Over the years, Wes Anderson’s distinctive style has made him and his work the source of infinite study and analysis. But on this May 1, his birthday, let us boil down the summation of watching an Anderson film to these six simple traits.
Everyone is white: There are some exceptions, of course. Like Zero in The Grand Budapest Hotel, or Pagoda in The Royal Tenenbaums. But, as you’ll not, they’re all mostly in the service industry. This is probably part of the reason why white people get so hard for Wes Anderson movies.
The soundtrack is either instrumental, dredging up of some “hidden” 60s gem or The Kinks: The Darjeeling Limited wins out with three songs from the seminal 60s band, “Powerman,” “Strangers” and “This Time Tomorrow.” Coming in second is “Nothing In This World Can Stop Me Worryin’ Bout’ That Girl” in Rushmore.
Roman Coppola and/or Jason Schwartzmann helped write the script: Apparently unable to resist the Coppola family tree, Anderson often works with one or both of these two cousins, most notably with both parties on the scripts for The Darjeeling Limited and Isle of Dogs, and co-writing solely with Coppola for every pederasts’s favorite movie, Moonrise Kingdom.
A white boy is on a vision quest: Or, in Isle of Dogs‘ case, a Japanese boy. Everywhere else, however, please expect to find a troubled Caucasian male in search of the approval he never got from his father.
The women in it are two-dimensional paper doll cutouts of what it means to be “weird” or “damaged”: It’s not that Wes Anderson means to create such two-dimensional interpretations of what men have computed in their small minds as “damaged goods,” it’s that he’s merely a victim of being a white male exposed to the long-standing manic pixie dream girl school of thought that the film industry is still in process of cleansing itself of.
The set design was created with the sole intent of being Instagrammable: Even before Instagram was a thing, it was as though Anderson could intuit that his style would be able to saturate this common denominator level of culture, thereby firmly securing him as part of the forever aesthetic zeitgeist of what it means to exist on this application, on which there has been created a now very famous account in honor of said looQue.
So there you have it, some handy tools for the novice still not totally familiar with Anderson or why he is so universally lauded as a god of modern cinema.
