The Safe Emo­tion­al Spaces of Wes Anderson’s Cin­e­ma – Part Two

There is neu­ro­di­ver­gent (ND) solace to be had with­in all of Anderson’s works – per­haps because you can take a scene at ran­dom and find a stra­tum of infor­ma­tion encod­ed in the images, dia­logue, per­for­mances, set dec­o­ra­tion, edit­ing, sound­track and over­all rhythm. This glut of har­mo­nious­ly arranged cre­ativ­i­ty serves as a sen­so­ry stim­u­lant, with every moment offer­ing intense mag­net­ism to a view­er oth­er­wise sub­ject to exec­u­tive func­tion lapses.

I had been slight­ly ter­ri­fied about how Ander­son would respond to a piece that seeks to map such a spe­cif­ic set of inter­pre­ta­tions onto his work. I asked how he felt that this piece was being writ­ten. His response put paid to the ter­ror and gal­loped off to a place where there is no stig­ma, only appre­cia­tive angles.

“How do I feel? You know, the inter­est­ing thing is peo­ple who iden­ti­fy as neu­ro­di­ver­gent often have par­tic­u­lar focus in their per­cep­tion of things, a dif­fer­ent way of pro­cess­ing infor­ma­tion. I like the idea that there’s an audi­ence who is, in a way, pay­ing extra spe­cial atten­tion and see­ing the movie dif­fer­ent­ly. Pos­si­bly see­ing the movie more the way I see it, as a film­mak­er, and also get­ting more out of it, a more care­ful focus. But the main thing is: what does that lead to? I hope and feel that it’s cre­at­ing an emo­tion­al expe­ri­ence that’s dif­fer­ent, because it’s an emo­tion­al expe­ri­ence that might be inspired by get­ting more of the details, pulling more of the thing in. I won­der if that makes sense and I won­der if that is true.”

It makes sense and I hope that it’s true.

While each frame in every film is the world in a grain of sand, there is, yet, one that stands out as the peak of ND-cod­ed char­ac­ters who (it could be argued) exist in old­er form as junior stargaz­ers Woodrow and Dinah in Aster­oid City. Look­ing back to Anderson’s 2012 film about juve­nile love, Moon­rise King­dom, the two pre­teen pro­tag­o­nists exist uneasi­ly with every­one except each oth­er. 12-year-old Suzy (Kara Hay­ward), is volatile, prone to lash­ing out at her par­ents (with sav­age remarks), peers (by throw­ing scis­sors), and her­self (by punch­ing a mirror).

Orphaned cub scout Sam (Jared Gilman) is ini­tial­ly mocked and dis­missed by his fel­low scouts and remains focused on sur­vival skills, such as ori­en­teer­ing, mak­ing fires and the art of escape. Suzy and Sam meet after he goes back­stage and finds her dressed as a raven dur­ing a church pro­duc­tion of Noye’s Flud­de. Their sub­se­quent let­ter-writ­ing cor­re­spon­dence becomes a plan to run away togeth­er to a peace­ful cove in New Pen­zance that the map calls Mile 3.25 Tidal Inlet. In the final scene of the movie, we see that Suzy, a book­worm with a poet­ic imag­i­na­tion, has rechris­tened it ​‘Moon­rise King­dom’. To push poet­ic imag­i­na­tion a mite fur­ther, we could say that ​‘Moon­rise King­dom’ sym­bol­is­es a neu­ro­di­ver­gent sanc­tu­ary where we can be unmasked and free.

Hayward’s per­for­mance is that of a tight­ly coiled spring whose des­per­ate emo­tion­al state is masked by a dis­tinct style, immac­u­late eye make-up and Sun­day School shoes. While capa­ble of sweet­ness when she feels safe, when this secu­ri­ty is whipped away, rage and raw­ness return ten­fold. There is an incred­i­ble scene that takes place after the run­aways have been found and tak­en to sep­a­rate homes. Suzy’s moth­er Mrs Bish­op (Frances McDor­mand) is spong­ing down her daugh­ter in a bath­tub while being gen­tly con­de­scend­ing. ​“We women are more emo­tion­al,” she says. ​“I hate you,” replies Suzy, a stone wall, but only moments lat­er when talk­ing about lov­ing Sam, she is total­ly exposed, even if her moth­er does not reg­is­ter it, dis­tract­ed as she is by the fact that Suzy has pierced her ears with fishhooks.

