Masculinity in Wes Anderson's Films
Senex and Sensibility:
Boys to Men in Wes Anderson’s Film Oeuvre
[The shorter version of this essay, which was published in Bitch magazine’s March 2005 issue, can be found here]
Wes Anderson’s films are so full of quirks, many carried over from one to the next (a fast-paced scene set to a drum solo, a slow-motion ending with all the key players), that it’s easy to miss his most peculiar cinematic habit: he rarely casts women and girls.
Each of his films feature only two or three female characters who speak more than a couple lines. While pivotal to their respective plots, these roles―for the most part, the love interest, mother, daughter or sister―are really intert compared to Anderson’s many, active, male characters, like the unmoving pins in hinges that allow them to move away from and closer to one another. Even background characters, from children to bookstore and hotel employees, who could have been female or multi-gendered without ruining his plots, are almost always male.
This lopsided casting goes way beyond a quirk, however, when other, corresponding elements of his oeuvre are considered. Clearly, whether consciously or not, Wes Anderson has made masculinity his central conceit.
Many types of masculinity have long been staples of the silver screen, from the machismo of Sylvester Stallone to the buddy-cop genre to Woody Allen’s nebbishes to the teenage fantasies of the Porky’s and American Pie movies. Wes Anderson, though, with the help of his fellow screenwriters Owen Wilson and Noah Baumbach, has explored a unique masculine theme over the course of his four films: the symbiotic relationship between boyish and manly behavior necessary for the health of not only a male individual, but also, by extension, the society around him.
A few reviewers[1] have mentioned in passing Anderson's penchant for father-son/mentor-protégé relationships, and even Anderson himself has acknowledged it. (In a 2001 Los Angeles Times interview, he credits director James L. Brooks—who helped him find the funding to turn a short film into his first feature, Bottle Rocket—with inspiring his affection for mentors.)[2] Those terms, though, are inadequate for describing the extent of the interplay, in his films, between representatives of young male values and representatives of old male values (through characters who are sometimes at the expected end of the age spectrum and sometimes at the other).
It’s true that a large part of every one of his plots involves a relationship between a young man and a man who is old enough to be his father (and, in one case, literally is): wanna-be thief Dignan, in 1996’s Bottle Rocket, and the crime boss Mr. Henry; tenth grader Max Fischer, in 1998’s Rushmore, and his industrialist adversary/friend Mr. Blume; favored child Richie Tenenbaum and his irresponsible father Royal, in 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums; and, in 2004’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, airline pilot Ned Plympton and the titular marine documentarian who might be his father. Most of these relationships, however, don’t flow one way, as would be the case with a mentor and his protégé. For example, the excesses of Max Fisher’s boyishness are tempered through his ups and downs with Mr. Blume, while the latter’s staid, “successful adult male” existence is brightened by traits he picks up from Max. Also, each member of these pairs is never an absolute symbol of either old or young masculinity. The complete sense of that dichotomy is spread throughout all the characters (except for a few female ones) in Anderson’s films, so that, as with a dream, each can be read as a different aspect of a single, dynamic identity.
This sense of internal journey is poignantly captured in The Life Aquatic’s climatic scene. After watching the long-sought jaguar shark pass by his submarine (accompanied by a rhythmic thump like pumping blood, as if his “Deep Search”―the vessel’s name―were for a heart, not an awesome beast), Steve Zissou, who had planned to harm it to avenge the death of his friend, begins to cry. One by one, each of the pod’s other occupants reaches out a hand to touch him, not as a sign of Team Zissou solidarity (like the hand-pancake made earlier by Steve, Ned, and bond company stooge Bill), but solemnly, as if in this moment he is receiving back long lost parts of himself. Then Steve places one of his own hands on the womb of the journalist Jane Winslet-Richardson, where she is carrying the child of her married editor. Until now, Steve has only spoken flippantly of her pregnancy, so this gesture almost seems like a narrative non sequitur. The two lines of dialogue that follow, before the scene changes to the film’s denouement, are superficially just as random, but, in terms of Anderson’s perennial theme, they address the heart of the matter.
