Author: Spitz, Marc
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With Owen Wilson now a full-fledged movie star, Baumbach and Anderson became writing collaborators. Though both visually striking, neither Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou nor The Darjeeling Limited carried the shock of the new that was Bottle Rocket and Rushmore. Meanwhile Coppola’s Marie Antoinette was opulent and ambitious but oddly empty at the same time. Critics seemed to seize on the film’s emptiness even while taking it its sumptuous art direction and costuming.
The millennials didn’t have Roger Corman, the exploitation film impresario who nurtured the ’70s Easy Riders like Coppola, Bogdanovich, and Scorsese, to teach them how to make films. But they did have skate videos, which were distributed hands-on like zines in the ’70s and ’80s. And they had MTV. A sort of companion school of soon-to-be-respected directors emerged out of music video production in the ’90s and early ’00s and created a half dozen films that stood proudly alongside the new, young post–Easy Rider auteurs, but stood out as well. The works of Spike Jonze, Coppola’s ex-husband, were not too far removed from a film like Marie Antoinette. Here were the boys dressing up and playing with record-company and later film-studio money (what is Jonze’s most famous music video, the Beastie Boys’s “Sabotage,” if not a case of dress up and frolic?). Coppola appears as a gymnast in the Chemical Brothers’ 1997 “Elektrobank” video, directed by Jonze, to whom she was still married at the time.
The films of Jonze, Frenchman Michel Gondry, and others bypassed the ’70s as influences and were instead throwbacks to the candy-colored, trippy ’60s and early ’70s (films of their childhood, ostensibly: Logan’s Run, Day of the Dolphin, The Omega Man, Soylent Green, and Planet of the Apes). Other times they were impossibly sweet but bizarre, and called to mind Bedazzled, Head, and other drug-culture informed, deceptively dark comedies. The best of them, Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Jonze’s recent Her, feature characters who want the same thing as Max Fischer or Scarlett Johansson’s Charlotte: they want to belong, to be loved, to figure out this big, scary world. They’re haunted characters existing in a world where the whimsy is not as neatly boxed as it is in Anderson’s creations. It feels homemade, like the costumes in Gondry’s Be Kind, Rewind, and just on the verge of falling apart, à la the hazy end of Jonze’s Adaptation. MTV before “Sabotage” and other Jonze videos like Bjork’s “It’s Oh So Quiet” and Weezer’s “Buddy Holly” lacked a certain playfulness (Gondry’s clips like Cibo Matto’s “Sugar Water” and especially his later videos for the White Stripes would keep this quality alive). The clips seemed harder, less art pieces and more products designed to move other products; more teen friendly with a real need for Twee spirit. Even Nirvana’s videos were moody and murky (with the exception of “In Bloom”). Only the young Beck seemed to get the joke of rock stardom and its attendant promotion and pressure—and the fun one can have with it. When these Twee video directors leaped over to feature films they brought this sense of dark whimsy and visual experimentalism with them, and like-minded artists like Beck (a little too arty, aloof, and on-his-own-planet-unique to pass as pure Twee) and Bjork (same) followed, loaning credibility and occasionally a song or two to a soundtrack. Childhood is never far; it haunts these heroes—take Jim Carrey bathing in the sink or slyly jerking off in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It even haunts the chimp trapped in the apartment of Cameron Diaz’s and John Cusack’s characters (practitioners of a very Twee and outré art form, puppeteering) in Being John Malkovich. When faced with a real man’s man, like Nicolas Cage’s Charlie Kaufman in Adaptation, these directors’ boy-men shrink in confusion.
With Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, Spike Jonze, who’d made his name with street-smart skater videos before virtually taking over MTV in the mid-’90s with one innovative video after another and then as a cocreator of the Jackass franchise, became respected as a serious—not just a “kid”—filmmaker. But once he was given a chance to have a carte-blanche career, what he chose to do was a murky adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, which had none of the zest and humor of his previous films.
