The Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky claimed there are two types of filmmakers: imitators of the world and creators of their own. You don’t watch the films of, say, Akira Kurosawa or Ingmar Bergman, Dario Argento or Alfred Hitchcock, so much as inhabit them. There is no mistaking a film by any one of them for anyone else.
Walking through the Design Museum’s exhibition of Wes Anderson’s archive feels the same. It’s not just an extensive collection of movie ephemera. You’re entering Wesworld. Anderson’s style is unmistakable — the saturated pastel hues, the miniature dolls house sets, the stories within stories — and there is a comforting, childlike, self-contained feel to it all. There are over 700 objects on display in what is essentially a museum of fictional things, including an ornate patisserie box (The Grand Budapest Hotel), a solar system blackboard (Asteroid City), and a pile of fictional fiction books (Moonrise Kingdom).
Some unexpectedly tug at the heartstrings — the bittersweet message “Bravo, Max! Love, Mom”, for instance, on a teenager’s typewriter case (Rushmore). The dedication to Gesamtkunstwerk or “total art” is impressive, and suggests Anderson’s heart is in an earlier age, when designers would create everything from architecture down to the cutlery.
You would think that this would all present as escapist fantasy — and indeed that is the charge that Anderson’s critics most often level at him. However, walking through the exhibition, I was struck by how much it reminded me of certain elite enclaves in London — though you can find them too in New York, Los Angeles, especially Paris, indeed, any wealthy Western city. These are the postcodes populated by young middle-class professionals and wealthy retirees. Places where the vote is Left-liberal-green, even if the actual lifestyles and backgrounds are closer to pink Tories. Places where you’ll see rainbow flags and Palestine Action stickers even if the population is overwhelmingly vanilla. There’s a cheese shop, a bagel place you must try and a French coffeehouse with macarons in the window. It’s Wesworld in 3D.
I know these enclaves well because I live in one. But I’ve never been able to suspend my disbelief, having lived for decades in less salubrious places. When I moved here, it always puzzled me how, leaving the area, literally turning a street corner, I could move from the lowest percentile of crime to the highest — from Wesworld to deprivation — and no one seemed to notice or care. When crime did occur, it was dismissed as a kind of accepted urban tax; the omnipresent bike and phone thefts for example. If it was more grievous — a kid stabbed to death on the field where my child plays — it simply did not happen. It could not happen. After all, this is Wesworld.
To understand the phenomenon, we must travel back to the Russia of Catherine the Great and another Wes Anderson-esque contrivance. The Empress wishes to conduct a tour of her dominion. Her courtiers have no intention of letting her see the deprivation and exploitation of peasant Russia so, the story goes, her favourite, Grigory Potemkin arranged for pretend villages to be built, lavish facades with actors playing the role of grateful serfs. The Potemkin village concealed the truth so that the imperial image could be sustained. It’s a strategy employed by many regimes since from Marie Antoinette’s fantasy rural idyll Hameau de la Reine to Hitler’s scale model of his future city Germania, which he was poring over as the Red Army approached his bunker.
It is the sound of the inside speaking to itself — denial and delusion masquerading as comfort and confidence. Angels dancing on a pin-head.
And the fantasy village survives into our time — and not only in the Potemkin postcodes of London. The camera might come to rest on the Wesworld of Davos where the World Economic Forum meets every year; a location Keir Starmer famously prefers to Westminster. For all the braying ignominy of the House of Commons, it still has some connection to the electorate. There are no such distractions in Davos. It is a paternalistic toytown, a delightful snowglobe that looks stage-managed by Wes Anderson himself with its funicular, its high railway viaduct, its baroque and art nouveau hotels and snowy peaks. Here, life is as it should be rather than as it is for the vast majority of mankind. Unaccountable billionaires and corporate monopolies can influence policy for the rest of us. A little war here, some privatisation there. Here is where the fiction is written.
What all this amounts to is a curatorial approach to life, which requires, ironically, given the liberal obsession with the term, immense privilege to enjoy. It is a world in which evil cannot exist — unless it’s Hitler or Putin or Trump or whatever effigy is useful at any given time. In such a world, you can propose getting rid of police and sending in social workers (as the son of a social worker I have been privy to the burden they already carry and know this is a very very bad idea). Only someone who knows nothing of violence and crime could find this luxury belief viable. Meanwhile, struggles that do not fit the preferred narrative are magicked away — because, say, the idea of young white girls being raped, tortured and trafficked challenges the ruling administration’s fictional conception of the world. The mainstream politico-media class simply cannot countenance the existence of evil, and the struggle against it, because it would challenge the entire system from which they benefit.
“Struggles that do not fit the preferred narrative are magicked away”
This is a lot to lay at the door of a charming and gifted auteur. In a less corrupt and compromising era, Wes Anderson may not have been a Potemkin director. It’s an indecent world, after all, that cannot allow for picturebook flights of fancy — and it may just be chance that Anderson’s work illustrates the Potemkin condition more effectively than any documentary critique could. He also seems fairly at home in this world himself, at least to judge from his adverts for American Express, Prada, SoftBank and co. For though Anderson belongs to that rarefied category of filmmakers who create their own worlds, in Tarkovsky’s definition, there is a crucial difference with his peers. You find Cold War paranoia and fear in Hitchcock; there is moral and social decay in Kurosawa; Tarkovsky celebrated the radicalism of the spirit in the midst of materialist atheist Soviet Union. Though rarely directly political, these directors pulled aside society’s veils.
