Most of us, at least once, come to a moment when the contradictions between the world as we prefer to imagine it and the world as it apparently is become impossible to ignore. Our defenses overwhelmed and our sustaining delusions exposed, we feel an acute sense of loss, a falling away of fixity and coherence. It is at these moments that nostalgia’s pull is strongest. The same could be said in times of cultural and political crisis. The world is burning; the country is collapsing; the only thing certain about the future is that it won’t look like the past. In this situation, we can argue with our feelings and prove the safety we yearn for is another delusion: our childhood wasn’t actually happy; our nation’s past was full of horrors. Or we can pick up the sword of reaction: take our longing for the past at face value and attempt to reorder the world back into its proper shape. Both quests, however, are quixotic and never-ending. Nostalgia is ineradicable: dangerous when channeled, but even more dangerous to ignore.
The question, then, is not whether to feel nostalgia but what to do with it. When the rush of events debunks our received wisdom about history and our place in it, new myths must be made that can explain how the world is supposed to be and why it isn’t that way, at least not yet. New objects for our nostalgia are needed. In America, the argument over what those new objects should be, the debate over when things went wrong (2016, 2008, 1992, 1964, 1865, 1776, 1619) is what we call “culture war.” And it’s a marker of the depth of our crisis, in symbolic terms at least, that politics and culture war have become virtually synonymous.
This question of what to do with nostalgia finds its synecdoche in the question of what to do with Wes Anderson. Few American artists have faced the charge of nostalgia (and the sundry accessory crimes of hipsterdom, tweeness, sentimental fetishism and mechanistic storytelling) as persistently as Anderson, and it’s not hard to see why. His films insistently close themselves off from our quotidian world, using detailed miniatures, sideways dolly shots, faded pastels, straight-on camera perspective and, more recently, animation. The values proposed by his films often seem strikingly anachronistic, even conservative. Patriarchs are redeemed; pants are high-waisted, suits full cut; and institutions (prep schools, fancy hotels, the New Yorker) are celebrated as oases from a fallen (which is to say a contemporary) world.
In his first few films, the stylization that makes Anderson’s work immediately recognizable is diegetic. The elaborate interiors and perfectly symmetrical mise-en-scènes—which reflect the protagonists’ neurotic attachment to childhood or some imagined past—contrast with glimpses of real life, such as the New York streetscape in The Royal Tenenbaums. The plots reconcile fantasy and reality, past and present, by staging a collision between them, and at last the characters are forced to grow up. As Anderson himself has aged, though, his stylization has only intensified. His recent films blend animation, miniatures and on-screen text with actors and on-location shooting, to achieve a degree of visual control so total as to suggest a renunciation of reality altogether. Few of Anderson’s most pugnacious critics still bother to write reviews of his films, but when they do, the complaint sounds something like this: If his characters grow up and move on, why can’t he? It’s easy to conclude that Anderson has fallen prey to the nostalgia trap he once depicted, especially as his films have become more deeply ensconced in the past. (None of his movies have taken place in the present since 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited.)
Yet there are reasons to doubt this thesis. Starting with The Grand Budapest Hotel in 2014, every live-action film Anderson has made has been set in historical eras marked not by paradisical twee but psychic flux: interwar Europe, the American 1950s, a decolonizing Middle East. His movies are also growing more violent: The Phoenician Scheme, which came out last year, begins with a man’s torso getting blown off. Those who would argue that Anderson’s historical turn proves he’s retreated into nostalgic fantasy cannot account for this grimness, nor for the increasingly baroque framing devices and frequent dissonant notes that call into question whether these lovingly constructed environs are supposed to be taken as ideals, as actual history, as personal fantasy or something else altogether.
For those who dislike Anderson, these later films are lifeless exercises in aestheticization. His defenders, meanwhile, apologetically point to his formal ingenuity, calling him an “auteur” and saying that films like Asteroid City (2023) are “about” artifice. Neither perspective can account for Anderson’s evolution from making movies about characters stuck in the past to making movies set in the past. Neither perspective grasps the trajectory of Anderson’s development in concrete historical terms: as an American nostalgist whose career has coincided with the collapse of any stable sense of what Americans ought to be nostalgic for.
Watching Rushmore (1998) or The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), we could delight in Anderson’s make-believe, his winking anachronisms, his likable losers in ascots and smoking heroines in berets. Watching films like Asteroid City, where the American 1950s that produced much of Anderson’s iconography are depicted as a repressive nightmare, we’re denied that comfort. In its place are the anguished contortions of an artist searching for a middle path between an unselfconscious and vindictive nostalgia (“Make America Great Again”) and discarding nostalgia altogether (“America was never great”). The discomfort that Anderson’s later work inspires speaks, I think, to our own inability to find an aesthetics that can at once meet our demands for idealization and realism. Can art provide an image of a better world while honestly grappling with the actual situation we face? What is there even left to idealize?
●
Anderson’s first three films—Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums—are best characterized as comedies: each one ends, if not always with a wedding, then with pairing off, release, reconciliation. With his fourth film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Anderson turns toward tragedy, and provides no reconciliation between fantasy and reality. Here, the washed-up documentary filmmaker Zissou, struggling to raise money for one last adventure, invites a pilot claiming to be his illegitimate son into the hermetically sealed world of his submarine. After some forgettable capering, the “son” dies abruptly in a helicopter crash.
Released in 2004, The Life Aquatic was the first picture Anderson shot after the September 11th attacks and his first released during the United States’ dual imperial wars. It also marked the beginning of a negative shift in Anderson’s reception: Roger Ebert described The Life Aquatic as suffering from a case of “terminal whimsy.” By the time n+1’s What Was the Hipster symposium was published in 2011, Mark Greif could refer to Anderson as the paradigmatic figure of the hipster “radicalization and aestheticization of the mode of pastiche,” where “reflexivity is used purely to get back to emotion, especially in the drive toward childhood” and irony is deployed “without bitterness or critique.” Detectable in these gathering criticisms is a resentment toward the smoothness of turn-of-the-millennium bourgeois American existence when set alongside the gathering costs of the war on terror abroad. In this context, it’s easy to see why the ironical, self-consciously nostalgic attitude many artists adopted in response to a supposedly post-historical America became such a critical target. Here you’ve been out marching against the Iraq War, and this guy was building a model of a deep-sea submarine.
