Snap Movie Apostrophes: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou Retry

You were good to see again, when I could actually hear the dialogue, being the only hipster in the room (my living room). The screening was brought on by a recent re-viewing of Royal T’s, and I’d been burning to see Rushmore again for a while (a weird burning, considering I own it), maybe since I saw I ❤ Huckabees. Anyway, as far as major Wes Anderson themes are concerned—that is, incest and (subsequent) non-reproductive families—I think Rushmore still wins. You are, in a way, basically Rushmore from the perspective of the father, but there’s something not quite right about that, too, as Royal T’s is supposed to be the same thing. Still, there is a way in which Royal is a rough draft for Steve. I’m not sure Steve would have made a lot of sense without the scenes of Royal with Ari and Uzi.

You’re also not quite as precious as I remembered. Sure, the movie is artificial as hell (”Let me tell you about my boat.”), but it carries enough affective charge for me to have even noticed it during the first screening at Doc. And though I cried during “Starálfur” during the first viewing and not the second, it still worked without being cheesy or silly. Furthermore, a lot of your preciousness, perceived or otherwise, is an artifact of your primary themes—incest and non-reproductive familial arrangements. Steve’s initial reaction to Ned, and his saying that he never wanted to be a father, is perfect. Yet, at the same time, Steve plays into the thematics of ownership, and gives his name (along with his desired name) to his kid. And that’s a Peter Pan complex. Incest grows out of immaturity—you’re too immature to realise that you have to work outside of the family strucutre, and non-reproduction comes out of immaturity, too; you don’t have the apparatus to perform your natural role as adult: propagation. And so we get Steve as a man-child (though I hate that term), in his little trainset in the basement (the Belafonte), with a bunch of men and unavailable women. Incest finally grows out of insularity, be that a form of bigotry (we get that in all of Anderson’s work) or physical confinement (that too).

Steve is perhaps more interested in having a slightly obesequious sidekick more than a son—he wants a Robin. Klaus he calls his little brother (Klaus curiously replies that he always considered Steve his father), and he takes up with Werner and Cubbie’s kid right away, even faster than with Ned, who may have been his actual, biological kin.

What does this say about Wes Anderson that he can only make movies about emotionally stunted men who want to sleep with their mothers in a not-really-Freudian way? I have no idea. I imagine his next project will show us.

Finally, I don’t know what my earlier comment about the Kinks and Mothersbaugh was about. Your music is still deadly great, and Seu Jorge is fantastic. Sofia Coppola may have cornered the market on raiding my CD collection to make great soundtracks, but Wes is way ahead of the curve in making soundtracks that end up in my CD collection.