News > The Wes Anderson Effect

Written by John Lichman

Clammy hands?Uncontrollable urge to wear tweed? Replace conversations with brief, pithy remarks before listening to Pulp's "This is Hardcore" and staring into your mirror?

You may have the Wes Anderson-itis.

Slate's Jonah Weiner sums it up:

In every film he's made, even the best ones, there's been something kind of obnoxious about Wes Anderson. By now, critics have enumerated several of his more irritating traits and shticks: There's his pervasive preciousness, exemplified by the way he pins actors into the centers of fastidiously composed tableaux like so many dead butterflies. There's his slump-shouldered parade of heroes who seem capable of just two emotions: dolorous and more dolorous (not that there haven't been vibrant exceptions to this). And there's the way he frequently couples songs—particularly rock songs recorded by shaggy Europeans between 1964 and 1972—with slow-motion effects, as though he's sweeping a giant highlighter across the emotional content of a scene. In The Royal Tenenbaums, Richie can't watch Margot get off a bus without Nico popping up to poke us in the ribs: "He loves her! And it's killing him! See?"

But his latest, The Darjeeling Limited, may be a bit, uh…racist?

Sometimes Wes Anderson winks at the brothers' fetishistic attitudes toward India, but he eventually reveals his own. When Francis grandly declares, "I love these people"—minutes after a shoeshine boy has run off with one of his "$3,000 loafers"—or when Peter says, "I love how this country smells; it's … spicy," Anderson must be chuckling at them. But he runs into trouble when he tries to stage their genuine awakening.

 While Weiner comes up with some interesting ideas (and personally, I'm waiting for the mash-up of The Bottle Tenebaums with Steven Zizou to prove they're all the same film) it is a bit far-fetched. You know, in the sense that no one has ever criticized Anderson about this before.

 edit: Upon confirmation of laughing, KvG is dead-on. Here's The Onion article , which goes oddly well with the Slate thinkpiece. I wonder why…