Tag Archives: Wes Anderson

The Horrible Perfection of A Wes Anderson X-Men

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There’s a decent number of Wes Anderson spoofs floating around: his ostentatious and predictable style of filmmaking makes him a sitting duck for parody. However, most are only moderately successful– even SNL could only manage to blandly lampoon his work in “New Horror Trailer: The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders,” a well-named skit which misses more targets than it hits. Why joke about Gwenyth Paltrow, who only appeared in The Royal Tenenbaums, when you could take on Jason Schwartzman, who has spent his entire career playing Anderson roles? Margot is iconic, but why not give the Anderson treatment to an existing horror icon? That’s the genius of the skit’s unaffiliated follow-up, “What if Wes Anderson made X-Men?,” which more than spiritually succeeds the SNL effort. It lovingly captures Anderson’s rhythms, charms, and awkwardness nearly beat for beat. On one hand, the Anderson-X-men pairing is so absurd that Patrick (H) Willems and his crew suggest that you could give the Anderson treatment to any series—What if Wes Anderson made The Flintstones? What if Wes Anderson made Breaking Bad? On the other hand, they make an amazing case for Anderson rebooting the X-Men in particular. Anderson’s quirky, nostalgic style would celebrate the goofy excitement and teenage longing of the original, while removing the toxic ‘epic-ness’ of recent reboots. In turn, the X-Men would give Anderson license to make the uncomplicated boys adventure story he clearly wants to make, free from intellectual expectations and his colonial pretenses. It’s a match made in heaven. Almost.

Wes Anderson would make an unexpectedly wonderful director of superhero movies for several reasons. First off, his films are devoted to the tension between boyhood fantasy, empty manhood, and maternal reason. (He makes a little room for feminine fantasy, which is often portrayed as wistful, and resigned to abandonment.) This axis resembles Superhero logic more than it departs from it. The superhero, a muscled Peter Pan, is the boyhood fantasy, and is juxtaposed to his faltering alter-ego who faces real life, ‘adult’ responsibilities. Superhero stories, however, tend to make dupes and conquests of the women. Not in the Anderson-verse, where the ladies call it like they see it, (even if their role is rather proscribed.) Wes Anderson’s third act typically calls for a reconciliation between fantasy and reality. He’s a generous filmmaker, in that neither side comes out victorious over the other; they instead consent to the necessary, life-affirming quality of both perspectives. I treasure Anderson’s formula, because I am grateful to find movies that simultaneously act as an ode, a critique, and an apology for grandiosity, and that don’t ignore the ways that women are often alienated by grandiosity. Thus, Anderson could honor the grandiosity of the superhero narrative, while assenting that this grandiosity can be destructive, delusional, and gendered.

Secondly, Wes Anderson assumes that people go to the movies for the same reason they go to see a middle school play: to see someone they love say something amazing (and/or ridiculous,) while wearing an amazing (and/or ridiculous) costume. In essence, Anderson transforms celebrities into the audience’s family members. Fans will come to see who Bill Murray or Tilda Swinton will be in this one, or because they could never imagine Ralph Fiennes or Bruce Willis in that role, wearing those clothes. This isn’t so different from how comic books work– they are sold based on reader’s attachment to certain, iconic characters, who are put in unbelievable situation after unbelievable situation. Fan devotion is laid most bare in fan-art and fan-fiction, where fans put favorite characters, even destructive, “evil” ones, into absurd, adorable, and kinky situations. Wes Anderson’s style is a close relative of the fan-fiction mind-set. His films are ‘love letters,’ to Jaque Costeau, or the Austro-Hungarian empire, and his troupe of real-life actors. This may explain part of his appeal. Like a mother bird regurgitating food for her babies, Wes Anderson handles the digestion of a story beforehand, putting it on-screen so that its inherent love-ability is accessible to all, (who are willing to eat it.) Anderson would make a perfect match for superheroes, who are already celebrities and icons. He would derive great pleasure by putting characters into ridiculous costumes, in ridiculous settings and scenarios, while making them say earnestly ridiculous things. These components are already native to the genre, although most modern filmmakers try to evade or disguise them through ‘bad-assery’ and self-mockery. Wes Anderson would call a jump-suit a jump-suit, and would love every freaking minute of it.