Though pop culture’s twee moment is long over, Anderson’s reception is still marked by this eye-rolling. In a typical negative review of 2023’s Asteroid City, for example, Mark Kermode could claim that “no one goes to a Wes Anderson movie expecting heartfelt melodrama or realistic human emotions and interactions. They go for intricately crafted doll’s house dramas featuring boxes-within-boxes narratives and arch, satirical conundrums.” That the view of Anderson as willfully avoiding reality gained ground with the release of The Life Aquatic—and that it became so identified with Anderson’s “aesthetic”—is ironic, because the film is clearly an attack on the desire to regress into a neverland where American domination never falters, where daddy still reigns. In his previous films, characters stuck in suspended adolescence need to learn from their fathers. Learn what? In The Royal Tenenbaums, the answer runs something like this: patriarchy may be a scam; family values may be a scam; America itself may be a scam, and all these scams leave scars. Yet these scams must be negotiated, not denied. Traumas are reenacted to be overcome, and the same patrimonial values that led characters astray are repurposed for third-act good. Not so in The Life Aquatic. Now, trying to be like daddy gets you killed. As it turns out, he isn’t even your father. Royal Tenenbaum and Steve Zissou are both paradigmatic mid-century American figures; they’re about the right age to be Anderson’s own father. In the post-9/11 world, it is these authority figures, the people who got us into this mess, whom Anderson and Greif are both railing against. Yet they also partially identify with the patriarchs, giving their critiques the bite of self-loathing.
Anderson described the ending of The Life Aquatic as walking “the edge between the corny thing and the thing that moves you.” But what Anderson couldn’t quite figure out—the reason the film feels like a baggy admixture of whimsy and anger—was how to give meaning to tragedy. His early comedies can be read as cautionary tales about nostalgia, yet they still manage in their final acts to insist on its value: yes, your fantasies aren’t real, but you’re not stupid to have had them. But without the retroactive justification of a happy ending, Anderson’s laboriously constructed play world in The Life Aquatic ends up being a simple setup for disillusionment. The problem with The Life Aquatic, in the end, isn’t that it’s too naïve, but that it’s jaded. What’s missing isn’t a critique of nostalgia—that corny thing—but an answer to the original question of what to do with it—whether, and how, we can let ourselves be moved.
●
Bereft of that answer, another filmmaker might have abandoned artifice for realism, the gauzy dream of an imagined past for the grit of the present. In the aughts, mumblecore films like Andrew Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha (2002) exemplified this latter response to a situation of vertiginous cultural confusion. Anderson was never going to go full Bujalski (or even partial Baumbach), but The Darjeeling Limited (2007), his most freely shot film, does demonstrate a puncture in his hermetically sealed filmic world. Like the movie’s characters, who travel to India looking for enlightenment, Anderson’s nostalgia is roaming—searching foreign lands for new ideals, new objects, new modes of comportment to replace the old, delegitimized ones. At the film’s climax, the three brothers ditch their inherited monogrammed luggage—the baggage of their upbringing—and find new models for how to live in the simple dignity of rural villagers.
Yet this follow-up to The Life Aquatic, which directly addresses the question of how to live without your parents rather than with them, was followed by the intricately worked stop-motion animation Roald Dahl adaptation Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) and the mid-century fantasia of Moonrise Kingdom (2012), where sets and real settings are arranged and shot as if Anderson were still working in snow-globe-scale miniature. Whereas in earlier films the characters regress in spite of themselves, these films are willful reversions to childhood—explicitly invoking children’s literature and restaging youthful exploits.
In retrospect these appealing but uneven films, Moonrise Kingdom in particular, seem to reflect a larger mood of cultural indecision. The critiques of American history that would soon be labeled “wokeness” were gathering force even as Obama’s 2008 campaign promised reconciliation with that history through the call to renew, not abandon, claims of American exceptionalism and unity. In Moonrise, a 1960s American childhood is a terrifying, lonely thing, characterized by loss and abandonment; yet by the end of the film its two all-American child-heroes are united in improbable matrimony. It’s Anderson’s last-ditch, not entirely convincing attempt to resurrect the values he had championed throughout his career, to return to the reconciliation between fantasy and reality that characterized his earliest films.
It is clear enough from the perspective of 2026 that, by the early 2010s, the Obama-era ideological project had failed to realize its optimistic vision of a morally rejuvenated, American-led international order. A mismanaged recession had wreaked havoc across the globe, the forever wars raged on and waves of neo-nationalist reaction set in around the world, arriving in spectacular fashion to the United States in 2016.
Since then, we’ve experienced a rolling symbolic crisis as people debate the meaning of our past and its relationship to the present. Is America racist? Is Trump a fascist? These interminable debates make more sense if we understand the role nostalgia plays in driving them. We feel that the present doesn’t align with how the world is supposed to be; we feel, too, that all the old answers about how the world is supposed to be and why it isn’t yet that way no longer suffice. These anxieties have erupted, over the past decade, in alternatively outlandish and terrifying ways. Would-be revolutionaries and techno-cultural entrepreneurs, among others, have arrived with manifestos in hand, ready to deploy nostalgia—for pre-woke America, for pre-neoliberal America, for prewar America, for precapitalist society, for pre-agricultural man—to solve the current impasse.
In times of perceived stability, nostalgia is a conservative force, socially if not always personally. By casting an imagined past in the guise of an eternal order, it naturalizes the world of today—think of Greco-Roman myth or the 1950s Western, which both rework the past to justify present-day mores. In times of perceived instability and decadence, though, nostalgia can be creative, even radical. One could think here of the history painter turned revolutionary Jacques-Louis David, whose severe lines self-consciously reflected the Jacobin project of reordering society according to a fictional classicism. Just as nostalgia has a potentially therapeutic function during personal crisis, it can flip, in moments of social and political crisis, from being a conservative force to a revolutionary one. Because the present is up for grabs, the past is too, and we disguise our forward-looking aspirations in historical garb.
History paintings depicted ideals, stripped of our world’s errors. Anderson’s films appear to do something similar: the stylization seems to say, This is a story that shows how things ought to be, not how they are. In the early films, quickly evoked framing devices (curtains and books opening and closing) gave us permission to take satisfaction in events working out according to eternal moral laws. But over time, Anderson has complicated this picture: his narratives, nested like matryoshka dolls, consistently frustrate the audience’s desire for a tidy takeaway. Where history paintings idealized the past, Anderson’s “history films” depict idealization at work.
●
Based on the writings of Stefan Zweig, 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel is set in the cosmopolitan prewar Europe the Jewish-Viennese author held dear—one where manners, literature and art matter more than nationality, where prejudice isn’t so much wrong as unsophisticated. But while the trappings of European culture are punctiliously maintained in the hotel, Grand Budapest doesn’t simply endorse the old ways. The central irony of the film is that it isn’t the aristocrats who are upholding the values of their own crumbling society, it’s the servants—both in trivial terms (expensive scents, rectilinear décor, politesse) and important ones (courage, dignity). The protagonists of the film, hotelier M. Gustave and his loyal lobby boy Zero, are heroic because they have chosen these values, not inherited them; arguably, they’ve made them up. As Zero says about M. Gustave: “To be frank, I think his world had vanished long before he ever entered it. But I will say, he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace.” Because they know the hotel is an oasis they’ve created, because they know it’s not “real” (that is, backed up by force), Zero and M. Gustave alone possess the resources to uphold its values. Here, following his middle period of searching, was a nostalgic impulse Anderson could finally accept—fighting to preserve a world that is self-consciously created rather than handed down.
