*****
Past, present, future
Irony maintains a
strange connection to history, always inhabiting a tricky past-present. Its
many meanings continuously build upon and erase each other, only to return
again. Irony appears as a rhetorical device beginning with Plato, as a characteristic
of dramatic theatre, as a core concept of German Romanticism, as the colloquial
definition of “saying one thing and meaning another,” as proposed cultural dominant
of postmodernism, and as sacrificial lamb of New Sincerity. Its methods sometimes
involve knowingly digging up material from the past in order to say something about
the present, its many reference points forever falling in and out of fashion. When
we speak of irony today, we speak of it as cultural mood, as synonym for
sarcasm and cynicism. Since the following chapter is centered around the early
2000’s – the site of a secondary rupture, of a “post-postmodern”1 break
- it seems customary to bring up the end of irony, and along with it the
end of postmodernism.
Linda Hutcheon foreshadows
these links with “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” (1998) an essay she
begins with a personal anecdote. Hutcheon writes about completing the final
manuscript of Irony's Edge (1995),
one of the many texts she has written on the subject of irony. An hour after
submitting the manuscript to her publisher, Hutcheon walked into a bookstore.
The first thing she noticed there was a magazine whose headline read “The
End of Irony? The Tragedy of the Post-Ironic Condition.” The feature article
announced that irony had tired itself out, and that it was currently being
replaced by “seven different types of nostalgia."2 Hutcheon
had spent the good part of a decade writing about postmodernism and what she
saw as its defining feature - irony - but had not thought to write about
nostalgia. Not only did she find irony more appealing, more "edgy,"
she did not think that irony had much to do with nostalgia anyway.3
Hutcheon's accidental
encounter with this article prompted her to reflect on what it might mean to
write about irony towards the end of the twentieth century. As a result,
she tries to make sense of the unlikely marriage of irony and nostalgia, the
latter being alternately indulged in and derided by postmodern culture. Like
nostalgia, sincerity can unassumingly stage itself as “a mode of
self-expression generally held to be nondiscursive, transparent, outside of
ideology.”4 “Back in the day”-type rhetoric suggests that there
was simply more sincerity to go around in the past, and that this reserve of sincerity
has since been depleted. This thought process stands in opposition to the
varied and “transideological” uses Hutcheon attributes to irony.5 That
is to say, where nostalgia tends to idealize the past, irony tends to
instrumentalize the past in order to critique it. Herein lies Hutcheon’s belief
in the political applications of irony.
Hutcheon’s article
made a few things clear to me. One, that as postmodernism drew to a close,
irony (its defining feature, according to many) began to close in on itself. A
strange culture war emerged on its grounds, one where the supposedly lost value of
sincerity is selected as a radically conservative, oppositional tactic for
combatting postmodern irony. Second, that the question of irony and its “end”
is inextricably linked to the ends of both modernism and postmodernism. Third,
that irony’s end had been announced prior to 2001, and that its end(s)
will continue to be announced in the future. The very act of placing irony
along a historical continuum is an exercise in “evading teleology” that
requires one to shuttle between the past and the present.6
An irony of ends
The ends of both
modernism and postmodernism can be traced to a single name: that of architect
Minoru Yamasaki. Yamasaki designed the St. Louis Pruitt-Igoe housing complex, a
monolith of modernist architecture. Modernism’s (thwarted, so the story goes)
aspirations to utilitarianism, functionalism, and progress were embodied,
caricatured, and incapacitated by the building’s imposing square structure. The
complex's small apartments and large communal spaces - initially intended to be
practical, economical - quickly became run-down. Less than twenty years
after Pruitt-Igoe was erected, its buildings were largely abandoned and
uninhabitable. On March 16, 1972, the first of the thirty-three buildings that
made up Pruitt-Igoe was demolished. Architectural critic Charles Jencks
famously announced this as the movement’s death knell, or “the day that Modern
architecture died."7 While the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe did
not bring modernism to its end (it was going to die anyway - of old age, of
inefficacy, according to Jencks), it stood as a pretty clear indication of the
way things were going.
The pathos of Yamasaki’s
failures as an architect extends to his other famous project; the
buildings that made up the World Trade Center. Many interpreted the collapse of
its towers on Septemeber 11th 2001 as the twin end of postmodernism and irony.
