The Grand Budapest Hotel is Probably Not Praxis.
Brecht and epic theatre
This article is a postscript to a previous article I wrote about how Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel uses a timeline of cinematic technology and formatting to differentiate nesting framing devices. Hinted at but slightly outside of the scope of that article was Anderson’s use of theatrical techniques. Specifically- in echoing Brecht’s Epic Theatre. The Grand Budapest Hotel deals directly with fascism, so it seems worthwhile to compare the Marxist and antifascist underpinnings of Brecht’s technique, with the ways Wes Anderson succeeds (and fails) to employ them.
Brecht’s Epic Theatre & The Frankfurt School
One of the primary goals for the establishment of the Frankfurt School was to interrogate why the German Revolution of 1918 ended the way it did. How did the birthplace of Karl Marx find itself at the end of a political upheaval turning to the allures of capitalism, and ultimately, fascism?
Bertolt Brecht’s Epic Theatre is one of a number of artistic forms which attempted to side-step the motivations of capitalism and to speak directly to his audience. I am no Brecht scholar, and a lot of nuance will be glossed over in this article, however put as simply as possible Epic Theatre employed a range of techniques aimed to snap their audience back into reality. And where were they really? They were in a theatre, watching a play.
Brecht thought that by refusing to let his audience suspend their disbelief, he could force them to engage with the ideas and values of his play, rather than getting lost in investment in the character’s emotional journeys. Brecht was a Marxist, and the ideas and values his plays contained were often specifically anti-capitalist ones. Some thinkers of the Frankfurt School further theorised on these techniques, which we’ll talk about later in this article.
Anderson’s neoliberal aesthetic
“I find Bertolt Brecht’s epic form, only out of focus, muddied by the bourgeois values of the neoliberal era.” says G.D. Brown of Wes Anderson’s most recent film The French Dispatch in a fairly incendiary Popmatters Article.
No matter Wes’ personal politics, his work is forged in neoliberalism. No matter how artistically successful any viewer may find his works, it is the box office that decides whether Wes Anderson keeps making movies. Furthermore, if he does aspire to the same revolutionary art which forged the Brechtian aesthetic, it is not apparent from his subject matter, nor his frequent brand collaborations.
“It is hardly a wonder that Anderson has directed commercials for SoftBank and American Express, for the likes of Stella Artois, Prada, H&M, AT&T, Hyundai, and Sony. His highly-stylized advertisements have connected common products and the arms of finance to sophisticated notions of film as elevated art, to visual reassurances of certain standards of taste and cultured cool. Of course, Anderson is not the first director of artistic merit to commercialize his talents. Supper won’t pay for itself.” G.D. Brown, Life After Brecht: Wes Anderson’s Lowbrow Dialectics
For Brown, the neoliberalism of Anderson’s aesthetic is rotten to its core: Its themes of minority identity under fascism function as appeals to the comfort of modernity rather than provocative calls to action. Indeed, the communists in Grand Budapest are just as hostile and threatening to the film's protagonists as the fascists (whether the communists depicted in Grand Budapest represent anything like actual communism is outside of the scope of this article.)
“In Brecht’s plays, his cues leading audiences away from the naturalist immersion of storytelling and toward the theater as an unreal portrayal (his breaking the fourth wall, his narrators and movements into song, and so on) were meant to prod the viewer into meaningful engagement with their own historical circumstances…
Anderson has faced criticism for his portrayal of largely white, upper-class characters in contrast with the roles of workers and people of color. As the viewer becomes aware of Anderson’s on-screen values, they must, like Brecht, take on the dialectical mindset to best understand the infusion of revolutionary form and bourgeois content, placing Anderson in the context of the neoliberal turn of the last half of the 20th Century.”
— G.D. Brown, Life After Brecht: Wes Anderson’s Lowbrow Dialectics
The accusation- for those who find this style exhausting (and I’m aware my writing often falls into this style)- is that Wes Anderson uses the stylings of revolutionary art, which is real and important. However, he uses them as a hollow appropriation. Anderson (though not necessarily through conscious intention) is packaging up the Brecht’s technique the same way he packages up other high-brow aesthetics (fine art, high fashion), resulting in an easily digestible remedy for intellectual and class anxiety.
An excellent quote from Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism, (which I pilfered from an also great Broey Deschanel video) spells out the process by which contemporary capitalism consumes and repackages revolutionary ideas, saying:
“To maintain its powers of attraction, capitalism therefore has to draw upon resources external to it, beliefs which, at a given moment in time, possess considerable powers of persuasion, striking ideologies, even when they are considered hostile to it.”
— Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism
Conversely, it could be argued that this form of neoliberal media is the necessary conduit to deliver revolutionary ideas to a mainstream audience. In The Andersonian Theatricality by Irene Kalesi, Anderson’s use of humour is explored as a cloak through which to smuggle critique and revolutionary ideas. Having made the link to Brechtian technique, Kalesi writes:
Comedy when used accurately can be the harshest judge of situations and the greatest fighter for change. Jones points out that “comedy is a vehicle for subtly (or not so subtly) addressing these injustices by mocking the social norms in the hope of slowly changing the masses’ beliefs about the inequalities”. Therefore, the employment of comedy can be pointed towards parodying and thus criticizing war and the collapse of the social ideals. The comedic atmosphere helps the audience engage with the film’s sensitive topic, namely a story that takes place during a tumultuous historical period. This bittersweet story needs the comedic perspective in order to avoid being an overly emotional burden on the viewer. The power of theatre is that it helps the audience not to identify with a character per se but it makes them contemplate deeply about the events happening on stage. According to Aristophanes, serious matters should be touched by the genre of comedy. As Dicaepolis from “Acharnians” says: “Comedy too can sometimes discern what is right. I shall not please but I shall say what is true”. Therefore, the power of comedy is to reveal truths and centralize issues that concern the spectators.
— Irene Kalesi, The Andersonian Theatricality
Is Wes Anderson praxis?
In Marxist theory, praxis is the putting of theory into action: it can be used to emphasise the importance of engagement and activity toward a common goal, without dismissing the importance of theory.
So does Wes Anderson’s work, specifically The Grand Budapest Hotel, hold up to the criticisms of the Frankfurt School aestheticians who created the groundwork for understanding Brecht’s epic theatre? I’m not uniquely qualified to tell you. But we can try to chase the logic down together: Writing specifically about Brecht, Walter Benjamin wrote:
“The task of epic theatre, Brecht believes, is not so much to develop actions as to represent conditions. But ‘represent’ does not here signify ‘reproduce’ in the sense used by the theoreticians of Naturalism. Rather, the first point at issue is to uncover those conditions. (One could just as well say: to make them strange.) This uncovering (making strange, alienating) of conditions is brought about by processes being interrupted.”
— Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht
And furthermore:
“Epic theatre casts doubt upon the notion that theatre is entertainment. It shakes the social validity of theatre-as-entertainment by robbing it of its function within the capitalist system. It also threatens the privileges of the critics. These privileges are based on the technical expertise which enables the critic to make certain observations about productions and performances. The criteria he applies in making his observations are only very rarely within his own control; he seldom worries about this, but relies upon ‘theatre aesthetics’ in the details of which nobody is particularly interested. If, however, the aesthetic of the theatre ceases to remain in the background, if its forum is the audience and its criterion is no longer the effect registered by the nervous system of single individuals but the degree to which the mass of spectators becomes a coherent whole, then the critic as he is constituted today is no longer ahead of that mass but actually finds himself far behind it.”
— Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht
This leaves us at somewhat of a junction in considering Anderson. Is the Andersonian Aesthetic a reproduction of these ‘theatre aesthetics’, or does the use of theatrical technique and aesthetic in a cinematic context alienate the viewer from more conservative cinematic techniques? I think your opinions about neoliberalism may define where you sit.
If all revolutionary aesthetics are consumed and repackaged under capitalism, is praxis in media possible? Herbert Marcuse, another thinker of the Frankfurt School, was slightly more optimistic.
“It seems that art as art expresses a truth, an experience, a necessity which, although not in the domain of radical praxis, are nevertheless essential components of revolution”
— Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension
Marcuse took it one step further than Benjamin in that he believed it was the authentic artistic experience that anyone could encounter the thirst for revolution and come to sympathise with the failings of capitalism. Whether Wes Anderson’s art hits even this bar for authenticity is again up to personal judgment.
That capitalism will, in time, homogenise all cinematic aesthetics into a sort of grey sludge seems inevitable. You can see it happen in real time. But hangers-on like Wes Anderson, who thrive in a space that is alternative if only by degrees- these artists may well be the first glimpse of real art many filmgoers experience. Can intellectually honest ideas be mined from these works? This writer believes that even if they can’t, you ought to look.
