The Cathode Ray Mission: Dahl, Brecht, and Wes Anderson’s Late Style
Wes Anderson is a rarity in the contemporary American cinema landscape, a genuine auteur who seemingly has license to pursue whatever projects he wishes while also having a considerable amount of mainstream cache. Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, and the Coen brothers come to mind as directors of a similar stature, but, with respect to their own considerable talents, Wes Anderson’s visual style is possibly the most idiosyncratic of all working filmmakers, to the extent that it’s become something of a meme. Of course, what the memes gloss over is the fact that Anderson is a supremely talented visual storyteller in command of a refined suite of techniques that are put to use to complex emotional ends. Increasingly, however, his work has further complicated its own affective resonance by explicitly and deliberately revealing the seams on what had been an almost excessively perfect formal object.
Anderson’s style is so distinct that his name is almost a worthy description on its own, but it’s worth charting that progression. Over the course of his early features, Bottle Rocket to Rushmore to The Royal Tenenbaums, Anderson and his longtime cinematographer Robert Yeoman began moving away from traditional coverage and shot styles towards more perpendicular movements, actors framed typically either straight on or in profile, and a similar approach to inserts (a style Wikipedia tells me is known as ‘knolling’). It’s not necessarily beholden to symmetry, as is often ascribed, but rather a very deliberate quality of layering detail and blocking actors that recalls theatrical, proscenium-style staging in a more confined display. As more films came and key collaborators joined (producer/co-writer Roman Coppola joined on The Life Aquatic in 2004, production designer Adam Stockhausen on Moonrise Kingdom in 2012, and it feels like a dozen actors are Anderson regulars at this point), the precision of the style reached a point that it almost threatened to feel completely suffocating. This is certainly what happened with me; Moonrise Kingdom was the first time I had seen anything like this style (I was 13 or 14 when it came out), and I found it deeply satisfying, but following Grand Budapest Hotel in 2014 I started to become indifferent to what Anderson was doing, and even dipped into some dreaded contrarianism regarding him, accusing his films of being glib dollhouse exercises for whatever quirky milieu has struck his fancy at the moment. I thankfully grew out of this impulsive line of thought, and at an opportune time as well, as 2023 has proven to be a big year for Anderson, seeing the release of not only a new feature, Asteroid City, but also a collection of short films produced by Netflix and inspired by the writings of Roald Dahl: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan, The Rat Catcher, and Poison. Taken collectively, they suggest a fascinating and exciting new direction that Anderson is taking his skills, what we may be able to consider his late style.
‘Late style’ is a notion that has become increasingly interesting to me, due, I think, primarily to my sympathies to the auteurist framework of cinematic art in conjunction with the simple fact that many of my most beloved filmmakers are getting very old. There is a common impulse within this framework of placing all of a director’s work into some sort of continuity, to see some binding agents across potentially decades of disparate work that emphasizes the singularity of the artist and their sensibilities. Sometimes the connective tissue is fairly obvious, and the career does exhibit that continuity; other times it’s more or less a critical invention, though that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily less compelling or legitimate. In referring to an artist’s late style, though, I refer primarily Edward Said’s conception of the term. To quote him at length:
“Each of us can supply evidence of late works which crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavour. Rembrandt and Matisse, Bach and Wagner. But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty and contradiction? What if age and ill health don’t produce serenity at all? This is the case with Ibsen, whose final works, especially When We Dead Awaken, tear apart his career and reopen questions that are supposed to have been resolved before such works are written. Far from resolution, Ibsen’s last plays suggest an angry and disturbed artist who uses drama as an occasion to stir up more anxiety, tamper irrevocably with the possibility of closure, leave the audience more perplexed and unsettled than before. It is this second type of lateness that I find deeply interesting: it is a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness, a going against.” (Said, “Thoughts on Late Style”)
Later, he writes in reference to Theodor Adorno’s treatment of the late-life works of Beethoven, “Late style is what happens if art does not abdicate its rights in favour of reality.” In essence: as an artist approaches this phase of their work, often coinciding with advancing age or some other acute awareness of encroaching death, their stylistic approach turns further inward, often to the point of attempting to negotiate certain contradictions or quandaries that have remained frustratingly out of reach. The particular interests narrow down and excessive concerns (in many cases, fidelity to the real or adherence to cultural trends) are shaved away (“The film of a free man,” Roberto Rossellini famously described Charlie Chaplin’s final film, A Countess in Hong Kong, as). Some cases in point: Bob Dylan has arguably been in his late style period since his 1992 album Good as I Been to You, his first full album of covers of traditional folk songs; we’re over 30 years removed from that release, but Dylan has continued down the path he set back then, honing in on the simplified folk and blues sounds he grew up with, in