The act of ironic interpretation suddenly seemed ineffective in the wake of unforeseen
cultural trauma. In the weeks following the attacks, announcements of irony's
death proliferated. It is true that a certain kind of irony - cynical,
detached irony as cultural mood - had naturally gone out of style by the
early 2000's. But this is only one kind of irony, so our conversation doesn't
end there. To reject irony in favor of a simpler simplicity is no simple task.
How is one to forget cultural irony when its aftermath is still strongly felt? Linda
Hutcheon makes a good point by observing that our age “joins just about every
other century in wanting to call itself the age of irony.”8 The very
recurrence of that historical claim supports the claim held by some that irony
is “inherent in signification, in its deferrals and in its negations,”9 that
every age is ironic in one way or another. If anything can be agreed on
regarding irony at the end of the twentieth century, it is that “irony had
become an extremely charged clear by the time the towers fell code word masking
a number of larger social, cultural and aesthetic divisions,”10 eventually
dividing itself into our current conversation of irony and sincerity.
The etymology of the
word ‘sincerity’ contains two meanings:
1) of one growth,
unmixed
2) that which is not
falsified.
Alison Young uses this
definition as the jumping-off point for her essay “Documenting September 11th:
Trauma and the (Im)possibility of Sincerity,” which discusses a contemporary “aporia
of sincerity."11 Through examining the methodology and
outcome of The 9/11 Commission Report (2004), Young concludes that we must reconsider the question of
sincerity. As sincerity shifts from affect to “media effect,” Young wonders
whether texts can succeed in delivering the sincerity effects their authors
seek.12 Young is not questioning whether authors are sincere or
insincere, but rather how works of literature or visual art might go about
communicating sincere things. Hopefully it’s become clear that my intention in
writing is not to claim particular artists for the camp of sincerity while
banishing others to the land of irony. To vouch for an artist's sincerity would
mean to know fully that artist’s intent, to be sure of the “congruence between
avowal and actual feeling”13 Lionel Trilling gave as a formula
for sincerity. Because our reading of sincerity is primarily one of effects,
and since infinite (mis)readings of these effects can and do occur, a sincere
attempt at expressing something can easily appear ironic.
It follows that my
discussion will center on recent stylistic techniques used to represent
sincerity. After the “death” of irony rose two strategies of the sincere within
visual culture. The first takes the form of a codified aesthetic of sincerity
within contemporary American cinema,14 the other a nostalgic-ironic
appropriation of so-called amateur aesthetics in video art. The subject or
document that is viewed as amateur generally has no conception of itself as
being sincere, but nonetheless comes to signify this quality.
Is there a sincere
colour?
Around the time these
things were happening, I was ten years old. I remember going to to see the film Zoolander with my family on the weekend of its release -
September 28, 2011. We arrived at the theater early, and sat watching previews.
One of the trailers made a distinct impression on me, not least because I
thought it only made a distinct impression on certain kind of person. Though I
never liked pink when I was younger, I found the faded Pepto Bismol that
spelled THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS delightfully
disgusting. Maybe I was a little proud of my newfound appreciation for strange
shades of pink. These shades filled a montage of white, upper-middle class
characters exhibiting vaguely anti-social behaviours. A man with a bright
geometric pattern painted on his face sped towards the screen in a vintage car.
A grandfather cheered on a dogfight with his grandchildren, surrounded by a
cast of “ethnic” characters of non-specific ethnicities. A blonde girl stalked
around her bedroom decorated with African masks. The scenes unfolded against
the soundtrack of “Judy is a Punk” by the Ramones. Both the film and the song,
which I had likely just heard for the first time (I was ten years old, after
all), felt interesting in a new way. After all, my reading of the trailer had
nothing to do with the contentious avant-gardes of punk music and reactionary
sincerity. I saw The Royal Tenenbaums (dir. Wes Anderson, 2001) shortly after its December
release, and subsequently tried to model myself after a young Margot Tenenbaum.
