emotionally absent father. “Hymenally challenged,” she is saving her virginity for Luke Perry and is more motivated by the state of her soul than the churning in her teenage body. Clueless is not without commentary and certainly not without charm. The high school hallways are full of girls with bandaged noses, dozens of them, but Cher, egged on by her complaint-rock-listening stepbrother, Josh (played by Paul Rudd), is determined to leave the superficial behind and devote herself to performing good deeds: sharing her fancy coffee with her teacher, buying takeout for her hard-boiled father. Her greatest challenge: making over the “adorably clueless” Tai Frasier, a fashion-challenged transfer student played by the late Brittany Murphy. Still, the world of Clueless is a fantasy; loosely based on the Jane Austen novel Emma, it’s a pretty fable when compared to that same year’s primal scream, Welcome to the Dollhouse, a junior high exposé that feels more like The Road Warrior.
Directed by Todd Solondz, who is consistently the darkest, bravest, and funniest of the ’90s Twee Tribe filmmakers, Dollhouse, like The Breakfast Club before it, asks the logical “Why?” in the face of student-on-student brutality, but it offers no easy, hopeful answers. When his chubby, bespectacled, hopeless-case heroine Dawn Wiener (Heather Matarazzo) gets in trouble for beating up a school bully, she justifies it to her horrid mother by claiming that she was only fighting back. “Whoever told you to fight back?” her mother retorts. A boomer, Dawn’s mother is absolutely astounded that anyone would ever think to resist the nerd-jock order that marked American high schools and junior highs for decades. Her hair pulled back too tight, her sweater unfashionable, a permanently befuddled expression on her chubby face, Dawn needs a few dozen more allies; and alas, she has none, not even her computer-geek brother. When she endeavors to draft like-minded peers into the “Special People’s Club,” she’s informed that “special people equals retarded. Your club is for retards.” Solondz wasn’t buying into the Hughes lightness, and had no fear to go pitch-dark.
“I think in parts it was probably a reaction against what I saw on The Wonder Years,” he says today. “When you make a movie, particularly when you’re young, you try to put something fresh out there—something you felt you haven’t seen captured before.” Dollhouse and, more so, the two films that followed it—Happiness and Storytelling—were raw, fearless, sweet, and subversive tales about what happens when the system releases these schoolyard victims into the real world. Dollhouse was a surprise hit, and Dawn Wiener became a sort of Norma Rae figure for nerds. “I think I was moved by her plight,” Solondz says of his greatest creation and possible alter ego. “Her flaws and her failures. It endeared me to her. And the reaction [from the public] was unexpected. Even Cindy Crawford said at one point, ‘Dawn Wiener, that w
as me.’ It struck some sort of chord.”
Belle and Sebastian saw a kindred spirit in Solondz and would later record a soundtrack for Storytelling, which turns its eye to the social structure of the American liberal-arts college. “All nine of them came out to Hoboken!” Solondz remembers of Belle and Sebastian, to work on the music.
“I think people saw Dawn as a hero,” Solondz says. Especially when contrasted with Cher Horowitz, Dawn Wiener seems so much more tangible. “They started using expressions like ‘geek chic,’” Solondz recalls. “Like there was something hip about her and the attitude towards her. But I think certainly ‘geek chic’ is something that’s embraced by people who haven’t had that epithet hurled at them.” Solondz clearly had, and wasn’t buying into it. Still, even though he kills off Dawn (her death is mentioned in his later film Palindromes), he hasn’t ruled out resurrecting her. He’s done so with characters in the past. He’s even cast different actors in signature parts, which he may have to do again, as Matarazzo seems to have permanently distanced herself from Dawn. “It’s possible the character may reappear at another point,” Solondz says. “I did want to bring Heather back, but she emphatically never wanted to play this character ever again. She didn’t want the role to define her.”
