Excerpted from my final essay for Sociology of Gender & Pop Culture.
In a world far reached our perception of reality, we frequently wonder how much realism remains. When it comes to films that are truly unique and able to transcend us to this subliminal space between realism and fantasy, Wes Anderson’s films may just be that vessel. Perfectly centred frames, surreal characters, deadpan dialogues, carefully curated set designs, and a sense of nostalgia litter the oeuvre of Wes Anderson’s work (Dilley, 2017, pp 1–2).
As it comes to gender portrayal, Anderson’s films are overwhelmingly filled with white heterosexual men, with a few exceptions of pivotal women who are outnumbered when compared to the former. Why so? It’s important to acknowledge that Hollywood cinema is innately constructed by unconscious patriarchy, and such, narratives parallel the language that is inherently male (Kaplan, 2010, p. 209).
Yet as a progressive filmmaker, Wes Anderson has produced distinct women In cinema history, but with his practice and narrative being central to men, one must question how are women being portrayed. We can turn to the question of the gaze by Laura Mulvey to argue of Anderson’s portrayal of women, that however not entirely, he manages to reject some of the concepts of the Male Gaze. I will be also exploring Anderson’s male characterization and his subjectivity towards women through Connell’s theory of Hegemonic Masculinity and de Beauvoir’s Second Sex.
Frequently depicted as a hyper-controlling perfectionist who falls short of their goals, Anderson’s portrayals of men are often flawed and in crisis of their masculinity. Jim Burlingame (2005) wrote that there are two common masculine archetypes in Anderson's earlier works: the self-absorbed boyish men and the traditional patriarchs. Rushmore (1998), Royal Tenenbaums (2001), and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) have the same pattern of depicting traditional patriarchs being at odds with rebellious young men, which both unencumbered by the authority. A form of hegemonic masculinity is apparent in Anderson’s characters of patriarchs, as their actions are in tandem with cohesive force and dominance, but we cannot simply ignore the former by reducing hegemonic masculinity to a character of personality.
In 1998’s Rushmore, the patriarch Herman Blume and the boyish Max Fischer initially admired one another’s line of behaviour, to the point of flourishing into a protege and mentor dynamic. But when discovered that they were pursuing the same woman, they fell into a homosocial rivalry and resorted to childish follies in the form of a revenge montage. Max, at some point in the film show signs of subordinate masculinity, subjected to bullying and effeminate name-calling (Connell, 1993, p.79) but it doesn’t deter the character from displaying superiority over other students. Rather than hegemonic, he represents complicit masculinity as evidenced by his vindictive obsession with women, and his way of ingratiating himself through persuasion which placed him in the position of the beneficiary of patriarchal values (Connell, 2005, p. 832).
Anderson’s films are constant in their exploration of masculine pursuits; the male relationship in Zero’s mentorship to the authoritative M Gustave in The Grand Budapest Hotel, the brotherly contention over the unreliable patriarch in The Royal Tenenbaums, or rivalries over women in The Aquatic Life of Steve Zissou and Rushmore. His numerous depictions have a common set of heteronormative values. Yet, Anderson’s imaginings of his characters are always seen as invariably imperfect men portrayed in an ironic, comical tone. They seek to pursue the ideal hegemonic masculinity, yet in the eyes of spectators, they are struggling individuals with meticulous plans that always go wrong and are impaired by their selfishness, thus we could barely look at them as reliable protagonists.
This idea of unreliable protagonists is apparent in his 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited, where we followed the three wealthy Whitman brothers seeking ‘spiritual enlightenment’ across India. Like any undercurrent of Anderson films, these men are ridiculed for their privileges. Audiences would align themselves, not from the perspectives of the three brothers, but through the local natives of India. Through this reverse perspective, we’d see the three brothers as self-entitled foreigners perceiving others’ culture at a surface level through their orientalist gaze.
That’s an example of how Anderson never positioned his male characters as the role models of cinema, their portrayal is often caricatured, and unrealistically self-serving that the audience would disidentify them and question their positions as the leading males. This does not necessarily disregard the fact that men are still hugely represented in Wes Anderson films and are the purveyor of perspectives, however, how the audiences see them also affects how we see the less dominant, women.
Women in Wes Anderson films are never without their unique penchants and quirks. Like their male counterparts, they are also flawed, if not just as wounded. In The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), we are introduced to Margot Tenenbaums. Amongst the child prodigies, Margot is the only female. Throughout her growth, she self-subjected herself to promiscuous actions as a result of her father’s ignorance. While in the Moonrise Kingdom (2009) Suzy Bishop, just like Margot, is ensconced in a dysfunctional family. Suzy is portrayed as a reserved child, extremely volatile instead of passive. Her fierce determination is showcased in an attempt to get herself out of her ‘confinement’ as she bravely ventures forth to explore the world.
