Objects/Desire/Oedipus: Wes Anderson as Late-Capitalist Auteur

Abstract

Wes Anderson’s films often seem to be about nothing except fathers: from the obscene and betraying father figures of Bottle Rocket and Rushmore to the failed yet redeemed father of The Royal Tenenbaums, and the nonfather father of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Anderson returns time and again not merely to the problematic relation between children and fathers, but to the problem of paternity as such and the role it plays in the subjective construction of his characters. His most recent films confront the limits of this idée fixe. The Darjeeling Limited relies on an absent yet always present father as three brothers squabble across India in search of their emotionally inaccessible mother after their father’s death, and Anderson’s most explicit scene of paternal castration as a cause of subject-formation—perhaps even better than the severing of Margot’s (Gwyneth Paltrow) finger in The Royal Tenenbaums—appears in his children’s film, Fantastic Mr. Fox, as Mr. Fox’s (George Clooney) maturity coincides with the loss of his tail. Fatherhood even provides narrative closure to the otherwise anarchic story of young love in Moonrise Kingdom, disrupting the potential suicidal closure solicited by its preadolescent pastiche of Badlands (Malick, 1973) and Bonnie and Clyde (Penn, 1967).