Buried beneath the humour, style, and nostalgic beauty in Wes Anderson’s latest film, loneliness is presented as a necessary condition for creative life.
In the restless, living city of Ennui — home to the French Dispatch — each citizen has a community and a sense of belonging. The old people have the Hovel District, the pickpockets have their cul-de-sac, the students have the Flop Quarter. Even the vermin have woven themselves into the fabric of the city, with the cats colonising rooftops and the rats taking to the subway.
The writers of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, however, are foreigners in this tight-knit city. Whilst, to some extent, they have each other as well as the fierce protection and nurturing of their editor, the film makes no illusions that their expatriate lifestyle is beset with solitude. Nowhere is this more felt than when Lucinda Krementz is cast out of the student movement.
JULIETTE
Why is she participating? She should maintain journalistic neutrality.
Krementz, like her fellow foreigners, cannot pierce those close-knit communities of Ennui. Journalistic Neutrality, then, is a metaphor for the plight of the outsider, who must stand at a distance. Observing, but never getting too close. (1:03:33).
ZEFFIRELLI
It’s a lonely life, isn’t it?
KREMENTZ
Sometimes…It’s true. I should maintain journalistic neutrality. If it exists.
This sense of isolation is perfectly captured in “Equal in Paris”, an autobiographical piece by James Baldwin, who served as one of the many inspirations for Anderson’s film. He notes that the French personality “had seemed from a distance to be so large and free,” but “for the foreigner” it was “full of strange, high, dusty rooms which could not be inhabited.”
Despite this alienation, each writer makes clear that they have deliberately chosen this path. Isolation, they claim, elevates their writing.
KREMENTZ
Take me at my word: I live by myself on purpose. I prefer relationships that end. I deliberately choose to have neither husband nor children (the two greatest deterrents to any woman’s attempt to live by and for writing).
Here, Krementz echoes the real-life writer that her character is based upon — Mavis Gallant. Much like her fictional counterpart, Mavis deliberately moved to Paris in the hope that she could devote herself entirely to writing.
Five years before her death, a fellow journalist travelled to meet Mavis in Paris and interview her for Granta magazine. On reflection, she began to understand her need for distance and isolation:
“In her essay “What Is Style,” she writes, “Literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death.” I have thought often and hard about this statement. It seemed at first a sweeping declaration, somewhat opaque. But over time this observation has grown specific, profound, startling in its significance. Stories were her means of survival. She belonged to them and nothing else. The defiant choice she made, to live as an expatriate, without family, and solely by means of her writing, was and remains a revolutionary act. Both in life and on the page, she blazed a trail no one since has dared follow.”
But why the need for such extreme devotion? A clue may be found in Roebuck Wright, the author of the magazine’s final feature article.
ROEBUCK WRIGHT
There is a particular, sad beauty well-known to the companionless foreigner as he walks the streets of his adopted (preferably, moonlit) city. (In my case, Ennui, France.) I have so often shared the day’s glittering discoveries with: no one at all. But always, somewhere along the avenue or the boulevard: there was a table. Set for me. A cook, a waiter, a bottle, a glass, a fire. I chose this life. It is the solitary feast that has been (very much like a comrade) my great comfort and fortification.
In each solitary feast, sat down with only himself as company, Wright enters an implicit conversation with himself, reflecting on his experience and reaching a deeper understanding of the human condition.
As is evident from the unique intonation evoked by Jeffrey Wright, the character he plays is partly based on James Baldwin. So, it should come as no surprise that Wright’s “solitary feast” philosophy is echoed in a 1962 essay by Baldwin entitled The Creative Process. In it, he lays out the conditions and purposes for a creative life.
“Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone. That all men are, when the chips are down, alone, is a banality — a banality because it is very frequently stated, but very rarely, on the evidence, believed. Most of us are not compelled to linger with the knowledge of our aloneness, for it is a knowledge that can paralyze all action in this world. There are, forever, swamps to be drained, cities to be created, mines to be exploited, children to be fed. None of these things can be done alone. But the conquest of the physical world is not man’s only duty. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest…”
Baldwin goes on to suggest that this state of being alone allows the artist to exist outside of society, a condition necessary to truly discover “the mystery of the human being.” “Whilst Society must accept some things as real, the artist must know that visible reality hides a deeper one and that all our action and achievement rest on things unseen.” Therefore, loneliness empowers the artist to “drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.”
In this sense, making art (or writing stories) is an almost spiritual endeavour that extends beyond the realm of mere craftsmanship. Unbound by social and cultural constraints, it is a liberating journey towards ultimate truth.
This truth is what Roebuck finds at the end of his story, a self-realisation that the life of a foreigner is a constant, unfulfilled search for something missing.
NESCAFFIER
I’m not brave. I just wasn’t in the mood to be a disappointment to everybody. I’m a foreigner, you know.
ROEBUCK WRIGHT
This city is full of us, isn’t it? I’m one, myself.
NESCAFFIER
Seeking something missing. Missing something left behind.
ROEBUCK WRIGHT
Maybe, with good luck, we’ll find what eluded us in the places we once called home.
This idea of the need for the artist to extract themselves from society is more explicitly explored in the story of Moses Rosenthaler:
BERENSEN
Born rich, the son of a Jewish-Mexican horse rancher, Miguel Sebastien Maria Moisés de Rosenthaler trained at the École des Antiquités at significant family expense; but, by the end of his youth, he had shed all the luxuries of his comfortable background and replaced them with: Squalor. Hunger. Loneliness. Physical danger. Mental illness. And, of course, criminal violence.
Not only does Moses abandon every connection to conventional social norms, he also literally separates himself from society through going to prison. Only then can he begin to search for the “deeper reality” that Baldwin describes.
Within the confines of prison, Moses eventually falls for the prison guard, Simone. Yet he is swiftly rejected by her, plunging him into despair. (40:15)
ROSENTHALER
Ouch. That hurts me. The cruelty of it. The cold-bloodedness.
In that moment, Simone is transformed from Moses’ idealised lover to a cruel, cold-blooded reminder of unrequited love. This is what he sees in the ceiling — not a literal image of Simone herself but a visual rendering of how he feels about a future without her.
ROSENTHALER
I need art supplies (canvas, stretchers, paints, brushes, turpentine).
SIMONE
What do you want to paint?
ROSENTHALER
The future. Which is you.
This dichotomy between literal images and abstract impressions is later explained by Cadazio.
CADAZIO
Drawn in forty-five seconds right in front of me with a burnt matchstick.
UNCLE NICK
A perfect sparrow. That’s excellent. May I keep it?
CADAZIO
Don’t be stupid. Of course, not. The point is: he could paint this [the sparrow] beautifully, if he wanted to, but he thinks this [his painting] is better. And I think I sort of agree with him.
This is the deeper truth that Baldwin describes in his essay on “The Creative Process”. Rosenthaler could have painted a literal image of Simone (the Sparrow). and Society would have welcomed it as a beautiful, yet familiar image. But Rosenthaler’s isolated lens no longer views things through this popular perspective. Instead, he digs deeper, beyond our preconceived notions about what an image of Simone should look like, and labours to uncover the truth of his feelings for her. This truth, as Baldwin would argue, is only reached through Moses’ isolation from society.
Ultimately, the story of Moses Rosenthaler is almost an allegory for the story of Wes Anderson and his beloved work. Many reviews point to fact that this is Wes Anderson at his most Wes-Anderson-y, delving full-tilt into his meticulous style and aesthetics. Of course, Wes could have simply told his story in a more conventional, Hollywood-like manner, by separating his anthology into a trilogy, sticking to a single genre instead of venturing into animation, and shortening the wordy script from the length of a novel to that of a novella. But this wouldn’t be his film. It would be Society’s film.
In the words of Cadazio, he could make a normal film if he wanted to, but he thinks his film — The French Dispatch — is better, and I think I sort of agree with him.
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