Best Drunk Standing On One Foot

Posted on May 16, 2014 by Kailyn Kent

There’s a point where wine news becomes real news. I’ve begun to hear about experimental psychologist Charles Spence’s “colour lab” from friends as well as wine writers. This is the crucial moment when a hypothesis becomes an urban legend, like red-wine headaches or health benefits, doomed to be repeated ad infinitum by shoppers at the local wine sore.

The colour lab’s finding: that colors, lights and sounds affect how people taste wine. The gripping conclusion: “[Spence] envisages it trickling down to consumer products in the near future, such as lighting and music suggestions on packaging, or sensory apps.”

Joy of joys.

It’s nice to have a little proof, however shaky, that everyone’s a little synesthetic, and that changes in lighting, color, music, and sound can change someone’s perception of a wine. Perhaps this is a two way street, full of unmapped and unintended consequences: could a glass of dark, bitterly tannic Aglianico del Vulture push a troubled relationship into a break-up, over one dinner conversation? Could a critic, sipping a vapid Trebbiano from a plastic cup at a Chelsea gallery opening, dismiss an artist’s work as vapid, and overly dependent of the color grey? (Or, even worse, praise it for its wispy, post-post-modern disinterestedness?)

As intriguing as they are, these results should be backed up– or contested— by actually rigorous studies in controlled environments. Laboratories may seem artificial, but they are much more controlled than street festivals. Ideally they are less susceptible to a sense of occasion. Experiments don’t always necessarily yield ‘events,’ or great findings that can change the face of wine-drinking as we know it. Which is the problem of hosting an experiment at a bona fide carnival– even the skeptics might be inclined, a few glasses in, to exaggerate the differences they’ve perceived. Everyone wants to be part of something landmark, or something crazy. With all the pomp and circumstance of black glasses and a high-tech installation environment, attendees could enter into the tent assuming that they were supposed to find differences between the green and red lights, that their palates are wrong or dull for not finding them. Especially when the experiment starts with the probe, “Are you a super taster or not? Here, lets find out.” After licking the paper strip, the declared super tasters are ready to try out their new super tasting powers (which actually should guard against discerning light and music based differences.) Having just been told they are not special, the non-super tasters are still struggling to find the mark, and are practically searching for nuances. It’s like going into the funhouse, and being unable to tell why the mirrors are funky. People will want to find differences, not only for the excitement of it, but because they are validated for finding them.

Spence’s test illustrates that for all the awards and point scores, people are willing to understand wine subjectively. Going further, that people will still reach for objective ‘solutions,’ like that red light creates sweet flavors, in the face of wine’s obvious-as-the-sun subjectivity. Which is rather profound. The experiment does not deliver hard and fast rules as to how people associate taste with vision and hearing. For every drinker that associates ‘red’ with ‘sweet,’ there may be someone who associates it with ‘spice,’ or even ‘blood.’ Plus, if sound and light affect the palate, who’s to say that the texture of clothing, or sound of other people’s voices won’t affect a wine too? The idea that the trilling of flutes will routinely evoke the same taste perceptions is ridiculous– even synesthetic people don’t share the same associations.

If lighting and music suggestions appear on the back of wine labels, I’m not sure if I’ll want to laugh, or cry. Most likely I’ll just shrug it off. The current label fodder darling, food pairings, is nearly as ridiculous, (by the way, roasted chicken goes with just about EVERY wine.) I doubt that most consumers match the wine to the recommended steaks and salmon dishes, and probably ignore the advice, or buy wines which reference foods they only wish they were eating. Similarly, any wine drinkers doubt that a wine can taste like the described ripe peaches or tobacco. Many others believe there are no differences to be discerned at all, because consumers regularly cannot tell the difference between an expensive and cheap wine (which is a fallacy, and covered here.) Back labels and wine rituals already cause enough confusion. Why put even more in the way of people’s appreciation?

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This post originally appeared on The Nightly Glass, a wine and culture blog.

On Lions and Tigers And Bears And Wine

Posted on May 5, 2014 by Kailyn Kent

Panel from Sean K’s ‘My First Panic Attack,’ 2011

For obvious reasons, American children are not introduced to a ‘canon’ of great wines in school. Instead, we grow up sifting through culture for cues and shorthands to help us decide what to drink. Some men tend to drink red exclusively, fearing that white is feminine. People stay away from Merlot in part because it was disparaged in the movie Sideways, (despite the fact that the protagonist’s most prized possession is a bottle of a Merlot based wine.) Buyers stick to famous place-names like Bordeaux, Chianti and Napa, while avoiding lesser known regions. At the same time, they’ll call just about any sparkling wine ‘Champagne,’ even if it wasn’t grown and made there. In the end, people prefer to buy by varietal, like ‘Cabernet Sauvignon’ or ‘Pinot Noir,’ rather than the growing region. Most people wouldn’t be able to point to Bordeaux on a map, and if they haven’t been there, they don’t care about it. But they’ve had a ‘Cab’ before, and know they liked it, and hear good things about it, so what the heck.

What does a winery do when they are not from a famous region? Or making wines from lesser known varietals? How do consumers differentiate one Cab from another? The people who have the most money and time to figure out these questions are large, multi-million dollar wine companies. Additionally, they ask, how can a large mass-producer disguise the fact that there is nothing special about their wine? The answer: to market it kind of like a book– or a gimmick at Spencer’s Gifts. Slap a cool sounding name on it, and an appealing image, and send it to market. People will want to buy it, because the name is a hoot, and its stacked in a pyramid, so it must be a big deal. To be honest, most people don’t have a specific reason for getting a Bordeaux, so why not get the one with the crazy label instead?

