The Darjeeling Limited – Bitch Flicks

Interracial Relationships: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts from our Interracial Relationships Theme Week here.

Interracial Relationships in Star Wars: The Force Awakens: The Importance of Finn & Rey by Sophie Hall

To have a Black character like this to not only be the co-lead in an iconic franchise but to also include him in a healthy, positively portrayed relationship with a white woman is a brilliant statement. … Finn and Rey’s difference in race doesn’t put any limitations on what this couple can and do achieve.

Interracial Relationships on Grey’s Anatomy by Cheyenne Matthews-Hoffman

While Grey’s Anatomy has a very large multiracial cast that leads to some impressive representation, its reluctance to discuss race doesn’t give it the opportunity to further explore intricacies of interracial relationships.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine Is Doing Something Right: How One Workplace Sitcom Shows That Interracial Relationships Can Be the Norm by Laura Power

But because the people coming into any workplace in New York City are already diverse in terms of race and sexual orientation, why would a cross-race relationship be bothersome? Brooklyn Nine-Nine doesn’t believe it should be. From the first episode, this show presents interracial relationships as an unquestioned norm, and this is what makes it stand out from all other shows of its kind on television.

No Place For Us: Interracial Relationships in West Side Story by Olivia Edmunds-Diez

West Side Story could be read as a warning to Latinas: stay away from white men. If María listened to her older brother, obeying his wish to keep her obedient and virginal, María would be safe and free from grief. This notion is exceedingly disappointing, especially considering that there are not many Latina main characters in Hollywood movies.

Pinky and the Origins of Interracial Oscar-Bait by Hannah Graves

Pinky is best understood at the starting point for a new Hollywood trajectory for interracial relationships onscreen: the worthy Oscar-bait drama that claims to enlighten as it entertains and serves as a conduit for fostering tolerance in the presumed white audience.

Interracial Love in the Afternoon: Daytime Soap Opera Relationships by Rachel Wortherley

It is glaring that amongst soap opera supercouples, there are few pairings with people of color, especially interracial couples. … In 2016, interracial couples only scratch the surface of storylines on daytime television.

Colonialism in The King and I and Related Media by Jackson Adler

The King and I promotes colonialist and “white savior” attitudes. … Adding romantic interest to the story, showing King Mongkut as exceedingly admiring of Anna and portraying her influence in the court as more than it was, paints Western values and morals as superior to others, justifying colonialism by making it seem as though Eastern countries “need” the West.

Negotiating Race as the Female Indian Love Interest in Bend It Like Beckham and The Darjeeling Limited by Allie Gemmill

Jackie Brown: The Journey of Self-Discovery by Rachel Wortherley

By not blatantly focusing on the racial disparity between Jackie and Max, it speaks volumes in regards to who the film is about. … It is silently implied that as a Black woman, she divorces her identity from the men in her life — including a man who, as a white male maintains a sense of privilege in society — and reclaims it for her own.

Blindness, Race, and Love in A Patch of Blue by Leigh Kolb

Fifty years later, portraying disability on screen with empathy and respect is still rare. Showing an interracial couple is also extremely rare (Green says that some people sent terrible letters to him about the kissing scene; in fact, it’s reported that in some areas in the south the scene was edited out for theaters). A Patch of Blue manages to weave together themes of disability, race, socioeconomic issues and family dynamics with beauty and grace.

‘We’re Not So Different’: Tradition, Culture, and Falling in Love in Bride & Prejudice by Becky Kukla

Though clearly based on the novel, Bride & Prejudice is a successful piece of transnational cinema, which uses the interracial relationship between the Bakshi’s second eldest daughter Lalita and white American Mark Darcy to discuss differences in race, tradition, and cultural imperialism.

Endearing Interracial Romance in Flirting by Grace Barber-Plentie

It’s a true rarity to see an interracial relationship that doesn’t have at least some element of suffering in it. In Flirting, on the other hand, most of the difficulties in Danny and Thandiwe’s relationship seems to come from the relationship itself, not the color of the star-crossed lovers’ skin.

On Indie Rom-Coms, The Duvernay Test, and Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong by Candice Frederick

It was Viola Davis who commented about the lack of substantial roles as love interests for women of color on the big screen. … We see that familiar and very white narrative unfold between an interracial pair in Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong, except this time it’s infused with cultural nuances that, while they don’t reinvent the wheel, offer a fresh perspective.

