Moonrise Kingdom

Moonrise Kingdom (5/5)

Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom opens with the sound of the composer Benjamin Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra,” which breaks down, piece by piece, each section of the orchestra and then later builds it back up.  The work is reminiscent of opening up a pocket watch in order to see all of the gears working in conjunction.  It is not lost on the audience that as Britten’s music is deconstructed, Anderson presents the inside of a household, using perfectly choreographed camera movements, that is itself immaculately designed by the eye of an idiosyncratic artist.  This got me thinking: is Wes Anderson one of our greatest creators of fantasy worlds? 

It might seem strange to suggest that Anderson should be mentioned alongside people like C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and George R.R. Martin.  You won’t find dragons or magic spells in his work, but what you will find is a hermetically sealed universe that seems to jump wholesale out of the mind of a singular artist.  Is Anderson’s fetish for vintage audio equipment that far removed from Tolkien’s love of medieval verse?  While every one of Anderson’s films is created in a world that is slightly out of step from our own, of all his live action work Moonrise Kingdom seems to rest out on its own plane of existence. 

And much of Moonrise Kingdom’s potency comes from the understanding that children and adults inhabit distinct and separate realms.  The film takes place in the 1960s on a sleepy New England island, New Penzance, which is not only largely separated from the mainland but also bares a name that would look comfortable written on a map of a fantasy world.  This close knit community is frayed when two young children, Sam and Suzy, go on the lam, making their way deep into the woods of the island thanks to skills Sam has picked up attending the Khaki Scouts.  As the children retreat into the wilderness, the adults scramble to catch up with them.  As we move back and forth between the adult world and the world of children, we understand the distinct sort of dysfunction that infects both.  In the 1960s both Sam and Suzy might have been called “trouble children.”  Sam is an orphan who doesn’t fit in well with his foster family (in fact, his foster father decides that he won’t invite him back to the house after hearing about his flight) and Suzy is prone to outbursts of violence and rage.  But where the children have trouble suppressing their emotions, the adults, in typical Andersonian fashion, hide their dysfunction under a laconic haze.  Suzy’s mother and father (played by Francis MacDormond and Bill Murray) are mired in a loveless marriage, which has led her mother to take up with the local police chief, Sharp (Bruce Willis). 

 

Wes Anderson clues us into his interest in world making through a series of books that Suzy brings along on her retreat with Sam.  These books carry fantastical names like The Francine Odyssey, The Disappearance of the 6^th Grade, and The Girl from Jupiter.  This need for escapism obviously parallels the children’s flight into the woods.  To disappear into the world of fantasy isn’t far off from dropping off the map and slipping out from under the expectations of adults.  Anderson constructs this universe with the help of a map as well as the narrating power of Bob Ballaban, who doubles as a wizard-like character who figures out how to catch up with Sam and Suzy.  As the film progresses, it becomes further and further detached from our world.  In fact, at times it seems as if Anderson is applying techniques he learned in his animated film, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, onto a live action palate.  This allows him to ratchet up the scope of his film towards the end by introducing a flood that seems to be borrowed from one of the world’s most famous fantasy epics, The Old Testament. 

But of all the great fantasy writers out there, perhaps none pervade Anderson’s universe more than the great artist, Charles M. Schulz.  Anderson, never one to be shy about his influences, even names a dog Snoopy.  In Peanuts, Schulz may have created one of the longest lasting fantasy worlds, stretching out over a half of a century.  And while he may have made the adults invisible (they only appeared in the TV specials as indecipherable and disembodied voices), he never ran away from adult concerns.  Where Anderson creates a world where two misfits can largely escape the dysfunctions of the adult world, Schultz had his prepubescent characters shoulder the crushing burdens of existential malaise.  And yet, there’s something refreshing about the optimism found in Moonrise Kingdom, along with much of Anderson’s work (an optimism that Schultz often struggled to find).  He manages to be both critical and highly empathetic towards his characters.  For Anderson, a fantasy world isn’t so much a retreat as it is an invitation, and one that I am never hesitant to take up. 

Slate Writer Doesn't Know How Language Works

 On the always contrarian website, Slate.com, Tom Scocca takes aim at those who drop references to the critically adored television show, Mad Men.  His argument is…well, I’m not exactly certain.  He’s angry because people keep on talking about this show, and he hasn’t seen it, and this makes him upset.  At one point towards the end of his article he suggests that using pop culture allusions don’t always fit the topic at hand, which would have been a legitimate argument, but it only comes up once and it is in reference to a journalist making use of the show The Sopranos, not Mad Men.  The title of the article is “Don Draper’s Shocking Secret: He Doesn’t Exist: Why do Mad Men fans and the New York Times mistake the show for reality?,” which suggests that, at its core, his argument is about semiotics, or the study of signs, like language, and what they mean. 

