The Suicide of Genius: Owen Wilson and Wes Anderson in Life and Art

By Will Lasky

[Editor's Note: The House Next Door is proud to reissue a series of articles developed at 24LiesASecond, a now-defunct platform for provocative criticism with an underdog bite. The essay below was first published on 2/21/2008, under the editorial guidance of James M. Moran (editor-in-chief) and Peet Gelderblom (founding editor).]

Over the last 15 years, Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson have shown us something about people who lead extraordinary lives, either by choice or through sheer coincidence of birth. One particular subtext in all Anderson-Wilson collaborations recalls the work of Oscar Wilde–that is, life, through the medium of creativity and troubled genius, imitates art. Genius, in their early work, is ineffable, resplendent with the trappings of depressive, rumple-haired Nietzschean eccentricity and Faustian striving and discontent. Anderson as writer/director and Wilson as writer/actor depict the creative spirit that defies diagnosis as it is ratified by its own insatiable drive, as it rebels against social pressures and cultural environments. Conversely, the therapeutic imperative of our contemporary society is to contextualize and diagnose, to encourage radical self-assessment in hopes of propagating permanent stability and happiness. As of late, Anderson’s original vision has been compromised by this imperative: his idea of the troubled genius has lost its romantic cache. Its integrity as a thing of heroism and beauty has been ostensibly diagnosed.

As if in response, Owen Wilson, the eponymous free spirit and troubled hero of Wes Anderson’s films, has struggled with what appears to be typical celebrity depression. According to gossip magazines and the industry of celebrity buzz, the blond Wilson brother is recovering from not just another fictional blunder, but a real-life suicide attempt. In this sense, our image of Owen Wilson has tangled itself with pop psychological discourse and celebrity persona: the man behind the characters has become increasingly enmeshed with his emerging popular fiction.

Mapping the idea of “life imitating art” onto Owen Wilson’s biography and Wes Anderson’s films reveals their startling convergence. As Anderson’s works increasingly addressed themes of depression, psychiatric treatment, and “hitting bottom,” so too did Wilson’s life chart a course towards collapse. Wilson’s characters in Anderson’s early films—the sublime geniuses born of commingling depression, emotion and creativity—gradually give way to caricatured objects of psychoanalytic explication. Yet even amidst Anderson’s emerging pop psychological clichés, there finally arrives a poignant story of life’s capacity not only to imitate art, but also to become so tangled in art that we lose track of the real.

Bottle Rocket through The Royal Tenenbaums: the Rise and Fall of Genius

The Anderson-Wilson oeuvre focuses on the subject of individuality, complex emotions, and creative genius. This subject appears incongruous within typical contemporary discourse, in which one does not merely recognize the category of creative genius as much as analyze its gestation amidst environmental conditions, socio-economic factors, genetic traits and evolutionary dispositions that produce both the artist and his art as packaged bio-cultural phenomena. It is the difference between painting a robust portrait of Van Gogh as a self-taught, idiosyncratic eccentric with self-destructive tendencies and embodying Van Gogh as the inevitable result of a medical pre-condition (e.g., bi-polar disorder).

The dichotomy at its most lucid is this: a worldview in which striving, failure, and despair are regarded as intrinsic to the creative act and a worldview in which these same emotions are diagnosed as symptoms of abnormality. Within the latter discursive framework, the idea of ineffable, spontaneous creativity channeled by the depressive genius figure is passé—a simple-minded notion of a bygone era. According to a more contemporary psychoanalytical paradigm, bio-chemicals are responsible for creating the complex emotions that spur creativity—and must be kept at normative levels lest all hell break loose.

In contradistinction, Dignan, played by Owen Wilson in Wes Anderson’s first major production, Bottle Rocket, and Max Fischer, played by Jason Schwartzman in Anderson’s subsequent film Rushmore, remain sublimely, almost heroically imbalanced and unstoppable. Rather than being produced by their environments, they are self-invented young men who refashion their environments to fit their own inexplicable creative drives and yearnings. Despite their fragile anomaly, they make the universe conform to their own expectations. They are rebels.

In vaguely similar comedies released during the 1990s, outsiders like these reach some sort of compromise with society: they publish, become human rights lawyers, get the ugly duckling girl, or in a bittersweet final scene, realize that all has not been in vain and that their depression is treatable. Anderson’s two early works don’t indulge in such convenient reconciliations: they eschew contemporary psychoanalytic explanations. A literary correlative of Anderson’s early heroes is Goethe’s Faust: Faust triumphs because he cannot be satisfied by Mephistopheles, whether by love or by unlimited power. Anderson’s early characters forge bravely onward through tumultuous worlds of inner turmoil–worlds that are inextricably enmeshed with the creative act.