I quickly took to walking around my middle school with the Ramones blasting
from my headphones, though I was never very good at affecting Margot’s
disinterest. At some point in my early teens, I fell out of love with Anderson’s
films. I’m not entirely sure why – maybe I thought them insincere, maybe I was
going through the teenage ritual of rejecting childhood things – but I think my
total adoration-turned-total-disgust speaks to the inexplicably strong
reactions Anderson’s films draw from audiences.
The most (in)sincere
director
A friend wrote to me
in a February 2012 email, “wes anderson is the most insincere director i can
think of, because i think the naivete is false and a twee refusal to grow up is
a gross and counterrevolutionary…super heteronormative as well.” I read the
email and agreed with him, only to find myself in the middle of a heated bar
conversation a few nights later. I brought up Wes Anderson, and before I could
get a word in, an acquaintance declared Anderson to be a supremely sincere
director. Not only was Wes Anderson sincere, he insisted, but he was sincere in
a way that many people just didn’t understand.
In light of these two
responses, Wes Anderson seems a particularly compelling subject of inquiry
regarding the post-9/11 “aporia” of sincerity that is the focus of this
chapter. Anderson’s 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums is set in an anachronistic New York populated by
whimsically decrepit buildings, for example a fictitious “375th Street YMCA.”15 With
no Twin Towers in sight, one is almost allowed to believe that the film took
place sometime before they were built, sometime before postmodernism and the
brand of irony associated with it.
But The Royal
Tenenbaums is bookended by a
hyper-awareness of nostalgic stylization. The film begins with a neatly
composed shot of a book being checked out of a library. A hand peeking out of a
camel blazer stamps the card enclosed in the book’s cover, something I haven't
experienced since childhood trips to the library. The book is then closed to
reveal a quaint illustration of melting candlesticks, THE ROYAL
TENENBAUMS spelled out in the
pink Futura of the film’s trailer. In the following shot, the cover
illustration reappears as a real-life set design, using the same mustard-green
colour scheme and curtained backdrop. These mirrored images make unclear the
starting point of stylization. Anderson could very well be flattening the
personalities of his characters to fit a simplified storybook format. But
Anderson works almost exclusively with stock characters, mainly drawn from
white upper-middle class America. Or, to be more specific, the stock character
of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Of course this "character"
exists in the real world, but it has been sufficiently mythologized (see The
Preppy Handbook, Ralph Lauren
advertisements, the disaffected prep school students of J.D. Salinger novels,
and so on). We can say that by framing The Royal Tenenbaums as fiction - its intertitles take the
form of book pages, “scene” swapped for “chapter” - Anderson counters the
argument that he is merely stylizing a referent firmly based in reality. An
astute observer of aesthetes and an aesthete himself, the visual style of his
films reads to me as the combined efforts of his own narcissism and the
narcissism of his characters.
The characters in The
Royal Tenenbaums largely
understand themselves through representation. Some fashion their reality in
writing, Margot with her plays and Raleigh, her husband, with his studies
in anthropology. Some emotions are explained only through their
bracketing, the story of Richie’s fall from tennis stardom succinctly told in
television footage of his losing game and a tabloid cover that reads MELTDOWN. Etheline also styled her children, a “Family of
Geniuses,” in prose. Like the rest of the film’s books-within-books, Family
of Geniuses appears onscreen
dog-eared and faded, a simulacrum of the book as intellectual fetish
object. Family of Geniuses is
not a real book, empty of content (asides from the story of the film that
contains it), but nonetheless appears significant, handsomely weathered. Like
the many unread books that make up an impressive library, the books written by
the Tenenbaums are markers of lives dictated by the pressure to endlessly
perform individual intelligence and precocity.
The Royal
Tenenbaums and mise en abyme subjectivity
The Royal
Tenenbaums is a portrait of a
family and their now-grown children. All three were child prodigies - Margot a
gifted playwright, Richie a star tennis player, and Chas an astute businessman
(businessboy, perhaps) - who faded into obscurity with the onset of adulthood.