After the screwball-comedy plot of prison breaks and art heists happily concludes, M. Gustave is shot dead by fascists, Zero’s wife Agatha dies from illness, and Zero lives out his days alone in the hotel’s decaying husk. With Grand Budapest, Anderson said, he had wanted to do justice to a “series of events in Europe [that] are somehow still right in the middle of our lives.” This motivation seems a little odd when you consider the liberties Anderson takes with that “series of events,” such as eliding two world wars. Yet the film’s last-minute swerve into tragedy helps clarify its relationship to “actual” history. Back in 2014, it was easy to scoff (or swoon) at the film’s veneration of bygone gentility. Watching the film today, one gives rather more weight to Zero’s statement that he doesn’t live in the hotel in memory of “his world”—that is, M. Gustave’s world—but for Agatha. Personal heartbreak stands in for the eruption of history: for the destruction by events of the ageless, imaginary worlds that Anderson, Zweig, M. Gustave and Zero had each sustained through their fictive nostalgias. Zero’s fate thus suggests a much more ambivalent endpoint for the inveterate nostalgist than Anderson’s earlier films. The nostalgia object (Western culture, old-world Europe, America, whatever), figured here as the decrepit hotel, isn’t a source of heroic rejuvenation or happiness or even particularly useful; it is instead a thing, a place, that you can’t give up for a simple reason: because everything you love is there.
The tensions running through Grand Budapest exploded into the open in 2015, and Anderson had to confront the rise of an even more committed nostalgist than he: Donald Trump. At first glance, it would be hard to differentiate Anderson’s response to Trump’s political project from that of many other aging liberals. In the stop-motion Isle of Dogs, from 2018, a boy, his dog and a student journalist come together to overthrow a would-be dictator hell-bent on annihilating all canines. At times the movie feels like another regression, encased in the larger #Resistance moment of yearning for the supposed clarity of twentieth-century politics, of democracy versus totalitarianism, decency versus domination, truth versus lies. (The film’s liberal opposition is called the Science Party.) Yet if this is a parable it is an unstable one, its aw-shucks wholesomeness coexisting uneasily with the moral and technological disasters of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima.
Where Isle of Dogs took its stylistic inspiration from anime, incorporating stop-motion, text overlays and split-screen images, the kaleidoscopic, and far more pessimistic, French Dispatch marks a return to live action but discards any lingering traces of realist composition. Instead of carefully framed shots of sealed, selfsame worlds rendered in intricate detail, we get a reel of flattened images with multiple overlapping topographies of animation, text, actor and backdrop. Though it was received by critics as an ode to the New Yorker (which ran five pieces about it!) or as a “love letter to journalism” in defiance of Trumpian attacks on the media, The French Dispatch is more of an obituary. In the film, the narration comes from journalists reminiscing about their Dispatch stories long after the magazine has closed, to an audience that has probably never read them. They have become Important Writers, interviewees rather than interviewers. A fresco painted under tortuous conditions now sits in a private museum; Timothée Chalamet’s student radical Zeffirelli has his likeness “mass produced and shrink-wrap packaged” and posthumously “sold like bubble gum to the hero-inspired, who hope to see themselves like this.” This is a process the journalists critique but also partake in, spinning their own writerly myths. Though ultimately tragic, Grand Budapest’s most lasting images are of M. Gustave’s bejeweled world and what he sacrifices for it; here, inspiring images from the past are commodified, rendered inert.
The surface reading of French Dispatch is that its collage of narratives reproduces the effect of reading a mid-century magazine. But another way of understanding the fragmentation on display—shifting almost frame by frame between animation, tableau vivant, gray scale and green screen—is as expressing the breakdown of totalized narrative: what happens when the creative potential of nostalgia is stifled, when the world you yearn for slips further and further away and it feels impossible to muster any ideal that could survive scrutiny from more than one angle, a nostalgia that could be justifiably maintained for more than a minute, a scene, a frame. Far from presenting a unified vision of the good life from the past that must be restored today, à la neoclassicism, French Dispatch pointedly rejects the idea that memories of a golden age can save us. Often now it feels as if Anderson is challenging himself: Can he still feel any nostalgia at all?
●
In Anderson’s next film, Asteroid City, the setting has flipped from a diegetic representation of the characters’ preferred world to a catastrophe they’re trying to ignore. Like Grand Budapest and French Dispatch, it is yet another nested narrative: a film about a documentary about a play about an astronomy convention in the Southwestern desert. Near the beginning of the play, Jason Schwartzman’s Augie Steenbeck nonchalantly snaps a photograph of a nuclear explosion. A caravan of shooting cops and robbers occasionally races down the road; atom-bomb tests rattle the glasses in the diner. The characters, though noticing these intrusions, do not exhibit undue alarm, literalizing to semi-comic effect the emotional repression of Augie, a grizzled war photographer and widower, and a depressed studio actress named Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson). Augie can’t bring himself to tell his children that their mother is dead, and can only express his feelings for Midge by burning his hand on a hot plate. Talking about their mutual negligence as parents, Midge declares: “I wish, at least, I felt guilty, but I don’t experience that emotion, if I understand it correctly. I’ve played it, of course.” Both are unable to regard the feeling that things should be different as anything more than a childish wish. “I don’t like the way that guy looked at us,” Augie says of an alien encounter. “Like we’re doomed.” “Maybe we are,” Midge replies.
Previous Anderson characters repress reality for the sake of living out their fantasies. In Asteroid City, the characters repress fantasy, but the movie repeatedly demonstrates how affectations of “realism” are themselves fantastical, reality-denying. You can’t look at what’s there, because if you did, you’d start screaming. The film cleverly fuses two classic film genres—the Western and the alien-invasion flick—to nightmarish effect: showing how readily the feeling that something is wrong can get subducted into the scenery. From the perspective of 1955, the law of the frontier was a salutary form of nostalgia: a model of nonconformist individualism that could yet serve the greater good. But in Asteroid City, cowboy stoicism is a cope. To locate any hope of deliverance, the play inverts the tropes of its other 1950s source genre. Here aliens are cast not as apocalyptic invaders but as potential saviors—harbingers of a better world to come.
