THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU (2004) - 10/14/2024
On my favorite Wes Anderson, the auteur, and a ranking
Part I: The Introduction
It’s odd to say that this is the first Wes Anderson film to be exposed to because there really are four or five appropriate answers, which are as follows:
Bottle Rocket - because you were there in the very beginning.
Rushmore - because you were there for the first mainstream film.
The Royal Tenenbaums - because this was the first major mainstream hit.
Fantastic Mr. Fox - because you were a kid and this film was so aesthetically appealing and had talking animals.
The Grand Budapest Hotel - Anderson’s biggest hit that allowed him carte blanche for the future. You were either aware of him before or didn’t get it, but you saw this because everyone else did, or you were in school when it came out, or you really like Tyler, the Creator.
That’s not to say any experience or answer is wrong, it’s just odd for your first introduction to not be one of those five answers. Those are typically the most accessible Andersons because they have had the longest staying power and biggest breakthrough into the cultural mainstream (aside from maybe Bottle Rocket). The countless Richie, Eli, Margot, and Chas costumes every year have solidified it as a Halloween mainstay. Budapest literally popularized a generational shade of pink. So if you are to say it’s another one of those films, it’s a little odd.
Part II: Let Me Tell You About My Experience
Black comedies like this are hard to grasp for a twelve year old but that was the impressionable age I was when I saw this film. All I knew about it was that it included Bill Murray (of Ghostbusters and Osmosis Jones and Groundhog Day), Jeff Goldblum (of Jurassic Park) and Cate Blanchett (of The Lord of the Rings) and a bunch of other people I’ve really only seen in commercials. My parents rented it because they heard it was funny but incredibly dry from a neighbor of ours and that it would be okay for a pre-teen to watch. I can’t personally say that it is an incredibly good film for a teen to watch, but fuck if it isn’t captivating.
As someone who was always entranced by discovery and exploration, this film spoke so much to me. About a man like Jacques Cousteau with cool uniforms who explores the seas and makes movies. Wes creating magnificent creatures that inhabit this beautiful world, drawing the viewer to fall in love with the magic that is the ocean. It’s catnip. It’s something you want to live in. On top of that we live in this gorgeously and meticulously constructed Belafonte that is reminiscent of so many dollhouses and Fisher Price sets. You wanted that model so you yourself could enjoy the sauna or observation pod the same way team Zissou did. It’s a movie that transports you to an imaginary world where only adventure awaits.
It wasn’t until a few years later, around my junior year of high school, that the impact of Wes Anderson would really start to set in. First, it was an upperclassmen drawing my attention to the “Oxford Comma” music video which is inherently a Wes Anderson homage1. Then, it was using Blockbuster online to rent all of his films and watch and understand this man’s style and dryness; the symmetry of shots and color palettes chosen. He just had a way to transport you into a warm world full of cold people and for some reason you just wanted to live in it too.
Part III: The Auteur
During my junior year of college there was another film theory course I had to take as a part of my movies degree. During this semester we had to write two thesis papers on auteurism using some of the traditional directors as examples. My first one was on Kubrick’s deconstruction and rebuilding of genre through The Shining, the second was on Wes Anderson and his dollhouse effect through all of his films to that point (which was Moonrise Kingdom). Mainly I wanted to write about his use of production design and how - in very clichéd terms - his sets become a major character. This is not wrong, but what I inherently missed was the larger conversation, which I will attempt to, briefly, fix here.
It is no secret that Wes likes to play with his toys: from very deliberate blocking, excessive background action to add depth, and his creation and execution of the main locations in his films. Rushmore has its titular school, the Tenebaum’s house, the Belafonte, the Darjeeling Limited train, Mr. Fox’s tree, the Island of New Penzance, The Grand Budapest, the Isle of Dogs, The French Dispatch, and Asteroid City. All of these places are so fully fleshed out you understand them and the controlled space we are visiting that people live in. It’s masterful and lovely and yes, feels like a doll house, but what truly caps it off is the material and its actors.
Wes Anderson is a child of divorce, and as we have seen, most of his films deal with him trying to work through that very specific trauma. From Rushmore through Moonrise, we see a man in real-time trying to figure out why this idea of fatherhood and parenthood is detrimental to his person. He picks his actors to work through these scripts dealing with love, loss, and late-stage growth as if he is using a psychiatrist’s toys to explain the situations at hand. The reason the camera is so focused and still is because we are seeing him play with his toys from his perspective, moving through the world as he moves his actors, delivering lines as any child re-enacting or making things up would - not with actual emotion, but by honestly delivering sentences. This is why everyone is so dry and flat with their delivery during much of his films and emotional moments. They are just repeating, verbatim, thoughts and ideas he has heard but may not understand the actual emotion behind the words. But, like most repressed (typically white) suburban adults, they fake it until there is an absolute boiling point.
It is not uncommon for many humans to do this, to pretend to be cool and calm until everything bursts out because we are all inherently idiots. When you grow up in a household that may deliver a lot of these similarly repressed emotions, it is (sadly) not weird to embody these feelings and recreate them from a learned environment. This is the reason we see this exact delivery in so many of Wes’ films, because he is just recreating an environment where everyone pretended everything was normal and fine even when it was as severe as a suicide attempt, a pirate hijacking, or the destruction of your home. It’s not until some actual tiny breaking point where these emotions spill out, and that’s when you get to the core of a Wes Anderson film. Sure, it’s fun to play pretend, but at the end of the day these are real actions with real consequences that you cannot just ignore.
Part IV: The After
Anderson has seemed to have evolved since then, hitting a new era that does not focus on the worries he had as a younger man, but instead just tells stories through a lens that still encompasses this dollhouse style he created. Sure, there will be bits about parenthood and family and love sprinkled into most of his stories, but the man seems more comfortable in his skin. Instead of using his dollhouses and actors to work through trauma, he’s just using them to play, which is a sign of growth and fun. It’s why people have come back on board since Budapest and enjoyed French Dispatch and Asteroid City. He is picking some of the things he remembered, loved, and were influential to him like the writings of Stephan Zweig or New Yorker articles, and folding them into his own world alongside that of films he clearly loved like Mon Oncle. He is an auteur in the highest regard (whatever you feel of that word) and is a true master of the craft.
Epilogue: A Ranking of Every Film
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Moonrise Kingdom
Rushmore
The Grand Budapest Hotel
The Royal Tenenbaums
Asteroid City
The Darjeeling Limited
The French Dispatch
Isle of Dogs
Bottle Rocket
And why, I think, those two entities will forever be linked, alongside the posh whiteness and lackadaisical attitude associated with Vampire Weekend and Wes.