Colorism and Interracial Relationships in Film: ‘Belle,’ ‘The Wedding,’ and More by Atima Omara

The colorism Dido experiences is seen throughout different Western societies that had Black African enslavement as part of its world. Many stories of colorism also exist in American history and folklore and we see how it impacts romantic relationships and in American film and TV.

Into the Badlands: Will Blasian Love Last? by Lisa Bolekaja

Into the Badlands, based on the classic Chinese tale Journey to the West, is set in a futuristic dystopian world where past wars have created a new feudal society. It’s gratifying to finally get an onscreen Blasian couple where they kiss, have sex, and get to have a real relationship.

What Parenthood Taught Me About Interracial Relationships by Livi Burke

I remember watching the scene in the episode “The Talk” where Crosby and Jabbar have their first conversation about the N-word. Crosby looked so caught off guard; he knows this is a racist word he’s not supposed to say, yet at the same he has no idea how to talk about this racial slur and its ramifications with his half Black son.

Animated Love: How Anime Produced Two of the Best Interracial Love Stories of All Time by Robert V Aldrich

Two of the greatest love stories in anime are interracial relationships. … While the industry as a whole generally eschews characters of color, that hasn’t stopped some series from featuring prominent people of color characters in narratively significant stories. This has led to interracial couples being featured in two of the greatest anime series of all time: The Super Dimension Force Macross and Revolutionary Girl Utena.

Negotiating Race as the Female Indian Love Interest in ‘Bend It Like Beckham’ and ‘The Darjeeling Limited’

Both ‘Bend It Like Beckham’ and ‘The Darjeeling Limited’ examine Indian women and their romances with white men. Within the interracial relationships explored in these respective films, both Jess and Rita… are burdened with navigating deeply impressed racial boundaries as they move through a modern society.

This guest post by Allie Gemmill appears as part of our theme week on Interracial Relationships.

Through Western lenses, Indian women are often framed as an exotic and forbidden ideal. Depicted as embodying a degree of Eastern mysticism, rooted in a culture of patriarchal duty, the Indian woman as love interest or girlfriend is often paired with a white man who views her with a sense of “otherness.” It then falls to the Indian woman to negotiate a specific kind of Eastern-Western iconoclasm — a clash steeped in racial and cultural sentiments — in order to let her romance with a white man flourish. The white male-Indian female dynamic is also often portrayed as a threat to traditional Indian expectations of a woman marrying within her racial group and the emphasized gender roles she has been raised to conform to are challenged.

Both Bend It Like Beckham and The Darjeeling Limited examine Indian women and their romances with white men. Within the interracial relationships explored in these respective films, both Jess (Parminder Nagra) and Rita (Amara Karan) serve as love interests but not long-term romantic partners for their white male counterparts. They are burdened with navigating deeply impressed racial boundaries as they move through a modern society. Meanwhile, their white male love interests are allowed to indulge their romantic curiosities with relative ease. This is crucial to note because these white men are rarely challenged to share the burden of interracial courtship, free from the onus of cultural or racial expectations. For Indian women, as experienced here, it is difficult to separate race from amorous pursuit; race serves as a definitive and non-negotiable aspect of the relationships between the Indian women and white men.

BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM

In Bend It Like Beckham, protagonist Jess is torn between honoring her Punjabi Sikh Indian roots (as embodied in her strict parents and sister, who is marrying according to racial and cultural codes) and the English culture which she has embraced and surrounds herself with (as embodied in her love of soccer and her budding romance with her white coach, Joe). Although she bears the burden of fetishization from her English peers in conjunction with her pursuit of a soccer career and gendered/racial expectations from her family, Jess for the most part negotiates a coalition between the two insofar as she is able to pursue her personal ambitions. Jess is forced to reckon with a strict code of honor and respect for her family throughout the film, as outlined by her Indian culture, which the film positions as a threat to not only Jess’s happiness in soccer but also in her budding romance with Joe (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers).