In the film, the oscillation between the play and its production somewhat resembles the metafiction of directors rarely associated with Anderson, like Abbas Kiarostami. Yet where Kiarostami’s films tend to blur the lines between performance and reality, Asteroid City calls attention to the fact that the production is itself a literal production. The vivid images of the play—drenched in Anderson’s famous pastels and earth tones—are intercut with stark black-and-white shots of the action behind the scenes, taking place in a 1950s method-acting netherworld. The difficult trick demanded of an actor in an Anderson film has always been to stipple the surface of assumed manners with tells of inner tension. In his early films, the journey from adolescence to adulthood is marked out by manneristic dignity, the character learning how to live up to an ideal. In Asteroid City, Anderson’s only film that shows actual actors acting (or rather, actors acting as fictional actors acting), the actors’ task isn’t to make the characters better. Many of the movie’s best scenes are punctuated by long silences, the camera holding on characters struggling to inhabit social roles they aren’t meant to be playing. To use the terms of method acting, the zadacha (problem) faced by every actor is how to express emotion when that’s precisely what their character cannot do. That zadacha parallels Anderson’s own: how to idealize when that’s precisely what he, like so many of us, can no longer do. From our vantage, the film’s mid-century images and affectations index a nostalgia whose every expression has been warped; it is creative like nuclear radiation.
In gestures like Augie’s or monologues like Midge’s, an actor can make the ordinary extraordinary, but not by falsifying emotion. Often the stage strikes us as more real than life because good actors can succeed in conveying what they’re feeling, whereas most of the time we cannot. Realist approaches to theater like method acting are, in one sense, anti-nostalgic, in that they seek to strip away inherited actorly affectations. On a more fundamental level, though, they’re exercises in nostalgia, because the goal is to make life assume the dimensions we can’t help but feel it’s supposed have, a feat ironically achieved by pretending a bunch of imaginary stuff is real.
The sense that there’s a better world that’s somehow been misplaced is not one that can be addressed through art, or at all. But that impossibility, that gap between real and ideal, is the generative force that drives people to do crazy things like put on a play, make a movie or launch a revolution. In the confusion of past and present, creation and destruction, Asteroid City’s nuclear imagery is an apt symbol of nostalgia: a reservoir of tensile energy that must, sooner or later, be released. One wonders whether Anderson’s later films would be more popular if he presented a more explicit vision of how that energy should be channeled, if he would issue a manifesto akin to David’s paintings or Zeffirelli’s scribbling. Yet Anderson is no Jacobin: the only ideals he has ever clearly proclaimed have been private ones. To remake a disordered world according to a new ideal is a violent task; as Trotsky observed about “old revolutionists” like himself: “None of us is scared by firing squads.” Anderson’s protagonists were always the ones lined up against the wall, not the ones with the rifles—at least until The Phoenician Scheme.
●
What Anderson’s history films reflect about our era better than any others I know is the feeling of certainties coming undone, the piercing of illusions one after another. First, the troubling reveal, in Grand Budapest, that M. Gustave’s sacrifice does not yield a happy ending; then the reckoning in French Dispatch with the journalists’ manufacturing of myths for money; then the strange inversions of Asteroid City, where the possibility of saving human society is so remote it requires alien intervention. The bigger the problem, the deeper the temptation to retreat into cynicism or delusion, discarding more and more of what you thought the world ought to be like. And so finally we arrive at Anderson’s strangest and most recent film, The Phoenician Scheme, where heroism takes the unexpected form of Zsa-zsa Korda, an arms dealer from a long line of arms dealers who knows nothing but violence.
Korda is a distinctly Trumpian character: a businessman and hard-nosed pragmatist, but also a visionary. Racing against time, and in the teeth of intense opposition from a coterie of deep-state “bureaucrats,” Korda hopes to complete one last, legacy-defining project before dying at the hands of one of his many enemies. He neglects his children, brings a box of hand grenades to every negotiation and openly acknowledges his plans to enlist slave labor. His recurrent dream sequences, where he faces judgment from God (Bill Murray) and a panel of angry ex-wives, are his only contact with a higher order—his only indication that there might be a better world than the one he knows. The question the film stages is not whether you can feel nostalgia when you have nothing to be nostalgic for—of course you can—but whether you can make creative, even heroic use of that feeling when no images of the good life, whether inherited or adopted, still seem valid. Or, as this same question presents itself to Liesl, a novitiate nun and Korda’s estranged daughter turned heir presumptive, can a blood-soaked inheritance be repurposed for good works?
The “good works” in this case are literal: an infrastructure project in the Middle East. The Phoenician Scheme’s plot consists of Korda and Liesl’s fundraising, which, while dramatically a little flat, does usefully indicate Anderson’s identification with Korda. (The series of backroom deals Korda makes to realize his improbable project are a pretty good analog for what it takes to get a high-production-value indie film made today.) And though the film retains Anderson’s ironic edge, it does venture a “yes” to the above question, albeit with caveats.
With his daughter’s support, Korda gives up his entire fortune to finalize the project, to the benefit of millions. But this success does not happen because Korda achieves the epiphanies of Anderson’s early protagonists. His motives remain a mystery, above all to himself. He doesn’t know why he wants to build the project, just like he doesn’t know why he’s having this midlife crisis, just like he doesn’t know why he craves money. Ultimately, he accepts his daughter’s religion and converts not because he believes, but because it’s hers, trusting to his instinctual need for love. For a nonreligious filmmaker like Anderson, it’s striking how much of Phoenician Scheme is taken up by explicit conversations about faith. But the faith he’s concerned with isn’t a faith in God, or not necessarily so; it’s the hope that a better world exists, one manifesting in shards through love and through art; it’s faith in the feeling of nostalgia itself.
Toward the very end of Asteroid City, the actors chant the mysterious line, “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.” Given Anderson’s earlier films, there’s a tempting interpretation here: you need to first allow yourself to be seduced by fantasy so that you can instantiate those values in the real world. But Korda’s appointments with his heavenly tribunal, sparked in each case by a near-death experience, suggest a more troubling interpretation. Stephen Dedalus described history as a nightmare from which he was trying to awake. Will we awaken from the nightmare in this lifetime, or is the slumber Anderson is talking about a properly eschatological one, a death leading to a better world to come? What would it mean for us—living in the twilight of American empire, or at least one version of it—to follow Korda and “give up” our inheritance of wealth and power in service of other dreams?
No doubt this will strike some as a ridiculous question. But history tells us that the dreams of ridiculous men and women have a way of coming true, if not in the fashion they anticipated, and that the track record of self-conceived “realists”—a type identifiable above all by a certain tone of knowing contempt, the same tone adopted by Anderson’s harshest critics—is checkered at best. Perhaps Anderson’s films have been misunderstood for so long because that contempt disguises a fear: that the realities we cling to are themselves fantasies, ones that, soon enough, will be swept away by history’s winds. Perhaps a dreamer like Anderson can only be fully appreciated once he’s gone. Perhaps the dream has to end for nostalgia to do its work.
Photo credit: Roger Do Minh, Asteroid City, 2021.