In 2000, the bulk-bottled Australian import Yellowtail arrived on American store shelves. It was cheap, and had a stylized Kangaroo on the label. Half cartoon, half Aboriginal sketch, the kangaroo was sophisticated enough for a dinner-party, but ridiculous enough to call attention to itself. Yellowtail did not start the ‘critter label’ fad, but it does exemplify it. Little Penguin, Smoking Loon, Dancing Bull and Gato Negro come to mind, as does Tussock Jumper, where every varietal in the line is symbolized by a different animal wearing a red sweater. Some of the best-known luxury wineries, like Screaming Eagle and Duckhorn and Frogs Leap, preceded this trend, yet profit from and increasingly engage in it.

Critter labels soon drew the ire and exasperation of wine critics, disgusted that so much attention could be drummed up for such mass-produced plonk. The marketing strategy seemed infantile and manipulative: people like animals, and like to purchase things with animals on them. Critter labels are so stupid they’re savvy– they play into our earliest associations with the countries that supply bulk wine, like Australia, South Africa, Spain and Argentina. We may not know much about these countries, but we’ve been watched Bugs Bunny bull-fight from birth, and grew up identifying Australia with kangaroos. France and Italy don’t have signature animals, but they don’t need them either; we associate France with wine, not with roosters. (Yet Le Vielle Ferme displays a prominent rooster on the label, in any case.)

For all that’s been said against critter labels, and for their weird colonial baggage, (Australia= exotic animals!) at least they sort-of, sometimes hint at the provenance of a wine, and insist that this is important information for the consumer. In most industries, this is a laughable anachronism. Who cares where one’s toothpaste or phone come from? Yet with fine wines, the place of origin is the reason it will taste a certain way, and when you smell it, remind you of certain things, and highlight different kinds of memories. The place determines how the wine will be meaningful to you, in and of itself. With bulk wines, not so much. Too many grapes from too many places went into it, and the wine has been stripped of its unique characteristics, so as to ensure shelf life and uniformity. These wines can be good, and are dependable, but not particularly meaningful. Like toothpaste. So its no surprise that the industry has developed another method, where the origin and varietals are incidental, and the brand and concept becomes the only thing that matters. In order for this to work, the brand has to be alluring, a little shocking, and “share-worthy.”

The shamelessly trendy marketing strategy is now the creepy label.

creepylabel_1

The Prisoner might be the king of creepy labels. It was originally created by Orin Swift, who has a whole line of disturbing labels, featuring knives and dismembered mannequins and jarring Dadaist collages. At Weilands in Columbus, OH, I was pleased to find The Prisoner posed against JC Cellar’s The Impostor– had the store actually sorted them this way? Then I looked around me:

What is this, Halloween? Even labels I wouldn’t have found creepy beforehand begin to seem a little nocturnal, and frightening. Slo Down’s Sexual Chocolate suddenly looks like it had been scrawled by a demented person. Sans Liege’s Groundwork appeared to be straight out of a Brothers Quay animation. Below them sat 19 Crimes, (opportunistically displaying another prisoner on the label,) and the ubiquitous Apothic Red at the bottom of the shelf. Copolla’s Zoetrope recalled a Kara Walker silhouette. Even critter labels like the Coniglio bunny, and Dashe’s monkey, appeared insidious. And look at all those black capsules, lined up together like a row of fascist uniforms.

It’s hard not to see parallels in pop culture at large– like the rise in vampire and zombie properties. There’s the Golden Age of Television, which often can be reduced to the Golden Age of Gritty Shows About Conflicted Sociopaths. Turn on the TV, and you’re as likely to find a show about a witch coven or serial killer as a sitcom. ‘Witch house‘ is arguably a musical genre, (or at least a style,) and artists like Future Islands and Tyler, the Creator physically menace their audiences. “Epic battle” style orchestrations straight out of Lord of the Rings grind alongside the hours of run-up footage to the Superbowl, and the entirety of the Olympics. Dimly lit, heavily paneled Speakeasy bars are popping up like daisies. Since the mid to late 2000s, everything must have gravitas, roiling drama, tainted love.

Why not wine too? Its not a far leap of the imagination. In movies, wine is most often drunk by cruel, corrupted villains. More positively, a glass of wine denotes sophistication and mastery– which narratively belong to the bad-guy, not the girl or boy-next-door. Creepy labels play into this understanding.

They also make wine fun. Creepy labels are rebellious, because they are not quite classy. Yet more than anything, they are nostalgic. They are just as accessible as critter labels. What is this flood of dark, gritty imagery, if not an appeal to take the things we loved (and feared) as children seriously? No one ever needs to grow up, because ghost stories and Batman and Harry Potter are for adults. And children’s pajamas. At the same time.

Creepy labels are also a way of making wine a little more guy-friendly. Women drink wine alongside villains. For instance, The Drinks Business recently reported “Men Fear Ridicule Over Ordering Wine” as a headline. Meanwhile, darkness and femininity have been equated for eons. Edgy male characters can appropriate shadowy, ‘feminine’ characteristics while retaining their masculinity. Just like femme fatales, they can seduce, dress well, drink wine, and modulate their voices to be sweet one moment, biting the next, and still remaine masculine. These behaviors are also vaguely aristocratic. While the gap between the rich and poor widens, this is a seductive visage to adopt, even if it is considered less than virtuous.

The safest way for a man to do feminine things is to be diabolical while doing them. Paradoxically, this becomes the most powerful way for a woman to be feminine– to be a woman playing a man playing at being a woman. Rates of wine drinking are rising rapidly amongst young men and women, who in turn re-negotiate what drinking wine ‘means.’ At least with red-blends, the fastest growing category, this re-negotiation confirms Hollywood’s typecasting, while weakening people’s connection to what wine actually is– an expression of a varietal, from a place. How convenient for industrial size producers, who will cloak their wine refineries and tanker trucks with a sexy vampire shroud.

Meanwhile, men and women can be united at last in their choice of blood-red blends with titillating names, leaning aloofly over vintage bars, and decorating the kitchen table with mysterious black bottles. Whoever brings the most sinister wine to the party wins.