“In twelve years, he’ll be eleven and a half,” Jane says. Twelve was the age at which Ned, who died in Steve’s arms a couple scenes previously, had written a fan letter to him, essentially saying Steve was his role model for growing from a boy to a man. In many ways, though, when they met as adults, Ned was more of a “man” than Steve (with his financing, for example, and his courteous wooing of Jane).
Thus, the film resolves itself symmetrically, when Steve replies to Jane, “That was my favorite age.”
That sentiment could just as easily explain the behavior of Dignan, Max Fischer, and Royal Tenenbaum. They probably wouldn’t admit it, even to themselves (in The Life Aquatic, Wes Anderson includes more self-awareness, on many levels, than in his other films), but all four of them act from within the framework of a preadolescent boy. Like eleven or twelve year old boys, they are not obsessed with girls, as an older teenager would be, and when they do occasionally turn their attention to them their courtship is aggressive and maladroit. This is because their thoughts are mostly on how to be a man.
At that age, kids of both genders play around with the tropes of their adult counterparts, employing a kind of capricious trial-and-error, with peers and in their private fantasies. In Partners in Play: a Step-by-Step Guide to Imaginative Play in Children, Dorothy and Jerome Singer explain that:
Make-believe play is an important means by which the child can begin to identify and to “try on for size” the varied and sometimes confusing social roles that characterize our culture… Each of these roles has certain defining characteristics―adults are bigger than children; nurses, policemen and athletes usually wear special costumes―and some roles have strictly defined rules or conventions associated with them.[3]
As if they are frozen in this growing up phase, Anderson’s protagonists are a boy’s patchwork approximation of what it means to be a man. Since, at that age, being a good husband or father is not exotic, those roles are shunned (which can be seen in Royal and Steve Zissou). Instead, boys favor masculine personas that connote adventure (the criminal, the deep sea explorer, etc) and their accoutrements: hand-drawn maps and other props, special uniforms, birdcalls, secret nicknames, and special jargon. (That last element is acknowledged in one of the few places named in The Life Aquatic: Port-au-Patois).
The very first scene in Bottle Rocket introduces this phenomenon: twenty-something Dignan crouches behind a bush and signals to his friend Anthony with hoots and a handheld mirror. Anthony, with his doctor's permission, uses roped-together sheets to "escape" from a mental hospital where he's been staying voluntarily to deal with exhaustion. What had made him so tired, we later learn, is the prospect of continuing to lead the predictable life of leisure his middle-class affluence allows. A third friend, Bob Mapplethorpe, is so rich he's resorted to growing a marijuana crop in his backyard to experience the thrill of risk for once (presumably, since he’s never shown getting high). Although they owe their economic positions to their parents, Anthony and Bob can be seen as symbols of the trade-off entailed in making it as an adult male: the accumulation of material wealth for a numb, conformist existence. By hanging out with Dignan (whose lower class status is sketched out in two lines: "You know there's nothing to steal from my mom and Craig" and "How's an asshole like Bob get such a great kitchen?"), they're not slumming, but rather reconnecting with their youth, when their future as men seemed full of possibilities. The rigidity of what manhood really turns out to be is personified by Bob's violent, condescending brother John, aptly nicknamed Futureman.
In Rushmore’s Mr. Blume, Anderson further fleshes out the idea that ideal adult masculinity can lead to ennui. This millionaire is introduced telling the boys at Rushmore, his prep school alma mater, to “get the rich kids in your sights and take them down.” His own money has certainly not brought him happiness: his wife flirts with another man in front of him and his twins, Ronnie and Donnie, are brats (at the end of the film, they’re sent to military school, which Blume says they love). On the dvd commentary, when he sits alone at his sons’ birthday party, the film’s co-writer Owen Wilson says, “It’s like that Talking Heads song [‘Once in a Lifetime’]. He really is wondering how he got there.”
