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Abstract
This paper situates Wes Anderson within the ‘quirky’ sensibility of recent American indie cinema, a category encompassing a range of films and filmmakers that emerged in Indiewood during the 1990s and 2000s (e.g. Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman, Jared Hess, etc.). The ‘quirky’ is often recognisable by its approach to comedy, a visual style that courts a fastidious ‘artificiality’, a thematic interest in childhood and innocence, and – most pervasively – a tone which balances ironic detachment with sincere engagement. Previously defined largely in terms of its aesthetics, the quirky is here firstly identified as one symptom of broader cultural movements concerned to challenge the reputed hegemony of irony within a postmodern structure of feeling. Focusing particularly on the vexed issue of tone, this piece goes on to argue – via a comparison of several quirky films' tonal strategies – that Wes Anderson's characteristic approach to irony and sincerity constitutes perhaps the purest expression of the impulses underlying the sensibility.
Notes
1. See also, for example, Hyden (2007, 1) and Sabo (Citation2010, 1), who cite Anderson's influence on such films as Tadpole (2002), Napoleon Dynamite (2004), Juno (2007), Rocket Science (2007), Be Kind Rewind (2008), (500) Days of Summer (2009) and so on.
2. As Proehl writes, sometimes ‘philosophy and phenomenology are too weighty and, like aesthetics, too broad; ethos, too moralistic; […] all are limiting, even if each plays some role’ (2008, 17).
3. See: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid = 20110105083841AARSTts and http://slumz.boxden.com/f218/what-films-paved-way-quirky-style-1463645/, respectively.
4. King, for example, has offered an analysis of Anderson's Bottle Rocket (1996) that defines ‘quirky’ more carefully than most, using it specifically to describe how this film's narrative, visual style and characterisation differ in slight degrees from ‘conventions […] with which we are more familiar’ (2005, 136).
5. See: Orgeron (Citation2007, 59), Mayshark (2007, 115), Zoller Seitz (Citation2009), Kertzer (Citation2011, 6), Browning (2011, 33), etc.
6. Treading rather similar terrain to myself, Mayshark's book contains some very fine interpretations of individual films; however, despite initially placing his thesis in the context of Wallace's critique of irony, he does not pursue the matter in relation to anything like all the movies he analyses, and the journalistic mode in which he writes also means he is unable to reflect in detail on the nature of such categories.
7. See: Olsen (1999, 12), Gorfinkel (2005, 153), Perren (2008, 1), Hancock (2005, 1), Mayshark (2007, 2), etc.
8. Within this climate Sconce places Patrick Buchanan's famous declaration at the 1992 Republican National Convention that there exists a ‘culture war’ in the USA between Christian conservative moralists and secular-humanist relativists (2002, 353), predictions of the ‘end of the age of irony’ following 9/11 (354) and so on.
9. See: Pfeil (Citation1988) on postmodernism as a structure of feeling.
10. Joel Achenback, ‘Putting All the X in One Basket’. The Washington Post, April 27.
11. Of course, it goes without saying that, as the anthropologist Angela Garcia reminds us, ‘at any given time, there are multiple structures of feeling in operation’ (Citation2008, 724).
12. See, for example, Seigworth (Citation2005) on ‘corn’ in indie music, Saltz (Citation2010) on contemporary art in which ‘Sincerity and Irony Hug it Out’, Greif (Citation2010) on similar approaches in ‘hipster’ taste economies and so on. Timmer (Citation2010) and Konstantinou (Citation2009) offer helpful overviews of such trends in popular culture.
13. Eggers is often mentioned in the same breath as Wes Anderson (e.g. Greif Citation2010; Taylor Citation2005), and regularly attracts the term ‘quirky’ in his own field (e.g. Konstantinou Citation2009). He also wrote the scripts for quirky films Away We Go (2009) and Where the Wild Things Are (2009).
14. For example, Dogma 95 (MacKenzie Citation2003), ‘New Punk Cinema’ (Rombes Citation2005), contemporary ‘historical anachronism’ (Gorfinkel Citation2005), the work of Guy Maddin (Beard Citation2005), etc.
15. It is necessary, incidentally, to distinguish this idea from another use of the term proposed by Jim Collins in his article ‘Genericity in the 90s: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity’. In Collins' schema, new sincerity is a 1990s approach to genre which ‘rejects any form of irony in its sanctimonious pursuit of lost purity’ (in contrast to another generic approach which favours ‘ironic hybridization’) (Citation2002, 276). Where new sincerity for Collins is thus entirely devoid of irony, the New Sincerity in almost all other accounts is specifically viewed as somehow ‘post-ironic’, suggesting a perpetual tension between irony and sincerity. I would suggest that a hint of such tension, however defined, needs to be seen as a minimum requirement if we are to avoid attaching the phrase ‘New Sincerity’ to any number of unrelated phenomena.
16. Kimberly Chabot Davis' book Postmodern Texts and Emotional Audiences, for instance, dedicates itself entirely to tracing strands of what she calls ‘sentimental postmodernism’ in literature and popular culture (Citation2007, 1).
17. Bunny and the Bull is one of the first British films to be clearly indebted to the quirky; others would arguably include Son of Rambow (2007) and most certainly Submarine (2011).
18. For example, the movie begins with a playful credit sequence that, like that of Napoleon Dynamite, has cast and crew names written neatly in the film's diegesis – on toast, in toothpaste and so on. This is accompanied by a repetitive, melancholic, pizzicato score for piano and guitar that might call to mind the music of Mark Mothersbaugh or Jon Brion. In a manner not dissimilar to the character introductions at the opening of The Royal Tenenbaums, a male voice-over with a literary tenor then informs us of a series of Stephen's idiosyncratic habits.
19. The famously bizarre and raucous British comedy series on which Bunny and the Bull's director, Paul King, worked for several years.
20. One of the crew's unpaid interns has his neck hacked by a machete but survives easily; Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum) is shot but recovers within a few minutes of screen time; one of the film's most amusing – because least credible – moments comes when Steve, faced with an entire room of Filipino pirates shooting at him, runs directly towards them, gun blazing: we cut away at this moment, but know instinctively to take the cut as humorous rather than suspenseful.
21. Other quirky films are certainly capable of using a similar strategy; we might think of Juno, for instance, which Perren (Citation2008) and Newman (Citation2011) have both suggested shifts from an ironic to a more sincere register as it progresses.
22. Projects handled with a comparable tone might include the ‘sweding’ of films in Be Kind Rewind, imagining a real-life relationship with a sex doll in Lars and the Real Girl (2007), environmental activism in I Heart Huckabees, animal rights protesting in Year of the Dog, performing at an open mic night whilst being unable to play guitar and sing at the same time in Winter Passing (2005), learning to play the harmonium and buying excessive amounts of pudding for the air miles in Punch-Drunk Love, writing and enacting a ‘clichéd’ romantic Hollywood conclusion in Adaptation, etc.
23. Such as Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995), which focuses on the bullying of an unpopular schoolchild while simultaneously finding dark humour in her mistreatment (e.g. her parents' excessive love for her younger sister), and placing us in a position to judge her harshly ourselves (e.g. Dawn's adoption of the language and manner of her bullies).
24. Though it is unclear to what extent Olive herself is aware of her inadequacy as a beauty queen candidate, which we might wish to call a failing on the film's part.
25. The opening pathetic revelation that Richard is giving a talk on how to be a ‘winner’ to a paltry and unimpressed audience, for example, is categorically ironic, whereas Dwayne's later discovery of his colour blindness prompts a much more sincerely handled histrionic outburst.