In Anderson’s early films, artistic genius refashions mundane life around its own principle. In Bottle Rocket for instance, Dignan, played by Owen Wilson, concocts a heist to escape the bonds of suburban boredom. He goes on the lamb with his friends, a band of sensitive outsiders who team up with him for lack of anything better to do. He wants to be a criminal like in the movies, and so he forces his friends to help him construct his “self-fiction.” Likewise, Max Fischer in Rushmore lives for the creative production. From a working class background, he has insinuated himself into an expensive preparatory academy, where he writes a theatrical adaptation of the cop drama Serpico and starts fencing and kite-flying clubs that seem drawn from a Rudyard Kipling public school fantasy. Fischer comments: “Maybe I’m spending too much time starting up clubs and putting on plays. I should probably be trying harder to score chicks. That’s the only thing anyone cares about.”

Dignan and Fischer are discontents who rebel against social expectations. Fischer, especially, appears unhappy. Yet through his creative triumphs, he shows us that it is in fact the mundane chick-scoring world that has it wrong. The individual creative genius he personifies eventually emerges to dominate his environment and refashion it in his own image of what the world should be. Other characters experience catharsis through his inventiveness. Through Fischer, the genius, their lives are made whole again—they are rejuvenated by their contact with this “dated” artist/genius figure.

Whatever nascent psychodrama our contemporary sensibilities detect in early Anderson, pop-psychology and pop pain have yet to leap to the forefront of the Anderson-Wilson project. They have yet to introduce the concept of “hitting bottom” and the imperative of radical self-reassessment–a theme that begins to assume dominance in The Royal Tenenbaums.

Collisions: The Royal Tenenbaums

The subtext of The Royal Tenenbaums is one of collisions. The sanctified world of genius, creativity and art collide with the world of contemporary psychology. Diagnosis, psychosis, breakdown, and divorce emerge like a hydra in the wings of Anderson’s work. And the point of collision is Eli Cash, played by Owen Wilson. Through Cash, Anderson’s tragic-comedic vision reaches its apex and foreshadows its decline into sentimentality and self-apologetic quirk.

As in Anderson’s other work, The Royal Tenenbaums is either indebted to or harbors a sympathetic sense of humor for the late illustrator, Edward Gorey, whose drawings of Edwardian men and women in fur coats getting squashed by urns and tangled in Victorian knots echo through the house of Tenenbaum, the consummate family of burnt-out child prodigies. The influence of Gorey makes perfect sense for this clan of geniuses still very much living within the 19^th century romantic imagination, each occupying a private floor to enact his or her creative passion.

The Tenenbaums have the form of genius, but without that sublime, imperturbable inner drive suspended on the cusp of fracture that characterized their progenitors, Dignan and Fischer. They are exhausted old-young people, resigned to misery for various adult reasons. Unlike in Anderson’s first two films, genius here emerges as a phenomenon intertwined with contemporary pop psychology, riddled with self-reassessment and breakdown.

In Tenenbaums, Anderson and Wilson have explicitly identified their themes. Through a psychoanalytical subtext, they link their characters’ creativity with the contemporary concept of “dysfunctional family,” creating a deliberate depiction of depression and “real adult concerns,” which cannot help but appear slightly less real as they are self-consciously brought to the forefront.

Yet, as a middle work, this self-consciousness makes sense as Anderson and Wilson analyze and revise their creative vision. In fact, the Royal Tenenbaums feels like Anderson’s most complete work exactly because it walks such a fine line between a deliberate thematic explication of depression and an effortless weaving of a compelling, humorous story. Yet here, the scales perceptibly tip away from lightness and towards weight: unapologetic genius fades into psychoanalysis, and work which the creative partnership previously rattled out like post-modern wunderkinds, increasingly feels produced by a deliberate, heavy-handed “artistic vision.” As the precocious Max Fischer from Rushmore says while hitting on his teacher, “Sic Transit Gloria: Glory Fades.” Indeed, as glory fades with each new Anderson film, a self-reflexivity emerges that is as clichéd as it is profound. In The Royal Tenenbaums, the focal point of this self-reflexivity—this convergence of art and life, genius and psychosis—emerges in the character Eli Cash, played by Owen Wilson.

Eli Cash: More Wilson Than Wilson

Eli Cash is a transcendent work of comedic acting, the creation of a man caught between comedy and drama, acting and being. Wilson slips into the character’s skin, becoming him—as though Cash is a slightly tweaked version of himself— a vehicle through which Wilson appears more Wilson than Wilson. When worlds collide, Wilson resides at the center of a nexus where creative genius and psychoanalysis clash.