addition to his more recent embrace of midcentury American standards, a hilariously non-commercial approach that simply reflects nobodies interests more than Dylan’s own. Similarly, director Paul Schrader has maybe best exemplified late style more than any other ongoing American filmmaker, beginning in 2017 with First Reformed, when he began more clearly than ever emulating his lifelong inspirations Robert Bresson and Carl Theodor Dreyer, not only in the austere severity of his images (‘austere,’ I think, can be a common descriptor of works of late style) but in the knotty existential concerns of the decayed soul of the modern man (and the decayed body of the modern Earth), and whether the possibility of atonement and rejuvenation is still with us, and what form that may take. Despite the moniker, this is not to say that ‘late style’ can only be achieved by artists in old age; the aforementioned Dylan album was made when he was in his early 50s, though it also came, extraordinarily, thirty years after his debut album (put another way: roughly half of the years of Dylan’s musical career could be considered his late style period). The recently deceased British filmmaker Terence Davies debatably started his career already in a late style mode and worked backwards towards more conventional subjects (biopics and adaptations, mainly), his early work inhabiting deeply personal filmic expressions of memory and history more typical of an old man than a young one, via highly idiosyncratic approaches to montage, composition, and sound (from his first film, Davies passed the “Can you tell who directed this from one second of footage” test with flying colors).
Oftentimes, this paring of excesses that is so common of late style turns its way in on itself, leading to a more self-reflexive impulse in the artist, a parting of the curtain that has separated the audience from the fiction for so long. We can find this impulse articulated best by the work of Bertolt Brecht, the German playwright and cultural theorist of the early 20th century, and his theory of “epic theatre.” To crudely summarize Brecht’s theory, epic theatre was a practice of constructing drama with the express effect of drawing attention to its own construction, and thereby involving the spectator as an active intellectual participant rather than a simple passive observer. Actors play multiple roles, sets are redesigned in view of the audience, lighting changes occur without adherence to realism, the fourth wall is broken, etc. Brecht, being a Marxist, aimed to use this approach as a means of raising political consciousness—by laying bare the artificiality of the elements that would normally seamlessly cohere as a work of fiction, a dialectic is created between that which is represented, the means by which that representation occurs, and the people to whom that representation is directed. Alienation is the intended effect; artistic escapism, a weapon of capitalist ideology intended to pacify the participant into thoughtless consumption (both of material goods and of ideology), cannot be properly achieved if the fiction is not afforded the opportunity to properly cohere into a whole experience, if it is consistently disrupted and the audience returned to the real world with an awareness of their historical and productive contexts. This is not to suggest that all the old artists that end up turning to Brechtian techniques are imposing a Marxist ideological lens (I wish!): John Ford, maybe the greatest of all American filmmakers, was famously politically incoherent throughout his entire career, vacillating between Confederacy apologism and admonitions of inherent American white supremacy, but also ended up achieving stronger Brechtian effects than nearly anyone before or since (“More Brecht than Brecht,” according to Jean-Marie Straub). But what is clear in many cases is that for a lot of directors in their late style period, the mere adoption of a cohesive semblance of fictional construction is insufficient, either in a creative capacity or a moral/ethical one (without spoiling anything, the ending of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is one of the most interesting examples of this from a recent American film, as are the other works of Scorsese’s late period).
It’s this Brechtian sense which I think Wes Anderson has invited with his recent work, what could cautiously be considered the start of his late style. He’s neither old (54) nor does he seem to be ailing from a fatal illness, so one can assume that he’s come to this point perhaps from an exhaustion with the typical means of fictive construction and has decided to directly embrace and prod at the formal design that he has so perfected. Anderson’s style is particularly ripe for this kind of affective breakdown, being that it practically begs to be thought of in logistical terms on its own merits—a perfectly designed building naturally invites the question of how it got made. ‘Perfect’ is an adjective I throw around casually as it pertains to Anderson’s style, but maybe the better word is obsessive or finicky; looking at the movies he makes would seem to reveal a lot about his own personality, though I’m not that interested in psychoanalyzing Anderson based on the coordination of his characters’ outfits. What it says for certain though is that Anderson cares deeply about every textural element of his films and approaches his work with a very careful, precise methodology for realizing each fictional world as a sort of hermetically sealed playground within which his characters exercise their dramas of contradictorily messy emotions and relationships. It threatens airlessness, a suffocating sense of control over the action, each line read and small gesture enacted with the utmost coordination—there is a reason why people criticize Anderson’s films as feeling lifeless. Asteroid City then came along and, amid the ideally modulated setting for a Wes Anderson movie, begins to show some ruptures to his approach.