“These parental rela­tion­ships are a form of nego­ti­a­tion where they’re try­ing to diag­nose you. They’re try­ing to work out, ​‘What’s wrong with you? Why is my child odd?’ ​‘I’m not going to take what you’re say­ing seri­ous­ly, because I know you’re weird,’” says Craw­ford, who sees Moon­rise King­dom through a very spe­cif­ic lens. ​“To me, it’s about two autis­tic chil­dren who find each oth­er and they’re both autis­tic in dif­fer­ent ways. Sam is sort of allowed to be – he’s allowed to be inter­est­ed in scout­ing and to have his lit­tle obses­sions, where­as Suzy isn’t. I think that’s real­ly where gen­der dif­fer­ence man­i­fests itself in child­hood: who’s a freak and who’s not a freak. Wes Ander­son is so good because you have social­ly awk­ward women. And that’s not some­thing that we’re allowed to be. What I love about Suzy Bish­op is that she doesn’t real­ly care.”

Art is a Rorschach Test and neu­ro­di­ver­gence is not a mono­lith. While Craw­ford sees autism in Suzy, I see emo­tion­al dys­reg­u­la­tion, a symp­tom of exec­u­tive dys­func­tion. Neu­ro-imag­ing has revealed that activ­i­ty in the pre­frontal cor­tex and amyg­dala (sites of the brain asso­ci­at­ed with con­trol of dai­ly tasks and reg­u­lat­ing emo­tions) are altered in the ADHD brain. And while the clichéd image of ADHD is of a hyper­ac­tive boy who can’t sit still or con­cen­trate, it can be the case with girls and women that hyper­ac­tiv­i­ty man­i­fests through an unsta­ble mood. ​“They are often emo­tion­al­ly intense and reac­tive, even if they try to hide aspects of this response. They tend to become upset quite eas­i­ly and ​‘over-react’ to stress, feel­ing eas­i­ly over­whelmed, has­sled and wound up,” writes Dr Joanne Steer in the book ​‘Under­stand­ing ADHD in Girls and Women’. I read this to Saman­tha Hiew, who says that she agrees but would add more con­text: ​“Emo­tion­al dys­reg­u­la­tion always has a trig­ger, it is not some­thing that bursts out of the blue. Peo­ple might be more like­ly to be dys­reg­u­lat­ed, espe­cial­ly girls, if they feel reject­ed, or not accept­ed by their peers. And when that hap­pens, it’s zero to 100, it is intense. And that’s because we feel more in our body – the brain of some­one with ADHD typ­i­cal­ly feels, hears and sens­es before they think.”

Hiew deploys the term ​“amyg­dala hijack” for when we are so emo­tion­al­ly over­whelmed that noth­ing makes sense and we go into melt­down. ​“You could either melt down and blurt out in anger and then scream, or you can shut down and lose the abil­i­ty to talk because you are so sen­so­ri­ly over­loaded,” she says. The only recourse when this occurs is to take one­self or be gen­tly tak­en to ​“a qui­et room to slow down and reg­u­late and breathe. Because it’s very hard to reverse things once it starts.”

Wes Anderson’s cin­e­ma is a con­trolled envi­ron­ment that calms my sen­so­ry over­whelm and makes me feel safe before stim­u­lat­ing a feel­ing of being alive, moved by the char­ac­ters and in awe of a sup­port­ive uni­verse whose organ­i­sa­tion­al prin­ci­ples give their emo­tions a chance of mak­ing sense. Per­haps the most pro­found aspect of Anderson’s cin­e­ma, which pro­duces a dopamine fies­ta in my body, has to do with tonal scope. He holds the worst of his char­ac­ters light­ly with a world­ly humour that swerves any judge­ment of their deeds. ​“Rude­ness is mere­ly an expres­sion of fear. Peo­ple fear they won’t get what they want. The most dread­ful and unat­trac­tive per­son only needs to be loved, and they will open up like a flower,” M Gus­tave pros­e­ly­tis­es to his staff at The Grand Budapest Hotel, only to play this out, post-jail­break, when he finds that pro­tégé and accom­plice, Zero, failed in that he: could not find a safe­house, did not bring false whiskers or fake noses and, the final straw, for­got to bring any of his sig­na­ture scent: L’air du panache. M Gus­tave deliv­ers a deeply cru­el rant and asks why Zero – an immi­grant – both­ered to come to Zubrowka. Instead of snap­ping back, Zero sor­row­ful­ly answers, ​“the war” and M Gus­tave sags, in a man­ner of a ND per­son, post-melt­down, when we realise that we have lost sight of the oth­er and tak­en aim at a val­ued relationship.