This scene ends with his cannonballing into the pool and holding his breath at the bottom in a shot Anderson admits (to Charlie Rose, in an interview also on the dvd) he stole from The Graduate. In that film, the protagonist Benjamin, wearing a scuba diving suit, is pushed to the bottom of a pool by his father, where he lies as the camera pulls back. This exemplifies his passivity throughout the first half of the movie (Mrs. Robinson pushes him into their affair, Mr. Robinson pushes him into dating Elaine); he’s floating on the current of the status quo toward a dull, adult role. His future is mentioned many times by others and, before he begins to take control of his life, he even exclaims to Mrs. Robinson, “I’m just a little worried about my future.” He should be, for what society had planned for him Mr. Blume has been ready to escape for a long time.
On the other hand, being in or on water often signals positive pivotal moments in Wes Anderson’s films, from Anthony and Inez in Bottle Rocket having their first kiss (initiating the rift in his boyish adventure with Dignan and Bob) while immersed in the motel’s pool, to the introduction of the adult Richie in The Royal Tenenbaums writing a letter to his friend Eli revealing his love for his adopted sister Margot, while literally “out to sea” on a permanent cruise. The apotheosis of this trope can be found in Rushmore, which in many ways looks ahead to The Life Aquatic.
While the later movie obviously mostly takes place on water, two key scenes stand out in this regard: Steve reviving Ned (with Klaus’s help), after the young man “drank a little too much water” during a practice scuba dive; and Ned’s death in the ocean, following the helicopter crash. Immediately preceding the latter scene, Steve gives Ned the letter he’d received from him decades earlier, and, after reading the “P.S.” (“Do you ever wish you could breathe under water?”), Ned says, “I still wish I could breathe under water.” “Me too, Ned,” Steve replies. If we read that desire as addressing a yearning for a turning point of masculine catharsis, then the mirrored symmetry of those two scenes helps meld these key characters into a single abstract idea.
In Rushmore, Anderson is much more on the nose about the symbolism of wishing to “breathe under water,” with a protagonist whose last name is literally “Fischer.” Both he and Mr. Blume woo Miss Cross throughout the movie by endeavoring to build a giant aquarium at the titular school, even though, as she points out at the end, she never asked for one. Nonetheless, her character is closely associated with “The Life Aquatic.” (As are her charges: in the scene where she’s overseeing outdoor easel painting, a student is working on “a jelly fish”). When he first peeks at her in her class, she is reading to her first graders from a worn, unabridged copy Kidnapped by Robert Lewis Stevenson, a choice that would be developmentally inappropriate in the real world, but that is a perfect fit for Anderson’s cinematic universe, since it’s a boy-being-taken-under-the-wing-of-a-man adventure that is largely set on the water. In the preceding scene, where Max is in the school library, reading Diving for Sunken Treasure by Jacques-Yves Cousteau (someone who not only inspired The Life Aquatic, but whose Richard Avedon portrait graces the wall of Mr. Henry’s loft in Bottle Rocket), we hear maritime sounds (seagulls’ cries and ship’s creaks) as he reads a Cousteau quote that turns out to have been handwritten in by Miss Cross. Soon, he’s helping her feed the fish in the extraordinary line of tanks in her classroom, gauchely yet endearingly shifting the spotlight from talk of her dead husband to his own dead mother, anticipating Steve Zissou’s saying, “You know, my best friend just got killed,” as Ned is discussing his mother’s death. When Max and Miss Cross come to the last tank, he asks, “What’s going on in here?” As they crouch down to look inside, she replies, “These were just born.” She’s telling this to a character who literally lives next to death (the cemetery where his mother is buried), so it follows that her role in the film is to be a kind of conduit for the main male characters’ rebirth.