The film is shot in dusky light, with strange pacing. It’s full of pregnant pauses. The Wild Things monsters, the great showpieces of the film, are just as brooding and neurotic and damaged by life as Max, who turns to them for diversion. In a 2013 profile of Jonze for Time, Joel Stein succinctly described the film as “a kids’ movie so true to what it feels like to be a kid that kids didn’t see it . . .” Once they had hits and power, the millennials seemed determined to tell even more personal and polarizing stories that drew them farther and farther away from the box office and deeper into their childhood traumas.
Similarly, Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding squandered much of the goodwill the director had banked with Squid. “Nicole Kidman’s figure is polarizing, and a lot of people did not respond to it,” says musician Dean Wareham, a friend and collaborator of Baumbach’s. “I kind of think people will accept the behavior of the Jeff Daniels character, the father, that way, but they won’t accept it in the mother—they’ll accept a man being a selfish prick.” No longer having to keep their Twee in check, it ran rampant in tandem with the out-of-control war effort and created a sort of backlash that was usually reserved for winking foreign films full of big-eyed scamps, like Audrey Tatou in the polarizing Amélie and anything starring Roberto Benigni.
“I hate the idea of ‘Oh, this is the new trend we have to kill,’” says Whit Stillman of the Twee cinema backlash, started in the mid-2000s, that even affected financing for his comeback film, 2011’s Damsels in Distress. “You get so much hostility it’s amazing. It’s a very perverse thing going on. I think if the world is upside down, we should be watching delightful 1930s escapism—and charming comedies. In 1935 our imaginations were at their apex and the world was in the worst spot it was going to be in. Ten years of absolute horror, and yet they made these gorgeous, wonderful films.” Similarly, as the world skirted another depression and a pair of seemingly endless wars, Twee films began to become more fantastical . . . and profitable.
Next came the stop-motion-animation retelling of Roald Dahl’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox (with no less than Meryl Streep alongside Clooney) and the magnificent Moonrise Kingdom, a love story set in the fading summer of 1965 between Suzy and Sam, troubled young runaways who share a brief but idyllic campsite on the shore of a remote island in New England. In this film, Anderson’s best and most commercially successful so far, there’s a literal storm coming to threaten the blissful, pure childhood of its two heroes. Anderson doesn’t even bother with masking his metaphors any longer.
When that film was released in 2012, it seemed only the crabs were vocal. The film charmed just about everyone else. The author and screenwriter Bret Easton Ellis, newly emerged as Twitter’s greatest and most lethal culture critic, tweeted, “The ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ review in NYTimes is the whitest review I have ever read about the whitest movie ever made,” while newly minted Generation Twee heroine Lena Dunham gushed, “Moonrise Kingdom couldn’t be more pleasurable.”
At least Donald Fagen, the Steely Dan cofounder who took Anderson to task during the Life Aquatic/Darjeeling Limited period for repeating his tropes, came around. In his 2013 memoir, Eminent Hipsters, he expressed cynicism-free affection for Moonrise. “I think one of the reasons we’re intrigued by Anderson is that he seems to be fixated on the sort of geekish, early-sixties adolescent experience that he’s too young to have had but that Walter [Becker] and I actually lived through. And yet he nails the mood precisely, using comedic exaggeration and fantasy to do the job. Although it was no picnic, it’s too bad everyone’s coming-of-age can’t take place in the early sixties.”
Sometimes even Anderson veterans took shots at the maestro. Hosting an October 2013 episode of Saturday Night Live, Moonrise Kingdom’s scout-troop leader Edward Norton appears in the horror spoof The Midnite Coterie of Sinister Intruders. The short is narrated in the fashion of Tenenbaums by Alec Baldwin (“From the twisted mind . . . of Wes Ander
son”), and Norton, doing a spot-on Owen Wilson, observes a gaggle of maniacs in his front yard through a set of vintage binoculars.
“Wow, look at him! He’s got the meat cleaver. And a record player!”
