By Matt Zoller Seitz
[The following is an excerpt from Part 2 of a five-part documentary analyzing the style of Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums), commissioned by Moving Image Source, the online magazine of the Museum of the Moving Image. Part 1 is here. Part 3 (on Hal Ashby) is here; Part 4 (on J.D. Salinger) will be published April 8; Part 5 (an annotated version of the prologue of The Royal Tenenbaums) will finish out the series April 10. By visiting the Moving Image Source website, you can read the series in transcript form or watch the documentaries by clicking on the "video" button in the right-hand column of the page.]
Martin Scorsese’s intellectualized sensuality and flamboyant kineticism are inscribed on Wes Anderson’s films. Scorsese has returned his disciple’s admiration, all but anointing Anderson his artistic heir and naming Anderson’s debut, Bottle Rocket, one of the best films of the ’90s. Orson Welles, François Truffaut, and animator Bill Melendez (A Charlie Brown Christmas, et al.) may have taught Anderson how to paint, but Scorsese taught him how to dance. Setting aside for a moment their very similar use of music, there are enough shared visual tells to make Scorsese and Anderson seem like a street-tough dad and his college-bound favorite son.Exhibit A is their use of slow motion. Slo-mo became fashionable in the 1960s as a way to draw out violent action. But while Scorsese has used it for this purpose, he also deploys it for another reason: to italicize emotion. We can see Anderson drawing directly on Scorsese’s example in film after film. Johnny Boy’s slowed-down arrival at the bar in Mean Streets—walking forward toward the viewer as the camera dollies backward—finds a visual equivalent in Rushmore when hero Max Fischer makes his triumphant exit from a hotel room elevator after terrorizing romantic rival Max Blume with a swarm of bees. Think also of the memorable slow-motion close-up of Jimmy Conway in GoodFellas smoking at the bar, his eyes lighting up malignantly as he contemplates whacking his cohorts in the Lufthansa heist, is echoed in the penultimate montage of Anderson’s Bottle Rocket in the shot of thief and playboy Mr. Henry puffing on a stogie after robbing Bob Mapplethorpe’s house.
Another shared signature is the God’s-eye-view insert shot, looking down at significant objects from an overhead position roughly parallel to the floor. Scorsese was by no means the first director to look at things from this angle—Alfred Hitchcock often employed the God’s-eye view shot to stunning effect, and it may be that Scorsese’s affinity for the angle comes from a close study of Hitchcock. But Scorsese personalized it by applying it to close-up inserts—often somewhat disruptive inserts placed within an otherwise conventionally edited dialogue scene. Think of the moment in Taxi Driver when Travis Bickle, attempting to charm the campaign worker Betsy, sweeps his hand over her desk to indicate the “all this” that shouldn’t preoccupy her; Scorsese very briefly cuts to an almost-overhead shot of the tabletop, then cuts back to the conversation. There are numerous similar examples throughout Scorsese’s filmography, and Anderson’s own deployment of the overhead insert is strikingly Scorsese-esque, from the composition and lighting to the duration of the shot. Think, for instance, of the overhead shot in Rushmore of Miss Cross grading papers on her desk or the overhead shot of Etheline Tenenbaum’s desk in The Royal Tenenbaums displaying the Sunday Magazine section with a cover story about cowboy novelist Eli Cash.
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11 comments:
Hey, Matt, more great work! This actually at a certain point transcends a discussion of individual filmmakers and becomes an examination of the evolution of pop songs in cinema.
Regarding Scorsese's influences on Anderson, I'd just like to mention Life Lessons, which strikes me as the single Scorsese film which is most influential on Anderson. The epicenter of the Scorsese / Anderson connection is, I think, the slow-motion, wide-angle shot of Rosanna Arquette walking torward the camera down an airport hallway; that one moment seems to link Scorsese's style to Anderson's more then any other. There's some variation on it in every film Anderson has ever made.
