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Notes
1 “[I]n several configurations and concentrations” (Wilkins Citation2019, 52).
2 The vast majority of AEC filmmakers are privileged white men, many of whom also receive the funding and distribution of mainstream “Hollywood” films while still creating more eccentric “indie,” “smart,” and “quirky” films that are not necessarily mainstream in content/style.
3 For example, Wilkins notes the crises of malaise of the character of Michael Stone in Anomalisa is a result of his disconnect from other humans and raises classic questions re: existence, and that in this neoliberal moment, “with its attendant focus on self-regulation, self-improvement, and entrepreneurialism, the experience of these crises as induvial maladies is exacerbated[.]” (Wilkins Citation2019, 2–3).
4 “Flat” being a word also synonymous with boredom.
5 “Someone who wanted to deflate Anderson’s visual ambitions could say that his shots are monotonous.” (Bordwell Citation2007).
6 “[A] particular style of acting in Anderson’s films: a straightness, stiffness, minimalism, deadpan and awkwardness, which suggests that a distinctive style of acting is evident in Anderson’s films in the same way that his cinematography and mise-en-scéne have been discussed” (Peberdy Citation2011, 55.)
7 To further justify my specific selection of “ennui” as a structural element: The French Dispatch (Wes Anderson Citation2021), the auteur’s latest film at the time of this writing, is titled after the French foreign bureau of the fictional Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun newspaper that is set in, not coincidentally, the fictional French city, “Ennui-sur-Blasé.”
8 In an endnote, MacDowell acknowledges that his definition of “quirky” may be considered too narrow, but also notes that a more inclusive definition risks “banality.”
9 To further emphasize the nebulosity of these categories, Vermeulen and van den Akker write: “The film critic James MacDowell, finally, has noted the emergence of the so-called quirky cinema associated with the films of Michel Gondry and Wes Anderson. MacDowell describes quirky as a recent trend in Indie cinema characterized by the attempt to restore, to the cynical reality of adults, a childlike naivety—as opposed to the postmodern ‘‘smart’’ cinema of the 1990s, which was typified by sarcasm and indifference” (Timotheus and van den Akker 2010, 7).
10 As a fiction writer, Wallace was not shy in his own interrogation of American ennui in his two tomes: Infinite Jest (Citation1996), in which a weaponized film, dubbed “The Entertainment,” kills viewers by turning them into the kind of viewer Wallace describes in his essay, what critics refer to as “sweaty, slack-jawed voyeurs;” and 2011’s posthumous The Pale King, which follows employees of an IRS branch in Illinois, and has been widely described as a book about boredom (Wallace Citation1997, 23).
11 This quote appears in an article by Timotheus Vermeulen. However, the quote is a summation of an essay by Jen Hedler Phillis (Vermeulen Citation2019, 331–348; Phillis Citation2014, 171–180).
12 “Much attention has been devoted to the distinctiveness of Anderson’s visual cinematic style in accordance with Jeffrey Sconce’s smart cinema aesthetic. Warren Buckland’s editorial for a special “Wes Anderson and Co.” edition of The New Review of Film and Television Studies begins with the note: ‘In response to my call for academic papers on the films of Wes Anderson—10 of which are published in this special issue—two key terms regularly cropped up to make sense of his films: the “smart” film and the “new sincerity.”’ Similarly, over one-third of the articles in Peter C. Kunze’s collection The Films of Wes Anderson: Critical Essays on an Indiewood Icon relate Sconce’s work to Anderson. Indeed, the perceived reliance on ‘braininess’ in the films I delineate as ‘American eccentric’ has been discussed by a number of critics and theorists in relation to ‘smart’ cinema” (Wilkins Citation2019, 100).
13 In both The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Limited, there is an allusive and dangerous wild animal—the Jaguar Shark in the former and a man-eating tiger in the latter. Both of these animals function as capitalistic iconology: (1) a shark can be a cutthroat investor or a company that is offering or executing a hostile takeover of a publicly-traded company; (2) a tiger economy refers to a country which undergoes rapid economic growth.
14 Peter suffers from migraines as a result of wearing his late-father’s prescription sunglasses. When the three brothers try to save three Indian children in a river, Peter gestures to his brothers’ age-old sibling rivalry when he climbs out of the river, bloody, holding the third child, deceased, and says, “I didn’t save mine.”
15 “Charitable viewers may speculate that the stellar cast’s half-mast energy and deadpan delivery are all part of Anderson’s devious strategy to suggest people underwater, or to relay Steve Zissou’s own extremely fatigued sense of himself as man of pop science fame. But the effect is often soporific” (Koehler Citation2004); “His doughy face fringed by a grizzled Ernest Hemingway beard and topped by a red watch cap, Mr. Murray turns tiny gestures and sly, off-beat line readings into a deadpan tour-de-force, at once utterly ridiculous and curiously touching” (Scott Citation2004).
16 “Zissou is a famous ocean explorer whose undersea adventures have less to do with scientific research than with pop-culture branding…Zissou’s world-weary melancholy, the utter seriousness with which he goes about being absurd, contains an element of inconsolable nostalgia” (Scott 2004).