Asteroid City follows in the Brechtian tradition of alienation by announcing itself as a work of fiction called “Asteroid City” within a work of fiction at the very outset (within, naturally, a work of fiction, Asteroid City). A televised play recounting the production of “Asteroid City”, a play by the Tennessee Williams-esque American playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), gives way to a recreation of the play itself, featuring the television actors in their onscreen roles’ theatrical counterparts (Jason Schwartzman plays Jones Hall, the lead actor of the play, as well as Augie Steenbeck, the character Hall plays in “Asteroid City;” likewise for the other actors). This is obviously a very complicated narrative arrangement, but for a while it seems like the play-within-the-play, “Asteroid City,” is going to be the main engagement of the film, and for the most part that is true, a majority of the film’s runtime is set in that space, and what a space it is. The high saturation blue-and-orange color palette recalls a postcard from the American southwest or a Wile E. Coyote cartoon (which is explicitly referenced at one point). The cut from the opening’s boxed-in black and white radio hall to the credits sequence, rolling across dusty deserts on a freight train is particularly breathtaking, promising the sort of vast environ and widescreen framing that seems so antithetical to Anderson’s diorama approach, but of course that response is checked by the baked in understanding that these endless reaches of land and sky are a fabrication of theatrical design.
What proceeds within the story of the play is a familiar Anderson tale of confronting grief and the possibilities of enkindling bonds amid strange circumstances, embellished by the usual eccentric twists and turns, here given a sci-fi flavor. The diegesis of the play, however, is interrupted at select points to return to the broadcast, usually detailing some behind-the-scenes development that occurred, like the wooing of Mercedes Ford (Scarlet Johansson) to play the role of Midge Campbell, or the marital breakdown the director Schubert Green (Adrien Brody) is undergoing. These interruptions are particularly striking in their placement; never really relevant to the plot developments of the play, their position seems motivated most by the point at which they would be the most disruptive to the viewer’s immersion and engagement with the drama—I saw this twice in theaters, and both times the first cut back to the broadcast delivered a sort of shock to the senses. You could charge this as poor filmmaking, and normally I would agree if it were not so clearly a part of the overall intended affect to deny the sort of emotional engagement with the text that is so intuitively assumed to be the goal of a film. It all culminates in the near-breakdown of the entire artifice of the fiction being performed, as Hall is struck in the play’s climactic moments with the realization that he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be feeling during this whole enterprise, and he leaves the set. “I still don’t understand the play,” Jones says to Schubert; “It doesn’t matter, just keep telling the story,” is his response. Jones finds his ultimate reconciliation with the actress who played his wife (Margot Robbie), whose scene was eventually cut from the play. They talk across the fire escapes, and come to feel that their work is less contingent on the meaning of the words or emotions than on the conveyance of them.