I'm less fond of Anderson than you, but this is no less rewarding for our difference in tastes (and is challenging my biases). Your use of the form is really expert -- I especially love that you split the screen between compared scenes. Is there a directory of similar video essays online? I remember an item about Keith's getting taken down, but that's it, and I'd love to see other critical works in this format.
Thanks, guys--
JJ: For some reason I forgot about that shot in "Life Lessons," but you're right, it does seem like the inspiration for a number of Wes Anderson moments.
Wrongshore: That was Kevin B. Lee you're thinking of. His YouTube page is here -- it was restored after he protested its removal.
My YouTube page is here. It contains only part of my output, because YouTube has gotten really hard-assed about publishing work that contains copyrighted material (even stuff that should be exempted under fair use), and also because some of the stuff I've done for the Museum of the Moving Image exceeds the 10 minute upload limit, and I don't want to break the pieces up because it would ruin the flow.
I've always been particularly fond of Anderson's use of slow motion in The Royal Tenenbaums when Margot disembarks from the green line bus while Richie watches.
I'm curious if you see Scorsese's imprint not only in signature shots but also in some of the darker thematic elements in Anderson's work (which usually get bypassed in favor of focusing excessively on his "tweeness"). Specifically in "Rushmore," Max's single-minded obsession with Miss Cross seems reminiscent of Scorsese's recurring theme of unhinged male jealousy -- "Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull," et al. The scene where Max confronts Blume in the backseat of his car is played with discomfiting seriousness, as is the one later where Miss Cross turns the tables on Max's aggression (a scene that starts Scorsese-ish but then makes a drastic departure).
Jessica: Then you'll definitely dig Part 4 (all about Salinger), where I compare that moment with a specific moment from Salinger's "Franny."
Craig: I hadn't thought of it quite that way, but I can definitely see your point. There's a dark obsessive streak in some of Anderson's characters that's weirdly Scorsesean -- Richie's obsession with Margot, Max's obsession with Miss Cross, Zissou's Ahab-like fixation on the Jaguar shark. They all pursue their obessions heedless of the damage inflicted on friends and loved ones.
The rawness of Scorsese's work has largely been ironed it in Anderson's oeuvre though they do share a certain stylistic intensity. I've written elsewhere about how the current generation of youngish filmmakers seem to draw on the Kubrick tradition (not so much in tone, but in the sense that they control every aspect of what we see and hear with an iron grasp) while the 70s generation drew on a Godardian aesthetic which made the viewer hyper-aware (often blissfully so) of the ruptures in the film's style and the sense of a documented reality, filtered through a highly individual vision, suffusing the mise en scene.
Also to put it succinctly, and perhaps somewhat crudely, the emphasis of the Scorsese/Godard cinema tilts towards editing while the emphasis of the Anderson/Kubrick cinema tilts more towards cinematography
Of course it's far more complicated than that (I just have a weird thing for creating illuminating, if dangerous, dichotemies), and you do a good job pointing towards Anderson's and Scorsese's commonalities. I do wonder though if they differ more than they gibe.
MovieMan: Oh, absolutely. I said in the narration that the Scorsese-Anderson lineage is that of a street-tough dad and his college-bound favorite son. Or to put it another way, Anderson might be a great comic book artist who learned to draw by studying Rembrandt; which is to say, he borrows the technique and a few of the themes and preoccupations, but always in the service of doing his own thing, without trying to duplicate, or really even approximate, the totality of the thing he admires.
I say this purely as a tongue-in-cheek gadfly, but the shot of Lorraine "feeling drunk" at her wedding in GoodFellas (at the 1:34 mark) is improperly labeled Mean Streets, by which I mean, it's the only 2 seconds of the piece that isn't perfect/extraordinary.
Shit!
Jessica,
Yeah, that shot in "Tennenbaums" is a direct qoute of the one in "Life Lessons".
And good observation, Craig, about their thematic and character similarities as well.
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