Titan of Twee

The Indelible Style of Wes Anderson

The hardscrabble writer Charles Bukowski confessed that he despised Walt Disney because, in Bukowski's mind, Disney unleashed a "plague of cute" upon the world. He thought that Disney minimized the struggle and pain of life through an incessant onslaught of adorableness, which is interesting considering that older Disney movies like Dumbo and Bambi are now notorious for their scenes of cruelty and violence.

The filmmaker Wesley Wales Anderson—or Wes Anderson, as he's known—has been similarly criticized, and while "cute" comes up in these diatribes, the word most often launched as a harpoon against him is "twee."

And what is twee, you ask? According to Merriam-Webster: "affectedly or excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint."

Well, we'd be hard-pressed not to admit the truth of that in Anderson's case. But is that a bad thing?

While Anderson's first film was Bottle Rocket, the one that really launched his career was his second offering, Rushmore. The story of a working-class teenager going to a private school that he's quite loudly flunking out of, it co-starred Bill Murray and Brian Cox, and immediately made a powerful impression with its strange tone. A mixture of the twee I mentioned above, but also a somewhat passive, bittersweet melancholy. After all, the teenager in question had lost his mother and was in love with a teacher whose husband had drowned. Handled by a different filmmaker, this material could've been a melodramatic weeper or a depressing Ingmar Bergman style super-downer. But large parts of it are funny! And even odder still, the humorous moments don't undercut the sadness, but bring an unexpected underlayer of warmth to it.

When I first saw it, I knew I'd encountered that tone before—a tone I could only describe as sublime alienation. Certain movies of the seventies had it—like Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude and Being There, or another title starring Bud Cort Brewster McCloud (Cort played Harold in Harold and Maude, and true to my assumption, that movie was inspiring to Anderson—so much so he cast Cort in his fourth film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou).

But Anderson doesn't simply rely on tone to build his Empire of Twee, he is also known for his meticulous set design. Consider the Grand Budapest Hotel — this book goes into ravenous detail about Anderson's inspiration for the now-iconic look of the film (check out all the books in the Wes Anderson Collection Series to get a glimpse into Anderson's obsessive visual style). In fact, Anderson's particular take on Weird-Cute has been so deeply pressed into the Collective Unconscious that this book and these postcards were created (with Anderson's blessing) to capture real-world examples of it.

After the Hulk-sized one-two punch of Rushmore and his third film The Royal Tenenbaums, twee-adjacent shows like Portlandia started appearing (with a wacky cookbook, another less wacky but nonetheless interesting cookbook, and an activity book), and Parks and Recreation (yes, also with a cookbook, an ultimate fan's guide, and a tour through the town of Pawnee). In a sense, the Wes Anderson aesthetic became a bizarre industry of sorts.

Naturally, the kind of indie success that Anderson has commanded creates a demand for in-depth explorations of his work. Wes Anderson: Why His Movies Matter and Wes Anderson: Film Maker Extraordinaire should quench your thirst in that regard, not to mention a deep dive into his most popular animated feature Fantastic Mr. Fox with Fantastic Mr. Fox: The Making of the Motion Picture.

Will the upcoming Asteroid City be considered one of Anderson's best or a lesser offering? Only time will tell. But unlike Bukowski's take on Disney, I think we're better off having Anderson's World of Twee. Hit or miss, how many filmmakers do we have anymore who possess a signature style? Frightfully few. Let's support them.

Wes Anderson's movies: Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom, Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs, The French Dispatch.

Read more by Terry Fleming