What comes to pass is a fascinating dissonance between technique and meaning. A sort of waking-dream passage ensues, culminating in the actors chanting “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep,” a pseudo-mantra arguing that making of art is itself a clarifying force on the nature of the world and the human condition, but that expression is delivered in such a disorienting, alienating manner that it almost ends up making an argument against its own claim. Anderson’s films are often messy at the level of story and character, and the neatness of the form often serves as a reconciling force; what makes Asteroid City fascinating is that the form is no longer sufficient as a reconciling agent, it has been subsumed into the meaning-searching drama of the characters, with punctuations of direct address and canted angles fraying the normally contained and composed diegesis. I’ve found this climax unsatisfying both times I’ve seen it, but it’s a productive dissatisfaction, it’s something I’m still trying to work through my understanding of; I don’t buy the “can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep” conviction, and I don’t think Anderson does either, for a director so versed in gesture and nuance it comes off too forcefully, like he’s trying to convince himself as much as the audience. Part of this comes from the text’s engagement with an aesthetic of midcentury American life, and the two different spheres represented: the fledgling Sun Belt in its postwar expansion, and the Actors Studio-esque modern theater scene. Both are seen grappling with the modern American identity crisis; spurred by science in “Asteroid City”—a casual atomic bomb test occurs off in the distance upon Augie’s arrival, and the scientific innovations of the military and the junior inventors invites an alien to touch down and possibly threaten their existence—and by art in the broadcast—the aforementioned inability to read the proper meaning from the play and the ensuing dysphoria that Jones suffers from, the dysfunction of Schubert’s life offstage, the untimely death of Earp. Anderson’s vision of American community skews utopic here as it often does elsewhere: the pilgrims of Asteroid City are ethnically, religiously, and politically diverse to a degree that would not have been realistic to an actual midcentury American setting, and the theater performers are forthright about their sexuality in ways that are more accurately reflective of their setting but still decidedly contemporary. Even amid this kind of revisionist historical idealization, there is a failure to reconcile the contradictions of the American identity more broadly in its postwar expanding phase. After the climax, the outro of the play commences: Augie and his family are the last ones left in town after everyone bailed in the middle of the night following the quarantine being lifted. He buries his wife’s ashes, takes Midge’s phone number, and packs up the family to leave; “Got no future, got no hope/Just nothing but the rope” intones the jaunty end credits theme. The ultimate feeling the film leaves with is one of disquietude, particularly towards Anderson’s own methods—maybe, for as much as we convince ourselves the worthiness of the effort it takes to build these elaborately detailed dollhouses and stage these eccentrically human dramas within, they don’t bring us any closer to figuring out what’s wrong with us deep down.
If Asteroid City sees Anderson use Brechtian metatextual techniques to try and enforce a coherence within the text, as a means of interrogating the narrative within the form, then his other project of 2023 sees these techniques applied to the construction of the images themselves, and taken as a whole may actually be more interesting. At the end of September, a series of short film adaptations of Roald Dahl stories hit Netflix in successive days: The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar, The Swan, The Rat Catcher, and Poison. This is not Anderson’s first engagement with Dahl; Fantastic Mr. Fox released in 2009 and arguably signaled Anderson’s mid-career maturing period, as well as further entrenching his visual style and introducing an important new element to his repertoire, stop-motion animation. Dahl’s droll children’s fables and Anderson’s invitingly odd sensibilities make for a perfect match, but the reconvening of the two after more than a decade introduces a new, knottier relationship between them. For one, the material Anderson is drawing from was written for a more mature reader than Dahl’s normal children’s books, and as such it tackles heavier subjects, specifically racism and bullying. Further, the translation of Dahl’s texts to the screen here is less conventional than it is in Fantastic Mr. Fox. In fact, what could be considered the key theme uniting the shorts is their engagement with fiction as an artificial construction and the making of that construction and its uses.
Each short takes their own visual approach, but one of the unifying elements across the four is their 1:1 reproduction of the narration of the original texts. Characters speak as themselves, but they also speak the non-diegetic narration; dialogue tags (“He said,” “he shouted,” “he realized,” etc.), actions, and thoughts are all verbally communicated. In some cases, Ralph Fiennes is on standby as Dahl to perform the part of third-person narrator, but often it’s the characters performing double duty. The effect is fascinating; in addition to just creating a constant stream of words, it places the written foundation of the film at the forefront. Rather than a linear relation from page to screen as most films are founded on, Anderson functionally situates the script as part of the onscreen text, foregrounding the continuity between cinema and literature while simultaneously blurring their distinctions, complicating the cinematic construction. To that end, the longest and ‘first’ short (there’s no real viewing sequence to the four, so I’ll use their Netflix release dates as an order), Henry Sugar, works as a concise encapsulation of the deconstructive