Cash is the consummate wannabe. He has foisted upon himself a mantle of self-invention to keep out the ordinary, because he is, in fact, not a Tenenbaum at all—not a natural genius—but their envious next-door neighbor and author of a wildly successful revisionist history of General George Armstrong Custer. He is not a Tenenbaum prodigy: his genius is academic and derivative, just like his book. As the envious Tenenbaum neighbor, living life on the family’s geographic periphery, he is the consummate environmental product. And though Cash resembles Anderson’s earlier characters, even more so than the Tenenbaums, his motivations are explicitly revealed as pathological: his insatiable envy, drug addiction, and reckless driving culminate in his own self-diagnosis: “I need help,” he says, as he “hits bottom.”

The Royal Tenenbaums represents the apex of Anderson’s genre since it does maintain balance despite a slight tip of the scales towards a heavy-handed psychoanalytic narrative. It is a movie about nostalgia for the effortless, child-like creativity of the past, prefiguring what is to come for Anderson as a director and Wilson as an actor and creative collaborator. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Darjeeling Limited, Anderson’s latest movies, rely less on the ephemeral and more on the pop psychological. When Cash says he needs help, he pre-figures a new, very self-conscious, unrealistic rendition of “adult concerns.” Additionally, Owen Wilson’s celebrity begins to chart a similar course, away from his image as a freewheeling comedic actor towards that of a clinical depressive. Mainstream psychoanalytic discourse and “reality” begin to preoccupy the fictions of Wes Anderson, and it is as if this discourse contaminates Owen Wilson’s celebrity image.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou: Owen Wilson as Ned Plimpton

In The Life Aquatic, Wilson plays Ned Plimpton, a mustachioed pilot from Kentucky. Vulnerability incarnate, Plimpton is the illegitimate son of the larger-than-life Steve Zissou, an oceanographer modeled on Jacques Cousteau, but burnt out as played by Bill Murray. Anderson explores their reunion as a depiction of human frailty, unearths veins of emotion, and forces the characters to own up to their own emotional inadequacies and needs. Mirroring his careful formal arrangement of sets, Anderson carefully displays this dysfunctional father-son relationship as a recognizable pop psychological “issue”: Plimpton seeks out his father–Zissou flees responsibility. The cast is filled out by other fractured characters, including Zissou’s alienated wife and his first mate Klaus, who is jealous of Plimpton. These figures resurrect Anderson’s earlier characterizations, but are cast though a prism of pop psychology clichés that flatten The Life Aquatic’s emotional landscape. Anderson leads the viewer by the hand towards a perception of Big Issues, rather than letting us discover the characters’ vulnerability for ourselves. Although they are honest and self-revealing, it is difficult to feel with them and for them because we are implicitly directed toward how we should respond.

All of The Life Aquatic’s pre-fractured characters must bear the collective burden of the death of Ned Plimpton, which occurs abruptly and unexpectedly. For example, the journalist Jane Winslett-Richardson, who is also Plimpton’s love interest, loses a potential father for her unborn child at the same time that Zissou realizes he will never get to know his own recently discovered son. This potentially poignant rendering of tragedy would work better if some of the issues involved (single motherhood, illegitimate birth, divorce) were moderated less by pop psychology discourses on human frailty. Where Max Fischer’s delightfully realistic high school Vietnam War play concludes Rushmore, nudging the characters towards inexplicable catharsis—a profoundly beautiful climax in which human pain, sorrow, and inner turmoil appears to come part and parcel with, nay, creates beauty, grace, laughter, and love—at the end of The Life Aquatic not much else is generated but the characters’ grief, once and for all atomized and laid bare for examination. Plimpton’s death serves as a pre-fabricated reason for Zissou and company to reassess their lives and ostensibly “grow up.”

Despite the film’s flattened sense of human being (and dying), all is not lost. Something unforeseen happens within this often confining and simplistic narrative. By concluding self-consciously with a cliché—that life and happiness are fleeting—Anderson at the very least resists Hollywood’s compulsion for happy endings. His film offers no deus ex machina that saves Plimpton, whose death creates a fresh and unexpected outcome. Nevertheless, Anderson’s earlier films are more original and perhaps even more realistic because they rely less on self-conscious renderings of emotions and issues and more on creating inference which beckons the audience toward emotional participation.

The Darjeeling Limited: Owen Wilson Is Francis Whitman

What is uniquely ironic about The Darjeeling Limited is how its presentation of the paradoxical interplay of life and art, of actor and character, unwittingly comments upon Owen Wilson’s real experience and celebrity image.