The story picks up with a cast of characters obsessed with recapitulating the
glory of their youth. They continue to wear their childhood clothes, as if the
garments had magically grown in a gesture of solidarity. Like the closet of a
cartoon character, Margot's wardrobe is filled with a dozen penny-loafers and a
striped Lacoste dress in every colour. Richie continues to dress like Björn
Borg, even in non-tennis situations. Chas replaces the business-wear of his
childhood with a new daily uniform, but the repetition does not end there. Now
a father, both Chas and his two sons wear red Adidas tracksuits at all times
(save for a funeral, where the trio opts for black Adidas tracksuits). They
also share the same curly brown hair, though this can be owed more to genetics
than to intent. By projecting his self-caricature onto his own children, the
cycle of repetition extends to an absurd degree.
This bittersweet
navigation of identity fits with the tone of The Royal Tenenbaums, which film scholar James MacDowell describes as
the composite of deadpan humour and melodramatic subject matter.16 In
"Notes on Quirky" and subsequent essays, MacDowell argues that tone -
not subject matter, not certain editing techniques, not uniform visual style -
is the strongest indicator of the "quirky" film. Treating the quirky
film more as a sensibility than as a genre, MacDowell explains that its tone is
illustrative of a larger cultural condition, a structure of feeling
characterized by its back-and-forth dialogue around irony and sincerity. I
follow MacDowell's analysis by focusing on Anderson's films in an essay
concerned precisely with this ironic-sinere structure of feeling. But before I
delve into the topic of tone, I want to comment on a particular aspect of the
quirky film. Central to The Royal Tenenbaums and other quirky films is a certain kind of
character best encapsulated by Anderson's paradoxically self-conscious
adult-children. I would offer the titular characters of Napoleon
Dynamite (2004) and Juno (2007) as culturally significant and instantly
recognizable examples of the "quirky" character. The aestheticized
awkwardness of these characters can be located along a spectrum. At the one end
is the character whose idiosyncrasies serve as fodder for cheap jokes, and at
the other is the character whose idiosyncrasies are meant to endear the
audience. On the first end, I think of the painful confession Napoleon Dynamite
makes after presenting his crush with a hand-drawn portrait: "It took me
like three hours to finish the shading on your upper lip." Even if
Napoleon's misguided social interactions are endearing by proxy, they are
generally treated with a kind of detached, jokey irony. MacDowell points out
that the ostensibly cathartic/redemptive dance scene at the end of the film
still mines from a "comedy of embarrassment."17 An
earnest but uncoordinated (note, uncoordinated) Dynamite performs a solo dance
routine to the applause of his classmates, but even his choice of song - the
musically awkward blue-eyed soul of Jamiroquai's "Canned Heat" - is
meant to be a kind of in-joke with the audience.
Still comedic but more
melodramatic, more openly sentimental, Juno treats its main character more kindly. She shrieks
would-be, cutesy teenage slang ("Honest to blog!") into her novelty
phone, which is shaped like a hamburger. These qualities are not framed
ironically, though; they contribute to a vision of a benignly dorky teenage
girl unexpectedly faced with the very adult responsibilities of having a child.
Returning to MacDowell's diagnosis of the quirky film, Juno tones down deadpan humor in favour of emotional
engagement.
Also worth mentioning
is the character-person of Michael Cera, who plays Juno's boyfriend in the
film. Cera's first popular role was as George Michael Bluth on the sitcom Arrested
Development. Cera was fifteen years
old when the series debuted in 2003, a real-life awkward-looking teenage boy at
the onset of puberty. Also an awkward teenage boy facing the onset of puberty,
George Michael mumbles nervously through most social situations that take place
on Arrested Development. One
of the more notable situations is the crush he harbours on his cousin, a teenaged
girl named Maeby (whose strange name serves as an endless source of puns,
including the running joke of her questionable conception). Humour drawn from
awkward-seeming characters and situations is a mainstay of quirky cultural
output. Adam Kotsko explores this point in his 2010 book Awkwardness, partially explaining the phenomenon of
awkwardness-based humour as a contemporary response to the issues of
postmodernism, one of these issues being the much-treaded theme of irony as
cultural dominant. Kotsko selects Woody Allen as the progenitor of this kind of
humour, describing the ambivalently autobiographical leads of all Allen films