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This piece is an amalgamation of two posts that went up on The Nightly Glass, a wine in culture blog. I’m hoping to make it like The Hooded Utiltiarian equivalent for wine, beer and spirits criticism, and would appreciate it if you check it out!

True Detective Reeks of Twin Peaks

Posted on April 12, 2014 by Kailyn Kent

The current “Golden Age of Television” is not so much a revelation that TV can actually be good, but that stories are often more impactful when told the long way. Plot arcs develop on a slow burn, and the audience has time to form intense emotional attachments to even minor characters. On the flip side, even a great television show will spend its initial few hours building up to that magic, pivotal moment that justifies the hype. The Sopranos first breaks out of its shell and becomes a harrowing nocturne in “College,” (season 1, episode 5,) and Breaking Bad clicked during the wrenching intervention scene in “Grey Matter” (also season 1, episode 5.) So a part of me can’t fully dismiss True Detective only after the first episode, even if I feel like I spent an hour of my life watching the unholy union of Twin Peaks and a dick measuring contest.

Dominick Nero at The Gothamist, and other besides, have already pointed out a striking similarities between Twin Peaks and True Detective here—(but watch out, there are spoilers in it. I try to remain spoiler free below.) Nero writes, “Rust Cohle and Marty Hart are arguably the 2014 equivalent of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper and his gruff buddy, Sheriff Harry S. Truman. The dreamer and the lawman, the weirdo and the straight guy—Lynch made this detective dichotomy a primetime staple over 20 years ago. And although Nic Pizzolatto is by no means a Lynchian storyteller, True Detective owes a lot to the short-lived ’90s series. Themes of existentialism, pagan naturalism, and the futility of old-fashioned Americana (in the north or the south) pervade both shows, making Pizzolatto’s efforts largely indebted to the elusive David Lynch.” In both shows, a young woman’s corpse is discovered, bearing ritualistic, sadomasochistic markings. It turns out she was a prostitute, and involved in some heavy shit. Wacky lawman pays attention to strange details and throws out high-falutin anthropological language, while straight-shooting lawman quietly bemoans the end of human decency.

I couldn’t read Nero’s case in full, because I don’t want to know the ending of True Detective yet. He articulates the stylistic differences between these shows, but perhaps gives too much credit to the post-Katrina nihilism that Rust Cohle and the show are meant to embody. In episode one, Cohle struggles to say anything that the Nietzchean teenager in Little Miss Sunshine wouldn’t have. The Laura Palmer-counterpart is named Dorothea Lange, a fact made even hokier by the show’s bristling self-importance. Twin Peaks is goofy and over the top in many ways, but the over-cooked, baroque Americana of True Detective’s opening sequence takes the cake. It’s like someone watched the first five minutes of True Blood and was like, “This, but darker! And with more strippers!”

Not to mention the first episode’s Frank Miller-esque issues with women. Twin Peaks had the decency to star lots of fascinating women, make Laura Palmer a character, and dramatize the bizarre, domestic fall-out from her death from episode one. Here we have Madonna and Whores, prostitutes and the melodramatic staple of the good-wife back home. And a sassy black secretary, who so far has only been a sounding board for Hart’s even sassier joke. This does not bode well, but there are seven more hours to go. I’ll return with an update upon episode five, and then the finale. It just might take me a few months to get there.

Robocop (1987): Chianti in the Rock Shop

Posted on April 7, 2014 by Kailyn Kent

Wine is a great accouterment for villains. Aristocratic and impenetrable, a glass of red can suggest that its drinker lounges about, sipping the blood of his enemies and chuckling evilly from the shadows. White wines code the airy disconnect of the elite, aestheticized and cruelly indifferent of everyman struggles. Hannibal drinks Chianti and eats people, and the merciless denizens of Elysium drink whites at garden parties in space. Wine conveys authority, but it’s a fairly obvious power-play. And a better villain can out-power that power-play. Enter Clarence Boddicker.

Kurtwood Smith’s performance in the original Robocop is one of a kind. Boddicker’s smile is vicious, but disturbingly sweet. One moment he squirms with glee, only to be still and deadly the next. He’s the ringleader of a hysterical, trigger-happy gang, which more than anything resembles a group of bros gone wrong. Which is a great reminder for the goonish underbelly of many male-bonding narratives.

But Boddicker doesn’t dominate as much as destabilize. He’s balding and bespectacled, yet emotes childishly. He throws tantrums. He unpins a grenade with his tongue, peering down at his quarry with an odd, come-hither look in his eyes, practically miming to his employer’s recorded assassination statement. Boddicker’s interaction with the one glass of wine in the film is no less subversive. When demanding a cut in the price of cocaine, Boddicker sticks two of his fingers into a drug lord’s glass of Ruffino Riserva Ducale, and then snorts the drops from his fingers. Even better, the drug lord then picks up the glass, and in a bizarre act of social facilitation, takes a sip.

It’s interesting that the wine appears here, in a cocaine factory, and not in the hands of one of the privileged board members of the evil corporation OCP. While it would have been ridiculous for wine to be served at their meetings, its equally absurd for it to appear in Sal’s rock shop. Not to mention that Ruffino Riserva Ducale is prestigious. Karen McNeil deems it a ‘must’ to try in The Wine Bible, “One of the leading producers of traditional Chianti… its Ruffino’s Chianti Claissico riserva called Riserva Ducale that is the jewel in the crown.” Sal’s bottle looks to be contemporary to the ‘80s; a current vintage Riserva Ducale would cost about $25 retail, and about $50 or more in a restaurant. Not a rare or overly expensive wine, but not cheap either, and Sal seems to be drinking it casually. Which is a power statement in itself—Ruffino Riserva Ducale is his house wine, even when it can be barely tasted over the wafting powder. Drinking Ducale in a cocaine factory reduces the wine to an empty signifier of prowess and sophistication. Snorting it is a more honest admission of what it is—a power trip.