Semiotics first arose from the work of Ferdinand de Saussure in the early 20^th century, but it really flourished in the work of French theorists in the decades following World War II.  Perhaps one of the most accessible introductions to the use of semiotics is Roland Barthes’s collection of essays, Mythologies.  In Mythologies, Barthes attempts to uncover the underlying meaning of a whole series of cultural signs.  For him, everyday objects like children’s toys or Greta Garbo’s face are representative of something deeper, hidden underneath the play of surfaces.  In his introduction, Barthes explains his purpose in the following manner:

The starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of impatience at the sight of the “naturalness” with which newspapers, art and common sense constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history.  In short, in the account given of our contemporary circumstances, I resented seeing Nature and History confused at every turn, and I wanted to track down, in the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying, the ideological abuse, which in my view, is hidden there. (11)

 

Barthes seems frustrated that ideas and concepts that are culturally made are being treated as absolutely natural or “true.”  Most of how we view the world is in fact constructed for us, and Barthes is hoping to uncover and tease apart these culturally made ideas.

But back to Scocca’s article.  While it is difficult to fully determine what he is trying to say, at least part of his argument hinges on the fact that there are “true” signs and there are “false” signs.  Scocca seems upset because characters like Don Draper don’t exist.  He writes, “He [Don Drapper] is a pattern of lit-up dots moving in front of your eyes for one hour, on Sundays, during the season run of the Mad Men program, which mercifully ends this weekend.”  (Part of Scocca’s apoplexy arises from the fact that a lot of people talk about this show, and he doesn’t like it, except that he admits that he hasn’t watched it, which means that no one has strapped him into a Clockwork Orange like contraption and forced the show on him).  Obviously, Don Drapper isn’t a real person.  Instead, he is a signifier for a whole host of social and cultural issues: capitalism, the generation gap, existential malaise, masculine constructs, etc.  But Scocca doesn’t seem to understand one thing: everything that he writes is also a sign.  When Scocca writes about the 1960s, they do not just immediately manifest themselves before us.  Like the television show Mad Men, he is using a series of signs (in this instance, words) to stand in for the decade in question.  In other words, Tom Scocca’s argument doesn’t exist.  Everything he writes is a pattern of lit-up dots on our computer screen.  (In fact, we might ask Scocca what he thinks of other terms that come from fiction, like quixotic or Kafkaesque). 

But Scocca appears to believe one set of signifiers is greater than another.  He seems to think there is some “true” 1960s out there that we can grasp in our hands.  One signifier is tangible and the other signifier is not.  He writes, “In the collision between the actual and the simulacrum, the simulacrum is winning.”  But everything he just wrote and quoted is in fact a simulacrum.  Like I stated, Mad Men is also a signifier for a whole number of things, most often the culture of the 1960s. But a "history" of that time is also just a signifier. If you open a historical reading of the 1960s, you don't open the book and enter into the thing itself. You read an interpretation of that era, which, funny enough, is exactly what Mad Men is.

You might argue that Scocca is concerned with the accuracy of Mad Men’s interpretation of the world—that there is a good deal of evidence about the decade that we can latch onto in order to determine cultural mores, dress, music, etc.  But this doesn’t seem to be the case.  There will always be competing versions of the 1960s.  Even well educated historians will differ on how best to interpret that decade.  A sign, after all, may be read in multiple ways.  Besides, perceived “accuracy” never enters into Scocca’s argument.  Let’s take the quote he uses about the turtle neck, taken from a New York Times article:

Francesca Granata, an assistant professor of art and design history at Parsons the New School for Design, traced the garment's high-fashion roots to the '60s, when, she said, ''Pierre Cardin and YSL reinvented the men's suit with a turtleneck instead of a buttoned shirt and a scarf instead of a tie.'' (Think more Paul Kinsey than Don Draper.)