These characters are well-written and portrayed as having the agency to seek their missions and interests. But on the other hand, they never stray beyond the conventional portrayals of mother, wife, and love interest. Dr Martha M. Lauzen’s in her research suggests that women are seen as more inclined to assume domestic and personal-life roles in cinema, two times more likely than men (2015, p. 3).
Anderson’s personal experiences and encounters with women as a man, of course, favour his film portrayals. As the product of a dysfunctional family himself, it might explain how he portrayed matriarchs as divorcees, in control, even detached. To quote Simone de Beauvoir, “man defines woman, not in herself, but the relation to him,” (1949) demonstrating that female subjectivity in the hands of a male, a male auteur, is difficult to depict accordingly.
Sure that men are the absolute, central of Wes Anderson films, but to say that women are inessential is an oversimplification of a series of well-constructed characters. Instead of positioning women as ‘the other’, an inessential part of the film only to be subjected to as sexual objects, they are in fact, catalysts to the self-realization of the male protagonists and their self-discovery (Meiers, 2012).
In The Royal Tenenbaums, Margot is coveted by three of the film’s male characters. When the men discover that she has been bottling secrets her entire life, they proceed to realize that her complex persona has only been on a surface level, that she is far from this ideal they had imagined. This cultivates them to realize that their love is unreciprocated, dejected and reinforced.
While for Suzy Bishop, despite being portrayed as this explosive femme, she is still submissive to his love interest Sam Shakusky when it comes to survival skills despite proven to be much more apt in survival than what Sam projected himself to be. Sam and Suzy didn’t end up fulfilling their insistence of being free but their life progressed since, especially Suzy's. At the end of the film, when Suzy finally joins her family for supper, it symbolizes her acceptance of her family and childhood innocence.
Examples like these indicate how Anderson’s female characters are personified, autonomous people, capable of retaining power as well as authority, so much that it affects the men’s psyche.
We have understood the gender dynamics in Wes Anderson’s past films, but has he progressed since? In answering the question of whether or not he’ll have female leads in his future movies, Anderson stated,
“I would love to write a good, big part where the lead character is a woman. I want to see if I could do that well.”
Well, his most recent picture, The French Dispatch, introduced us to yet another ensemble cast à la the auteur. The film is based on a series of short stories published in a fictitious ‘The French Dispatch,’ with two of the four narrators being female and two other principal female characters placed across these stories. Perhaps these are the most acutely central we’ve seen women in Anderson’s film in terms of their portrayals, yet they are still situated as the object of admiration to the male characters in some scenes throughout the film.
The muse-artist relationship in the second act of the French Dispatch has many facets that prove Laura Mulvey’s theory of the gaze as well as disproved some aspects of it. The gaze is the positioning of the spectator, as Mulvey suggests, in which the female holds a passive position under the bearer of the gaze, who is almost always male. The act begins with a painter seemingly studying his subject; before we switch to view the subject herself, a beautiful woman standing nude. There is a frame-by-frame switch between the painter’s and the muse’s perspectives. And due to no dialogue exchanged in this sequence, as well as the obviousness of the situation, the spectator must assume the active male (painter) and passive male (muse) roles.
As the painter approaches the muse, controlling and directing her joints as he pleases with a much-distressed response from her, we then cut to a wide shot showing the painter’s entire face while only the muse’s breast and lower body are shown. This perhaps prefigures what Mulvey indicates as Sternberg’s fetishistic scopophilia, in which women’s beauty, whose body fragmented by close-ups, coalesces with the screen space (1975, p.12). The indifference of Sternberg’s approach is located in the absence of a male standing in for the audience, while the other form of visual pleasure, which Mulvey examined from Hitchcock, is the amalgam of scopophilic gaze and narcissism, where viewers would identify with a self-like image through the perspective of the active (male) character (1975, p. 10).
As I have discussed before, The trope of an active male is parodied by Anderson so distinctively, and along with the non-realist editing techniques he employed, audiences detached themselves from these characters. Even if there is an instance of a male’s viewing of the female, it is often done in an interchangeable mode, where the women would also reverse the gaze, so the portrayal of active male and passive male is often negotiated.
