The Making of Nostalgia: "The Royal Tenenbaums"
We live in an age of pop culture nostalgia. Our screens are filled with movies and shows that place a premium on references to old movies and shows, and often use those references as the centerpiece of their own appeal.
More nakedly, remakes, reboots, and spin-offs are the order of the day. Unlike older film versions of works like Dracula or the Sherlock Holmes stories, our contemporary remakes tend not to simply take the bones of the tale and treat it in an updated way. Instead, they create a world in which a part of the viewer’s ability to fully experience what they’re watching depends on their knowledge of earlier works that told the same story. The viewing experience for many of these vehicles is doubled, consisting both of what's on the screen in front of us and of our memories of the older movie or show it's quoting.
This is a fascinating phenomenon, and one I’d love to be able to explain. Unfortunately, I have no real convincing argument about its cause.
Market forces seem to me to play a part, as there is (from the studios' perspective at least) much to be gained from "content" (to use that despicable word) that has as a built-in part of its audience people who are fans of the earlier work. The nearly overwhelming dominance of digital media in our lives also seems to be a factor: a world in which so much of our time is spent viewing memes and visual references is a world in which our own narrative art will begin to take reference as its topic.
Finally, the temporal extension of culture, and its concomitant slowing-down, seem to factor in. Virtually every show or movie or song ever made is floating around out there in the ether of the internet, surrounding us, bearing down on us, demanding that we be aware of it if we are to be cool. This availability, or assault, would seem not only to put a sea-anchor on the creation of new works, but also to beget entertainment that grounds itself in previous entertainment.
These accounts or variations of them all seem plausible, but there’s something missing: the force that these referential or nostalgic works generate.
No explanation for cultural phenomena that ignores the emotional force of those phenomena can ever be complete. People do not watch things because history or economics or algorithms decree that they do. They watch things because they like them, or because those things make them feel things they like to feel.
So where does this force come from? What is that thing that is stirred in us by this cycle of entertainment? To start to untangle this, I think we could do worse than think through The Royal Tenenbaums, Wes Anderson's 2001 comedy (or is it a tragedy?) that perhaps helped kick off our era of nostalgia.
The film features a distinct narrative layering. It's presented as the story told by a book of the same title, checked out in a pre-title sequence from a public library. The film then proceeds as a series of chapters from this book, as read by an unnamed narrator (voiced by Alec Baldwin).
The story this book (and the movie we're watching) tells is of three children still suffering as adults from the wreckage of bad parenting. Their mother Etheline (Anjelica Huston), decided that she would mold her children into geniuses, and after being satisfied that she had done so wrote a book about her success. Their father Royal (Gene Hackman) deserted the family, although not after inflicting on them the distress of his immense narcissism.
Chas (Ben Stiller) is the oldest son. Full of rage over a childhood incident in which Royal shot him with a BB gun in a play battle in which they were on the same team, Chas made himself into a business mogul at a young age. After the recent tragic death of his wife, he has also become radically overprotective of his own kids, whom he's never allowed to meet Royal.
Richie (Luke Wilson) is the middle child, and was Royal's doted-on favorite when they were young. He became a successful professional tennis player, up until the marriage day of his adopted sister Margo (Gwyneth Paltrow). She was at one point a promising playwright, whose career has stalled out as an adult; one of the hidden secrets of the family is that she and Richie are in love, but feel that that love can never be consummated because they're brother and sister, although they're not related by blood.
Also on the scene is Eli Cash (Owen Wilson), the Tenenbaum’s childhood friend who has become a successful, if neurotic and drug-addled, Cormac McCarthy-style novelist, and is also sleeping with Margo. Surrounding this family is a small constellation of other characters, all of who play into the drama.
At the opening of the film, each of the Tenenbaums returns to the ancestral brownstone. Royal, broke, announces (falsely) that he's dying of cancer and convinces the family to take him back in for his final days. Chas, driven to the point of neurosis by fear for his kids, moves home for their safety; Richie returns from the cruise ship on which he's been living, intent on facing his love for Margo; for her part, Margo leaves an unhappy marriage and goes home to be a part of the action.
The plot then moves us through the resolution of their familial issues. Etheline has a suitor (Danny Glover) and must cut her emotional ties with Royal once and for all if she is to move on to a new phase of her life. Chas needs to reconcile with his father – and introduce his kids to their grandfather – if he's going to be more than a shell of a man. Eli needs to give up the drugs. Richie and Margo have to admit their love for each other and deal with the consequences. And Royal, for his part, needs forgiveness from the family.
Each of them gets these things and, although Royal dies at the end, the closing of the film is a happy one.
That this plot is oriented toward the concerns of adolescence is one of the sources of its comedy, and also of its power and joy.