as "the Woody Allen character."18 Woody Allen clearly
bases this character (and its nebbishy charm) on his own idiosyncrasies and
neuroses, fashioning many doppelgangers in the characters of Alvy Singer (Annie
Hall, 1977), Isaac Williams (Manhattan, 1979), Mickey Sachs (Hannah and her Sisters, 1983), and others. The Woody Allen character does
not necessarily need to be played by Allen himeself; Larry David (Kotsko
devotes a whole chapter to David in Awkwardness) recently assumed this role in the Allen-directed Whatever
Works (2009). Beyond this, the
Woody Allen character has its own life as a cultural type, the character-person
of Michael-Cera being a contemporary example. Since Arrested
Development, Cera has continuously
been cast in the role of the adorably awkward teenage boy. Perpetually virginal
and sheepish, he still manages to impregnate his love interest in Juno. Subsequent roles in films like Nick and
Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008), Youth
in Revolt (2010), and Scott
Pilgrim vs. The World (2010) see
Cera shyly charming his way into the hearts of manic pixie dream girls, subtly
reputing the common notion that confidence is sexy (see chart below). I imagine
Cera was first cast in this type of role because he was, conveniently, an
actual shy teenage boy. But Cera has been playing this role for a good part of
the last decade. Yes, playing the role of himself, contrived as it sounds. This confusion of
identity is compounded in Paper Heart (2009), the meta-documentary (I don't know how else to describe
it) based on the unverifiable romantic relationship between Cera (who plays
himself in the film) and Charlyne Yi, the film's screenwriter and lead actress.
What does it mean for
a person to purposely act awkward, acting being by definition self-conscious
and awkwardness being by definition unconscious? It leads to the impossibility
- as with Allen and as with the Tenenbaums - of verifying whether the character
of a film is necessarily the stylization of a referent firmly rooted in reality
(in simpler terms, of the actor or actress who plays the character). Further,
it makes any claims to authenticity near-impossible to confirm, resulting in a
perpetual chicken-or-the-egg-type questioning of subjectivity.
What, then, should one
make of the Tenenbaums? Are they just a cast of lovably "quirky"
characters? Are we supposed to interpret their antisocial behaviour as a
fashion statement or a remote critique via inhabitation? In his article
"If I Can Dream: The Everlasting Boyhoods of Wes Anderson," Mark
Olsen writes that Anderson "does not view his characters from some distant
Olympus of irony."20 After all, how is Anderson to
maintain emotional detachment from characters who stand as infinitely repeated
versions of himself? The director's early films - Bottle Rocket (1996) and Rushmore (1999) - were filmed in his native Texas. As an
adolescent, Anderson atteneded the preppy collegiate - seemingly lifted
straight from a Salinger novel - used as the set of Rushmore. One can easily identify Rushmore's Max Fischer - serial overachiever and director of
pretentious, cutesy middle school plays - or the dysfunctional geniuses of The
Royal Tenenbaums as the
director's gently self-mocking portraits. If we trace the caricature at work in The
Royal Tenenbaums far back
enough, we end up with Wes Anderson infinitely styling and projecting himself
as the characters of his own (the) film.
Knowing naiveté
Art historian E.H.
Gombrich writes, “The more you prefer the primitive, the less you can
become primitive,"19 a statement that is taken up
ambivalently in The Royal Tenenbaums. This paradox is best expressed in the film’s knowingly naïve visual
style; its neatly composed shots look like childhood drawings traced by an
adult, the final product retaining none of the original messiness. James
MacDowell points to this in the “sweetly unsophisticated pink flag” that flies
above the Tenenbaum home.20 Anderson’s aesthetic can be easily
described (and dismissed) as cloying. Unusual shades of pink pop up everywhere;
the awning of a hotel, a rotary phone, the walls of an ice cream parlour, a
woolen glove. The decidedly unrealistic proliferation of such details holds a
mirror to the suspended naiveté of the film’s characters. MacDowell writes that
the childhood artifacts that Margot, Chas, and Richie cling to remind us that
they are no longer children. Richie sets up an anorak-yellow tent in the family’s
living room, his too-tall body dwarfing the structure clearly intended for
children. This visual gag frames the character’s longing for childhood instead
of expecting us to indulge uncritically in it. The “wrongness” of these images
rests not only in their resemblance to impossibly perfect children’s drawings,
but in their ability to evidence the Tenenbaums’ problematic relationship to
childhood.