Anderson, who at the time of this writing was deep into the production of his latest film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, was likely oblivious to it all. I went to see the film on its opening day in March 2014 and realized just how far he stood above the haters. He seemed to straddle them, his head far too high in the clouds to even hear or acknowledge them. The film’s main action (there are flashbacks and flash-forwards) takes place in a lavish hotel in the fictional Republic of Zubrowka during the weeks and months leading up to a “tricky” war, as concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) describes it. It’s obviously World War II, but specifics are not mentioned and plot (an art heist) as intrigue is not really important. It’s a Wes Anderson film about Wes Anderson’s latest vision. “[The film] is about the spiritual heritage and the political force of those long-vanished styles,” Richard Brody writes in his New Yorker review “about the substance of style, not just the style of his Old World characters but also, crucially, Anderson’s own.” I also realized in the lobby that the openings of Anderson’s films are akin to a new action film starring a bevy of Marvel comics heroes; they are events, full of triggers (cameos by beloved Anderson collaborators like Owen Wilson, Bob Balaban, and of course Bill Murray) and signals to his devoted (“Rudeness is merely the expression of fear,” one character declares). It’s the real world, with only a “glimmer of civilization in the barbaric slaughterhouse we know as humanity,” as another character complains, that’s got the problem, not Anderson, the filmmaker as pastry chef; the one-man preservation society. With every great, old palace, like the Grand Budapest, that falls into “shabby decay,” Anderson, another catcher in the rye figure like Cobain, seems determined to be there to point out the shame.
Chapter 12
Extremely Loud and Conveniently Local
2001–2009
In which catastrophe and war separate the real men from the man-children in the worlds of literature and activism, and the fate of the modern age hangs in the balance. Would it be the end or the beginning of something better, kinder, and more hands-on?
The world was going to end. The giant rabbit with the gnarled teeth predicted it. Donnie Darko, the cult film directed by Richard Kelly is a long, occasionally funny bad omen. Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) is an insomniac, overmedicated, and over-psychoanalyzed troubled teen in the fall of 1988. He may also be dead. In another bit of horrible coincidence, a part of a jet airplane has fallen on his house. He exists now in a sort of netherworld, a Holden Caulfield figure in purgatory, obeying the call and parsing out the cryptic utterings of a giant, Harvey-like bunny. Donnie Darko is a great Twee film because it’s suffused with dread, darkness, and humor à la Anderson’s oeuvre, and because it reduces its adult characters to either helpless or deluded. In terms of production and setting, Darko takes Anderson’s ardor for the unremembered 1960s and places it in the 1980s; it’s set on the evening of a George Bush–Michael Dukakis presidential debate. In 2001, teens rallied around Darko, making it an almost instant cult hit, largely because it was spearheaded by a credible film rebel in Donnie—but also because by this point, thanks to technology, the unremembered ’80s could be virtually experienced. Echo and the Bunnymen’s “The Killing Moon,” Duran Duran’s “Notorious,” the Church’s “Under the Milky Way,” and especially Tears for Fears’s “Head over Heels” and the haunting cover of “Mad World” by Michael Andrews and Gary Jules made going back in time seem preferable to the actual madness that had descended like falling debris.
Few other works of 9/11-informed art ring as true as Darko, probably because it was filmed before the attacks and has prescience on its side. Even pop saint Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising feels somewhat exploitative, having been recorded after the attacks. Artists had the means to respond to catastrophe faster in the twenty-first century, and perhaps this was not such a good thing. There was a good decade’s worth of simmer between J. D. Salinger conceiving of Holden Caulfield, taking him to war, processing what he saw in Hürtgen Forest and at Dachau, and ultimately writing The Catcher in the Rye.
After the 9/11 attacks, there was also the prevailing sense that the adults needed to be in charge, not an increasingly infantilized and hybrid generation of teens. The Bush-Cheney leadership treated Americans like children, instructing us to do some shopping if we felt like helping, carrying on as if nothing happened at all. But as with World War II, the world had changed forever, and answers were not coming clear or fast enough to satisfy, well, anyone.
September 11, 2001, brought with it, more than anything else, a sense of confusion and disorientation. Were we going to get hit again? Who was hitting us, anyway? They didn’t wear uniforms. Why do they hate us? It was left to our elected officials and public servants to produce concrete answers and to our artists to address the abstract. Some looked forward. Others looked backward for precedent, and a few, perhaps unwisely, looked at the still-smoldering and tension-electrified present.