In fact, in a sense, Miss Cross herself is a decoy, a misdirection to keep us from noticing the importance of the third main male character: her dead husband, Edward Appleby. While the plots of Max and Mr. Blume’s crushes on her are certainly legitimate, they actually serve to cast into relief their failings in comparison to this offstage ideal man. (“Edward has more spark, and character and imagination in one fingernail than Herman Blume has in his entire body,” she tells Max, her wonky syntax betraying the fact that she hasn’t moved on from him yet). He’s the one who gave her the Cousteau book, which she later donated to Rushmore – and that happened when he visited England when she was 13, an age that should ring a bell by now. After all, when Max enters her house via a ladder and a convoluted made up story of being knocked off his bike, he interrupts her sitting wistfully on the bed in her dead husband’s museum-like prepubescent childhood room. Max is already soaked from the rain, but it’s like he’s now entering the fish tank to be born again, to “breathe underwater.” As Miss Cross leaves the room to get supplies to minister to his supposedly hurt head, Max lays back on the bed where Edward Appleby had once lain as a boy, and he says, “So this is where it all happens.” Obviously, on the surface, that remark is just a pushy, naïve kid’s parroting of a cliché he’s heard—sort of like the plays he writes that rip off movies or someone else’s real life story—but, more deeply, Wes Anderson is telling us that that location is the crucible where his male characters must discover their mettle. The final shoe drops when we (and Max) learn that, just like Ned will in The Life Aquatic, Edward Appleby died in water (by drowning).
Personal growth is hard, sort of like treading water and getting in over your head sometimes, so, while it’s a letdown, it’s also no surprise when Max takes advantage of Miss Cross’s close quarters first aid to kiss her. As the mood in the room sours, she looks at what she’s wiped off his forehead and says, “Is this fake blood?” When he replies in the affirmative, she cuttingly sends him off with: “You know, you and Herman deserve each other. You’re both little children.” While clearly an insult, the truth is, though, that by this point in the film the distinctions between what each of them represents has begun to blur. Mr. Blume has certainly come a long way from his own immersion in water in the beginning.
Back then, in Jungian terms, Mr. Blume had found himself surrounded by the trappings of the senex, or “old man” archetype. According to psychotherapist Rob Preece, “Senex seeks to create and maintain organizations and systems, which give a stable, ordered basis for control and authority in matters such as administration and education.”[4] In a sense, this archetype is more purely represented by Rushmore’s headmaster Doctor Guggenheim (whose job, in an earlier version of the script, Max was going to attempt to take by force, Wes Anderson says on the dvd). Blume, though, is ready to turn away from a role that “At its most shadowy,” Preece describes as, “rigid, dogmatic, and ruthless.” Thus, Blume (whose name even calls to mind personal growth), more than Guggenheim, is in a place to reconcile with his Jungian opposite: puer aeternus, the archetype of all that is boyish.
This is indicated early on, when he asks the puer character in Rushmore, “What’s the secret, Max?” The balm the puer provides for society, according to Thomas Moore in Care of the Soul, is “fresh vision and necessary idealism,”[5] of which Max has an abundance, along with the archetype’s requisite overconfidence. (One of his mythical counterparts is Icarus). “The world needs dreamers,” Mr. Henry declares to Futureman in Bottle Rocket, defending Bob’s Dignan-influenced actions, but also anticipating Max, Royal, and Steve Zissou’s roles in their respective films.
Besides inspiring those around them, though, these puer characters are also often irritating. As Moore says of the dark side of this archetype:
It can be insensitive to the failures and weaknesses of ordinary mortal life. It is also difficult for people to find intimacy with this puer spirit. It can be charming and attractive, but it carries a heavy stick behind its back. There is a concealed sadistic streak in the puer, one you would hardly guess is there until it strikes.[6]
He also points out that “The puer spirit often maintains its distance from the labyrinth of the family,”[7] a trait Anderson explores in more depth in his next film The Royal Tenenbaums.