This unfaltering
belief in the purity of childhood is not the only element of primitivism
evident in The Royal Tenenbaums.
The characters display a tendency to view other cultures as exotic or less advanced
than their native American one. Margot bolsters her writing career with
cultural tourism, the kind I imagine she thinks of as "zany
anthropology." A brief montage shows Margot at the age of nineteen at a
wedding on an unidentified West Indian island; flirting with lesbianism in
Paris at twenty-one; then a few years later in New Guineau, groping a man in
tribal dress (her in a pink bikini). Etheline works as an archaeologist, and
Raleigh St. Clair as a neurologist who conducted field studies on a fictional
tribe called the Kazawa Atoll. St. Clair's book on the subject, The
Peculiar Neurodegenerative Inhabitants of the Kazawa Atoll, features a photograph of the author with one of his
research subjects. The two men stand side-by-side, St. Clair in a bathing suit
and the subject in a loincloth, headdress, and body paint. The photograph is
shot in classic ethnographic style, straight-on and perfectly centered. The
composition of the photograph is not unlike those of the shots that make up the
film, their veneer of order and artistic control contradicting the unfinished
emotional business (adult children, intentional naivete, an "aporia"
of sincerity, and so on) taking place in the frame.
Throughout the film,
St. Clair studies the behavior of Dudley Heinsbergen, a boy inflicted with a
peculiar form of autism. He calmly watches Dudley struggle to arrange a set of
toy blocks in a particular formation, calmly taking notes on the boy's
progress. He later reads the results and chuckles to himself “How interesting,
how bizarre,” as if the boy were a mischievous pet or inhabitant of remote New
Guineau. What is actually bizarre, I suppose, is that St. Clair does not make
much of a distinction between the two. St. Clair takes Dudley everywhere he
goes, the boy narrating in deadpan the details of their surroundings to no
person in particular. Dudley favors a Jacques-Cousteau-plays-tennis outfit of
corduroy shorts, yellow ringer t-shirt, and bucket hat with navy stripe, his
nerd-chic style later cashed in on by films like Napoleon Dynamite. The unlikely fashion plate of Dudley Heinsbergen
reflects a world where no person or thing is immune to being aestheticized.
“I always wanted to
be a Tenenbaum”
Taste classifies, and
it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their
classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make.21 -
Pierre Bourdieu
In his essay for the
Criterion Collection release of the film, Kent Jones points out that The
Royal Tenenbaums – alongside
other films directed by Anderson – centers on a character “from a little lower
on the economic ladder.”22 This character is Eli Cash, the boy grew up in
a simple apartment with his aunt. Cash lived across the street from the
Tenenbaums and became a regular fixture at their home, an honorary member of
the family also inflicted with their complex around creativity. Eli was not a
child genius, but later tried his hand at writing. At the beginning of the
film, we are introduced to the grown-up Eli at a reading for his newly-released
novel. After reading, he takes a phone call from Margot, and anxiously implores
of her “You think I’m especially not a genius?” Cast as his adoptive family’s
foil, Eli illustrates just how strongly the concepts of taste, precociousness,
and genius are linked to class. We are reminded of many kinds of work that
factor into the designation of genius.
Eli writes middlebrow
fiction that is met with lukewarm critical reception and offhand remarks from
those close to him. Having grown up in a lower-middle class household, the
quality of Eli's work is never validated with the label of “genius” his
wealthier counterparts already attained before adolescence. In fact, Eli’s
books are only met with positive regard at the very end of the film. In the
middle of a police questioning, the officer pauses to pay Eli a compliment; the
officer, transparently portrayed in jus'folks-style, had read Eli's new novel
and greatly enjoyed it. The officer even asks for an autograph, temporarily
alleviating the embarrassing events leading up to the police questioning.
The Royal
Tenenbaums points to
the cycle of legitimation that links class, taste, and cultural
production. Eli's inability to be validated as an author of
"highbrow" fiction reflects a kind of glass ceiling of class
mobility; (lower) middle-class upbringing, middlebrow writing. Conversely, the
Tenenbaums cannot escape the trappings of their own background. Their
predetermined, premature success is crystallized forever in the figure of the
adult-child. Like fallen rulers, the “royal” Tenenbaums are trapped by the
privileged status they reached as children. They remain there indefinitely as
dysfunctional apparitions of their former selves. I feel that the film is
neither as explicitly political as my discussion of it, nor as apolitical or
twee as it has been made out to be. Maybe I'm at fault for not picking a side,
but it's the film's back and forth - between irony and sincerity, critique and
indulgence, artifice and naturalism - that makes it so intriguing.