Ruffino Riserva Ducale Vinages: 2001 (Standard label), 1953 (Standard label), 1980 (Gold label)…The packaging in the still is definitely from the 80s.

A quick dip into the history of Chianti reveals a stranger layer at play. Up until the seventies, Americans knew Chianti as a cheap, barely palatable wine in a straw bottle. While Chianti must be primarily made with the black grape Sangiovese, misguided Tuscan wine laws permitted—then required– the inclusion of Trebbiano and Malvasia into the blend, which are (usually) characterless white grape varietals that are easy to grow. This stretched the Sangiovese a little further, but watered down the quality significantly. While there had always been a tradition of making Chiantis for cellaring, like Riserva Ducale, their reputation was harnessed to the low esteem for the basic Chiantis.

In the early seventies, Ruffino was one of the first producers to do away with the straw bottle, and presumably decrease the amount of white grapes in the mix. Other producers created “super-Tuscans,” highly lauded, heavy-weight Cabernet Sauvignon blends that often, but not always, included Sangiovese. As these didn’t conform to existing wine laws, they couldn’t be labeled Chianti, and their popularity mirrored the success of the renegade wineries in Napa, California. In order to compete with these non-Chiantis, a “Chianti Classico” designation was created in 1984, which required 80% or more of the blend to be Sangiovese, harvested from only the most traditional growing areas, and the final 20% comprised of black grapes like Cabernet, Merlot, Canaiolo or Colorino. However, the use of white grapes wasn’t completely outlawed until 2006.

Chianti’s reputation progressed enough for Hannibal to name-drop it in Silence of the Lambs in 1991. Parallel movements occurred at the same time in Piemonte, with Barolo and Barbaresco, and throughout the whole of Italy by the late 80s. Italy attracted the attention of American wine critics and their high scores—and a preference for large, fruity wines. For better or for worse, Italian wines changed to fit American palates. In turn, America replaced fantasies of France with rustic Italy, for a variety of reasons ranging between changing kitchen habits and Reaganism. As covered by Lawrence Osborne, in The Accidental Connoisseur,

“Unlike the French, Italians were spontaneous, unsnooty, casual, unpretentiously friendly, and family-oriented—that is, much more like Americans themselves….The huge success of Italian-sounding wines like Gallo and Mondavi had much to do with this commercialized idea of Italy: the Italian family seated around the Mediterranean banquets in golden sunshine. Somehow Italy… had the innocent energy of nature. Like fruit-and-veggie-packed wine itself, that sun-kissed land had about it a whiff of the health food store.”

Meanwhile, Mayor Giuliani was patching broken windows and gentrifying Manhattan, with its heavily Italian heritage, into a safe haven for the wealthy. Film experienced the renaissance of the Italian mob-boss, who took hold of the American imagination with Coppola’s The Godfather in 1972, and was a mainstay by Scorsese’s Goodfellas in 1990, about the time Italian wines went from plonk to paragon.

Sal, wine glass in hand, registers this transformation. Authoritative, barely accented and dressed in a khaki suit, Sal is the image of late-eighties self-indulgence. He barely registers as a bad guy in comparison with Boddicker, who derisively calls him a ‘wop.’ Sal is the image of elevated crime, with a mob pedigree, which he signals not with course stereotypes, but with his enlightened, Italian wine habits. Boddicker’s gesture calls his bluff, replying that crime is always a kind of perversity. By not relying on racial signfiers, and instead including this vinous conceit, Verhoeven can satirize mob movies, and the thuggish indulgence of Reaganism and the eighties, while avoiding actual racism against Italians.

Boddicker might be crazy, but he’s honest about who he is. Robocop attests that crime is chaos, twenty years before The Joker’s declares this in The Dark Knight. Boddicker and the titular Robocop oppose each other like order and anarchy, yet they exist on the same ethical axis, and importantly, are both revealed to be corporate puppets in the end. Sal floats off in cloud-cuckoo land, where there’s honor amongst thieves, or at least a hierarchy. Unfortunately for him, Robocop guns criminals down rather indiscriminately.

This post is the second in a continuing column, What Were They Drinking?!, featured on The Nightly Glass, and occasionally co-posted here on The Hooded Utilitarian.

The Grand Budapest Hotel’s Lost Pouilly-Jouvet

Posted on March 28, 2014 by Kailyn Kent

“Do it—and bring a bottle of the Pouilly-Jouvet ’26 in an ice bucket with two glasses so we don’t have to drink the cat-piss they serve in the dining car.”

It should not be surprising that a film about a luxury hotel features a few wine cameos. Nor should it be surprising that a comedy should make a joke of them. Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel more than delivers on both counts, and his characters’ stilted dialogue seems tailor-made for subtle wine farce. Characters pronounce wine names ridiculously, with baroque flourishes, only to quickly bury them under more talk. You have to be fast enough to catch the name, and faster still to catch that the name was actually a joke. This quirk makes Grand Budapest an oddly respectful film about connoisseurship—a certain amount of taste is required to comprehend what’s funny in the first place.

In Grand Budapest, Anderson rarely mentions a wine directly. He instead creates his own kind of ‘wine talk,’ fragmenting the obscure jargon of wine names, regions and styles, and stringing together passwords comprehensible only to the initiated. In an early scene, the owner of The Grand Budapest orders a red wine whose name I was not quick enough to catch, and then “a split of the brut.” Not a split of Champagne, nor a half-bottle of Pol Roger, Billecart Salmon Rosé, or Whatever Whatever. The former would have been obvious, and the second amateurishly showy. ‘A split of the brut’ delights in the absurdity of the language, its implied, abstracted violence (to cleaver a beast?) that can hardly be linked to that tiny bottle of dry Champagne. The server even brings a comically itty-bitty sample glass. Most sparkling wines are made dry, or ‘brut,’ and say so right on the label. As we rarely refer to a wine this way, (“I’ll have the brut”) the term slips under the surface of the cultural consciousness, its use reserved for eccentric experts.