Whereas Bert Fischer, Max’s kindly barber father, is so supportive he’s ill-suited for smoothing out his son’s rough edges, Royal Tenenbaum must return to his kids to hone down his own. In this third film, Anderson has shuffled the pieces of an idea he sketched out in Bottle Rocket and painted in clear, bold strokes in Rushmore, so that the end result is a kind of cubist exception that proves the rule. Here the character who has the most senex in him is Royal’s son Chas, who’s been obsessively protective of his young sons, Ari and Uzi, ever since their mother died in a plane crash. Even as a child, though, Chas was more of a typical adult male than his own father; he dressed in suits, lived in an ascetic room (a style taken to an extreme with Steve Zissou’s “nemesis” Hennessey, whose predilection for steel recalls Mr. Blume on the phone at work: “I don’t want alloys, I want steel!”), and spent his time making money through the sale of his Dalmatian mice and real estate deals.
As with the senex archetype, Chas is also the advocate of rules. While Royal’s reading in bed, Chas turns off the light, curtly replying to his protestations, “You’ll have to finish it in the morning. Them’s the rules.” This difference between the two is epitomized by the scene where Royal shoots the child Chas in the hand with a BB gun, despite being on his team. As an important aspect of a boy’s growth from childhood to manhood, the attempt to pin down the right rules for the right scenarios suffuses Anderson’s films, from Dignan, Bob, and Anthony bickering over their robbery plans to Ned and Klaus, Steve’s first mate, having trouble agreeing when their gentlemanly tiff has ended.
This issue is connected to a distinction between the terms “play” and “game,” which Bruno Bettelheim elucidates in A Good Enough Parent:
Although [they] are often used interchangeably, they are not identical in meaning. Rather, they refer to broadly distinguishable stages of development, with “play” relating to an earlier stage, “game” to a more mature one. Generally speaking, “play” refers to the young child’s activities characterized by freedom from all but personally imposed rules (which, unless the child is compulsive, can be changed at will); by freewheeling fantasy involvement; and by the absence of any goals outside the activity itself. “Games,” on the other hand, are usually competitive and are characterized by agreed-upon, often externally imposed rules; by a requirement to use the implements of the activity in the manner for which they are intended and not as fancy dictates; and frequently by a goal or purpose outside the activity itself, such as winning the game.[8]
Significantly, Royal begins to break through to Chas in the family game closet. (Also, on the Rushmore dvd, Anderson says he lifted a shot from Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game). Richie―who as a child was probably his father’s favorite because, with his toy car collection and ham radio hobby, he was the most boyish―has a nervous breakdown during a very adult game, a tennis championship.
Both the Singers and Bettelheim decry the amount of structured activities modern parents impose on their children. As the latter puts it, “they are continually distracted from the task of self-discovery, forced to develop their talents and personalities as those who are in charge of these varied activities think best.”[9] This can be seen not only in the excessive safety and exercise regimens Chas sets for his boys, but also in the chalkboard of scheduled classes he and his siblings had to adhere to as children.
When Royal, prodding his grandsons into hanging out with him says, “I’m not talking about dancing lessons. I’m talking about throwing a brick through the other guy’s windshield. I’m talking about taking it out and cutting it up,” he’s addressing their need for puer-type spontaneity, but he could also be talking about Anderson’s own attitude toward formulas, including his own, which he has stretched by including a female main character in the form of Royal’s adopted daughter Margot. (His estranged wife Etheline is crucial to the plot, but―like Inez and Miss Cross, the respective love interests in Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, and Eleanor and Anne-Marie, the ex-wife and script supervisor in The Life Aquatic―she doesn’t experience personal growth over the course of the film).
With Margot Tenenbaum, Anderson overtly suggests that, as with the puer and senex archetype, his boyish/manly theme is universally applicable. Everyone can relate to the struggle to balance conflicting parts of themselves, especially the urge to play around with roles and rules as you choose and the urge to uphold them and reap their rewards―and, below the surface, this is what his films are about.
It would ruin Anderson’s aesthetic, though, to emphasize a female character in the same manner he does his men, so not only is Margot an outsider, by being adopted, she also has a doppelganger in the character of Eli Cash, Richie’s childhood friend from across the street. Eli (who, as an adult, has written a book in the style of uber-masculine author Cormac McCarthy) has always wanted to be part of the Tenenbaum family, but, unlike Margot who seeks to impress Royal, he sends clippings of his accomplishments to Etheline.
