‘Same old song’: on audio-visual style in the films of Wes Anderson

Abstract

Wes Anderson's films display a carefully crafted symbiotic relationship between songs, visuals and dialogue. Songs are essential to the storytelling style we see and hear across his cinematic oeuvre – a style we cannot simply describe as visual. From Bottle Rocket (1996) through The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), soundtracks often drive the narrative and enrich the development of the characters. We discuss five stylistic threads, illustrating their trajectory through examples from four of Anderson's films. Music plays a paramount role in producing nostalgia and structuring his trademark montage sequences. Silence and/or music often replace ambient sound in synergy with changes in the visuals to intensify significant narrative moments, and music-related technology links characters and their objects of desire or loss. Finally, songs carry paratextual information, which can add a further layer of meaning. In this paper, we argue that these audio-visual stylistic threads are a defining feature of Anderson's films.

Keywords:

• Wes Anderson
• film music
• nostalgia
• montage
• silence
• music-related technology

Notes

1. See, for example, Smith 1998, Kassabian 2001, Wojcik and Knight 2001, Inglis 2003, and Powrie and Stilwell 2006.

2. Anahid Kassabian (2001) has adopted the terminology used by several film music composers: ‘source’ to replace ‘diegetic’, ‘dramatic’ to replace ‘non-diegetic’, and ‘source scoring’, which represents the music that doesn't belong to either one or the other dimension. Although widely used, the distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic is unsatisfactory, chiefly because the term non-diegetic suggests that music, sound, and silence don't participate in the creation of the film world. In the following pages, we will use the alternative terminology proposed by Kassabian.

3. There are another seven Bowie songs adapted into Portuguese and performed by Seu Jorge, who plays crew member Pelé dos Santos. Every cover is performed by Pelé in the film world. Interestingly, while every cover version appears close to difficult times, the originals occur where Steve feels fulfilled.

4. The prefix para- is here intended as ‘alongside’, ‘beside’, ‘near’, rather than ‘beyond’.