A little later in the film, I wondered if Anderson had started to make things up. M. Gustave, the film’s intrepid concierge, demands a bottle of Pouilly Jouvet. I’m sorry—of Pouilly-Fuisse? A world-class Chardonnay from Burgundy, in Northeast France? Or Pouilly-Fumé, the renowned Sauvignon Blanc wines from the Loire river valley a little to the west? Is that what he meant by cat-piss– are they serving a cheaper Sauvignon Blanc in the dining car, maybe from South Africa or New Zealand? (Of course not, this is a period piece!) Going back to the script, he does in fact call for a Pouilly-Jouvet. A quick Internet search returned an answer that nicely fits Anderson’s nostalgic phantasmagoria.

At Allexperts.com, ‘John’ posted an inquiry to a ‘wine expert,’ asking if he knew of a Jouvet Pouilly-Fuisse, “an excellent wine but did not Bankrupt the vault [sic.]” In the mid seventies, it was about $10-15 dollars in a restaurant, and $9 to $10 in a store. Presumably restaurant mark-ups were much tamer then, although according to inflation calculators, a $10 bottle of wine would cost equivalently $43 now. The expert responds that Jouvet disappeared in the ‘80s, much like the Grand Budapest Hotel is supposed to have closed, sometime after the author-character visits in the late sixties, but before he wrote about the hotel in the mid eighties. Which is about the time young couples enjoyed bottles of Jouvet Pouilly-Fuisse in New York, an affordable luxury recalling a lost, less-modern Europe. The Tenenbaum children had probably just been born.

The Pouilly-Jouvet namelessly re-emerges near the end of the film, when M. Gustave, the owner’s younger self, and the owner’s wife repeat the train trip where they had first brought it. Before, police thugs hindered the owner and M. Gustave, but this time the scene is shot in black and white, there are real SS, and M. Gustave is arrested and assassinated off-screen. But not before the script directs him to throw his glass of wine into the face of his executors.

In Anderson’s world, wine is flamboyant but innocent, like M. Gustave, and the hotel itself. As M. Gustave and the hotel owner dually put it, “there are faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.” Wine is an absurd protest against militarism, modernism, and whatever else you can say Anderson’s Nazis represent. Yet its absurdity makes its resistance all the more potent. A happy indulgence, fine wine can neither integrate with modernity nor its mercenary expediency, and is lost to time instead.

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This post is the first in a continuing column, What Were They Drinking?!, featured on The Nightly Glass, and occasionally co-posted here on The Hooded Utilitarian. I also wrote a longer piece on service in The Grand Budapest Hotel here.

On Service in The Grand Budapest Hotel

Posted on March 19, 2014 by Kailyn Kent

Forgive me for thinking that all of Wes Anderson’s movies are about aristocrats. His characters seem rather taken care of, living in manicured homes, and setting forth on boyish adventures that each new film believes in a little bit more than the last. Yet his stories don’t really talk about class, or the tension between classes. It’s a diagetic abandon I’ve loved, perhaps indulgently. No one scurries about trying to hang the mirror just right, before the lord of the house enters. His heroes are inventive and not a little cultured, implying that they may have decorated the house themselves- or maybe that they are really just a extensions of the interior design.

Anderson’s most recent film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, is the first that permits the alternative, and chances a glimpse of a world outside the parlor rooms. More remarkably, it centers on the exploits of two characters responsible for the upkeep of a luxury hotel in Eastern Europe, threatened by a sort of World War II. Which means that the film is partly about service, and the workers who construct the clean, rosy fetishes that have become synonymous with Wes Anderson, but have remained backgrounded or backstage in his previous films.

The Grand Budapest is an explicitly contemporary fantasy, commenting more about our nostalgizing of pre-War (and wartime) Europe than those periods themselves. It stars an impetuous hotel concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) and “his lobby boy,” Zero, (Tony Revolori) who resist the tides of modernization through the enforcement of an almost chivalric code of service and taste, and fundamentally, nostalgia too. Their reluctant admission– that the Anderson dream is a façade, is played for nostalgia but comes off as restive, a sensation only compounded by the film’s enervating slew of deaths and dismemberments. Still, M. Gustave and Zero nobly go down with their ship, and Anderson’s vision of human decency in tow. Yet while Grand Budapest romanticizes service, the film is subliminally contemptuous of the reality of service– and service workers– in America today. Sure, the film is set in a make-believe country, bordering other make-believe countries, threatened by make-believe Nazis. On paper, it has no responsibility to representing contemporary maids, bakers, valets and servers. But then where does M. Gustav’s bilious, racist slandering of immigrant workers come from? Why is it excused? Why does it serve as an opportunity for him and Zero, a supposed immigrant, to connect? And why does the silhouette of Mexico float around the movie screen, imprinted as a birthmark on the heroine’s face?

Many will find connecting these two things far fetched, and I do not mean to reduce Grand Budapest to a reading about labor relations. Neither is this an attack on Wes Anderson: this is coming from the girl who spent the last term of high school dressing up as Margo Tenenbaum (at least, as much as I could manage, only having one off-brand polo dress.) Grand Budapest progressively casts a non-white protagonist, and lightly subverts the conventions of white-hero and colored-sidekick in a humorous way. Zero comes up with the majority of the plans. He drives the sled and motorcycle, while M. Gustave babbles on behind him. It’s a little like Wooster and Jeeves if they were both butlers. Or perhaps more awkwardly, Crusoe and Friday. Grand Budapest hotel is a grown-up boy’s adventure story after all, and both Friday and Zero are named for the circumstances of their arrival in ‘society,’ whether rescued on a Friday or coming with zero experiences, money and connections. Both Friday and Zero also escape death in their native communities, cannibalism and a firing squad respectively. It’s worth noting that the terms of their escape are both sensational, rather stereotyped threats from their communities. Friday is an indigenous American, so of course he risks being eaten by other Indians. Zero is Middle Eastern, so according to adventure story logic, its no shocker that his entire family was killed in a war.