Most of us, at least once, come to a moment when the contradictions between the world as we prefer to imagine it and the world as it apparently is become impossible to ignore. Our defenses overwhelmed and our sustaining delusions exposed, we feel an acute sense of loss, a falling away of fixity and coherence. It is at these moments that nostalgia’s pull is strongest. The same could be said in times of cultural and political crisis. The world is burning; the country is collapsing; the only thing certain about the future is that it won’t look like the past. In this situation, we can argue with our feelings and prove the safety we yearn for is another delusion: our childhood wasn’t actually happy; our nation’s past was full of horrors. Or we can pick up the sword of reaction: take our longing for the past at face value and attempt to reorder the world back into its proper shape. Both quests, however, are quixotic and never-ending. Nostalgia is ineradicable: dangerous when channeled, but even more dangerous to ignore.
The question, then, is not whether to feel nostalgia but what to do with it. When the rush of events debunks our received wisdom about history and our place in it, new myths must be made that can explain how the world is supposed to be and why it isn’t that way, at least not yet. New objects for our nostalgia are needed. In America, the argument over what those new objects should be, the debate over when things went wrong (2016, 2008, 1992, 1964, 1865, 1776, 1619) is what we call “culture war.” And it’s a marker of the depth of our crisis, in symbolic terms at least, that politics and culture war have become virtually synonymous.
This question of what to do with nostalgia finds its synecdoche in the question of what to do with Wes Anderson. Few American artists have faced the charge of nostalgia (and the sundry accessory crimes of hipsterdom, tweeness, sentimental fetishism and mechanistic storytelling) as persistently as Anderson, and it’s not hard to see why. His films insistently close themselves off from our quotidian world, using detailed miniatures, sideways dolly shots, faded pastels, straight-on camera perspective and, more recently, animation. The values proposed by his films often seem strikingly anachronistic, even conservative. Patriarchs are redeemed; pants are high-waisted, suits full cut; and institutions (prep schools, fancy hotels, the New Yorker) are celebrated as oases from a fallen (which is to say a contemporary) world.
In his first few films, the stylization that makes Anderson’s work immediately recognizable is diegetic. The elaborate interiors and perfectly symmetrical mise-en-scènes—which reflect the protagonists’ neurotic attachment to childhood or some imagined past—contrast with glimpses of real life, such as the New York streetscape in The Royal Tenenbaums. The plots reconcile fantasy and reality, past and present, by staging a collision between them, and at last the characters are forced to grow up. As Anderson himself has aged, though, his stylization has only intensified. His recent films blend animation, miniatures and on-screen text with actors and on-location shooting, to achieve a degree of visual control so total as to suggest a renunciation of reality altogether. Few of Anderson’s most pugnacious critics still bother to write reviews of his films, but when they do, the complaint sounds something like this: If his characters grow up and move on, why can’t he? It’s easy to conclude that Anderson has fallen prey to the nostalgia trap he once depicted, especially as his films have become more deeply ensconced in the past. (None of his movies have taken place in the present since 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited.)
Yet there are reasons to doubt this thesis. Starting with The Grand Budapest Hotel in 2014, every live-action film Anderson has made has been set in historical eras marked not by paradisical twee but psychic flux: interwar Europe, the American 1950s, a decolonizing Middle East. His movies are also growing more violent: The Phoenician Scheme, which came out last year, begins with a man’s torso getting blown off. Those who would argue that Anderson’s historical turn proves he’s retreated into nostalgic fantasy cannot account for this grimness, nor for the increasingly baroque framing devices and frequent dissonant notes that call into question whether these lovingly constructed environs are supposed to be taken as ideals, as actual history, as personal fantasy or something else altogether.
For those who dislike Anderson, these later films are lifeless exercises in aestheticization. His defenders, meanwhile, apologetically point to his formal ingenuity, calling him an “auteur” and saying that films like Asteroid City (2023) are “about” artifice. Neither perspective can account for Anderson’s evolution from making movies about characters stuck in the past to making movies set in the past. Neither perspective grasps the trajectory of Anderson’s development in concrete historical terms: as an American nostalgist whose career has coincided with the collapse of any stable sense of what Americans ought to be nostalgic for.
Watching Rushmore (1998) or The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), we could delight in Anderson’s make-believe, his winking anachronisms, his likable losers in ascots and smoking heroines in berets. Watching films like Asteroid City, where the American 1950s that produced much of Anderson’s iconography are depicted as a repressive nightmare, we’re denied that comfort. In its place are the anguished contortions of an artist searching for a middle path between an unselfconscious and vindictive nostalgia (“Make America Great Again”) and discarding nostalgia altogether (“America was never great”). The discomfort that Anderson’s later work inspires speaks, I think, to our own inability to find an aesthetics that can at once meet our demands for idealization and realism. Can art provide an image of a better world while honestly grappling with the actual situation we face? What is there even left to idealize?
●
Anderson’s first three films—Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums—are best characterized as comedies: each one ends, if not always with a wedding, then with pairing off, release, reconciliation. With his fourth film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Anderson turns toward tragedy, and provides no reconciliation between fantasy and reality. Here, the washed-up documentary filmmaker Zissou, struggling to raise money for one last adventure, invites a pilot claiming to be his illegitimate son into the hermetically sealed world of his submarine. After some forgettable capering, the “son” dies abruptly in a helicopter crash.
Released in 2004, The Life Aquatic was the first picture Anderson shot after the September 11th attacks and his first released during the United States’ dual imperial wars. It also marked the beginning of a negative shift in Anderson’s reception: Roger Ebert described The Life Aquatic as suffering from a case of “terminal whimsy.” By the time n+1’s What Was the Hipster symposium was published in 2011, Mark Greif could refer to Anderson as the paradigmatic figure of the hipster “radicalization and aestheticization of the mode of pastiche,” where “reflexivity is used purely to get back to emotion, especially in the drive toward childhood” and irony is deployed “without bitterness or critique.” Detectable in these gathering criticisms is a resentment toward the smoothness of turn-of-the-millennium bourgeois American existence when set alongside the gathering costs of the war on terror abroad. In this context, it’s easy to see why the ironical, self-consciously nostalgic attitude many artists adopted in response to a supposedly post-historical America became such a critical target. Here you’ve been out marching against the Iraq War, and this guy was building a model of a deep-sea submarine.