In a way, killing off Dawn was an act of mercy. Many of Solondz’s characters simply cannot navigate adulthood. Their misadventures and miseries behind closed doors validate every fear expressed by modern cinema teens. When you grow up, your heart not only dies, it slowly rots first. Dark Horse, Solondz’s 2011 film, concerns a charmless, bloated man-child (Jordan Gelber) who lives at home, in middle age, with his elderly parents, played by Christopher Walken and Mia Farrow—the latest in a series of major stars who’ve clamored to work with Solondz since Dollhouse—in a room surrounded by vintage toys. “It’s a kind of death in life,” the director says. “It’s also a very class-oriented issue. [Not growing up] is a problem of the privileged in a world that’s kind of become a consumerist paradise.”
There are those who might look at Twee cinema as the absolute moment that the “strong, silent type,” so admired by Tony Soprano was lost forever. John Wayne in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Gary Cooper in High Noon. The Stillman characters and their offspring in Baumbach and Anderson’s films are never silent and never very strong, despite being mostly beautiful on the outside. There’s trimness and rosiness to all Twee characters, and usually a hollow, or at least dysfunctional, core.
Baumbach was barely out of college when he returned to the world of academia for Kicking and Screaming in 1995, released in the midst of the popularity of 1994’s Reality Bites, Gen X’s first assertion in Hollywood. That movie featured much bigger stars than Baumbach’s, like Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke, but trod the exact same period of young-adult life.
In order for Kicking and Screaming to get financed as a shoestring affair, another movie star, Eric Stoltz (a veteran of Hughes’s Some Kind of Wonderful and Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction), had to agree, via a fax sent from Scotland, where he was filming Rob Roy, to appear in a small part. That part hadn’t even been written. Baumbach would have to pencil in for him the role of Chet, the all-knowing bartender at the local college-town tavern.
“I got the script from Mary-Louise Parker while we were shooting Naked in New York,” Stoltz remembers. “She said it was really good—but there were no roles for either of us. So I gave it a read, it’s always nice to read something good. Joel Kastelberg was producing, so he arranged a meeting with Noah Baumbach. I thought he seemed a fine fellow, and we agreed I was to play the video clerk. Then I went off to Scotland to shoot Rob Roy, and during that summer I got a fax from Noah saying that the original lead of the film had dropped out, and that Trimark—the company financing the film—needed a “name” within a week or they’d pull the money. I wrote back that there was really no lead role that I was appropriate for, and Noah wrote that we could make one up. He came up with Chet, the older guy at the college who never graduates and works as a bartender. I agreed, even though my agents were a little thrown.”
The quality of the writing seemed to put the producers at ease despite Baumbach’s inexperience. “Noah hadn’t been on a film set. He’d never even directed a play. But he had a presence that was inspiring,” says Stoltz.
In a way, Baumbach is the poster child for the bedroom scholar who, like Morrissey and Stuart Murdoch, formulated a stance strictly by absorbing and filtering other artists’ work. Baumbach’s mother, Georgia Brown, and his father, Jonathan Baumbach, were both writers and cinephiles. “Noah was instantly in his element as a director,” Stoltz recalls.
“It was a fun set to be on, as everyone was there because they loved the script,” Stoltz says. “That’s one of the great things about small independent films—since no one is really making any money, the cast and crew tend to be there for the right reasons, and the work often reflects that.”
The film’s plot concerns a group of recent graduates of a Vassar-like university (Vassar was Baumbach’s alma mater) who are reluctant to head out into the world and conquer it. Kicking and Screaming’s heroes create a de facto bunker in a cramped, off-campus hut and attack each other like Pinter heroes until, one by one, they break down. Nothing has happened to them to warrant such sadness or hopelessness. They are simply the new, soft men, the first generation who did not have to—and did not know how to—fight.
“I’m nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday,” Chris Eigeman’s Max complains. “I’ve begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I’m reminiscing this right now. I can’t go to the bar because I’ve already looked back on it in my memory and I didn’t have a good time.”