In The French Dispatch, Anderson revealed to the audience that the space was not a studio but a prison. That the muse was the prison guard, self-subjecting herself to help the painter exercise his craft, who in actuality, is the prisoner this entire time. Simone, the prison guard, throughout the film addressed by the other characters as “more than a muse, but a mastermind” behind the creation of these paintings, “it’s always been, Simone.” One might assume this is Anderson imbuing romanticization of the muse, but Simone would use even extreme forces to create those paintings, despite the male character’s resistance and order. Simone is not merely a passive image of visual perfection, she’s well aware of it and uses it to exercise her fascination with the arts. This summons forth the shifting authority by the female characters that are often projected in Anderson's films if not, advanced in his latest one.
Yet we cannot simply omit the male gaze. After all, Anderson’s practice has always been centring on all-male collaborators (in directing, editing and cinematography), which dates back to early Hollywood, an era of patriarch cinema often referenced in Mulvey’s essays. Anderson’s signature camerawork in itself is inherently voyeuristic, serving as this omnipresence that surveils his characters through rigid, orchestrated, and immaculate tracking shots, as well as panning and zooms (Goldberg, 2018). Therefore, spectators identify themselves more through this omnipresent that is Wes Anderson himself.
Anderson’s portrayal of his characters has played something of a strategic way of conveying the idiosyncratic and non-realist nature of his films, but in contrast, his female portrayals also point towards his subjectivity to women, drawn from his personal or even historical relation to them, from what is inherently a male perspective.
True, his subsequent portrayals of women transcend Hollywood clichés; women are active, embodied beings who have authority as well as agency over their male counterparts and their narratives. They don’t, however, have the power to go outside the frame of lens that Anderson so tightly controls.
Who is to blame other than the patriarchal system of Hollywood cinema that influences Anderson’s works? Of course, the fact that he’s a man and that art is unconscious. It is a vexed, almost-subconscious privilege that perpetuates his works.
Jill Soloway talked about the female gaze at TIFF in 2016, (I took only a fragment from her beautifully worded statement to refer to how modern male filmmakers maintain the male gaze),
“it is (film) a privilege generator. It’s storytelling to get you on somebody’s side; my camera, my scripts, my words.”
Films mentioned
Rushmore. 1998. [film] Directed by W. Anderson. United States: Touchstone Pictures, American Empirical Pictures.
The Royal Tenenbaums. 2001. [film] Directed by W. Anderson. United States: Touchstone Pictures, American Empirical Pictures.
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. 2004. [film] Directed by W. Anderson. United States: Touchstone Pictures, American Empirical Pictures.
The Darjeeling Limited. 2007. [film] Directed by W. Anderson. United States: Fox Searchlight Pictures.
Moonrise Kingdom. 2012. [film] Directed by W. Anderson. United States: Focus Features.
The Grand Budapest Hotel. 2014. [film] Directed by W. Anderson. United States: Fox Searchlight Pictures.
The French Dispatch. 2021. [film] Directed by W. Anderson. United States: Searchlight Pictures.
References
Dilley, W., 2017. The Cinema of Wes Anderson. Columbia University Press, pp.1–2.
E. Ann Kaplan. 2010. ‘Is The Gaze Male?’, in Furstenau, M., 2010. The film theory reader. New York, NY: Routledge, p . 209.
Burlingame, J., 2005. Masculinity in Wes Anderson’s Films — Timelapsed & Still. [online] Timelapsed & Still. Available at:
<https://www.timelapsedandstill.com/writing/2017/4/24/masculinity-in-wes-andersons-films> [Accessed 6 December 2021].
Connell, R. W. and Messerschmidt, J. W. 2 005 ‘Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept’, Gender & Society, 19(6), p. 832. doi: 10.1177/0891243205278639.
Connell, R. W., 1993. Masculinities. University of California Press.
Meiers, E. A. 2012. ‘Desire And Influence: Male Self-Realization And Film Progression Due To
The Influential Women I n The Films Of Wes Anderson’ (2012). Theses and Dissertations. 1360. Viewed
08 December 2021, < https://commons.und.edu/theses/1360>
Lauzen, M., 2015. It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World: On-Screen Representations of Female Characters in the Top 100 Films of 2014. 2014 On-Screen Representations. P.3.
Beauvoir, S., 1989. The second sex. New York: Vintage Books.
Barrett, C., 2014. Wes Anderson, The Grand Budapest Hotel — Women In Film . [online] Refinery29.com. Available at:
<https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2014/02/63246/wes-anderson-women-in-film> [Accessed 8 December 2021].
MULVEY, L. 1989. Visual and other pleasures. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, Macmillan, pp. 10–12.
Soloway, J. 2016. Jill Soloway on The Female Gaze | MASTER CLASS | TIFF 2016. Available at:
<https://youtu.be/pnBvppooD9I > [Accessed 8 December 2021]