Feel­ings are expres­sions of the release of chem­i­cals in the brain; dopamine means antic­i­pa­to­ry plea­sure, sero­tonin and oxy­tocin mean a pos­i­tive con­nec­tion to some­one else. On the oth­er hand, stress trig­gers cor­ti­sol and brings on anx­i­ety. ADHDrs are known to have reduced lev­els of dopamine (and nor­ep­i­neph­rine), and a high­er lev­el of cor­ti­sol than those with­out ADHD and some of us are prone to quick fix­es – not all of them healthy – in pur­suit of feel­ing good again. Luck­i­ly for M Gus­tave, Zero instant­ly for­gives him and their bond con­tin­ues, lead­ing to sero­tonin all round, includ­ing for the invest­ed view­er. As Saman­tha Hiew says, ​“Cre­ativ­i­ty is the most sus­tain­able dopamin­er­gic plea­sure and that can come from any source – appre­ci­at­ing art is a form of creativity.”

M Gus­tave deliv­ers a pas­sion­ate apol­o­gy to Zero that is full of self-recrim­i­na­tions build­ing to the sin­cere obser­va­tion that, ​“This is dis­grace­ful and it’s below the stan­dards of The Grand Budapest…I apol­o­gise on behalf of the hotel.” The fact that a character’s mis­ery and the hilar­i­ty of their expres­sive­ness is con­tained, simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, in the same moment is famil­iar to the self-aware neu­ro­di­ver­gent, for it feels ridicu­lous to be rou­tine­ly felled by tiny and pre­dictable com­pli­ca­tions. This dual­i­ty harkens back to the Char­lie Chap­lin line, ​“Life is a tragedy in close-up and a com­e­dy in long shot.” When I put this to Jason Schwartz­man he says, ​“I live for that” and tells me an anec­dote about watch­ing Rush­more with an audi­ence for the first time:

“They laughed in a cou­ple of places I hadn’t expect­ed. At first I thought that they were laugh­ing at me, at how bad I was. I was like, ​‘Why are they laugh­ing? That’s not sup­posed to be fun­ny’. I was like, ​‘God, that’s not fun­ny. That’s sup­posed to be so seri­ous!’ And then I realised, ​‘Oh, that IS fun­ny because it means so much to him [Max]’. Con­verse­ly, on Aster­oid City, I remem­ber see­ing it and peo­ple weren’t laugh­ing in places. I realised, ​‘Ah, they’re not not laugh­ing because it’s not fun­ny, they’re not laugh­ing because it’s sad to them.’ It real­ly is how you choose to land. One thing that I real­ly love about work­ing with Wes is all these things are in play, yet they don’t have to be so defined. Some­times I’ll say to Wes, ​‘Do you think it’s this, or is it this?’ and he’s like, ​‘Both?’”

The order­ly aes­thet­ic of the Ander­son­verse is in sup­port of this ​“both­ness”. His stylised visu­al sig­na­ture – so ripe for shal­low par­o­dies – is a way of not sac­ri­fic­ing any detail that could enhance sto­ry or char­ac­ter or mood. ​“I make them [the films] order­ly, in a way, to try to effi­cient­ly com­mu­ni­cate infor­ma­tion, to get things across as clear­ly as we can,” says Ander­son, ​“Because often I feel like I’m try­ing to put a lot of infor­ma­tion in one frame or one sequence and I want to try to fig­ure out how to do it so it real­ly all is clear.”

As part of this dri­ve for clar­i­ty, Ander­son does some­thing autism-friend­ly by famil­iaris­ing us with a loca­tion before the action begins. An intro­duc­tion to ​‘Aster­oid City’ involves a cam­era tour around every key site – a 12-seat lun­cheonette, a motel, an advert dis­play­ing a mete­orite crater, a ramp lead­ing nowhere – each decked out in sooth­ing colours and clear­ly labelled in an invit­ing font. Only then does Augie’s car whizz into view. The fram­ing device of the film as a play means that we wit­ness the mir­a­cle of Edward Norton’s play­wright Con­rad Earp describ­ing his ​‘Aster­oid City’, then, hey presto, it appears and the light of the desert sun is nei­ther warm nor cool but always clean and, above all, unfor­giv­ing. The effect of an imag­i­na­tion spit­ting out a world ful­ly formed is not just a neat visu­al trick, it is extreme­ly mov­ing to a ND per­son who strug­gles to com­mu­ni­cate the basics. Not only does Ander­son have a unique imag­i­na­tion, he has the where­with­al to com­mu­ni­cate it to the army of sen­si­tive cre­atives who have built it from scratch. This feat is awe­some and melan­choly, as it brings home how far our lives are from this sophis­ti­cat­ed dream world.