Gender is constantly conflated with racially-based codes of conduct: Jess is repeatedly questioned by her mother and sister about why she would not eagerly desire to marry young and marry an Indian man. Her mother is quick to bawl her out for participating in soccer, here read as masculine and therefore thoroughly out of line with how Indian women should act in public. Jess is considered a reflection of her family’s morals at all times when she is in public and any time she acts according to her own desires, she risks shaming her family and threatening her sister’s impending nuptials. In this world, Jess bears the brunt of delicately mollifying her family while speaking for her “white/masculine” athletic ambitions.

Add to this a budding romance with Joe, a white Irishman, and Jess’s own racial and gender predicaments double. Through Joe’s eyes, Jess is positioned as an exotic “other,” a young Indian girl seemingly sheltered from the pleasures of contemporary British culture. During Jess’s “transformation” moment — when her friends lender her more revealing and sexy garb to wear out to a club in Berlin — the camera lingers on her body before cutting to Joe’s furtively intrigued looks. Despite there being other women of color in her soccer team, Jess is the only one treated as different from the rest, with other scenes depicting the bemusement her teammates have over her Indian culture. This moment seals the forbidden love that Jess and Joe will cultivate for the latter half of the film. As they find themselves drawn to each other, Joe is narratively allowed the ease to step in when necessary to speak on behalf Jess. Twice he makes speeches to her father about how deeply he cares for her and believes in her abilities as a soccer player. Both times Jess does not get the chance to contribute to the conversation between the men although her agreement is implied. Joe risks little in taking a romantic shine to Jess whereas Jess appears to risk everything. Furthermore, he is allowed to pursue her, however discreetly, without threat of losing his job or credibility.

As gender and race are tightly bound up together in Bend It Like Beckham, director Gurinder Chadha makes it clear that an interracial relationship of this specific dynamic (white man-Indian woman) is a sincere threat to a young Indian woman. Even when transplanted to the London suburbs, Jess and her family seem to live in a tight-knit Indian community seemingly bent on being hermetically sealed from white English life. This clash of racial and social ideologies make for the biggest villains to Jess’s own chance at happiness.

THE DARJEELING LIMITED

In The Darjeeling Limited, Rita is reduced to an object that Jack (Jason Schwartzman) is infatuated with while on vacation with his older brothers. Jack’s storyline is centered around a recent and gruesome breakup, leaving him vulnerable. Upon seeing Rita for the first time, while she makes the brothers comfortable, Jack firmly sets his sights on her. While Rita is a minor character in the adventures of the Whitman brothers, she can be read as a boldly fetishized representation of Indian women. In doing this, we place further burden on how Indian women are characterized onscreen.

Rita is presented as a modern and beautiful woman, but ultimately repressed, ostensibly by the Indian culture in which she was raised. She is seemingly trapped aboard the train, The Darjeeling Limited, with her boyfriend, an intense young Sikh man who runs the train with an iron fist. She is willing to bend the moral code by sneaking away with Jack to have sex (which she enjoys in the moment) but rebuffs him when he continues to make advances. She sneaks cigarettes in between service snacks and pouring tea. Albeit committed to her duties, she does them as if half-zombified, stating at one point that she has “got to get off this train.” She is deadened in a stylish way as only Wes Anderson creates his characters. In all of these little actions, Rita becomes Jack’s forbidden interracial-love-interest-cum-souvenir.

In addition to having little screen time, the script seems further set on reducing Rita to being a faceless trope when Jack returns to the trio’s train carriage, attempting to appear nonchalant after having sex with Rita mere moments after meeting her. Jack’s brother Francis (Owen Wilson) incredulously asks, “Did you just fuck that Indian girl?” It’s a small moment but effective in immediately redacting any shred of agency Rita may own. A white man simply lumping Rita into the throngs of Indian women that surround him betrays an intact colonial hierarchy as modern microagression. Jack does nothing to protest this categorization of his potential love interest and instead continues to pursue her, believing she may somehow heal him or make him feel better about himself for a time. Rita’s treatment as a cure-all to white male pain feels oddly preposterous, especially considering the film is set in a modern era. What right does Jack have to take so quickly to Rita in both a romantic or needy aspect? What entitles him? While Rita gives Jack a reason to believe there may be the stirrings of a romance, their love seems doomed not only because of his neediness and apathy to fully commit, but also because she seems wholly restricted by her relationship to a traditionally Indian man as well as her innate sense of duty to her work.