When Anderson intends to lend more realism to his fiction, the end result becomes more stilted and artificial. Conversely, as Wilson increasingly plays more realistic characters in Anderson’s films, his real life as rendered by celebrity tabloids appears to mirror the lives of his own fictional, psychologically depressed counterparts. Life and art within the confines of Anderson’s films and in real life interact with each other in a more and more overt manner. As Anderson’s characters increasingly display a pop psychological profile, with his suicide attempt of last summer, Wilson himself entered into the fictionalizing rumor mill of ‘troubled celebrity’ and in doing so took on an image that would mirror his character Francis Whitman, one of The Darjeeling Limited’s protagonists.

In The Darjeeling Limited the theme of life conflated with art becomes startlingly pronounced in that Owen Wilson both plays and is a man who attempted suicide. Within the film, Francis Whitman, an obsessive compulsive, gets high off of cough syrup, buries mystic peacock feathers, habitually plans itineraries, bosses his brothers around, mourns his father and searches for his mother, engaging in elaborately arranged enactments of pop psychological problems involving depression, grief, self-medication, chemical imbalance and Freudian neurosis. Whitman bears the eccentric veneer of Anderson’s earlier genius characters in the way he dresses and just by virtue of being played by Wilson. His emotional disarray, however, lacks the mysterious, inferred internal landscape that drives Anderson’s early creations. Unlike Cash, who portrays an almost epic collapse of genius into neurosis, Whitman arrives pre-packaged, the consummate quirky neurotic.

Yet this potentially fertile landscape of issues, rivaling even The Life Aquatic in its richness, is parched by the convergence of Wilson’s life and Anderson’s art. In a scene that is rendered profound by Wilson’s trauma, Whitman displays his ghastly cranial wounds and in doing so, reveals the depth of his suffering. His brothers stand side-by-side in front of a mirror—the shot is pure Anderson—as Whitman removes his bandages, uncovering his hair matted with blood and his stitched gashes (Wilson’s already broken nose adds to the effect). Measuring the depth of Whitman’s despair by revealing his emotional and physical damage, Anderson leads us to the conclusion that Whitman can finally begin “the healing process.”

What is so remarkable about this scene is that we cannot help but view Wilson through the looking glass of his fictional creation, Whitman. After reading about his failed suicide attempt, we view through Whitman, Wilson himself revealing his own damage. We are either led to view or accidentally encounter Wilson’s despairing fictional creation through the lens of his real life despair. Even the names Whitman and Wilson suggest a purposeful commingling of actor and character, life and art in a way the names Plimpton, Cash, and Dignan don’t suggest.

Art About Artists

It is tempting to say that Anderson’s earlier characters are psychologically healthy, while his later ones are sick. However, it is more accurate to say that Wes Anderson’s early characters resemble romantic geniuses or artists who live for and through their work, while his later characters reject this outdated model of genius and instead are recast through the lens of pop psychology to be disassembled into a spectrum of issues. Like Vincent Van Gogh sublimating his despair in bursts of color or Beethoven in furious creative riposte with his imminent deafness, Anderson’s early characters signify themselves through their ability to harness their own pain through creativity. His later characters, however, are laden with a clichéd pop psychological sub-text and quirky self-reflexivity: the recent films read like obvious statements about their author’s fascinations.

Equally, the later characters seem shallow by bringing all of their emotions to the surface and leaving little for us to infer. Yet out of this emotional flatness, something new arises. Where the earlier characters commented on the overlap of life and art within the lives of geniuses, the later ones chart art’s almost physical migration off the script and into Owen Wilson’s real life. Whitman seems to be a mirror for Wilson. Whatever clichés leap to the forefront of The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Limited may do so less out of Anderson and Wilson’s enthusiastic embrace of pop psychology and more because the artists have nothing else to resort to. Given their lack of experience in directly confronting the nuances of realistic adult drama, they instead confront and work through their own adult issues and concerns through the medium of multiple characters.

Anderson and Wilson, in life and art, have manifestly begun to analyze their own creative impetus and reason for being and creating. It is sensible that their later films reflect this development. Still, the overt psychodrama embedded in Anderson’s later works often reduces images of complexity to cliché in ways that aren’t interesting and kind of sad: sad like a chemical, biological explanation of sadness. Despite the startling Whitman-Wilson convergence, the latter films feel incomplete, reductive, as if Anderson fears that his audience needs to be led by the hand towards a specific conclusion about human nature. In short, they make us nostalgic for the mysterious inner worlds suggested by Anderson’s earlier geniuses and nostalgic for the past represented by Anderson’s earlier films. But then again, such nostalgia has always been the essence of the Wes Anderson-Owen Wilson product, and perhaps their heavy-handed involvement with the psychology of adult dysfunction, both in film and in real life, is a necessary step in their ineffable artistic growth.
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Will Lasky is a freelance journalist who writes on culture, travel, and business. He blogs at Mike Tyson Vodka and has contributed to 24LiesaSecond.