Finally, the X-Men would be a wake-up call for the filmmaker. I have a sinking suspicion that each consecutive Anderson film reduces the female characters’ voices, reaching a point of near muteness in The Grand Budapest Hotel. As their voices fade, the films lose the friction that made his movies interesting in the first place, and the ‘boys adventure’ quotient increases inversely. Wes Anderson seems to be in the business of making bouncy, nostalgic escapades that lionize the value of cross-generational male friendship, and displaced father-son relationships. He’s careening head-first into superhero narratives, but he may be in denial about it, convinced that he’s actually making smart movies about the Austro-Hungarian Empire, (or Lord help him, fascism.) If Anderson were to truly commit to a superhero franchise, he might need to back-pedal a bit, and perhaps re-discover the power, and ethical necessity, of his earlier approach.

There’s a problem, however. Anderson’s style is inaccessibly white. His movies cater to white nostalgia about self-absorbed aristocrats. While I do not find him to be an explicitly racist director, I sometimes wonder why I don’t. He indulges in non-stop colonial nostalgia, from the wall-paper to the entire premise of The Darjeeling Limited. He employs racist language to elicit shocked guffaws from the audience, making his character ‘flawed’ in the way that your grandfather is ‘flawed,’—incorrigible, yet loveable anyway. But are they lovable? This friction makes his perennial father-son conflicts poignant, yet the racist language is never really addressed, or treated like a flaw worth resolving.  Anderson cast an indeterminately ethnic actor as Zero in The Grand Budapest Hotel, playing a refuge from the Middle East, yet most of Zero’s lines are spoken in narration when he’s an older man– a role played by a white, Jewish actor. Anderson would white-wash perhaps the noblest part of the X-Men—its commitment to diversity, and its stories about civil rights, hate-crimes, prejudice, and genocide.

Then again, X-Men often does a pretty terrible job talking about racism. I am not an avid reader of the X-Men, and never have been, so I will cite the opinions of better informed writers than myself. In his piece “What if the X-Men Were Black,” published on this blog, Orion Martin comments, “What’s disturbing about the series is that is that all of these issues are played out by a cast of characters dominated by wealthy, straight, cisgender, Christian, able-bodied, white men. The X-Men are the victims of discrimination for their mutant identity, with little or no mention of the huge privileges they enjoy.” In “Mutant Readers, Reading Mutants,” Neil Shyminsky argues that the X-Men appropriates the Civil Rights struggles for a white audience, re-imagining these morality plays with white victims. He cites the work of recent authors like Grant Morrison in combatting this, but largely finds, “While its stated mission is to promote the acceptance of minorities of all kinds, X-Men has not only failed to adequately redress issues of inequality – it actually reinforces inequality.” Noah Berlatsky reviewed Jack Kirby and Stan Lee’s original X-Men, which was created before the series committed itself to having a diverse cast. 

Noah and Neil both reflect that the original X-Men’s creators were Jewish men who anglicized their names, perhaps with the same mix of eagerness and frustration that Angel voices when trussing his wings behind his back.  Most generously, the X-Men comics could be seen as a metaphor for Jewish assimilation and combatting anti-Semitism, but only of a masochistic kind: “[Lee and Kirby] nonetheless persevered in tightening that truss, which, in this comic at least, consisted not merely of new names, but of what can only be called a servile, deeply dishonorable acquiescence in hierarchical norms, casual misogyny, and imperialist fantasies.”

The films don’t look to be much better: Elvis Mitchell wrote of the 2000 original, “the parallels to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Xavier) and Malcolm X (Magneto) are made wincingly plain,” and “clumsy when it should be light on its feet, the movie takes itself even more seriously than the comic book and its fans do, which is a super heroic achievement.” You can’t accuse Mitchell of being a hater, however: he repeatedly extols the poignancy of the original comics in comparison, saying, “Perhaps that was the reason “X-Men” comics struggled and failed initially; the world wasn’t ready for misunderstood young martyrs with special powers saving the world and living through unrequited flushes of love.”

Wes Anderson would be the kind of director who would value those flushes of love, while completely disregarding the “seriousness” of the series, special effects, civil rights and all. The Anderson treatment would be honest about the X-men’s heart, but it would also be a confession of defeat. I’m not sure whether Patrick H Willems intended that as part of the commentary: in 2011 he mocked Hollywood whitewashing in “White Luke Cage,” without really pointing fingers at anyone, least of all Marvel. “What if Wes Anderson Made the X-Men?” is part of a series of auteuristic take-offs on superhero properties, which are as much love-letters as spoofs. Intended or not, the skit functions like a critique of Marvel, not of the X-Men or Wes Anderson. How perfect would it be for Hollywood’s whitest director to re-make Marvel’s most prominently diverse cast? So perfect. That’s the sad part.

The Grand Budapest Hotel’s Lost Pouilly-Jouvet

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“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.

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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

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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?
 
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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.
 

Tony Revolori

 
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.
 
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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.