In the above excerpt, the academic being questioned suggests that the turtle neck symbolized the changing cultural mores and generation gap of the 1960s. The author then uses Mad Men as a point of reference, a show that happens to use clothing to symbolize the changing cultural mores and generation gap of the 1960s. It is unclear why it is okay to rely on the language of the "expert" and not the television show, especially since they seem to be saying the exact same thing. One means of signifying the 60s is more "true" (the academic's words) where the other means of signifying the 60s is "false" (the images on a television show), even when signifiers are coming to the same conclusion.  For Scocca, any sort of fictional art is a false signifier, even when it happens to be accurately representing the world.  Scocca is falling into the old trap that Barthes observed about fifty years ago.  He thinks that there is a natural world he has access to that is not built by an interpretation of various signs.

Of course, as someone who is interested in fictional narratives, I have pony in this race.  It is an old discussion that goes back at least as far as the novel itself.  People seem to think that just because something is a fictional retelling, then it can never tell us something “true” about the world.  Just this year, the Pulitzer Prize awarded no prize for narrative fiction, despite having some well regarded books in the running.  Many have argued that this is a result of a culture that denies that fictional stories can tell us something true about the world.  But while the form is certainly different, the same arguments that take place out in the “real” world also occur in the fictional universe created by authors.  When Charles Dickens wrote about work houses and orphanages, he did so after learning about these places through his own experiences and through newspapers (which happen to be made up of a series of signs).  He then made arguments about the dehumanizing effects of these places, but he did so through characters, dialogue and narrative.  

The true difference between fiction and non-fiction texts is that fictional texts take work.  In order to uncover what a novel is trying to say, you must first engage with it, determine what argument lies underneath its entanglement of metaphors.  A non-fiction text, by contrast, is didactic.  It comes right out and tells you what it wants you to know.  This can be useful, but it can also be problematic.  A work of non-fiction is always trying to convince us that it is absolutely “real,” when it is always an interpretation of the world.  Besides, the difficulty inherent in the novel is also why it is useful.  In a world where information is presented to us in small bites, there’s something to be said for the exercise of deciphering a text and engaging with its argument.  The world is a complicated place, and fiction never lets us forget how much of a tangled mess we live in. 

The Mice - For Almost Ever Scooter

The Mice – For Almost Ever Scooter (4.5/5)

The Mice is a Cleveland punk outfit from the 1980s.  They’re the sort of group whose chief audience these days happens to be music geeks interested in local scenester history.  I, in fact, fall into this niche audience, and anyone who is similarly interested in Cleveland’s 70s and 80s punk scene should snatch up this piece of history immediately.  But even for those less inclined to delve into the minutia of the rust belt’s interlocking history of musicians, For Almost Ever Scooter reliably delivers a set of should have been classics. 

The Mice’s poppy yet aggressive sound will be familiar to anyone who grew up listening to music in the 90s.  An entire subgenre of pop-punk rose in popularity thanks to the surprise ascendance of Green Day and The Offspring.  While there were quite a few bands that you might term “diamonds in the rough,” many of these bands were characterized by sped up music that served to cover up their lack of hooks or general songwriting talent.  For bands supposedly in the punk tradition, they seemed far too shiny and clean—presumably more interested in the diamonds than in the rough.  So when professing my love for The Mice, I have to ask myself why do I love this scrappy band from Cleveland and not all of the imitators who suddenly appeared ten years later?

For one thing, they’re great craftsmen.  As time moves on, music scenes tend to move further away from their original source of influence.  Green Day was obviously a bigger influence on Blink 182 than, say, The Undertones.  The result sounds like a copy of a copy.  The Mice write great little packets of punk noise, but “Rescue You Too” and “Little Rage” prove that they can also whittle out a mid-tempo ballad in the tradition of 70s rock.  The Mice also benefit from lead singer Bill Fox’s delivery that’s just scruffed up enough to lend some gravity to his bratty attitude.

While the majority of the songs off of For Almost Ever Scooter are concerned with unrequited love (female names figure into a large portion of their lyrics), The Mice also have a political bent.  Several songs bring up the specter of empires that have faded away as obvious parallels to the United States.  In “Not Proud of the USA,” Fox sings, “Look at Rome and Babylon / Even Egypt sat beneath the sun / Now it looks like their days are done.”  It might seem strange that a band would sing these lyrics in the mid-80s.  After all, a few years later would see the fall of the Soviet Union.  But the collapse of the rust belt served as a canary in the coal mine for many in Cleveland, and the lack of decent, stable jobs for high school graduates has been cited as one reason for our present day sputtering economy.  In this instance, it was because The Mice were located way out in the “fly over states” that they had a prescient understanding of the world.  Maybe it’s time we start ignoring the buzz bands from Brooklyn and start asking what the rest of the country has to say.