But Anderson is a different creature. He is an illusionist. Rather than pulling the curtain aside, he creates more veils, more tricks. It’s easy to imagine him as a theatrical genius in earlier times, designing mechanical devices or trompe-l’œil for regal masques — or Grand Guignol tableaux. His films often feel like plays but not necessarily human ones. Instead, he positions his characters as if they’re marionettes, figures to be manoeuvred around diorama. They even speak that way. Anderson’s one-liners may be witty, but they are almost always the voice of the ventriloquist.
Again, this, for many, was part of the initial attraction of his films (especially for those raised on point-and-click video games). But a darker interpretation emerges if you consider these characters as, effectively, puppets, devoid of any will of their own. The charming artifice and comforting insularity make this apolitical director’s work hyper-political.
Anderson’s films do have humanity, with themes of loneliness, family, love, grief and responsibility — it is not entirely style over substance. But the form of his work, the comforting self-containment of it all, is a departure into solipsism. It’s insider art treated as outsider art. This is harmless in cinema — but disastrous in reality. It is this supposedly benevolent solipsism, sacrosanct to liberals on the Left, Right and centre, that has marked the authoritarian turn in the Anglosphere.
It is always presented in the form of protection. This was evident in the relish and severity of the Covid crackdowns during Covid and when the wrong kind of riot or protest kicks off. It is there in the clampdown on free speech, in the push for ID cards, in the dismantling of trial by jury, in the creeping spectre of militarism and the disturbing mantra that Europe must prepare for war and our sons and daughters must be ready to die. Policies that are anti-democratic and even tyrannical are pushed through with specious claims of the greater good.
The conspiratorial might suggest that this is all Machiavellian and duplicitous, yet this would require untold levels of psychopathy. Instead, it appears as if the builders of our Potemkin age genuinely believe their own fiction. From the UK’s own Potemkin village, the Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently spoke of: “A Britain that is free from decline… confident about its future…” This would be in stark contrast to, say, Dame Anne Owers’s report on the dire state of the nation’s prisons, or the BMA council chair Tom Dolphin’s diagnosis of the NHS: “The whole nation knows that the health service is in deep crisis.” There’s spin and then there’s hallucination.
Still, once you have been charmed by Wesworld it is very hard to be uncharmed by it. Working in Eastern Europe and the Baltic States, I had to resist taking every photo in his style. I periodically see buildings (the Sphinx Observatory in the Alps, the Zoroastrian fire temple in Mumbai) where Wes Anderson is my first thought. Indeed, when The Grand Budapest Hotel came out, I was staying in Paris and went to see it in an archaic cinema, with an old man selling tickets in a booth who then shuffled off to double as the projectionist. It was enchanting, like watching a Wes Anderson movie within a Wes Anderson movie. The reverie lasted until I stepped out onto the street and received a bunch of expletives to the face from a passing group of little bastards not unlike my younger self.
To visit Wesworld is a pleasure then, provided you remember to leave. Only a monster could object to a shop window full of macarons — but life is not a fucking patisserie. It requires a degree of infantilism to believe that the Potemkin village you have constructed is real. Anderson is beloved for his coming-of-age tales but they also represent the dangers of arrested development – of yearning for a prelapsarian state that’s long been squandered. Our civilisation no longer even pretends to produce the beautiful everyday Art Deco objects that Anderson fetishises.
It’s arguable that Anderson’s greatest work comes when, instead of making kids’ films for adults and instead makes kids’ films for kids (see Fantastic Mr Fox). But among his adult films, he is at his best when he lets darkness in. Anderson’s well-publicised on-set difficulties with Gene Hackman were a necessary brush with truth and the friction made The Royal Tenenbaums a better film. Still, in my opinion, the closest Anderson has come to a masterpiece is The Grand Budapest Hotel — with its startling tonal shift from knockabout comedy to historical bleakness. This is the moment when Anderson deepens Wesworld by momentarily escaping it.
Ralph Fiennes’s hotel concierge is impeccably mannered, lovably roguish but ultimately honourable. Then fascist authoritarianism comes for the fictional nation of Zubrowka — and he finds himself suddenly living in a society that has no place for any of his charms. It is the moment that real palpable evil is allowed to enter Wes Anderson’s world and it’s his best and truest moment. It shows what Anderson is capable of when he dares to take a hammer to the Fabergé egg.
And perhaps we are on the brink of such a moment too, in a world that is increasingly ignoble — but why face reality, especially when it is not profitable or ideologically sound to do so? Why spoil a beautiful thing, even if there’s the sound of riots outside?
Only, a world that cannot admit to evil, and its own complicity in it, is a world that will endlessly permit it. In The French Dispatch, Lucinda Krementz (played by Frances McDormand) deems a student manifesto to be “a luminous abstraction.” This could be a harmless description of cinema. It could also be a damning verdict of our rulers, devoid of honour, contrition, humility or perspective. The aim is not to make society better but to maintain the luminous abstraction as long as possible.