Still, this information is revealed as a twist, rather than initial background. For the first half the movie, Zero is addressed as “a bloody immigrant.” The exchange that reveals Zero’s true history is greatly disappointing, and beneath a director whose humanity locked step with dead-pan humor and whimsy throughout his entire career. After Zero assists M. Gustave break out of prison, they reunite, but Zero has forgotten to bring M. Gustave’s signature eau de toilette. As it appears in the script:

M GUSTAVE

(escalating)

“Precisely. I suppose this is to be expected back in Aq Salim al-Jabat where one’s prized possessions are a stack of filthy carpets and a starving goat, and one sleeps behind a tent-flap and survives on wild dates and scarabs – but it’s not how I trained you. What on God’s earth possessed you to leave the homeland where you very obviously belong and travel unspeakable distances to become a penniless immigrant in a refined, highly cultivated society that, quite frankly, could’ve gotten along very well without you?”

ZERO

(shrugs)

The war.

M GUSTAVE

(pause)

Say again?

Zero speaks softly and struggles deliberately to hold back his emotions as he says, staring at the ground:

ZERO

Well, you see, my father was murdered, and the rest of my family were executed by firing squad. Our village was burned to the ground. Those who managed to survive were forced to flee. I left—because of the war.

M GUSTAVE

(back peddling)

Ah, I see. So you’re actually really more of a refugee, in that sense.

ZERO

(reserved)

Truly.

M GUSTAVE

(ashamed)

Well, I suppose I’d better take back everything I just said. What a bloody idiot I am. Pathetic fool. Goddamn selfish bastard. This is disgraceful – and it’s beneath the standards of the Grand Budapest.

While M Gustave tearfully apologizes for wrongly categorizing Zero, his vitriol against immigrant workers is left unaddressed. It is an ugly statement, yet decked out in the same fanciful loquaciousness as about every other piece of dialogue. Neither does Zero rebut it. The script elsewhere makes plain that M Gustave and Zero share the same values and allegiance to the Grand Budapest, and that their status as service workers is synonymous with their understanding of basic human decency. After this exchange, Zero declares them brothers, which does little to slow the swirling currents of family, class and citizenship going on in this conversation. M Gustave, the rogueish, valiant dandy and Zero’s hero, despises Middle Eastern people for their poverty, indulging in a slew of anciently racist imagery. He wrongly believes that a society of decadence can exist without foreign laborers. As long as Zero conforms to the current-day cliche, that the Middle East is a viper’s nest of ethnic violence, he is excused, because it is M. Gustave and Europe’s responsibility to watch over and deliver him. Anderson explicitly and unreflectively reveals a post-9/11 id, and perhaps demonstrates that his imperialistic leanings go a little deeper than the Scalamandre brand wallpaper.

One could reply that Grand Budapest is about as political as little boys playing ‘Cowboys and Indians’—then again, that’s exactly the point. The mission to keep up The Grand Budapest Hotel is cast as quixotic. The backdrops, speeding trains and establishing shots are deliciously faked. The actors speak in stilted, deadpan stage-talk, in their native, incongruous accents. Zero is played by an actor of Guatemalan descent, and grows up into F. Murray Abraham. Little effort was made to match the two, and while Abraham is actually of Syrian/Italian descent, it sort of looks like Zero transforms into a Jewish grandfather by 1965.

Even the film is nested in time—the story is framed as a contemporary girl reading a book written in the eighties by an author who interviewed Zero in the sixties about events that happened in the thirties. The film is an American fantasy of Europe, and America’s own fixation of Europe ‘having been lost forever’ in World War II. So, treading back to M. Gustave’s speech above, it’s not unfair to read contemporary immigrant workers into the meaning of the story. A contemporary film, speaking through the limitations of an anachronistic character, ventures to say something quite disgusting and untrue about immigrants. Whether this outburst is being used to ‘deepen’ or ‘complicate’ M. Gustave, or actually expresses a frustration with real immigrants, the film doesn’t do much to criticize M. Gustave’s opinions. He seems tasteful if snobbish, broad-minded if eccentric, in about every other circumstance. It’s as if the film casts his perfume-dependence as a greater weakness than his prejudice against other human beings, including Zero.

This only becomes more problematic, as plenty of critics have noticed that M. Gustave is a transparent stand-in for Wes Anderson himself, taking “extra special care of every little-bit” of his story worlds. I am not accusing Wes Anderson of racism, only this strange and forgivable slip. The issue is that the slip opens up a new line of inquiry. Why are almost all the hotel staff male and white? Why are there so few maids to be seen? Why is the one maid untrustworthy, (played by my favorite, Lea Seydoux?) Was light chauvinism part of the nostalgia? The humor? Grand Budapest is a peculiar fantasy of the authority of service. M. Gustave knows everyone and everything about the hotel. He’s a connoisseur of wine, food, perfume, art, partly for his own amusement, mostly because he can better assist his guests. Once the caper begins, M Gustave can pull favors from about anyone, in places high and low, because of the impression he left as an impeccable helper. He befriended a lonely little boy that grows up into an influential police chief. In prison, he wheels around a gruel cart with a wink and a smile, he wins access into an escape plan. He and Zero are rescued by a league of extraordinary concierges (all white men, except for ‘Dino,’ an Indian man in an orange turban.) His Bernie-esque companionship to an aged women (one of many he carries on with,) gains him a huge fortune, a masterpiece, and the hotel itself. When he is killed by a ‘Nazi’ firing squad off camera, Zero inherits the hotel in his stead. M. Gustave willed all of his possesions to Zero in exchange for his steadfast service to him.