Amidst the flurry of lust flung upon her by Jack, Rita appears to be inured to this kind of attention. While she navigates her life in a position of literal service and subservience to the passengers of the train, she holds that place metaphorically as an Indian woman. In vocalizing her desire to escape the confines of the train, she negates a racially-inbred sense of second-class status as an Indian woman. While she is wholly defined by her race and gender in Darjeeling, she is imbued with a defiance as only modern women seem to possess. Jack is allowed to ply her with sex and cigarettes because he can temporarily indulge in the local fare; Rita, however, is living in a very real and very traditional Indian society, unable to escape or completely negotiate her duty with her desire.

It is perplexing to see that both films seem set on giving the impression that Indian society is ultimately restrictive and patriarchal to women. In reading these films (one made by an Indian woman born in Nairobi and raised in England, the other made by a white man from Texas), both exude the confinement of Indian women and their struggle to navigate a modern (read: white, Eurocentric) world amidst such strong ties to their racial background. It would be the hope that when Chadha placed Jess in the white world of suburban London and Anderson wrote Rita into her native India, we would see some characters reflective of these different but ultimately Western perspectives. Instead, both directors have unwittingly constructed their Indian women to abide by an implied universal gendered and racial code. As such, these cinematic Indian women are painted into a corner in juggling their race with their ambition and most importantly, their romantic desires.

Allie Gemmill is a film journalist based in Tampa, FL. She is the founder and creative director of The Filmme Guild, a feminist film salon dedicated to examining the intersections of women and film. Follow her on Twitter and Medium.

Travel Films Week: Dialogic Explorations on ‘The Darjeeling Limited’ and ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona’

This is a guest review by Steffen Loick and Ingrid Bettwieser.

At a hasty glance, movies often tell stories about traveling to talk about the processes of longing. Longing for far about places, for something new, for something unachieved. As it seems, what is inscribed in the narrative of traveling in the end is the need for change. The individual voyages the phantasms of the far, far away, to negotiate her- or himself’s identity. Traveling can be regarded ultimately as a coming of age journey, which holds many gendered and racialized subtexts of becoming.

In this essay, we ask how the genre of comedic travel-movies encodes gender-topics and how these are linked to the metaphor of a journey. Thereto we loosely compare the eponymic female protagonists of Woody Allen’s comedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) and the dandy-male protagonists of the comedy The Darjeeling Limited (2007) directed by Wes Anderson. Both movies follow socially close connected White, heterosexual US-Americans, who go on a trip to another continent, where they are afflicted by emotional disputes. We also ask how the particular female or male main ensemble is constructed in dialogue to the projected otherness of the countries they are visiting.

Vicky in the cab

“A passing thing, now it’s over”: Gender, Identity, and Travel in Vicky Christina Barcelona

“Vicky and Cristina decided to spend their summer in Barcelona,” the male voice of the narrator in the opening sequence of Vicky Christina Barcelona declares. His introduction locates the following events in the “exotic” scenery of Spain and marks the seen protagonists by name, as they leave an airport with their luggage and get a cab. More importantly, the opening sentence determines the whole plot immensely: both protagonists are traveling.

The narrator’s voice will escort the complete storyline from the distance, commenting on it slightly mockingly and directing my impressions of the movie’s protagonists. This starts already on the cab ride to Barcelona, which serves as exposition: the White US-Americans Vicky and Cristina have known each other since college and are best friends. Using their affection for culture, the narrative structure of the movie defines and criticizes them as stereotypical. They are educated women, who want to travel beyond the touristic mainstream and are only divided by their different perspectives on love. Vicky represents the type of severe and inhibited female intellectual, who seems to be feminist but actually isn’t. She lives in a committed relationship with her White, autarchic fiancé. She “had no tolerance for pain and no lust for combat; she was grounded and realistic,” illustrates the narrator. Vicky goes on the journey because she’s doing a “Masters in Catalan identity.” Her research interests generate from her early worship of Gaudi’s architecture. She looks at Barcelona correspondingly with an ethnological, nearly colonial gaze; after all, she does research on a cultural group she is not herself a part of, whose language she barely speaks and who she reduces to touristy significant cultural markers. In contrast, Cristina “had yet broken up with another boyfriend and longed for a change in scenery,” the narrator explains. Cristina represents the sensual but deeply insecure artist, who hates her own art. Suffering is accepted by her as “an inedible component of deep passion.” Apart from this, she knows only what she doesn’t want: she strictly refuses Vicky’s life and love design.