“Our good fortune allowed us to feel a sadness that our parents didn’t have time for,” Ewan McGregor says in voice-over in Mike Mills’s bittersweet love story Beginners. Now the sadness was ours. We had our own World War II, our own Vietnam, and few of us had the sure-handedness or the ego of the Boss. What would we do with it? Would we handle it well, or would we clam up or blow it with self-absorption? It behooved our young artists to figure it out, even as the pit was being cleared of smoldering metal and ash and the air smelled deadly. Clarity was key.
“I don’t think 9/11 had much bearing on me writing about history,” says Sarah Vowell. “In fact, I was finished with a book of historical essays and had to scramble to write another, what came to be the title essay of Partly Cloudy Patriot, which was a tip of the hat to Thomas Paine. I will say it had a drastic impact on my music consumption. I used to have music playing around the house all waking hours, and I switched to news overnight and never really went back. It sounds silly now, but I slept with my radio tuned to my NPR affiliate for at least six weeks because I wanted to know the second they took bin Laden into custody. I did not anticipate that would take ten years. Though the first thing I did when I heard was put on Joan Baez singing ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic.’”
Brooklyn writer Jonathan Safran Foer, today a divisive literary figure, should at least get credit for his attempt to write his literary equivalent of The Rising. Foer’s Oskar Schell, the nine-year-old hero of the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, is a precocious waif in a ski hat and backpack who has the run of the city until tragedy strikes. When he loses his father in the attacks on the World Trade Center, New York is no longer his playground but a haunted house. Oskar, like Holden Caulfield obsessing over his ducks, spends much of the book and subsequent film adaptation searching for the lock to a key the old man left behind. Here is a somewhat broadly drawn boy genius, but also one who has every right to whine and brood. There were many orphans made that terrible day.
And yet at the time of the book’s publication, four full years after the attacks, there were readers who cried again and again, “Too soon,” or “Not concrete enough.” More than a decade on, that seems unfair. An artist’s themes and topics cannot be dictated by the public, no matter how disturbed. But bin Laden was still at large. Support for the wars in both Afghanistan and later Iraq had yet to fizzle out and turn many against the president. There was no new Freedom Tower rising at Ground Zero. There was no balm at all, really. A good writer tends to ask more questions than provide answers, and this is useless in a panic.
Foer’s previous novel, 2002’s Everything Is Illuminated, was a best seller and announced the arrival of a major new voice. Extremely Loud stopped that momentum cold.
When asked whether he had second thoughts taking on 9/11, Foer responded, “I think it’s a greater risk not to write about it. If you’re in my p
osition—a New Yorker who felt the event very deeply and a writer who wants to write about things he feels deeply about—I think it’s risky to avoid what’s right in front to you. None of the ways people were talking about 9/11 felt right to me.”
That this new, murky conflict was a religious war forced the literary thinkers of all generations, especially the new, young heroes who had all the media attention (even those who were, at their core, utterly secular), to reflect on questions of spirituality. There was a pressure to select a faith and use it as a survival tool; a sort of zealot envy pervaded. The enemy, if there was an actual enemy, certainly had a fanatical investment in faith.
“I want to talk about God in a literary way,” Foer said. “But I think I would have a very hard time praying to God.” Despite the bravery and the sincerity with which he wrestled with these serious themes, Foer’s Twee visage is what really did him in. Nobody questioned his talent. They took issue with his glasses; people confused him with Oskar. He looked like a boy, a spelling-bee champion. When an actual actor replaced Foer in the popular imagination and gave us an alternate face of Oskar, however, things just seemed to get even worse.
Images of a falling man—at the back of the book, in a kind of child’s flip book design—showed a real-life victim who committed suicide by jumping from the tower, rather than dying from heat, fire, smoke inhalation, instead floating back up into the smoky window. To some this was seen as not poetic but exploitative. After 9/11 people asked if irony was dead. They might have inquired about whimsy as well.
The film version of Extremely Loud was Oscar bait that salted the wound. Worse, it was a falling Tom Hanks. The actor is America, representative of everything we trust and are proud of, the Jimmy Stewart of his age. And here was this adaptation nobody wanted, killing him and making us relive that dreadful Tuesday all over again.