Wes Anderson: the ultimate heartbreaker
by guest contributor Thea, originally published at Shameless Blog
Have you ever woken up one morning and suddenly realised that an old and cherished friend doesn’t care about you or anything you represent, and actually either ignores or caricatures your existence?
Well, neither have I. But too many times I’ve realised that a director (or musician or writer or artist…) that I love like a friend actually creates art that exoticises, fetishises, or all out erases who I am.
I’ve managed to recover from the horror of finding that much of the music I used to like is grossly sexist, (see our little blurb about Jessica Hopper’s famous article on emo music here) but I’m still working on getting over my ex-friend Wes Anderson.
Before I identified as a woman of colour and started applying anti-oppression criticism to every inch of pop culture I could get my hands on, I loved Wes Anderson. But in my grand old age, I can’t excuse the racist caricatures that populate all of his movies.
Like Pagoda, the cute little Indian man in the Royal Tenenbaums (who also appears in Bottle Rocket and Rushmore) who exists solely to do Royal’s bidding, and has an adorable lack of morality. Or the slew of characters of colour – the Brazilian David Bowie (played by Seu Jorge who actually has quite an illustrious film and recording career); Vikram Ray, whose character’s main feature is that he was “born on the Ganges”; the Filipino pirates – in The Life Aquatic.
Characters of colour in Anderson’s films are always caricatures, hilariously exotic. Anderson uses “race as a novelty”, says salon.com, “suggesting an assertively white-kid view of the world.”
These characters are funny not because of their personalities or life situations – unlike Anderson’s white characters – but solely because they’re brown. It’s like Anderson is saying, “The pirates are Filipino! How hilarious is that??” Needless to say, I don’t get the joke.
As if that isn’t bad enough, Anderson also uses Asian cultures to demonstrate just how educated and well-travelled he is. It’s like the movie equivalent of “Some of my best friends are Laotian” and “I went backpacking in Vietnam.” The master of in-joke filmmaking, Anderson’s brown characters are like an inside joke for urban hipsters who’ve visited Little India a few times.
While Anderson devotees have brushed off criticisms of characters like Pagoda as being minor, and few and far between, it seems like things are about to get a lot worse:
Last week, Anderson’s new film The Darjeeling Limited opened. The film is the story of three American brothers who travel to India together after their father dies. Maybe I’m being prematurely judgemental, but the Darjeeling Limited looks suspiciously like “Pagoda: The Movie.”
It’s this that really gets my back up about the Darjeeling Limited:
This is what really breaks my heart: Wes’ track record with women of colour. Anderson just loves pairing women of colour up with dorky white dudes, shortly after dorky white dudes have been dumped or rejected by white ladies. Even though Rushmore’s Margaret Yang is the fullest of all of Wes’ colour characters, she is still paired up with the loveable/hateable Max after Ms Cross turns him down. It’s the same story with Inez, the lovely Latin American hotel cleaner in Bottle Rocket.
Once upon a time, when it was illegal in Canada for non-white men to marry white women (incidentally it was only in the 60’s that those laws were repealed both in the US and Canada), I imagine images of interracial relationships were radical statements. But these days, you can’t swing a cat in urban North America without stumbling across some form of cultural appropriation.
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