17 “Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain…[because it fails]…to distract people from some deeper type of pain that’s always there… Walkmen, iPods, Blackberries, cell phones that attach to your head… I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down” (Wallace 2011, 85).
18 Although, just before this scene cuts, I notice Zissou’s mouth twitch, which I perceive as a restrained smile/laugh, one that feels uncharacteristic of Zissou and more like a performative flaw—i.e. Bill Murray trying not to laugh at the ridiculousness of his performance rather than Zissou’s emotional state.
19 Wes Anderson, quoted on The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou Criterion Collection DVD director’s commentary, 2005 (User Reviews Citation2005–2006; Fellini Citation2001).
20 This quote appears in Peberdy’s “‘I’m just a character in your film’: acting and performance from autism to Zissou,” however it is derived from two other sources, according to the author: (Shaffer 1997, 2–8; Doane Citation2003, 89–111).
21 As sourced from IMDB reviews: “[O]ne of the top ten most boring, unfunny, and ridiculous films of all time…” (lufetargbas, January 1, 2005); “Other [than] that the movie was dragged out and boring… Bill Murray’s character is as boring as the one he played in Lost in Translation. By that I mean flat, dead, and lack-luster… [H]e should stop taking boring parts.” (dennison-3, January 17, 2005); “I was sooooo bored………… The characters were boring.” (jimmyhenry, April 6, 2007); “At times I was totally bored with this movie…” (ccthemovieman-1, December 16, 2006). Retrieved from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362270/reviews
22 With AEC being a mode predominately consisting of white, male directors it is worth noting the ongoing discourse surrounding Wes Anderson’s portrayal of people of color or of a different (typically lower) class than his white, male, (often) elitist protagonists. For example, in the Talk Film Society article “‘I’m Gonna Go Pray At Another Thing’: Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited,” Manish Mathur notes that “…the film is guilty of treating its India location as a mere backdrop, without really engaging with the optics of three rich white men trampling around a country that was once colonized by white men.” In Jonah Weiner’s “Unbearable Whiteness,” in Slate, he states that, “…South Asia has long been a hotspot in the American and European orientalist imagination. But for a director as willfully idiosyncratic as Anderson, it’s surprising how many white-doofuses-seeking-redemption-in-the-brown-skinned-world clichés Darjeeling Limited inhabits.” Conversely, Ross Douthat’s The Atlantic article “Reihan: Defending Wes Anderson”—a post that, at times, is tonally problematic in itself—rebuts a blog post called, “Wes Anderson: The Ultimate Heartbreaker,” by Thea Lim in Shameless. In response to Lim’s comment on The Life Aquatic (“These characters are funny not because of their personalities or life situations—unlike Anderson’s white characters—but solely because they’re brown. It’s like Anderson is saying, “The pirates are Filipino! How hilarious is that??” Needless to say, I don’t get the joke.”), Douthat writes, “If anything, I actually think Wes Anderson movies are highly ethnic movies about highly distinctive white subcultures…” Of The Darjeeling Limited, Douthat says, “It’s a damn good movie about being in a twilight age. It takes place in a beautiful place, and it is affecting without being maudlin… Know why the Indian characters aren’t at the heart of the movie? Because it’s about three American brothers…” Douthat goes on to address Weiner’s aforementioned Slate article as an “…an unfamiliar interpretation of a touchstone for my generation. That doesn’t mean it’s right.” While not the scope of this paper, this dialogue is noteworthy to the concept of AEC’s preoccupation with “Americanness,” and could be extended, for example, via the ideology of the United States as a cultural “melting pot,” to explore the mode’s American appropriation versus appreciation, diversity versus discrimination, and inclusion and equity versus othering, of non-American cultures (Mathur Citation2018; Weiner Citation2007; Lim Citation2007; Douthat Citation2007).
23 “[H]olding onto items from his father suggests Peter still sees himself as someone else’s child too much to fathom having a child of his own” (Shaffer Citation2018).
24 Francis mentions that he was on his way home when the “accident” occurred, only to then look out the window and deliver a hyper-specific and telling digression: “I live alone right now.” This is the only time during the monologue about the “accident” when Francis breaks eye contact with his brothers. He immediately resumes eye contact when he returns to describing his crash.
25 “The reigning economic system is founded on isolation; at the same time it is a circular process designed to produce isolation. Isolation underpins technology, and technology isolates in its turn; all goods proposed by the spectacular system, from cars to televisions, also serve as weapons for that system as it strives to reinforce the isolation of ‘the lonely crowd.’ The spectacle is continually rediscovering its own basic assumptions—and each time in a more concrete manner” (Debord Citation1994, 22).
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Zachary Tyler Vickers
Zachary Tyler Vickers is the author of Congratulations on Your Martyrdom! [Indiana University Press]. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the recipient of the Kurt Vonnegut Prize, the Richard Yates Prize, and the Grand Prize for Best Television Pilot Script at the 2021 Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival, among others. His work has appeared in many journals, including The Saturday Evening Post, Boston Review, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, and The Iowa Review.