Quick Notes on Hotel Chevalier
A Posts entry from Thursday, September 27, 2007Women in Wes Anderson movies are typically soft spoken, unforgiving and unattainable, whereas men can be uncomfortably straight-forward and crude. This dynamic is pretty consistent: Ms. Cross and Mr. Blume/Max Fisher in Rushmore, Etheline and Royal in the Royal Tenenbaums, or Steve and Eleanor Zissou in The Life Aquatic. (I’m not counting Bottle Rocket since that was more of a prototype, but even Inez fits the role to a certain extent.)
What makes Hotel Chevalier hold a special place in Anderson’s films is that these archetypes are reversed, Jason Schwartzman plays the typically female role, and Natalie Portman plays the typically male role.
She is curt:
Portman: “What the fuck is going on?”
He is unforgiving and soft-spoken:
Portman: “If we fuck I’m going to feel like shit tomorrow.” Schwartzman: “That’s okay with me.”
An interesting note about the role reversal is that Schwartzman’s character is more flawed (an vulnerable?) than any other female character in the archetype, save Margot Tenenbaum, and more importantly he is attainable by Portman, the male archetype.
Perhaps because of gender expectations, both characters in Hotel Chevalier seem stronger to me than in their previous incarnations. Because they are defying how we expect a certain sex to behave they seem more forceful and more alive, or just more interesting. Oh, and the movie is beautiful.
Bryan Klausmeyer
I’ve heard that pre-screenings of The Darjeeling Limited have been really brutal. An interesting explanation might be a trend in post-9/11 cinema (vs. films made during the so-called “Happy 90s”). People are no longer interested in characters whose perceptions occupy the fantasy-space of the screen, but need a minimal distancing in the form of a fantasy-space composed of social substance, i.e. a collective sense of identity.
The Life Aquatic tried to accomplish this, which made it distinctly different from other Wes Anderson films (with the violent intrusion of the pirates), but still got mixed reviews.
Bryan Klausmeyer
The difference might be more clearly illustrated using Heideggerian terminology: Dasein vs. In-der-Welt-sein.
Mark Cullen
People always say the characters in Wes Anderson movies are too fantastic to be beliveable, but I’ve always had the opposite reaction. To me the dialogue seems much closer to how “normal people” talk (and percieve?), especially in The Squid and the Whale and Bottle Rocket.
The funny thing about that scene in The Life Aquatic was that it seemed to be a parody of that social substance, us vs. them, overly dramatized and obviously fake (“This is real life, this is really happening”).
Bryan Klausmeyer
In retrospect, the more important scene in The Life Aquatic might be the death of Owen Wilson’s character. The scene with the pirates, as you rightly pointed out, is certainly comic. This is true too with a lot of other instances in Wes Anderson films where violence, trauma and the Sublime all acquire a minimal distancing. For instance, in Bottle Rocket, crime and unemployment are comic, not traumatic; in Rushmore, Max Fischer (the “Fischer King”) and Blume’s attempts to murder one another are comical as well, and the same is true for The Royal Tenenbaums, where Luke Wilson’s character’s suicide attempt also contains a comic dimension (e.g., his remarks about how he wrote his suicide letter ex post facto).
The difference with Owen Wilson’s death in The Life Aquatic is precisely its purely traumatic dimension. There is nothing comic about it whatsoever. It is probably also the most powerful scene in the film because of the logic of antinomy: on a purely formal level we have typical Wes Anderson (trauma subverted by comedy, light-heartedness, innocence, etc.), but then in a dialectical reversal, we have pure, abyssal trauma unsubverted by the usual light-hearted milieu of his films.
Consequently, I think his death stands rather for a collapse of Wes Anderson’s cinematic materialism (in a very Christ-like sense), and in some sense relates back to the difference between the pre- and post-9/11 worlds.
Thus, what we’re dealing with is a world where we all have access to our deepest fantasies, but rather than proving to be a horrifying experience, we’re able to acquire a minimal distancing from “reality” as such. From such a stance, an In-der-Welt-sein serves no special function. The burden of the narrative is entirely upon the Dasein, precisely because the position of Dasein is grounded as comical. This is why his movies are very “Happy 90s.”
Try and imagine The Royal Tenenbaums taking place after 9/11. It would be impossible to imagine. How could the film possibly not acknowledge the In-der-Welt-sein dimension? But on the other hand, it would have to completely ignore it, but in doing so the fantasy-space of 9/11 would become a repressed element that would actually make it far more traumatic (i.e., how in cinema and literature sometimes what is not shown arouses even greater tension than what is).
In that sense, a post-9/11 Wes Anderson film is nearly impossible to make, and Owen Wilson’s death in The Life Aquatic makes that clear. No wonder they crashed in a plane (well, a helicopter, but still). The only way that a Wes Anderson film can continue on without undermining its style or causing a morbid return of the repressed is to somehow incorporate the logic of In-der-Welt-sein but give it a fantasy support that fits with Wes Anderson’s style.
Added note: this same lack of In-der-Welt-sein may also be why United 93 and WTC fail as films. Precisely because they fail to acknowledge the totality and concreteness of the events leading up to 9/11, the repressed content is ontologically malleable so that what precedes the traumatic event is perfectly suited to the distorted realm of fantasy-support. To make it more understandable: its lack of giving any reason for why 9/11 happened allows for it to play upon our worst, most nationalist emotions (and in that sense makes them both propagandist films).
Mark Cullen
I don’t think I understand your reason for why 9/11 should have any effect on Wes Anderson’s film making. I think 9/11 doesn’t even enter the equation. What sort of event (no matter how cataclysmic) could possibly preclude the existence of a fantasy? Maybe it could influence how willing the audience is to accept it, but that has nothing to do with the work itself.
Obviously any major event will alter perception, but in many ways events like 9/11 and Pearl Harbor (obviously not quite the same, but both had strong cultural impacts) do little to effect our personal relationships or everyday lives– the foci of Anderson’s films.
I can easily imagine a post 9/11 Royal Tenenbaums since it was released on December 14th, 2001. But, assuming you’re talking about some effect 9/11 should have on film… A post-9/11 Wes Anderson film will be the same as a pre-9/11 Wes Anderson film as the implications of the event are irrelevant to his themes.
Also the reviews of the Darjeeling Limited I’ve read have been very positive, and the general consensus [seems pretty good](www.rottentomatoes.com/m/darjeeling_limited/). But anyway, once you dumb down what a post 9/11 film is supposed to include for me (I’m ignorant), how does the Squid and the Whale measure up?
tina oiticica harris
I am awaiting this film just because I think Natalie Portman is the greatest young actor and most beautiful too. It’s available on iTunes, I hear?
Tim
The Squid and the Whale was written and directed by Noah Baumbach. Wes Anderson surely had influence as producer and friend to Baumbach but I don’t think The Squid and the Whale could possibly be called a Wes Anderson film.
Mark Cullen
I mean… he was on the set most days, i’m sure he had a lot of influence as producer, just from watching the film, but whatever, man.
The Author
Mark Elliot Cullen
mark@ivystreet.net
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