Accidentally Wes Anderson

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Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, on Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City (2023) and AI pastiche.

I became familiar with Wes Anderson’s visual style long before I actually watched any movies by the director. Having spent too much time on Tumblr in the early 2010s, I consumed a variety of blogs devoted to aesthetic GIF edits of fans’ favorite Anderson movies, stylized Instagram accounts featuring symmetrical photos of ornate interiors and vibrant landscapes, and a twee sub-genre of amateur photographers, videographers, and content creators who fashioned their work after Anderson’s style. Anderson, of course, was always credited on these accounts. Even if his name wasn’t mentioned, his visual signature was there.

For viewers, however, ongoing attempts to mimic Anderson distract from the essence of his work. We become too focused on the formal aesthetics, rather than the content of his movies. Recently, the proliferation of Anderson-style AI edits has elicited the same feeling I had of scrolling Tumblr many years ago. If you’ve spent any time on Twitter or TikTok, you’ve probably encountered one of the viral Anderson-style trailers for familiar IP, from Lord of the Rings to Harry Potter to Star Wars to Succession. Most film critics seem to detest these harmless parodies. I don’t mind them. These AI trailers are simply an inevitable byproduct of the past decade’s shallow Anderson obsession. Crucially, such content emphasizes style at the expense of substance, revealing how, as one critic puts it, the director’s “truly inspired authenticity” is hard to fake.

For years, I felt like my brain had absorbed all the visual elements of an Anderson movie. So why would I need to watch one? In reality, I was being bombarded by poor imitations of Wes Anderson. These creations rendered the director’s meticulous eye for arrangement and color into an easily replicable style, defined by warm color grading, a pastel palette, one-pan zooms, symmetrical framing, and tableau-style compositions. It had a rather stultifying effect on how I came to his movies. I’m not sure if I resisted watching them or if they were simply harder to stream a decade ago. Either way, I didn’t see Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) or Moonrise Kingdom (2012) until about two years ago, days before an early screening of The French Dispatch (2021).

After watching the films in close succession to each other, I emerged from it with the realization that, however “familiar” I felt towards Anderson’s style, his inventive aesthetics are just the starting point to understanding his cinematic worlds. Anderson typically nests his central narratives within a fictional story, establishing to the audience that the film is a story within a story, or a world within a world. Without his well-crafted vignettes and wit-sharp dialogue, Anderson would be little more than a feel-good filmmaker. The final shot of the Grand Budapest Hotel, for instance, is of a girl reading the book that contains the story we had just seen, sitting beside the monument of the author/narrator. Most Anderson-inspired content online misses this metafictional framing device, which establishes the basis for his characters’ zaniness. They’re figments of another characters’ imagination.

Asteroid City (2023) is a documentary about a fictional play of the same name, written by the famed mid-century playwright Conrad Eap (Edward Norton), who tragically dies before its completed run. The film is perhaps Anderson’s most explicit examination of storytelling as a subject. Its actors are actors playing actors; the desert town of Asteroid City (pop. 87) is an on-stage set.​​ Like most of Anderson’s works, the movie is told over a set of vignettes, interspersed with black-and-white, behind-the-scenes footage of the theatrical production.

We learn about the interpersonal drama between the actors, and witness how “off-screen” interactions mirror—or are loosely connected to—on-screen events. The lead actor who plays Augie (Jason Schwartzman) had a secret affair with Conrad. The twist: The actor is playing a widower who is grieving his dead wife, while he is grieving the dead playwright. On a lighter note, it’s revealed that the actor playing Augie’s son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) was actually an understudy, who was cast after successfully convincing an actress (Scarlett Johansson) sought after by Conrad to take on the role. Asteroid City is, as some critics have remarked, Anderson doing Anderson. Strangers fall in love. An unexpected, albeit low-stakes event unfolds with a touch of whimsy: A random alien landing leads the US government to impose a strict quarantine upon visitors.

I was, however, most taken by a scene near the movie’s end, set in an acting class led by Saltzburg Keitel (William Dafoe). The play’s ensemble cast is rehearsing for a scene where all the characters fall asleep on-stage. To this end, Salzburg declares rather eerily: “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep,” presumably a reminder to the actors (and the audience) that everything is play-pretend. A spotlight migrates, zooming in on each actor’s face as they in turn declare: “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.” The fourth-wall starkness of the scene reminded me of the Club Silencio performance in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), where the on- and off-screen audience are told that there is no band accompanying the musicians. “It’s all recorded.” And yet, the film manages to will us into a trance-like state of suspended belief.

In Paste Magazine, Kayleigh Donaldson calls AI a “plagiarism machine,” but I think a better term for this visual regurgitation is pastiche. Even so, AI seems only capable of producing the most superficial form of pastiche, without any subtlety, humor, irony, or profundity. There is an expected kitschiness to its results, a garish familiarity in the machine’s learned representation of style.

In his 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” the artist and critic Clement Greenberg defines kitsch as popular commercial art and literature that is mechanically produced. Kitsch borrows certain elements from “high” art and waters the materials down, converting it into an easily replicable system before “discard[ing] the rest.” Not all kitsch is bad kitsch, but “because it can be turned out mechanically, kitsch has become an integral part of our productive system in a way in which true culture could never be, except accidentally.” To Greenberg, The New Yorker was “high-class kitsch,” so if he were alive today, he might not look very kindly upon Anderson’s work.

Because Anderson’s sets are intricate and beautiful, we often think of his work (or dismiss it) as sanitized or emotionally diminutive. “Adult fairy tales,” as a friend of mine once put it. Fairy tales can be horrifying in their irreality, although I think people dislike Anderson’s stylization because it’s an overt reminder of the frivolity of filmmaking. Stills from his films aren’t photorealistic at all. The characters don’t speak at all like “regular” people, and the sets are too neat and pretty to exist in the “real” world. Contrary to what his imitators might think (or say), there is nothing accidental about Wes Anderson’s work. Everything is so obviously staged to be in and for a movie. As viewers, perhaps we just don’t like being told that it’s all fake, that what we’re watching is obviously actors playing pretend. Asteroid City and all other Anderson movies imitate reality only to the extent that the auteur is imitating himself.

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