Service is a tangled conundrum. The people who come to know our things best are often those who do not own them. The people at Tri-Valley Cobbler understand my shoes better than I do, and when I worked in a wine store, we knew more about the expensive bottles than most people who bought them. A maid perceives the corners of a house that its inhabitants are blind to, and a cook fathoms the interlocking steps and ingredients of a recipe. A complex economic chain separates authority from possession and enjoyment. M. Gustave instructs Zero “A lobby boy is completely invisible, yet always in sight.” Hospitality is sometimes a performance of equal parts competence, flair and subordination, but many times it is simply inconspicuous. Luxury hotels have greater disposal to hide its staff—maids and waiters ride separate elevators, and their uniforms look more like costumes. They are disguised so as not to suggest their independence of the hotel, and its setting.

Grand Budapest solves the issue of inheritance—both M. Gustave and Zero inherit the hotel, uniting authority, possession and recognition in two fell swoops, the rightful kings restored. Much later, Communism threatens to nationalize the hotel, and Zero trades his fortune for it. Then the hotel goes bust and he presumably dies. So rather than grant the worker a life separate from the institution, M. Gustave and Zero meld themselves into it. For M. Gustave, he merges out of love of a lost era. For Zero, he holds on out of love for his deceased wife Agatha (Saoirse Ronan).

Which returns us to the giant Mexican birthmark. The birth-mark is specifically a ‘port-wine stain,’ a large, irregular mark on the face whose name Wes Anderson would love. Agatha is a kind, quiet and hardworking “pastry-girl.” She exists as sophisticated eye candy, biking with a heavy load of pastry boxes in slow motion, smiling wisely at her fiancé and M. Gustave’s banter. She also speaks with a cute Irish brogue, but she’s barely given anything to say. Agatha falls short of about every other female character in Wes Anderson’s films, but shines compared to the other women here: a trio of insipid fat villainesses, a beleaguered peasant, the treacherous lady’s maid and the numerous elderly ladies M. Gustave companions as part of his impeccable service. Zero always narrates over her scenes. Unlike Margo or Mrs. Fox, she can’t see through the boyish adventuring. She just gazes adoringly at Zero, at M. Gustave, at the camera, while the men joke-fight about flirting with her. (It’s like Wes Anderson forgot how to see through himself.) The most characteristic thing about Agatha is her Mexican shaped birthmark.

The birthmark makes sense on a comic, absurd level. Mexico is an easily identifiable and perfectly random country to appear on her face. Its gentle curve is aesthetic as well, drawing attention to her rosy cheeks and lips. Other countries would have looked like a random blotch—but why a country in the first place? Especially since all the other countries are imaginary. It resonates strongly inside a film about war and lost statehood, whether Lutz, Zebrowka, or the Grand Budapest itself, even when the nations are imaginary, and the fascist forces oh so vague. And why a birthmark? My guess is that birthmarks are simply nostalgic, being pre-laser removal and all, but they do dredge up associations. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Birthmark, the hero Alymer kills his wife in an attempt to remove her birthmark, convinced it is infernally possessed, and in cahoots with her hidden, feminine darkness. According to folklore, birthmarks are caused by the unsatisfied wishes of a pregnant mother, or past-life traumas. They are the inherited psychic turmoil of generations past, suppressed before and now spilling forth like a stain, or a brand. In this case, in the shape of Mexico —in a film by an obscurely Texan director.

When you glance onscreen and see Zero, do you see a Central American or a Middle Eastern man? Hero or sidekick? Immigrant or refuge, with all the modern connotations of those terms? The answer always seems to be an intermixture. In a film about service, Anderson obscures service’s troubling anonymity and its powerlessness with, well, le air de panache. He repaints it as a thing that young white boys do, a sort of elaborate game and secret society, and then ignores and kicks dirt on the people who work service jobs because they need to. Not all fantasies require this. Fairy tales do rather well with balancing vulnerable protagonists with valiant quests. But fairy tales are about girls, and this is a boy’s adventure story, where our hero must swagger from the start, and his challenge is more mischievous than difficult. Anderson lets us see the man behind the curtain, M. Gustave, master of the dream world. Do not worry—its not like there’s some underclass or anything, pasting up the wallpaper, building the submarine, and making all of those perfect animal costumes. M. Gustave and his crew of youths handle it themselves.

And this is the fantasy behind the class and luxury of Wes Anderson’s world, which refuses to connect with stories about class and luxury in our own. It’s usually not a problem. A movie shouldn’t be anything it isn’t. The difference is that here, the ghost of what Anderson doesn’t mention insists on itself, and starts beating like a heart under the floorboards, a part of his creation. Anderson ignores it, muffles it, then shrieks at it, and finally, it materializes upon the face of the film.

A Penguin State of Mind

Posted on February 21, 2014 by Kailyn Kent

My first encounter of Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom Country was as a child, with a stuffed version of the character Opus. He was outfitted in reindeer antlers and shiny, plush Christmas ornaments. My sister and I did not know what to do with him. We were not sure what animal he was supposed to be. For the most part he looked like a penguin, but his beak, if it could be called that, was somewhat moose-like. Large, misshapen and skin-colored, this nose seemed adult– something that wasn’t meant for children to like or understand. It seemed inappropriate. All in all, the creature looked forlorn, but his holiday costuming looked jaunty, and fleshy, vaguely insidious schnoz. There were just too many layers going on at once. As conspicuous as a spy in a kid’s movie, Opus didn’t belong. He seemed to have other motivations for being there. He came from some world we didn’t recognize. He had baggage we couldn’t account for, and we found it difficult to overwrite his mysterious past for a game of ‘Life at the North Pole.’ We ignored and neglected him. Every year we unpacked him with the rest of the Christmas animals, placed him on a chair, and avoided him.