Opening scene: Cristina in the cab

Both are utterly successful as stereotypical tourists of culture: she dives into the “artistic treasuries” of Barcelona and meets in person the highly-educated painter, Juan Antonio, the Spanish seducer per se. Through his local knowledge, they can experience art and culture as distinguished insiders, and even Vicky is almost enchanted by him. A short, romantic and for her unusually passionate night is the reason for Vicky to fundamentally doubt her life concept. Even the spontaneous marriage with her suddenly appearing fiancé doesn’t seem to be able to stop the crumpling of her self-perception.

Her hostess, the older US-American Judy, accelerates this further. Judy feels trapped in her long-term marriage with a boring and rich man. An escape appears none but surrogated in the person of Vicky, who she sees as a younger emblem of herself. Meanwhile the exact opposite happens to Cristina, who is now in an ongoing sexual relationship with Juan Antonio. She begins to live with him and realizes that he is on highly explosive terms with his ex-wife, the Spaniard María Elena. In joining a polyamorous relationship with both, Cristina seems to live her own ideal: she lives the Avant-garde in Europe; she is the lover of physically desirable artists; she lives beyond the heteronormative, dichotomizing standard, which Vicky symbolizes. This is mainly established through the emotionally unstable but nevertheless strong character of María Elena. She is not only intimidating and choleric, but rather represents the type of the highly hypnotic muse. Thanks to her, Cristina gets self-confident about art; she begins to photograph while Juan Antonio and María Elena paint.

Final scene from Vicky Cristina Barcelona

In the end everything stays as it was before. The journey, the summer in Barcelona, is for both women only an intermezzo. Vicky and Cristina are standing on moving stairs in the last sequence, which literally bring them back down. Vicky goes back to her husband, to her frame made of “seriousness and stability” and Cristina–who couldn’t dare commit to Juan and María–is still searching. None of them found a new self. None of them seems happy. The essence of the plot is brilliantly stated by Vicky’s character, “It was a passing thing; now it’s over.”

In conclusion, one must point out that Vicky Cristina Barcelona generates its immense comedic potential from mocking its stereotypical unemancipated female main characters. The end of the film especially shows the intellegence of the story: nothing changes for Vicky and Cristina. They do not find a spiritual solution; everything stays the same.

Prelude scene from The Darjeeling Limited

“I want us to make this trip a spiritual journey where each of us seek the unknown”: Clash of masculinities and postcolonial forgiving in The Darjeeling Limited

Our next movie starts off with an emblematic taxi ride again. This time, in a prelude to the main plot, an American business man is turbulented through hectic traffic and ongoing day-to-day routines of an unknown Indian mountain town. Bollywood-style music is hammering as a ruthless and emotionally unaffected taxi driver speeds to the local train station and leaves the American to clutch the front seat. Through the steering wheel we can see the driver’s small picture relics, signs of religious appreciation. Having arrived at the station, the American hastens straight to the ticket counter without a word to the obviously insulted driver and past a waiting line of locals. In this scene, central subjects of the movie are encoded: The hegemonic White western masculinity which is contrasted by the suspicious subaltern male, who for most of the time is captured in local customs and therefore cannot speak (be understood) as well as the mystified female postcolonial cultural landscape.

Villagers demonstrating their gratefulness

In the course of the movie, we follow the family dynamics of three US-American upper-class brothers who take a train ride, a “spiritual journey,” through the Darjeeling district in eastern India. We learn that there is a deceased father, whose luggage they symbolically carry with them, and more importantly, as things unfold, a mother who has left “her boys” in order to work as a nun in an Indian convent. Every time the subject of the mother turns up, the three collectively consume pain killers to “get high.” In short, resulting from being brought up with this incompletion, the brothers are incapable of living up to the proper standards of functional adult masculinity: The eldest holds scars from a recent suicide attempt; the second fled his pregnant wife and the responsibilities of fatherhood; and the youngest is unable to get over his ex-girlfriend. On this so-called “spiritual journey,” the “spiritual” can be paralelled with the missing mother-figure and, more generally, with the “mystic” and “unknown” femininity that is being ascibed to the postcolonial country. Only through the journey can the brothers attain their proper heterosexual masculinities.

