GBH
I hate Wes Anderson films, which have always reminded me of a noxious slick of dogshit sandwiched within a Laduréemacaron. For him the swagger over the substance, the lazy dichotomy of wordy kids as grown-ups and ennui-wracked adults as moping children, the anally retentive fussing over the composition of the frame, the screen drenched with pastels that would make any patissier blush, the tricksy sandwiching of plots within plots and frames within frames. I want to take a Wes Anderson lover and go through every single painterly still, every kooky-adorkable shout-out to a weird-beard technology (funiculars, yo!), every cameo keeping Owen Wilson in blow and whores and Adrien Brody in work – and I want to scream – flecks of my spittle no doubt catching in their whimsically curated facial hair – this isn’t film-making. That thing you just saw? That you thought was cool? That was a trick! It’s all a trick! There's nothing there! See that pastel-coloured patisserie over there? Bite it!
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It wouldn’t bother me as much as it does if Anderson’s films were relegated to curiosity status: to weird love-letters to themselves, or to surface sheen, or whatever the hell they are. But they’re more than that to today’s cinema-goers – they’re a handy shortcut to cultural capital. People treat this asshole mountebank as one of the few remaining auteurs – each of his releases is met with the same fanfare as a Tarantino or a Malick. And the best thing about them is they don’t have a load of swearing, and don’t last three hours!
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The cultural bankruptcy of a world in which Wes Anderson films are celebrated was really rammed down my throat last Friday, when I attended a screening of The Grand Budapest Hotel organised by Secret Cinema. If you’ve never been to a Secret Cinema event, imagine a world in which all the key tenets of capitalism have failed and a chortling cabal ofNathan Barley idioterati have taken control of the asylum – where instead of £55 entitling you to a screening, and a seven-course dinner, and a split of champagne, and a blowjob, you receive instead a poorly-worded email aping some of the most instantly recognisable ideas associated with the film you’re going to see. You then go to a “secret” location, dressed in clothes that most instantly recall the most obvious aspect of the film you’re going to see, and mingle for longer than at all necessary with like-minded lovers of interesting cinema. After that, you’re led to the venue, where failed or failing actors will cheerfully harass you “in character”, and get you to hand over your mobile phone, because you have paid £55. And then you’re in! The setting will almost certainly be instantly recognisable as an abandoned warehouse, but decorating teams from all the local primary schools will have done a bang-up job painting some bits of plywood with more or less the relevant colours; more gleefully cretinous acting-people will further accost you and thus put the cherry on the top of this seamless act of world-building. Then you will have to buy your own food and drink, and poke around the desultorily-decorated abandoned warehouse for the next three hours, and then you will sit down to the film, because you have paid £55.
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It struck me within about 10 seconds of being welcomed to Secret Cinema’s Grand Budapest Hotel that Secret Cinema and Wes Anderson were made for each other – and more importantly, were made for the same people. The same conspiracy of mass-delusion sustains them both: that deepset meaning, substance, value are all wholly unnecessary as long as there is enough on the surface to entertain consumers’ minds for long enough for them to think they’ve got their money’s worth.
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One reason commonly put forward to explain Secret Cinema’s burgeoning, baffling success is that This Is A Recession, and that people are moving away from the substantial and towards the experiential. Who needs a new iPod (or whatever) when instead, for a fraction of the price, you and some friends can get dressed up in strange clothes and go to a strange urban space and do something that not everyone else is doing? Hashtag memories!
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Littered throughout The Grand Budapest Hotel are more troubling echoes of the non-pastel shades of twentieth century history – most starkly in the SS-style banners that adorn the hotel during its Second World War occupation. Whilst I wouldn’t argue for a second that the only acceptable tone for discussing World War Two is one of po-faced solemnity, I also felt slightly repulsed by this appropriation (just as curatorial and fundamentally gutless as the taxidermy-tastic stylings of Fantastic Mr Fox) of such serious subject-matter, as though Wes were turning to his critics and saying “see – I can do adult themes too!”. It was another trick – a wave of the wand to give you something apparently substantive to chew on and tide you over before the next image of Willem Dafoe riding a motorbike. When really it was just another fucking macaroon.
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In the end, I just want to say “grow up”. I don’t really know who I want to say it to. Wes Anderson, probably. People who enjoy Secret Cinema’s danses macabres, probably. I’m not even sure “grow up” are the correct words. I just know there’s something wilfully arrested in the development of Wes Anderson’s imagination and/or directorial sensibility, and in the minds of people who take pleasure, at an age where they’re old enough to own homes and abort children, in deceiving themselves that an abandoned warehouse in Farringdon is a fictional hotel in a fictional country.
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Something that may surprise you: I enjoyed Grand Budapest Hotel. I laughed a lot, and Ralph Fiennes in particular is on ripping form. But I don’t think I derived one atom of pleasure from anything that could be ascribed to Wes Anderson’s choices as director. The film is good because it has a good script and good central performances. Everything else was extraneous.
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Something that may surprise you: I enjoyed Secret Cinema’s Grand Budapest Hotel. I laughed a lot, and Ralph Fiennes in particular is on ripping form. But I derived no pleasure from the plywood-thick artifice erected around the screening, the botched accents and desperate gurning of the staff. The film was funny. I laughed. Everything else was extraneous.