The strongest point of
Jones’ essay on The Royal Tenenbaums is in his identification of the film’s political
implicaions. Unfortunately, this point is a little lost on Jones, whose
assertions of Anderson’s particular brand of sincerity read as
self-congratulatory. Jones writes, “For someone like me, who connected directly
with his sensibility from the first frame of Bottle Rocket, it's difficult to comprehend how anyone could not
get the work of such an exquisite storyteller.”23 Jones
suggests that Anderson presents a secret kind of sincerity that only a special
kind of person would understand. I do not know what to make of this “secret”
sincerity; I have made it clear that the definition of sincerity is no simple
task, but the idea that it can only be decoded by some kind of super-sensitive
aesthete does not sit well with me. Despite pointing out the issues of class
raised by Anderson, Jones only affirms these relations by designating sincerity
as an esoteric taste category requiring specialized understanding. This
category, which formed in reaction to the perceived ideological threat of
postmodern irony, possessed a problematic ideology of its own. If
postmodern irony was dismissive and mocking of the stupid, the unrefined, the
"primitive," then the New Sincerity romanticizes the
"primitive" in a way that is (often unbeknownst to itself) condescending.
In the following
installment, I will discuss the New Sincerity, a term that has risen to
prominence in the last decade. As I understand it, the New Sincerity - like
Anderson's films - concerns itself mostly with problems of the self, the double
or performed self, the artistic process and artistic self-representation, a
reactionary stance towards irony that favors a highly idealized vision of the
sincere, and an arguably regressive engagement with primitivism.
Arielle Gavin
_________________________________________________________________
1I'm hesitant to use
the word, but no single term has been agreed upon. Of the many terms put forth
in the race to name the contemporary moment - off-modern, hypermodern,
altermodern - the one that interests me most is the metamodern. I will discuss
the concept of metamodernism in the next chapter.
2 Linda
Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” Methods for the Study
of Literature as Cultural Memory (Amsterdam:
Editions Rodopoi, 2000) 193.
3 Ibid. 195
4 Jane
Taylor, “Torture, Truth, and the Arts,” The Rhetoric of Sincerity, Eds. Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel
Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009) 22.
5 Linda
Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge (London:
Routledge, 1994) 20.
6Linda
Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” Methods for the Study
of Literature as Cultural Memory (Amsterdam:
Editions Rodopoi, 2000) 195.
7Charles
Jencks, “The Death of Modern Architecture,” The Language of
Post-Modern Architecture (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) 57
8Linda
Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge (London:
Routledge, 1994) 27.
9Ibid.
10Jeffrey
Sconce, “Irony, Nihilism, and the new American ‘smart’ film,” Screen 43:4 Winter 2001: 353.
11Alison
Young, “Documenting September 11th: Trauma and the (Im)possibilty of
Sincerity,” eds. The Rhetoric of Sincerity, Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel
Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009) 99.
12Ibid. 104
13Lionel
Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1972) 4.
14This
aesthetic is best represented by what has been termed the "quirky"
film.
15375th
Street does not exist; The highest street number in New York City is 263.
16James
MacDowell, “Wes Anderson, tone, and the quirky sensibility,” New Review
of Film and Television Studies 10:1 March 2012:
8.
17Ibid. 11
18Adam
Kotsko, Awkwardness:An Essay (0
Books:Winchester, 2010) 1.
19E.H.
Gombrich, The Preference for the Primitive (New York:Phaidon, 2006) 297.
20James
MacDowell, “Notes on Quirky,” Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism I (2010) 5.
21 Pierre
Bourdieu, Distinction : A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste,
Trans. Richard Nice
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984) 6.
22Kent
Jones, “The Royal Tenenbaums,” Criterion Collection: Current Jul. 8
2002. www.criterion.com/current/posts/214-the-royal-tenenbaums
23 Ibid.
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