“I like the lev­el of con­trol, because the real world so often feels out of con­trol,” con­curs Craw­ford, ​“Things aren’t man­aged, things aren’t sym­met­ri­cal. Things aren’t organ­ised. That can be real­ly dis­tress­ing. I’ve learned to cope more as I’ve got­ten old­er. We accli­ma­tise. If something’s not at a per­fect 90-degree angle, it’s not the end of the world, but it can feel like it. Where­as in a Wes Ander­son film, it would be the end of the world. It would nev­er hap­pen. It’s not allowed to hap­pen. Because if it did hap­pen, it wouldn’t be on cam­era. It wouldn’t be on film. It’s real­ly spe­cial that when you watch a Wes Ander­son film you know that nothing’s going to be out of place. I know that I’m going to be in a safe space when I enter.”

Hiew traces this sen­so­ry sen­si­tiv­i­ty back to its source, ​“There is a part of the human brain where peo­ple receive sen­so­ry input from their envi­ron­ment, whether music or birds singing, or what you see in bright day­light or dark­ness, what you feel, what you taste?” These are all feel­ings that are height­ened in neu­ro­di­ver­gence. She con­tin­ues, ​“We’ve seen brain scans for autis­tic chil­dren ear­ly on in infan­cy, where they are going through such a huge amount of brain devel­op­ment and the con­nec­tiv­i­ty is so sophis­ti­cat­ed. That’s why a lot of autis­tic kids are known to be quite clever, but also prone to sen­so­ry melt­downs because the amount of infor­ma­tion that they get from the envi­ron­ment is so much more than a brain with­out this sen­so­ry receptivity.”

Extreme sen­si­tiv­i­ty isn’t all bad, because when the stars align you feel more fuck­ing alive than any­one has ever been. Per­haps the deep­est source of plea­sure (nev­er to be tak­en for grant­ed by an ND per­son) is the feel­ing of being con­nect­ed to anoth­er per­son, direct­ly or through their art. Our cul­ture has con­ceived of the word ​‘paraso­cial’ to describe one-sided rela­tion­ships with par­ties (often famous ones) who don’t know that we exist, how­ev­er this does not describe the life force that can flow between art and its appre­ci­a­tors, spark­ing hope in places where despair has domin­ion and recon­nect­ing us with some­thing sacred that had drift­ed out of view.

Hiew points out that, ​“Those of us who have masked so much in our lives don’t know which of our iden­ti­ties are us. Mind­ful­ness is good at help­ing neu­ro­di­ver­gents because it can enable us to come back into the present, to appre­ci­ate what we have.” She argues that the cin­e­ma of Wes Ander­son is so absorb­ing that it induces a state of mind­ful­ness with­out us even hav­ing to try. ​“When you watch some­thing, you’re hav­ing a 3D expe­ri­ence with the sound and visu­als and the feel­ing. It almost forces your brain to notice the colours, because he has this amaz­ing way of cre­at­ing a set that puts you in tune with what is hap­pen­ing with you. It makes you more mind­ful with­out know­ing it.”

Noth­ing exter­nal – not the most lov­ing per­son, not the most pro­found work of art, not sex, not drugs, not rock ​‘n’ roll – can be a per­ma­nent panacea for feel­ing out of tune with wider soci­ety. It’s more that in a moment of mind­ful­ness (or a fea­ture film’s worth of them) we expe­ri­ence a glim­mer of the rap­ture avail­able to peo­ple with our wiring and, pow­ered by that flash of clar­i­ty, can choose to pri­ori­tise the past-times that speak to our most authen­tic selves.

There are films that har­ness some aspect of what Ander­son does in terms of being ND friend­ly: the pas­tel con­fec­tion of Jacques Demy’s The Umbrel­las of Cher­bourg; the swoon­ing Tech­ni­col­or of Dou­glas Sirk’s body of work; Guiller­mo del Toro’s immer­sive night­mares; the sat­u­rat­ed 1950s colours in Todd Haynes’ Car­ol and the play­ful cin­e­mat­ic gram­mar of his forth­com­ing May Decem­ber. In short, every film­mak­er that plays with ​“both­ness”, craft­ing a fan­ta­sy bro­cad­ed with recog­nis­able details that offers both escapism and cod­ed meaning.