This kind of symmetry (which turns up, visually, in Anderson’s perfectly centered shots) is only one of many ways in which these films resemble children’s stories. On the Rushmore dvd, Anderson cites the goal of a fable or “storybook” feel as influencing his use of a wide lens and his removal of references to contemporary pop culture, events, and the real cities in which he films (or, in the case of New York City, where The Royal Tenenbaums is obviously set, the elimination of familiar landmarks and the creation of new ones, like the 375th St. Y, to facilitate the sense that it takes place both in this world and yet another). This suits his central conceit, for, as Bettelheim writes in The Uses of Enchantment, “Fairy tales, unlike any other form of literature, direct the child to discover his identity and calling, and they also suggest what experiences are needed to develop his character further.”[10]
Even the much lauded soundtracks to his films reinforce this theme. Bottle Rocket’s climax is scored to the Rolling Stone’s “2000 Man,” which describes a family man who is literally in the future, caught up in the masculine demands of a technological age. Hope shines through, though, in lines like “Oh daddy, your brain’s still flashin’/Like it did when you were young.” Conversely, Rushmore ends with the Faces’ “Ooh La La,” in which a grandfather futilely tries to pass on wisdom to his grandson, lamenting in the chorus, “I wish that I knew what I know now/When I was younger.” In The Life Aquatic, even Iggy and the Stooges’ “Search and Destroy,” with its line “I am the world’s forgotten boy,” helps cast Steve, driving pirates off his ship, in the light of a twelve year-old playing in his backyard.
Even as adults, Wes Anderson seems to be saying, playing should remain an important part of our lives. After we’ve graduated from the free-flowing amusements of childhood to the games in which adults are expected to take part, there remains only one form of officially-sanctioned play: art. As if to remind us of this, Anderson has framed his last three films in three different artistic mediums: theater (Max’s school play about Mr. Blume’s most manly experience, his time fighting in Vietnam), literature (the book pages that are shown on screen in The Royal Tenenbaums, read by Alec Baldwin’s narrator character), and the Jacques Cousteau-like films-within-the-film that are premiered at the beginning and end of The Life Aquatic).
His next project (which he’s co-writing with Noah Baumbach) is a stop-action adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Thus, like his thematic contemporary Tim Burton, Anderson will continue to mine the land where childhood and adulthood overlap.
Nevertheless, his specific exploration of the way boyish/manly identity issues touch on that area seems to have ended with The Life Aquatic. Its final scene even depicts the two ends of the male age spectrum united, almost into a single being.
Steve sits outside the theater where his documentary is screening. Beside him is Klaus’s young nephew Werner (who, in the beginning of the film, gave him a crayon pony fish―a gesture of shared interests that is contrasted with Steve’s eventual rebuffing of another fan, the film’s oldest man, who just wants him to sign a stack of posters). Steve says, “Ho.” Werner says, “Ho” back. Then, after declaring, “This is an adventure,” Steve puts him on his shoulders and walks down the stairs to his ship, leaving behind the award by which grown-ups have validated his boyish pursuits.
End Notes
1. “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” Glenn Kenny, Premiere, [posted online 12/10/04]; “This bond goes deep…,” Rachel Abramowitz, Los Angeles Times, 12/5/04, p. E14; “Holiday Sneaks…,” Jan Stuart, Los Angeles Times, 11/1/01, p. F13
2. “Holiday Sneaks…,” Jan Stuart, Los Angeles Times, 11/1/01, p. F13
3. Partners in Play: A Step-by-Step Guide to Imaginative Play in Children, Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer, Harper & Row, 1977, pp. 92-93
4. www.mudra.co.uk/individuation
5. Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life, Thomas Moore, Harper Collins, 1992, p. 251
6. ibid
7. ibid
8. A Good Enough Parent: A Book on Child-Rearing, Bruno Bettelheim, Vintage Books, 1987, p. 185
9. ibid, p. 178
10. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Bruno Bettelheim, Vintage Books, 1976, p. 24