Though pop culture’s twee moment is long over, Anderson’s reception is still marked by this eye-rolling. In a typical negative review of 2023’s Asteroid City, for example, Mark Kermode could claim that “no one goes to a Wes Anderson movie expecting heartfelt melodrama or realistic human emotions and interactions. They go for intricately crafted doll’s house dramas featuring boxes-within-boxes narratives and arch, satirical conundrums.” That the view of Anderson as willfully avoiding reality gained ground with the release of The Life Aquatic—and that it became so identified with Anderson’s “aesthetic”—is ironic, because the film is clearly an attack on the desire to regress into a neverland where American domination never falters, where daddy still reigns. In his previous films, characters stuck in suspended adolescence need to learn from their fathers. Learn what? In The Royal Tenenbaums, the answer runs something like this: patriarchy may be a scam; family values may be a scam; America itself may be a scam, and all these scams leave scars. Yet these scams must be negotiated, not denied. Traumas are reenacted to be overcome, and the same patrimonial values that led characters astray are repurposed for third-act good. Not so in The Life Aquatic. Now, trying to be like daddy gets you killed. As it turns out, he isn’t even your father. Royal Tenenbaum and Steve Zissou are both paradigmatic mid-century American figures; they’re about the right age to be Anderson’s own father. In the post-9/11 world, it is these authority figures, the people who got us into this mess, whom Anderson and Greif are both railing against. Yet they also partially identify with the patriarchs, giving their critiques the bite of self-loathing.
Anderson described the ending of The Life Aquatic as walking “the edge between the corny thing and the thing that moves you.” But what Anderson couldn’t quite figure out—the reason the film feels like a baggy admixture of whimsy and anger—was how to give meaning to tragedy. His early comedies can be read as cautionary tales about nostalgia, yet they still manage in their final acts to insist on its value: yes, your fantasies aren’t real, but you’re not stupid to have had them. But without the retroactive justification of a happy ending, Anderson’s laboriously constructed play world in The Life Aquatic ends up being a simple setup for disillusionment. The problem with The Life Aquatic, in the end, isn’t that it’s too naïve, but that it’s jaded. What’s missing isn’t a critique of nostalgia—that corny thing—but an answer to the original question of what to do with it—whether, and how, we can let ourselves be moved.
●
Bereft of that answer, another filmmaker might have abandoned artifice for realism, the gauzy dream of an imagined past for the grit of the present. In the aughts, mumblecore films like Andrew Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha (2002) exemplified this latter response to a situation of vertiginous cultural confusion. Anderson was never going to go full Bujalski (or even partial Baumbach), but The Darjeeling Limited (2007), his most freely shot film, does demonstrate a puncture in his hermetically sealed filmic world. Like the movie’s characters, who travel to India looking for enlightenment, Anderson’s nostalgia is roaming—searching foreign lands for new ideals, new objects, new modes of comportment to replace the old, delegitimized ones. At the film’s climax, the three brothers ditch their inherited monogrammed luggage—the baggage of their upbringing—and find new models for how to live in the simple dignity of rural villagers.
Yet this follow-up to The Life Aquatic, which directly addresses the question of how to live without your parents rather than with them, was followed by the intricately worked stop-motion animation Roald Dahl adaptation Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) and the mid-century fantasia of Moonrise Kingdom (2012), where sets and real settings are arranged and shot as if Anderson were still working in snow-globe-scale miniature. Whereas in earlier films the characters regress in spite of themselves, these films are willful reversions to childhood—explicitly invoking children’s literature and restaging youthful exploits.
In retrospect these appealing but uneven films, Moonrise Kingdom in particular, seem to reflect a larger mood of cultural indecision. The critiques of American history that would soon be labeled “wokeness” were gathering force even as Obama’s 2008 campaign promised reconciliation with that history through the call to renew, not abandon, claims of American exceptionalism and unity. In Moonrise, a 1960s American childhood is a terrifying, lonely thing, characterized by loss and abandonment; yet by the end of the film its two all-American child-heroes are united in improbable matrimony. It’s Anderson’s last-ditch, not entirely convincing attempt to resurrect the values he had championed throughout his career, to return to the reconciliation between fantasy and reality that characterized his earliest films.
It is clear enough from the perspective of 2026 that, by the early 2010s, the Obama-era ideological project had failed to realize its optimistic vision of a morally rejuvenated, American-led international order. A mismanaged recession had wreaked havoc across the globe, the forever wars raged on and waves of neo-nationalist reaction set in around the world, arriving in spectacular fashion to the United States in 2016.
Since then, we’ve experienced a rolling symbolic crisis as people debate the meaning of our past and its relationship to the present. Is America racist? Is Trump a fascist? These interminable debates make more sense if we understand the role nostalgia plays in driving them. We feel that the present doesn’t align with how the world is supposed to be; we feel, too, that all the old answers about how the world is supposed to be and why it isn’t yet that way no longer suffice. These anxieties have erupted, over the past decade, in alternatively outlandish and terrifying ways. Would-be revolutionaries and techno-cultural entrepreneurs, among others, have arrived with manifestos in hand, ready to deploy nostalgia—for pre-woke America, for pre-neoliberal America, for prewar America, for precapitalist society, for pre-agricultural man—to solve the current impasse.
In times of perceived stability, nostalgia is a conservative force, socially if not always personally. By casting an imagined past in the guise of an eternal order, it naturalizes the world of today—think of Greco-Roman myth or the 1950s Western, which both rework the past to justify present-day mores. In times of perceived instability and decadence, though, nostalgia can be creative, even radical. One could think here of the history painter turned revolutionary Jacques-Louis David, whose severe lines self-consciously reflected the Jacobin project of reordering society according to a fictional classicism. Just as nostalgia has a potentially therapeutic function during personal crisis, it can flip, in moments of social and political crisis, from being a conservative force to a revolutionary one. Because the present is up for grabs, the past is too, and we disguise our forward-looking aspirations in historical garb.
History paintings depicted ideals, stripped of our world’s errors. Anderson’s films appear to do something similar: the stylization seems to say, This is a story that shows how things ought to be, not how they are. In the early films, quickly evoked framing devices (curtains and books opening and closing) gave us permission to take satisfaction in events working out according to eternal moral laws. But over time, Anderson has complicated this picture: his narratives, nested like matryoshka dolls, consistently frustrate the audience’s desire for a tidy takeaway. Where history paintings idealized the past, Anderson’s “history films” depict idealization at work.
●
Based on the writings of Stefan Zweig, 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel is set in the cosmopolitan prewar Europe the Jewish-Viennese author held dear—one where manners, literature and art matter more than nationality, where prejudice isn’t so much wrong as unsophisticated. But while the trappings of European culture are punctiliously maintained in the hotel, Grand Budapest doesn’t simply endorse the old ways. The central irony of the film is that it isn’t the aristocrats who are upholding the values of their own crumbling society, it’s the servants—both in trivial terms (expensive scents, rectilinear décor, politesse) and important ones (courage, dignity). The protagonists of the film, hotelier M. Gustave and his loyal lobby boy Zero, are heroic because they have chosen these values, not inherited them; arguably, they’ve made them up. As Zero says about M. Gustave: “To be frank, I think his world had vanished long before he ever entered it. But I will say, he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace.” Because they know the hotel is an oasis they’ve created, because they know it’s not “real” (that is, backed up by force), Zero and M. Gustave alone possess the resources to uphold its values. Here, following his middle period of searching, was a nostalgic impulse Anderson could finally accept—fighting to preserve a world that is self-consciously created rather than handed down.