The Tenenbaum kids are all stuck emotionally in their teenage years. Celebrated then as geniuses, they've never really gotten over the victories and traumas of those times. Maturity is not something that automatically happens with the passage of the years, in the vision of the film; "adulting," to use a phrase coined after the movie but applicable to it, is a skill that one has to learn if one is to be any good at it. And the Tenenbaum kids haven't learned it yet. What's preventing them is the wounds inflicted by their parents (Royal in particular), as well their own inability to deal with powerful emotions: love, in the case of Richie and Margo, and fear, Chas's case.
There is an affecting rawness here, as well as a clarifying simplicity. All of us who are no longer teenagers remember the seemingly overwhelming force of the things that happened during those years: love and anger and dismay were not simply feelings but hurricanes, mountains looming over us, dense oceans through which we struggled. The Royal Tenenbaum's portrait of emotional life, like that of many films centered on childhood, is similarly reduced and purified. It's a movie of grand gestures and broad, vivid strokes.
Like the Salinger novels that loom overhead, it's the feeling of emotions that is most central to them, and most profoundly flummoxing, rather than their complexity; or, better, the feeling of emotions is the source of their complexity, instead of the other way around. (One should note, to be accurate to the author, that the strange deep horror of adult-child relationships that can pervade Salinger's short stories such as "For Esme – with Love and Squalor" or "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" is nowhere present here.)
To say that the simplifications of youth are one of the sources of the attraction of nostalgia is almost tautological. One might feel differently if one spent one's early years in, say, the Great Depression or the Soviet Union under Stalin, but for many people there’s a comfort in returning to those pre-adult years. (Or staying in them. One of the questions the film never quite fully faces is whether Royal's children are more similar to him than they understand, inhabiting their galaxies of ennui out of something akin to self-serving self-pity.)
But simplicity is only one half of the equation here. Because to this pared down and deeply felt emotional brew – and here's where I think the film is perhaps unparalleled – Anderson adds a veneer of perfect artificiality. It's this strange mixture of brute emotion and surface-oriented artificiality that gives the film so much of its dynamism, both comedic and narrative.
By artificial here I do not mean fake, but precisely constructed and controlled. This begins, of course, with the set design, which is so impressive as to be difficult to understand without watching the film. Every interior is filled with perfectly-curated objects – from drawings to board games to tents – that overwhelm our ability to take them all in, even with repeated viewings. This is matched by an astounding facility, in both indoor and outdoor, on-location shots, with color palette and lighting, as well as of the costuming which matches these things. There is virtually no shot in the film in which all of the visual elements are not intentionally, and beautifully coordinated.
Finally, Anderson's camera work is impeccable. The film features a predominance of static-camera shots in which actors do not move, but this is not the only trick in his bag. When it suits him, Anderson uses everything from reaction-zooms to slow motion sequences set to pop songs to elegant dolly work to get what he's after.
The result of all this is the feeling that the movie takes place not in our world, but in an ineradicably constructed world where every element has been placed for a reason. There is no randomness here, nothing intrudes to break the control. What is there has been chosen, and has a reason.
It is, in other words, the exact kind of world one might create if one were looking to celebrate the force of memory and of emotional adolescence, and at the same time to master those things.
On the one hand, we have the overwhelming feeling of being young and at the mercy of larger things – of adults in particular, of their expectations and actions – and on the other hand we have a world that is so controlled as to admit nothing it’s not in charge of. Like the attempt of comedy itself, the effect is both to master the un-masterable and to highlight the inherent ridiculousness of that very quest.
(I should be clear here that I'm not making any claims at all about Anderson himself. I'm certainly not saying it's a film about his own experience, or that it was some attempt on his part to play this game of mastering memory in regard to his own life, about which I know very little; I'm saying that he's fantastically accomplished at creating an expression of things the audience is familiar with, and responds to because of that.)
It's this combination of emotional force and control, I think, that can help us begin to think through my original questions about our age of nostalgia.
What The Royal Tenenbaums suggests is the degree to which there’s an uneasy air of the desire for mastery in our moment. Our continual rehashing of the cultural past may not simply be about the comfort of the familiar. It may also be about a revisiting of turbulence from a vantage point of safety. Put differently, the comfort instilled by nostalgia may come at least in part from accessing broader, more forceful things – from our personal experience of childhood to our perception of the kitsch of older artworks – from a perceived position of control.
We get all of the sturm und drang of adolescence but none of the peril; we reassure ourselves that the things we went through, or the TV shows and movies we liked, were meaningful without ever having to open ourselves up to their true danger – for art, like all emotion, is dangerous because of the way its overwhelming power threatens our sense that we're in charge of things – or to the danger presented to us by our younger, more vulnerable selves.
Memory is threatening because it confronts us with change. Perhaps nostalgia is, at least in part, an attempt to deal with that threat.
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