interests of this cycle. Opening with a brief intro from Dahl (Fiennes) in his cabin describing his process for starting to write, the bulk of the film centers on an idle playboy, Henry Sugar (Benedict Cumberbatch), as he discovers a method to accrue wealth faster than ever conceived and eventually comes to realize he’d rather use his talents to philanthropic ends. It’s a fairly simple moral exercise that falls most in line with other children’s literature, an uncomplicated fable of how money doesn’t buy happiness but helping others does, which is the main reason I ultimately favor it less than the other three. What is much more interesting about it is its construction. Anderson takes the boxy Academy 1.33:1 aspect ratio and pushes further on the inherent theatrical qualities the medium affords and that his own style has historically evoked. All action occurs in a straight-on proscenium staging, with a narrow depth of space; lighting and costume changes occur mid-scene; actors play dual roles; sets are intricately rigged up, sliding in and out of view as scenes change dynamically (in other words, it resembles a lot of what epic theatre does). The transformations of mise-en-scene that would normally occur in an edit are instead on display in front of the camera in a way that deliberately mimics the theater, thus denying the illusion of spatial and temporal continuity that narrative cinema historically relies on. Beyond just the visual construction, Henry Sugar also foregrounds its narrative construction in a similar way to Asteroid City: while it is ultimately about Henry Sugar’s activities in the “present,” his story is initiated by him reading a manuscript, Dr. Z. Z. Chatterjee’s (Dev Patel) encounter with Imdad Khan (Ben Kingsley), an elder man in colonial India who has developed the ability to see without his eyes; Khan’s own written account of how he developed this ability serves as a further flashback, becoming the third layer of Dahl’s story that we see. Henry Sugar ends up enacting a sort of recursive loop of mutable storytelling—texts referencing other texts, actors playing different people across time periods, an infinite number of discrete spaces able to replace each other, complicated further by a coda in which Dahl assures us that this is a real story that found its way to him under condition of anonymity. By not only showing the author of the fiction within the fiction, but by breaching the hermetic seal of the fictional world and making a point of showing its construction, Anderson effectively considers the material methods of how cinematic fiction comes to be, and the seemingly endless possibilities that arise from them with a little imagination.
Henry Sugar makes a good starting point for this Dahl cycle mainly because these ideas carry throughout the whole group, albeit in different approaches. The Swan, the second of the four, is most similar to Henry Sugar in its deconstructive mise-en-scene, but pushes the idea even further in some ways while taking a decidedly different tonal tact. The story of The Swan is about an adult man (Rupert Friend) reflecting on a scene from his childhood during which he was horrifically mistreated by some neighborhood bullies. Except for one moment, he refers to his younger self in the third person as Peter Watson, played by Asa Jennings less as an actual performance and more as a living prop. The staging of the film is a continuation of Henry Sugar’s theatrical style, prop masters frequently move about in the backgrounds and the set decorations are obviously artificial (hidden doors in the set dressings are a common sight), but there’s a greater immersive quality to the fiction here. There’s less in-shot scene transitions and more editing, less movement of background elements and more movement of the camera, a larger 1.66:1 frame that holds host to an oppressively white sky. One crucial area that The Swan disrupts its immersion to force the viewer’s reflection is through absence—the two bullies never physically manifest in the film, they only take shape through Friend’s narration and the abuse reinstated on Peter Watson, though without an actual figure to enact it it gives the impression of something almost ritualistic or somnambulistic being performed, a past trauma revived over and over again in an effort to be reconciled but never successful. At first Peter is simply bound and led around by the bullies at gunpoint, but their torture escalates quickly, including tying him to a railroad track and letting a train pass over him, killing a nesting swan and tying its wings to Peter’s arms, and then shooting him out of a tree. It is a monstrously cruel series of events, jarring both in its abstraction and in its chilling manifestation by a director who to this point has never really displayed an interest in these sorts of fictions (the spareness of this short is particularly noteworthy in contrast to Anderson’s normal approach; a dull color palette, negative space, and empty soundtrack show a more austere Anderson than we’ve ever seen before). The story ends with Peter getting shot in the leg and finding some poetic strength within him to fall out of the tree and soar away on his majestic and bloody wings, landing on his front lawn. Dahl’s narration suggests that this is a story of perseverance, that Peter’s flight is ultimately evidence of the great, uncommon strength of his spirit, greater than the bullets of his bullies; Anderson’s filmmaking suggests that this is a story of pain and weakness in the face of force reverberating through time and haunting its victims in the present and the chilly wheatfields and ponds of their memories. “My darling, my darling boy! What’s happened to you?” cries Peter’s mother at his chimeric collapsed form. Contra both Asteroid City’s and Henry Sugar’s approaches, The Swan’s metatextual efforts underline a vital discrepancy between the author’s perspective towards his text and a separate party’s interpretation of it, demonstrating the inadequacy (perhaps deliberate) of the author’s stated evaluation of his work at resolving the trauma contained within.