After the screwball-comedy plot of prison breaks and art heists happily concludes, M. Gustave is shot dead by fascists, Zero’s wife Agatha dies from illness, and Zero lives out his days alone in the hotel’s decaying husk. With Grand Budapest, Anderson said, he had wanted to do justice to a “series of events in Europe [that] are somehow still right in the middle of our lives.” This motivation seems a little odd when you consider the liberties Anderson takes with that “series of events,” such as eliding two world wars. Yet the film’s last-minute swerve into tragedy helps clarify its relationship to “actual” history. Back in 2014, it was easy to scoff (or swoon) at the film’s veneration of bygone gentility. Watching the film today, one gives rather more weight to Zero’s statement that he doesn’t live in the hotel in memory of “his world”—that is, M. Gustave’s world—but for Agatha. Personal heartbreak stands in for the eruption of history: for the destruction by events of the ageless, imaginary worlds that Anderson, Zweig, M. Gustave and Zero had each sustained through their fictive nostalgias. Zero’s fate thus suggests a much more ambivalent endpoint for the inveterate nostalgist than Anderson’s earlier films. The nostalgia object (Western culture, old-world Europe, America, whatever), figured here as the decrepit hotel, isn’t a source of heroic rejuvenation or happiness or even particularly useful; it is instead a thing, a place, that you can’t give up for a simple reason: because everything you love is there.
The tensions running through Grand Budapest exploded into the open in 2015, and Anderson had to confront the rise of an even more committed nostalgist than he: Donald Trump. At first glance, it would be hard to differentiate Anderson’s response to Trump’s political project from that of many other aging liberals. In the stop-motion Isle of Dogs, from 2018, a boy, his dog and a student journalist come together to overthrow a would-be dictator hell-bent on annihilating all canines. At times the movie feels like another regression, encased in the larger #Resistance moment of yearning for the supposed clarity of twentieth-century politics, of democracy versus totalitarianism, decency versus domination, truth versus lies. (The film’s liberal opposition is called the Science Party.) Yet if this is a parable it is an unstable one, its aw-shucks wholesomeness coexisting uneasily with the moral and technological disasters of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima.
Where Isle of Dogs took its stylistic inspiration from anime, incorporating stop-motion, text overlays and split-screen images, the kaleidoscopic, and far more pessimistic, French Dispatch marks a return to live action but discards any lingering traces of realist composition. Instead of carefully framed shots of sealed, selfsame worlds rendered in intricate detail, we get a reel of flattened images with multiple overlapping topographies of animation, text, actor and backdrop. Though it was received by critics as an ode to the New Yorker (which ran five pieces about it!) or as a “love letter to journalism” in defiance of Trumpian attacks on the media, The French Dispatch is more of an obituary. In the film, the narration comes from journalists reminiscing about their Dispatch stories long after the magazine has closed, to an audience that has probably never read them. They have become Important Writers, interviewees rather than interviewers. A fresco painted under tortuous conditions now sits in a private museum; Timothée Chalamet’s student radical Zeffirelli has his likeness “mass produced and shrink-wrap packaged” and posthumously “sold like bubble gum to the hero-inspired, who hope to see themselves like this.” This is a process the journalists critique but also partake in, spinning their own writerly myths. Though ultimately tragic, Grand Budapest’s most lasting images are of M. Gustave’s bejeweled world and what he sacrifices for it; here, inspiring images from the past are commodified, rendered inert.
The surface reading of French Dispatch is that its collage of narratives reproduces the effect of reading a mid-century magazine. But another way of understanding the fragmentation on display—shifting almost frame by frame between animation, tableau vivant, gray scale and green screen—is as expressing the breakdown of totalized narrative: what happens when the creative potential of nostalgia is stifled, when the world you yearn for slips further and further away and it feels impossible to muster any ideal that could survive scrutiny from more than one angle, a nostalgia that could be justifiably maintained for more than a minute, a scene, a frame. Far from presenting a unified vision of the good life from the past that must be restored today, à la neoclassicism, French Dispatch pointedly rejects the idea that memories of a golden age can save us. Often now it feels as if Anderson is challenging himself: Can he still feel any nostalgia at all?
●
In Anderson’s next film, Asteroid City, the setting has flipped from a diegetic representation of the characters’ preferred world to a catastrophe they’re trying to ignore. Like Grand Budapest and French Dispatch, it is yet another nested narrative: a film about a documentary about a play about an astronomy convention in the Southwestern desert. Near the beginning of the play, Jason Schwartzman’s Augie Steenbeck nonchalantly snaps a photograph of a nuclear explosion. A caravan of shooting cops and robbers occasionally races down the road; atom-bomb tests rattle the glasses in the diner. The characters, though noticing these intrusions, do not exhibit undue alarm, literalizing to semi-comic effect the emotional repression of Augie, a grizzled war photographer and widower, and a depressed studio actress named Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson). Augie can’t bring himself to tell his children that their mother is dead, and can only express his feelings for Midge by burning his hand on a hot plate. Talking about their mutual negligence as parents, Midge declares: “I wish, at least, I felt guilty, but I don’t experience that emotion, if I understand it correctly. I’ve played it, of course.” Both are unable to regard the feeling that things should be different as anything more than a childish wish. “I don’t like the way that guy looked at us,” Augie says of an alien encounter. “Like we’re doomed.” “Maybe we are,” Midge replies.
Previous Anderson characters repress reality for the sake of living out their fantasies. In Asteroid City, the characters repress fantasy, but the movie repeatedly demonstrates how affectations of “realism” are themselves fantastical, reality-denying. You can’t look at what’s there, because if you did, you’d start screaming. The film cleverly fuses two classic film genres—the Western and the alien-invasion flick—to nightmarish effect: showing how readily the feeling that something is wrong can get subducted into the scenery. From the perspective of 1955, the law of the frontier was a salutary form of nostalgia: a model of nonconformist individualism that could yet serve the greater good. But in Asteroid City, cowboy stoicism is a cope. To locate any hope of deliverance, the play inverts the tropes of its other 1950s source genre. Here aliens are cast not as apocalyptic invaders but as potential saviors—harbingers of a better world to come.