Now that I know Opus, and his attitude of beleaguered optimism, this strikes me as a little sad. Poor excluded Opus, a victim of branding. Yet there are advantages to being a cartoon icon. Comic strips are ephemeral. They are one of the few publications still discarded after reading. Perhaps due to a fluke in human brain functioning, their characters easily outlive their physical forms, or narratives. Some arcs and strips remain in the memories of certain readers, but cartoon characters become immured in a greater cultural context, with or without their original story lines. Opus made my sister and I uneasy, because while we could recognize him as a denizen of America’s collective unconscious, he demonstrated that we participated in this incompletely. On a related note, we continued to be confused as to why we saw so many urinating Calvins on a daily basis.

Opus is sort of a minor-league cultural artifact, a case of a mascot without rampant commercial licensing. It took a lot longer than I expected to discover my stuffed toy’s source material in daily life. My dad, a devotee of the strip’s original run, never purchased collections of Bloom County or its spinoffs. Neither Outland nor Opus ran in the Modesto Bee. I participated in the comics industry for years without stumbling upon them. I might have remained forever ignorant of the strip if not for earlier posts here on Hooded Utilitarian. Breathed makes his case in the Bloom County Library that he unwittingly pioneered pop-cultural references in comics, changing the landscape of the funny pages forever. Whatever influence he had, it’s not uncommon for ‘disruptive technologies’ to be forgotten in favor of more recent iterations. It’s harder to erase an iconic mascot, and their innate appeal. When done well, an icon exists in its own irreplaceable visual category. Opus looks uniquely like Opus, not like a generic cartoon penguin or moose. Opus is arguably the first visual element of Bloom County that uniquely belonged to it, and he’s a talking animal to boot. Breathed satirized mascots, and the merchandising death-spirals they inspire, in his Bill the Cat sunday strips, although he wasn’t above using them, either.

Opus becomes a mascot rather innocently. He doesn’t appear until six months into the run, and when he does, he looks like a standard penguin. In fact, when I asked at what point I should jump into the strip, Noah Berlatsky here at Hooded Utilitarian advised, “Few years in, maybe? When Opus starts looking like Opus is probably the way to go…” This echoes Breathed’s own commentary on the strip from January 28^th, 1982, at around this point: “Opus. Center found, the fog clearing. The strip had found its voice, its tone and its point of view. People and comic strips are alike in needing this.”

On the May 1^st, 1983 strip (below), he adds, “In case you’re interested, a line like that at the end is exactly why I needed Opus in Bloom County. An innocent amidst the insane.”

This is striking, as Bloom County is not lacking in innocent voices. There’s mild-mannered Mike Binkley—while his father conflates his femininity with perversity and cowardice, readers know better, and Binkley’s quiet honesty comes off as rather valiant. There are the forest animals, banding together to elect a presidential candidate for their Meadow Party, and easily perplexed by human kissing. There’s a handicapped doctor who role-plays science fiction fantasy games with said forest animals—his name is Cutter John, which doesn’t seem to be a malpractice joke. There’s the old lady who volunteers to disarm a nuclear warhead using her famous pie recipe. The list goes on. Even Milo Bloom, who in my opinion has become creepy yellow journalist by 1983, has his heart in the right place. And the offensive frat-boy turned lawyer Steve Dallas earns the bemused affection of the cast, mostly because he is harmless. If a certain variation of innocence exists, Berkeley Breathed has created a character to exemplify it.

Innocence and insanity are not mutually exclusive either. Innocence is described as a kind of veiled, distorted vision just as often as it is defined as clarity. In this it parallels, and approaches, the definition of madness. No Bloom County character is exempt from delusions, and being made a fool by them. These delusions go hand-in-hand with the rampant ‘fantasy play’– animals pretending to be on Starship Enterprise, children reminiscing about their pretend, exotic love affairs with dead-pan faces– which also interweave with each character’s particular wisdom. Opus is the resident ‘alien’ of Bloom County. He is not tied to the natural ecosystem, like the forest animals, nor did he grow up in the school system, like the kids. Neither was he brought in for a job. He’s a flightless bird. He starts out as Binkley’s pet, and is reinvented as his subtenant. The absurdity of his existence gives him a privileged distance in which to question reality, often because he himself doesn’t understand it. Opus’ perspective remains gentle, optimistic and non-judgmental. The joke is always on him, but life is crazy anyway.

Perhaps what Breathed was trying to say was this: In order to make Bloom County work, he needed a character who was not just innocent, but who pointed out the absurdity of the world in an innocent way, without a trace of domineering snarkiness. Perhaps it was just a coincidence that this focal point arrived in the form of an iconic animal mascot. Or perhaps not. Breathed’s “existentialist penguin” talk aside, I suspect it is actually Opus’ iconicity—his status not as an alien, but as a visual alien—that gives Bloom County its center of gravity. Opus’ body — nose and all — becomes the calling card of Bloom County. Pre-Opus, Bloom County struggled to differentiate itself stylistically from other comics, particularly Doonesbury. Then: enter endearing animal mascot. It’s not the most original act of branding, but it works. Breathed’s breath-holding reverence for Opus betrays an uneasiness that has to tunnel away and re-emerge as Bill the Cat six months later.

I don’t think that Bloom County needs a mascot for exactly the same reason a sugar cereal, or the Olympics games, or even Garfield needs a mascot. Cartoon animals have nothing to do with breakfast food or professional sports, only with selling them. Garfield is almost nothing but an exercise in branding, (one reason why the experiment Garfield Minus Garfield is so brilliant.) The earliest definitions of comics theory conflate iconicity and storytelling; there is no theory today that does justice to the complex relationship of these two concepts. Opus’ iconicity gives readers a stronger elastic to stretch around and bundle Bloom County’s various parts into something coherent, a Bloom County-ness. He’s the only drawing that feels alive half the time, a slapstick break from all the talking heads. As a mascot, Opus helps Breathed brand the strip. He’s Bloom County’s voice not because his character is the comic’s keystone, but because his image is. And there is a baffling genius to his composition, his pleading eyes and tiny bow tie. As a character, he is just one strand of the large, crazy web of innocents Breathed spins.

_____
The entire Bloom County roundtable is here.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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