the darjeeling limited pt II

What is Wes Anderson's art?

Is he doing what he thinks is cool or is he commenting on others? Principally, he is doing neither of these though his actors and co-writers no doubt bring material in this way. What we get is the Imaginary and the mixture of truth and falsity which it has on its never ending surface.

Firstly, lets say you have a seducer of young girls and a used car salesman. These people work in the imaginary as well, they can see by the way someone walks and moves alone how they are or aren't at home in their bodies and by their words and dress how much self-confidence and self-knowledge they have. They don't understand everyone or everything about the "sucker" but have become clever enough to spot the
the general signs of a person's naivete


Anderson's movie is driven by music which isn't deep or primal but rather stretches across a pretty but naive surface. Take Nico's 'These Days'-- there is no perfect moment of uniting words and music but rather overall it has a sensibility that you can get lost in. The same can be said for Van Gogh whose work taken singally doesn't have a world in it (unity of idea and gesture) but enough similar gestures which taken together have a mood. Sometimes enough things point to an idea to have something sublime but sometimes everything is disjointed and muddled.

In many ways this is not based upon a living creativity so much as channeling one's childhood impressions. If you look at Hotel Chevalier, the short before the Darjeeling Limited, you can see the room is filled with little childish trinkets like butter flys under glass, half-finished paintings, and the game of speaking in a different language and timing a song to play at the right time when someone comes in. There is a very strong delight in things of a 'unique nature' a savouring of the chocolate that has a wrapper indicating the Hotel and not some big company, one brother buying a deadly snake and receiving it in a box with skulls on it from a market when at a train stop. Everything is seen as a constant beginning, like so much could come from it.

David Bowie, who was used in the Life Aquatic is a good example, you can sense his creativity as suspended belief, a return to the childhood possibility or potential, the days where you see someone who is dressed up like a goth or biker or gypsy and imagine they have a secret life. But, that life doesn't exist and is only an amalgamation of all the childhood stories, TV shows, and hear-say in your head. But, these are only a beginning and a promise for life but life, the world, is not there. This kind of art is parasitic on your ability to find yourself beautiful and still believe in a future someone will come and take you to. This art is fantasy.

The line at the end where one brother relates how he'll miss the smell of India 'it smells spicy' seems to get across the point that it isn't reality being engaged with but rather it is overwritten with a mood (which is to be contrasted to it being overwritten by someone who checks off all the tourist attractions they've been to). I'm toying with the idea that Lacan owes much more to Jung than he lets on. Jung's introvert/extravert is basically the approach Lacan uses for the obsessional vs. the hysteric and I think in many ways Jung's character type of feeling can be taken for the imaginary phantasy in Lacan.

--more to come

The Darjeeling limited pt 1

I'm split. I used to be able to think purely in a personal intuitive way but psychoanalysis has begun to enter into my appreciation of things.

I can't help but see the father and mother as the frame of this story. The father is dead and they are carrying his luggage all around India on a journey which will eventually end with finding their mother. However, the dead father reappears symbollically as a deadly tiger that is haunting the nunnery where the mother is living. At the end the boys decide not to go back home but to remain for the rest of the time they intended to stay but in order to catch the train they have to leave behind all of their father's luggage which they've been carrying around which bears his initials. Basically the story here is one of the psychotic whose self isn't held together firmly and is as fragmented as the train is shown to be during a sequence when each room holds a different person and different style (or the ship in Life Aquatic, etc..). By creating a different name for himself (letting go of the father's name) he can hold himself together. I think the same thing is going on with Bob Dylan (Robert Zimmerman had so many different people and styles in him). With someone like Maddonna the process would be the same but rather than holding together a bunch of personalities her change of styles represent serving fashion and staying on top which is a protection not from mere guilt of not being anything but the psychotic fear of the Other behind the scenes who can devastate one's reality (aliens, demons, etc... when the break occurs and leads to delusions).


Though this psychoanalytic backdrop seems feasible to me we can say that the enjoyment of the film is never found there.


But the real story is in the childishness of the characters.