The Rat Catcher and Poison are more conventionally composed, though neither is lacking in interest. The Rat Catcher is conceivably as near as Anderson has come to a horror mode of storytelling, detailing the intrusion of an offputting exterminator (Fiennes) into a small community apparently beset by a scourge of rats. The short maintains a dry, macabre tone throughout, the rat man’s assumed expertise in matters of pest control falling flat, culminating in an implication equally funny and disturbing. The theatrical qualities of the previous works are kept minimal, appearing most predominantly in the short’s most striking moment, a duel between the exterminator and a rat that he keeps on-hand in one of his pockets. After a brief bit of stop-motion play, the lights dim, the set recedes, and Rupert Friend, who had been playing a mechanic bearing witness to the rat man’s antics, inserts a set of false teeth and begins making ratlike poses. The violent altercation between the two plays out in dynamically composed static shots that call to mind early, Expressionist-influenced horror films as Richard Ayoade’s narration pushes us through the horrifying action that we’re seeing in fragments. The most gruesome moment of the film is also the most abstracted; no violence is represented save for some bloodstains afterwards, and even the narration refrains from describing it in detail. What idea this is ultimately communicating, I’m not exactly sure, but I do think it’s formally interesting to heighten the artifice of an otherwise fairly straightforwardly presented film at the exact moment of seemingly greatest cinematic potential.
Poison lacks even that kind of solitary moment, but engages with the deconstructivist project more subtly, namely in casting. The story sees a British administrator in colonial India, Woods (Patel), find his colleague Harry (Cumberbatch) held hostage by what may be a deadly poisonous snake resting on his stomach underneath his blanket. In a hushed mania, they eventually get in contact with a local apothecary, Dr. Ganderbai (Kingsley), who comes and aids in the situation. After much deliberation, they manage to reach a point of extracting the snake; however, upon removing the blanket, they find no evidence of a snake. In the confusion that follows, Dr. Ganderbai offhandedly suggests that maybe there was no snake to begin with; Harry takes great offense to what he perceives as a condescending remark by an Indian man, and racistly chastises the doctor, who then leaves. Cumberbatch fits the prototypical WASPy mold, but Patel and Kingsley are far more intriguing presences in this film. Both are of Indian descent, though the darker-skinned Patel is playing the British character and the fairer-skinned Kingsley plays the Indian one. Despite lacking the staging techniques or camera effects (save for a switch to handheld at the climax) typically ascribed to Brechtian cinema, the casting decisions of Poison encourage the same distancing effect, complicating our involvement with the fictive surface and demanding a greater thoughtful engagement. Unlike the other shorts, though, there is actually a more concrete, real world subject that this specific distancing makes the viewer think about—the lingering history of British colonization, the effects of ingrained racial prejudice specifically on the arts, and even the racism embedded within Dahl’s own text. Poison has a political dimension that is almost wholly lacking from Anderson’s oeuvre, but it follows the logical path of the Brechtian approach that reality would start to definitively break through into the fiction beyond merely the processes for creating the fiction, it’s unavoidable.
So, where does this leave us with Wes? The release order of the Dahl shorts should not be misconstrued as a linear progression of Anderson’s style, but within the collection we do see examples rising up of the metatextual effects shifting in their ambitions, from an exercise in storytelling (Henry Sugar) to a means of exploring deeper psychological and sociopolitical subjects (The Swan, Poison). Following on from Asteroid City, it would appear that the crises of the text are fading in interest; the key question of Asteroid City, as asked by Jones Hall, is “How can I be asked to create art when I don’t even know how to feel about it?”, but the Dahl shorts seem to transform the question into “Can we reconcile all of these modes of art into something capable of reaching beyond itself?” The answers are appropriately ambivalent; Poison is predicated on the kind of racism and historical tension represented being still relevant, and The Swan refuses to find peace in the narrative of overcoming adversity that Dahl unconvincingly proposes it to be. Without putting too much stock in a couple short films that just released, there seems to be a reframing of Anderson’s interests away from his fiction being the sealed away, pristinely preserved dramas that they’ve always been, more towards something situated in a larger context, and particularly concerned with the negotiation between his methods of construction and the newly found jaggedness of those contexts. Perhaps it’s an inversion of Adorno; after making art that has refused to abdicate its rights to reality for twenty five years, maybe now Anderson is reaching a point of acknowledging that he must account for reality in his art, lest it become little more than a cinematic tchotchke, dusted off every once in awhile to appreciate its self-contained qualities but knowing it lacks a certain vital relevance beyond its design. Based on this recent run of work, I have faith that Anderson will continue on this trajectory, and only become a more interesting artist in the years to come.