More thrilling, still, are films that use switch­es in form to illus­trate inter­nal shifts for their char­ac­ters. In Dar­ius Marder’s Sound of Met­al, the sound is turned down to con­vey the over­whelm of Riz Ahmed los­ing his hear­ing; in Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge, Matil­da Lutz is shot like a music-video Loli­ta, repli­cat­ing the per­spec­tive of her rapists until she becomes the venge­ful pro­tag­o­nist and the cam­era rebirths her as a hunter. Gary Ross’s Pleas­antville is all black and white until sex and cul­ture caus­es colour to enter the frame. Xavier Dolan’s Mom­my has an aspect-ratio shift that lands as euphor­ic, fleet­ing free­dom. These types of choic­es bring home the fact that being in the world doesn’t always hit in the same way. This is true for every­one, but in my neu­ro­di­ver­gent expe­ri­ence, it is extreme­ly pro­nounced. Some­times I feel locked out of soci­ety – my strug­gle to com­mu­ni­cate silo­ing me off into soli­tude – and some­times I feel like a glo­ri­ous part of it all. What makes the dif­fer­ence most often, most always, is to do with indi­vid­ual peo­ple and whether they show up.

This is why it all comes down to Richie Tenen­baum and the way his despair and sur­vival is framed by Wes Ander­son. ​“It was very qui­et and very pri­vate, the way we shot it,” says Ander­son, ​“We did it very late in the movie, in part because Luke Wil­son has a beard and the hair and it all gets cut off, so you have to shoot it at the right place in the sto­ry.” They were film­ing in an aban­doned man­sion in Yonkers, ​“Luke was very ready. The peo­ple work­ing togeth­er were so bond­ed and con­nect­ed by then. Prob­a­bly, the men­tal health of Luke and Bill Mur­ray was start­ing to take on what was going on with their characters.”

Through the script, Ander­son throws in a com­rade that Richie can­not see, but we can. After he has com­plet­ed the scis­sor stage of beard-cut­ting, smoothed foam onto his face and shaved one neat line off his facial hair, Richie says to the mir­ror, ​“I’m going to kill myself tomor­row”, even though the plan is to do so right away. It’s a line orig­i­nal­ly spo­ken by the actor Mau­rice Ronet in Louis Malle’s 1963 despair poem, The Fire With­in. The effect is that a soli­tary mis­fit has the bal­last of cin­e­ma his­to­ry tying him to anoth­er. There are bonds clos­er to home, too. A per­spec­tive flip occurs imme­di­ate­ly after Dud­ley finds Richie col­lapsed in the bath­room and releas­es a scream, silent beneath the sound­track of Elliot Smith’s Nee­dle in the Hay. Now, Tenen­baum after Tenen­baum receives news of his attempt and dash­es to the hos­pi­tal, like The Soci­ety of the Crossed Keys dis­tilled to pure urgency. It’s clear that Richie can­not grasp the extent of his con­nect­ed­ness to oth­er peo­ple. He is an avatar for every­one whose sense of alien­ation blocks an aware­ness of the love in their life.

A sense of alien­ation can arise from lam­bast­ing your­self inter­nal­ly for not being ​“nor­mal” or ​“straight­for­ward” and a vicious spi­ral can arise where the freaki­er one feels, the more one self-iso­lates. It can feel dan­ger­ous to reach out from this place of height­ened sen­si­tiv­i­ty in the knowl­edge that even an unin­tend­ed slight can cause us to slide deep­er into the well. Con­verse­ly, this is also a yawn­ing­ly recep­tive state for kind­ness, accep­tance and the wis­dom that says: this lone­li­ness is very human. Wes Anderson’s cin­e­ma is pop­u­lat­ed by idio­syn­crat­ic lost souls who some­how cling on to their place with­in blood and/​or found fam­i­lies. The qual­i­ties that make them mis­er­able Ander­son, their cre­ator, cel­e­brates as part of their human­i­ty. To nor­malise the pain of exis­tence and to tell sto­ries where it is the sta­tus quo – just stan­dard-issue emo­tion­al fur­ni­ture – is to give audi­ences per­mis­sion to feel their feel­ings clean­ly with­out the addi­tion­al bur­den of judge­ment on top. The God­fa­ther star, scion of the Cop­po­la dynasty and moth­er of Jason Schwartz­man, Talia Shire, has some­thing to say on this sub­ject, via her son. Over to Schwartzman:

“When my dad died when I was younger, my mom said to me, ​‘There’s no wrong way to feel.’ I didn’t know what that meant. Lat­er, I remem­ber look­ing around and every­one was cry­ing but I wasn’t cry­ing. Then I was like, ​‘Am I a bad per­son because I’m not cry­ing?’ So, you’re judg­ing your­self for how you feel, rather than just feel­ing, right? To me, that’s what Aster­oid City is about. In many ways it’s like, ​‘Just keep feel­ing it’. Don’t try to think about it too much. It’s like grief, it’s a process. With Wes, there is no wrong way to feel.”

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