With this month’s release Asteroid City, Wes Anderson returns to his native Southwest for the first time since his late 90’s double-punch breakout of Bottle Rocket and Rushmore. A lot has changed over the intervening 25 years and 10 features: while he has continued to craft quirky screwball ensembles suffused with deadpan humor and aching pathos, every frame bearing the mark of his singular specificity and instantly recognizable dollhouse aesthetic, he’s also broadened the scope of his vision. Like Federico Fellini before him, Anderson has mostly moved from real world locations to hand-crafted (and increasingly meticulous) sets, while also coming up with progressively novel framing devices for his narratives (Asteroid City is presented as the filming of a previously unproduced play for television broadcast) and moving further away from realism.
Anderson is the rare big-name American director whose every film has been a personal project. Not only has never come anywhere near some studio tentpole IP, he’s never even done a ‘one for them.’ You would think even those most allergic to his work would have to begrudgingly respect that.
But you’d be wrong.
This is not to say that every critique of Anderson is unwarranted. By the time he made The Darjeeling Limited, his obsession with daddy issues had started to wear thin, and every once in a long while he’ll miss the mark when shooting for poignancy and land on something phony. And while I personally feel his movies never veer too far into whimsy—Anderson, a truly gifted and underrated direction of action, balances this out with exciting moments of violence, as well as a fair helping of cynicism and dark humor—it’s easy to understand how someone might be automatically turned off by his ornate (some might say fussy) aesthetic.
And yet, his stories remain achingly human at their core, something his detractors miss when they lobby the lazy criticism of “style over substance” (as though style itself isn’t inherently substantive in the visual medium of film) or accuse him of telling the same old story about sad, rich white people (already a shallow take, as one look at the diversity of his casts over the last several films renders this moot).
The stories he’s chosen to tell of late have expanded along with his sets and casts, with The Grand Budapest Hotel explicitly examining the rise of fascism two years before that became every politically-conscious filmmaker’s favorite subject. The French Dispatch, meanwhile, is one of those movies about seemingly everything, from civic engineering to modernist art to Marxist revolution to the experience of living as a queer foreigner to food to… Regardless of whether you think Anderson’s has anything substantive to say about these subjects (and regardless of whether they pass any individual ideological test), you can’t claim he makes the same movie over and over, or that he’s only interested in disaffected WASPS.
But it’s not just Anderson’s critics that get him wrong. His most ardent admirers are often guilty of the same. As with every original voice to come onto the scene, Anderson has inspired his share of copycats, as seen in the wake of overly-twee coming of age movies about precocious teen misfits and/or family dramadies with a heavy Salinger-esque ennui released in the wake of his first three films—a list that includes, but is hardly limited to, the dire likes of Napoleon Dynamite, Garden State, Little Miss Sunshine, Juno, Chumbscrubber, Thumbsucker, and Gigantic. Even if these films didn’t all sprout from his influence or weren’t directly aping his work, they nonetheless traded on his popularity when it came to their marketing.
(We shant count the films of peer and frequent collaborator Noah Baumbach because, for as similar as their milieus and themes, his work is far more grounded, acerbic and pessimistic … at least up until his recent White Noise, which does feel like he’s ‘doing’ Anderson, much to its detriment.)
These films have petered out over the last decade, but the influence of Anderson’s current style—particularly as the costume design and visual language he uses in Grand Budapest—can be seen on the likes of the much-beloved Paddington 2 (2017) and the little-seen See How They Run (2022). But while the glut of Anderson ripoffs are no longer as prevalent at the multiplex or arthouse, they’ve infested social media.
From the beginning, Anderson’s work has made easy fodder for parodies. And while the most popular examples aren’t anywhere near as clever or exacting as some would have you believe—The Midnight Coiterie of Sinister Intruders? What Anderson title is that supposed to be taking the piss out of? The man didn’t direct Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium—they stand head and shoulders above the recent crop that have spuing up on Tik Tok.
These ‘Accidentally Wes Anderson’ trend see Zoomers overlay a green-orange filter and a slice of Mark Desplat’s score from The French Dispatch on symmetrical shots of them—always centered in the middle of the frame—giving their best deadpan expression while going about their day. If these videos were your only frame of reference to Anderson’s work, you’d think he were Bresson, all static shots and ‘modeling’ in place of acting. In fact, Anderson and his loyal cinematographer Robert Yeoman are constantly using movement—by way of both camerawork and mise-en-scene—and Anderson himself has stated, “It’s the actors who are the center of it all to me.” You’ll notice that none of these homages or parodies ever attempt to replicate the films’ acrobatic screwball dialog or Tex Avery-style slapstick (and in the rare instances they do, it turns out disastrously).
Normally, such a trend wouldn’t merit strong reaction or criticism, since it’s just some young people goofing on a successful and popular filmmaker. But it’s hard not to take offense given they’ve popped up parallel to the far more insidious spate of A.I.-rendered short videos, which “imagine” popular franchises (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Avatar, and more) as made by Anderson.
Beyond how inherently disgusting A.I. ‘art’ is, both morally and aesthetically, it’s doubly infuriating that Anderson would prove a favorite of the cretins behind it, given how singular and personal his work is. That these videos reduce his deeply humanist works to a couple basic components—again: symmetry and monochrome color—in the name of anti-hum tech, while would-be influencers take the same tack to reduce it to a lifestyle brand, shows what our culture thinks of artists who remain true to themselves.
At the Cannes premiere of Asteroid City, Anderson told the AP that while he hasn’t watched any of these Tik Toks or AI parodies, “anytime anyone’s responding with enthusiasm to these movies I’ve made over these many years, that’s a nice, lucky thing.” But for as magnanimous as that answer is, reading the whole interview, it’s clear he’s understandably uneasy about the whole idea.
Beyond how insulting both trends are, there is something undeniably sinister at work in the aggressiveness to which all of these uncreative ‘creatives’ have set their sights on Anderson. And one wonders if, as with those earlier critical attacks on his work (as well as how allergic awards bodies are to it these days), it has to do with the fact that he’s never compromised his art. If he’d taken the route of, say, Tim Burton, and bent his style to fit corporate IP, would there still be this drive to diminish or disregard his work?