Peter Whitman entering the train through the lower class compartments, passing the “silent” but watching subaltern

As the train sets off and as we are getting more involved with the brotherly conflicts, the only other female character with a name (and at the same time the only local with a personality) is introdced. Rita, the train stewardess, soon catches the attention of Jack Whitman who then brashly has sex with her in the bathroom. Symbolically speaking, the Indian postcolonial cultural space is being re-appropriated by this act.

Througout the journey, the three brothers are contrasted by the “other” Indian male who is not complicit or unruly and does not understand the realms of western hegemonic masculinity. Therefore, he appears suspicious and has neither personality nor name. There is the overly business-like, stiff chief stewart (whose sanctions are ignored), the shoeshine boy (who steals the expensive shoe), “laughing” boys (“assholes”), crooked salesmen (who don’t really know what they are selling), and finally cricket players (who play cricket with a tennis ball).

Scene from The Darjeeling Limited

With these competing (but depicted as inferiour) modes of masculinity, the “spiritual journey” for the attainment of functional manliness can only be completed by a heroic act. The brothers accidentally observe how three local boys tip over into a river as they’re fishing, and they are instantly carried away by the stream. Each brother bravely jumps in after a boy to find that they could only save two. Peter couldn’t bring back “his” boy alive.

After scenes of relatives mourning in the nearby village, the brothers are invited to attend the boy’s funeral by the grieving father. With this symbolic act of acknowledgement by a local subaltern male, the Westeners can reconcile with their male identities.

Rita marks Jack “spiritually”

Despite the rescue of two local boys, Peter blames himself for the loss of the third. Only the news of the birth of a baby boy can make amends for this and unite the brothers in male bonding so that they are finally ready to encounter their mother.

At the peak of a Himalayan mountain (and the movie) the three brothers meet their surprised mother in a convent and confront her with several questions concerning her disappearance and the abandonment of her sons: “Why didn’t you come to dad’s funeral?” … “What are you doing here?” … and “What about us?”

Rita looking for Jack

Factually she explains: “I didn’t want to. I live here.” And, pointing at a statue of Mother Mary, she withdraws herself from the patriarchal demands of motherhood: “You are talking to her. You are talking to someone else. You are not talking to me. I don’t know the answers to these questions. I don’t see myself this way.”

Regardless of this final demonstration of female agency, one of the overall implications of the movie is the damage done by the cancellation of motherly liability–which is also a predominant subject in Western educational discourses. Being set in the postcolonial imaginary, the “lost” here is re-appropriated by masculinist bonding and the subordination of the subaltern “other.”

Steffen Loick is doing research about the relationship between gender identity and body optimation at Ludwig-Maximilian University, Munich Germany, and Ingrid Bettwieser studies history and literature at Freie Universität, Berlin Germany.

2013 Golden Globes Week: An Open Letter to Owen Wilson Regarding ‘Moonrise Kingdom’

This is a guest post by Molly McCaffrey and is cross-posted with permission.

Movie poster for Moonrise Kingdom

Dear Mr. Wilson,

For many years, I believe people had the sense that Wes Anderson was the genius behind the three films you co-wrote with him:

Bottle Rocket,

Rushmore,

and The Royal Tenenbaums.

This is probably because Anderson’s persona jibes with our expectations for an artistic genius whereas you, as much as I hate to admit it, come off as the class clown, the cad.

So it was easy to believe that Anderson was the brains behind the operation, and you were the color. But, having seen all of the Wes Anderson movies—including the ones you co-wrote and the ones you didn’t, it’s now clear to me that we all had it backwards.

Clearly, you are the brains, and Anderson is the color.

Because ever since you stopped collaborating with Anderson, things have gone downhill in his work. Don’t get me wrong—some of the movies Anderson made without you showed moments of true brilliance, but none of them were the masterpieces that are Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums—two films that were as much about character development as they were about oddball behavior, unusual costumes, retro props, quirky sets, and elusive ingénues, the trademarks of Anderson’s style.