In the film, the oscillation between the play and its production somewhat resembles the metafiction of directors rarely associated with Anderson, like Abbas Kiarostami. Yet where Kiarostami’s films tend to blur the lines between performance and reality, Asteroid City calls attention to the fact that the production is itself a literal production. The vivid images of the play—drenched in Anderson’s famous pastels and earth tones—are intercut with stark black-and-white shots of the action behind the scenes, taking place in a 1950s method-acting netherworld. The difficult trick demanded of an actor in an Anderson film has always been to stipple the surface of assumed manners with tells of inner tension. In his early films, the journey from adolescence to adulthood is marked out by manneristic dignity, the character learning how to live up to an ideal. In Asteroid City, Anderson’s only film that shows actual actors acting (or rather, actors acting as fictional actors acting), the actors’ task isn’t to make the characters better. Many of the movie’s best scenes are punctuated by long silences, the camera holding on characters struggling to inhabit social roles they aren’t meant to be playing. To use the terms of method acting, the zadacha (problem) faced by every actor is how to express emotion when that’s precisely what their character cannot do. That zadacha parallels Anderson’s own: how to idealize when that’s precisely what he, like so many of us, can no longer do. From our vantage, the film’s mid-century images and affectations index a nostalgia whose every expression has been warped; it is creative like nuclear radiation.
In gestures like Augie’s or monologues like Midge’s, an actor can make the ordinary extraordinary, but not by falsifying emotion. Often the stage strikes us as more real than life because good actors can succeed in conveying what they’re feeling, whereas most of the time we cannot. Realist approaches to theater like method acting are, in one sense, anti-nostalgic, in that they seek to strip away inherited actorly affectations. On a more fundamental level, though, they’re exercises in nostalgia, because the goal is to make life assume the dimensions we can’t help but feel it’s supposed have, a feat ironically achieved by pretending a bunch of imaginary stuff is real.
The sense that there’s a better world that’s somehow been misplaced is not one that can be addressed through art, or at all. But that impossibility, that gap between real and ideal, is the generative force that drives people to do crazy things like put on a play, make a movie or launch a revolution. In the confusion of past and present, creation and destruction, Asteroid City’s nuclear imagery is an apt symbol of nostalgia: a reservoir of tensile energy that must, sooner or later, be released. One wonders whether Anderson’s later films would be more popular if he presented a more explicit vision of how that energy should be channeled, if he would issue a manifesto akin to David’s paintings or Zeffirelli’s scribbling. Yet Anderson is no Jacobin: the only ideals he has ever clearly proclaimed have been private ones. To remake a disordered world according to a new ideal is a violent task; as Trotsky observed about “old revolutionists” like himself: “None of us is scared by firing squads.” Anderson’s protagonists were always the ones lined up against the wall, not the ones with the rifles—at least until The Phoenician Scheme.
●
What Anderson’s history films reflect about our era better than any others I know is the feeling of certainties coming undone, the piercing of illusions one after another. First, the troubling reveal, in Grand Budapest, that M. Gustave’s sacrifice does not yield a happy ending; then the reckoning in French Dispatch with the journalists’ manufacturing of myths for money; then the strange inversions of Asteroid City, where the possibility of saving human society is so remote it requires alien intervention. The bigger the problem, the deeper the temptation to retreat into cynicism or delusion, discarding more and more of what you thought the world ought to be like. And so finally we arrive at Anderson’s strangest and most recent film, The Phoenician Scheme, where heroism takes the unexpected form of Zsa-zsa Korda, an arms dealer from a long line of arms dealers who knows nothing but violence.
Korda is a distinctly Trumpian character: a businessman and hard-nosed pragmatist, but also a visionary. Racing against time, and in the teeth of intense opposition from a coterie of deep-state “bureaucrats,” Korda hopes to complete one last, legacy-defining project before dying at the hands of one of his many enemies. He neglects his children, brings a box of hand grenades to every negotiation and openly acknowledges his plans to enlist slave labor. His recurrent dream sequences, where he faces judgment from God (Bill Murray) and a panel of angry ex-wives, are his only contact with a higher order—his only indication that there might be a better world than the one he knows. The question the film stages is not whether you can feel nostalgia when you have nothing to be nostalgic for—of course you can—but whether you can make creative, even heroic use of that feeling when no images of the good life, whether inherited or adopted, still seem valid. Or, as this same question presents itself to Liesl, a novitiate nun and Korda’s estranged daughter turned heir presumptive, can a blood-soaked inheritance be repurposed for good works?
The “good works” in this case are literal: an infrastructure project in the Middle East. The Phoenician Scheme’s plot consists of Korda and Liesl’s fundraising, which, while dramatically a little flat, does usefully indicate Anderson’s identification with Korda. (The series of backroom deals Korda makes to realize his improbable project are a pretty good analog for what it takes to get a high-production-value indie film made today.) And though the film retains Anderson’s ironic edge, it does venture a “yes” to the above question, albeit with caveats.
With his daughter’s support, Korda gives up his entire fortune to finalize the project, to the benefit of millions. But this success does not happen because Korda achieves the epiphanies of Anderson’s early protagonists. His motives remain a mystery, above all to himself. He doesn’t know why he wants to build the project, just like he doesn’t know why he’s having this midlife crisis, just like he doesn’t know why he craves money. Ultimately, he accepts his daughter’s religion and converts not because he believes, but because it’s hers, trusting to his instinctual need for love. For a nonreligious filmmaker like Anderson, it’s striking how much of Phoenician Scheme is taken up by explicit conversations about faith. But the faith he’s concerned with isn’t a faith in God, or not necessarily so; it’s the hope that a better world exists, one manifesting in shards through love and through art; it’s faith in the feeling of nostalgia itself.
Toward the very end of Asteroid City, the actors chant the mysterious line, “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.” Given Anderson’s earlier films, there’s a tempting interpretation here: you need to first allow yourself to be seduced by fantasy so that you can instantiate those values in the real world. But Korda’s appointments with his heavenly tribunal, sparked in each case by a near-death experience, suggest a more troubling interpretation. Stephen Dedalus described history as a nightmare from which he was trying to awake. Will we awaken from the nightmare in this lifetime, or is the slumber Anderson is talking about a properly eschatological one, a death leading to a better world to come? What would it mean for us—living in the twilight of American empire, or at least one version of it—to follow Korda and “give up” our inheritance of wealth and power in service of other dreams?
No doubt this will strike some as a ridiculous question. But history tells us that the dreams of ridiculous men and women have a way of coming true, if not in the fashion they anticipated, and that the track record of self-conceived “realists”—a type identifiable above all by a certain tone of knowing contempt, the same tone adopted by Anderson’s harshest critics—is checkered at best. Perhaps Anderson’s films have been misunderstood for so long because that contempt disguises a fear: that the realities we cling to are themselves fantasies, ones that, soon enough, will be swept away by history’s winds. Perhaps a dreamer like Anderson can only be fully appreciated once he’s gone. Perhaps the dream has to end for nostalgia to do its work.
Photo credit: Roger Do Minh, Asteroid City, 2021.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.