Max is the prototype for the coming generation of tech-propelled young people who want their glories accelerated without the burden of paying any dues. “There’s this sort of world-weary pose coupled with being incredibly naïve at the same time,” says Eigeman of the character. In another scene, pacing and smoking, he announces, “I wish we were just going off to war.”
“I think he’s really sincere,” Eigeman says of the sentiment. “Those kids really wished the big events of their lives were behind them and not in front of them. It’s a pose that’s easily adoptable.”
As the postgraduates wait, Vladimir-and-Estragon-like, for the love and glory and life that they don’t fully believe in to happen to them, they grow listless. Instead of sweeping up a pile of broken glass, Max simply places a hand-drawn sign on it, reading: BROKEN GLASS.
They test each other on useless trivia too, naming the Friday the 13th films in order. “The obsession with trivia is a way of avoiding the bigger questions in life,” says Hamilton, who plays the closest thing the film has to a romantic lead. Grover, like Max, is inert, but whereas Max shrugs and muses at his fate, Grover keeps convincing himself that he’s all right. The shortcuts he aspires to are not just macro; they are micro too. He is the kind of guy who reads enough of a book to be conversant. Hamilton is such a winning screen presence that Grover is less punchable than he should be when dismissing his girlfriend Jane’s sincere desire to explore the newly tourist-friendly, somewhat cliché, Prague. “Oh, I’ve been to Prague,” he tells her. When she points out that in actuality, he hasn’t left the campus in years, much less visited Prague, he snaps back, “Well, I haven’t been-to-Prague been to Prague, but I know that thing, I know that ‘stop shaving your armpits, read The Unbearable Lightness of Being, fall in love with a sculptor, now I realize how bad American coffee is’ thing.”
The film was only a modest success, although it is now prized as a cult classic.
“There is a whole new wave of people who’ve found it,” says Hamilton, “so obviously whatever it touches upon is not changed. If anything, it’s even a bleaker situation, graduating from college now.”
As with any artistic trend, Twee doesn’t become a movement until it gets its own household name. He arrived in the corduroy-draped, beanpole shape of Wes Anderson.
“I don�
�t know how Wes Anderson does it,” says Whit Stillman.
For one thing, he isn’t a New Yorker. Anderson was born and raised in Texas. He skirts Hollywood, even though he is a studio filmmaker. As with his musical contemporaries like Belle and Sebastian, he’s found a way to make films that are at once indebted to older masters, whether it’s Satyajit Ray, Louis Buñuel, Hal Ashby, John Cassavetes, George Lucas, or even the 1980s teen-angst school of John Hughes, Risky Business, and Heathers, but he has created a cinematic language all his own. He has a signature tempo and rhythm, instantly identifiable like Altman’s or Quentin Tarantino’s. From all of this, Anderson builds a universe as detailed and signature as that of Orson Welles’s early films or George Lucas’s Star Wars. Everything seems to fit, every detail has a thought behind it; nothing is simply hung or placed in a Wes Anderson movie.
The distinctness of Anderson isn’t only down to the way actors speak or what they say: it is also what they don’t say. Tarantino fills every frame with noise. Anderson’s hushed, haunted, too-smart-to-smile debut Bottle Rocket has heroes often staring into the distance, lost in thought and in life. Visually, Anderson is a frame saturator. His films are cluttered and compulsively designed, and as his now classic American Express commercial implies, there’s not a detail that hasn’t been puzzled through, from a swatch of wallpaper to the right hat. Anderson’s father worked in advertising in his native Houston and it’s the selling of a vision, almost ad-campaign-like, with a kind of requisite certainty and conviction that has rubbed off. This is why, like Charles and Ray Eames before him, Anderson has always been a sought-after commercial director.
Anderson could not have gotten there without the likes of Stillman, but his alpha stance has afforded him a gift that only Tarantino had previously enjoyed: a seemingly blank check. Tarantino and Anderson are, in this way, the Francis Ford Coppolas of their generation, wildly respected by their peers, with money and power contributing to a kind of gifted-child indulgence that could ruin either of them if they ever missed. But both are fairly crack shots.