In fact, after watching the four Anderson films you did not co-write, one is left asking the question: what went wrong after Tenenbaums?

There is no doubt that both The Life Aquatic

and The Fantastic Mr. Fox

hit some high notes, and it’s not unusual for intelligent viewers to defend one or both of them.

The Darjeeling Limited is another story.

Anderson’s fifth is generally regarded by most of his fans to be his most disappointing film. That’s reason enough not to talk about it, but I want to talk about it precisely because doing so might lead us to the source of Anderson’s current problem.

In order for absurdity—the hallmark of any Anderson film—to work, it must be paired with emotional honesty; otherwise, the story risks alienating the audience. For instance, in The Royal Tenenbaums, the viewer can overlook the absurdity of Margot listening to old albums on a child’s record player inside a pup tent in the middle of her brother’s childhood bedroom because Richie has just tried to kill himself and is about to tell her—his sister—that he did it because he loves her. The audience is so caught up in the depth of Margot’s and Richie’s emotions that we don’t become distracted by the fact that the two of them share them in front of what looks to be a child’s bed sheet decorated with bright red rocket ships and ringed planets.

In contrast, The Darjeeling Limited doesn’t provide an honest moment of emotional complexity—when the three main characters save some Indian children from drowning—or include a named female character—when they finally reunite with their mother—until almost an hour into the film. Unfortunately, by this point, Anderson has lost most of his audience, viewers who find themselves desperate for an authentic hook on which to hang their emotional needs.

No doubt absurdity is a popular trend in 21st century cinema. We see it in the work of Anderson and in the work of other admired filmmakers such as Charlie Kaufman, Sofia Coppola, Spike Jonze, Diablo Cody, and David O. Russell just to name a few. And, of course, we see it in the work of a handful of their predecessors: David Lynch, Tim Burton, and Jim Jarmusch, for instance. For this reason, it’s crucial to understand how and why absurdity can and cannot work. For evidence of why this issue is so important, please see I Heart Huckabees. See Broken Flowers. See The Darjeeling Limited.

And that brings me back to the films of Wes Anderson without you, Mr. Wilson, and specifically to Moonrise Kingdom.

Simply put, Moonrise Kingdom broke my heart.

It broke my heart because it had so much potential. It was, in fact very close to being a truly great film, another Rushmore or The Royal Tenenbaums. But, sadly, it failed to get there.

At its core, this ode to young love is an incredibly moving story, a story with emotions that remain with you days later. A story that grabs you by the shoulders and spins you around in circles until you fall happily to the grass, laughing euphorically to yourself. But that grab-your-heart story gets lost amidst far too many knee socks

and lightning bolts

and short skirts.

It’s heartbreaking to watch because it’s easy to see that with the right help—with your help perhaps—this film could have been as brilliant as the others.

But it’s not.

After much soul-searching and speculation, I’m forced to admit that the only noticeable difference between the great Anderson films and the almost-great Anderson films is you, Mr. Wilson. And once I realized this, it wasn’t hard for me to begin to believe that Anderson—like Sonny without Cher—can’t make great art without you.

And that’s why we need you, Mr. Wilson. We need you to stop whatever you’re doing right now and go find your buddy Wes Anderson. We need you to make certain he never again creates another almost-great film. We need you to tone down his oddball moments,

to edit out his Parisian prologues

and his gratuitous girl-on-girl action,

to say no to his unnecessary narrators in inexplicable long red coats,

to curtail his need to document every quirky corner of his detailed sets,

to tone down his male gaze,

and to encourage him instead to capture the provocative emotions of his always fascinating characters—both male and female. We need you because you might be the only one who can do this for Anderson.

In short, we need you, Mr. Wilson… Wes Anderson needs you… American cinema needs you.

Please send help.

Molly McCaffrey

———-

Molly McCaffrey is the author of the short story collection How to Survive Graduate School & Other Disasters, the co-editor of Commutability: Stories about the Journey from Here to There, and the founder of I Will Not Diet, a blog devoted to healthy living and body acceptance. She has worked with Academy Award winner Barbara Kopple and received her Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati. Currently she teaches at Western Kentucky University and designs books for Steel Toe Books. She is at work on her first memoir, You Belong to Us, which tells the story of McCaffrey meeting her biological family.