Lock Yourself In Your Hotel Room

Jonathan Fire*Eater “The Search For Cherry Red” – Like a lot of people who grew up with modest means, I have an attraction to stories about very affluent characters. I suppose that the reason for this is the same as why people write about wealthy people to begin with, or why any of us would desire to be rich ourselves — an absurd surplus of funds gives a person license to pursue most any whim. It’s not true freedom by any stretch, but it sorta seems that way from a distance, or in certain types of stories.

It’s not exactly a surprise that Wes Anderson is constantly making films about rich people. Above all other things, Anderson is obsessed with aesthetics, and logically, his taste in scenery limits him to stories in which his characters must either possess a lot of money, or enter the context of wealth. Unlike a lot of artists and producers in this decade, Anderson’s fixation on wealth has little to do with the glamor of expensive objects and tacky nouveau riche style — think about this year’s MTV awards, Entourage, The Hills, Kanye West — but rather the tossed-off everyday comfort of having no major financial limitations. You can’t buy the lifestyle Anderson is selling — you have to be born into it. You can try to talk your way into it, like Max Fischer or Eli Cash, but it won’t work out. You can work hard, make a lot of money, and enter a higher tax bracket like Herman Blume or Royal Tenenbaum, but your drive and working class roots will always set you apart from those whose ambitions have been stalled by the inertia of excessive comfort.

The three main characters in Anderson’s new film The Darjeeling Limited are the sons of a successful businessman, but their wealth is mostly downplayed throughout the film despite the fact that it is crucial to the context of their story. On one hand, Anderson and his collaborators are making an effort to make it easier for audiences to like and relate to the characters as human beings, and on the other, it is a very effective way of showing how rarely their characters think about their privilege, either because they’ve simply taken it for granted, or don’t believe themselves to be as rich as other people they might know, or are just lost in a haze of self-absorbed oblivion. Their tastes are not extravagant, but they are very whimsical, affected, and every so slightly toxic in their entitlement. The prequel short Hotel Chevalier depicts the youngest brother living in a Parisian hotel room for at least a month while sulking through a pathetic bout of depression, and the film proper follows the boys as they take a trip through a foreign country and mostly just stroll through the scenery whenever they aren’t half-heartedly taking in some “spiritual” destination or forcing nameless faceless others to — literally — carry around their emotional baggage.

It’s worth noting that Wes Anderson co-wrote The Darjeeling Limited with Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman, which goes a long way towards explaining why the film essentially plays out like the dude version of Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation. What is it about the Coppola family that compels them to make highly stylized films that beg the viewer to take the emotional pain of extremely privileged young adults very, very seriously? Is this simply narcissism in the form of self-critique? Schwartzman’s character in Darjeeling is an author who is amusingly incapable of writing a story that isn’t a very thinly veiled version of his own life — are we meant to take that as a sort of self-deprecating joke? It certainly seem as though both films drop their whiney leads into a country that they fetishize but do not understand as a way of deliberately highlighting the way both the characters and the filmmakers value aesthetics over content or human connections. The weird tension of The Darjeeling Limited comes from how Anderson’s restrained enthusiasm and deadpan melancholy clashes with the self-pity and disengagement of the Coppolas, resulting in some of the film’s most appealing moments, but also a larger feeling that Anderson has reduced all of India and its people to a cutesy diorama playset to accompany the Coppolas’ sullen miniatures.

Since I saw The Darjeeling Limited on Saturday night, I’ve been wondering why I feel a bit bothered by its low key depiction of wealthy characters, and I’ve settled on an answer: While I am all in favor of fiction that portrays affluent characters as three dimensional human beings, I chafe at stories that are entirely or seemingly uncritical of wealth. I love Jonathan Fire*Eater‘s dark, stylish songs about debauched rich kids, and the hilariously grotesque Bluths of Arrested Development. I adore the snobby primness of Richard and Emily Gilmore and the gleeful capitalist sleaziness of Jack Donaghy, and I’m intrigued by the promise of creepy decadence in ABC’s new Peter Krause vehicle Dirty Sexy Money. However, aside from Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan and, uh, maybe Batman, I’m drawing a blank on rich characters that I enjoy who are not meant to seem at least somewhat distasteful and untrustworthy to the audience.

Am I being unfair? Is this how my classism manifests itself? Am I really just after stories that are there to tell me that I’m better off and more authentic because I grew up in and will likely always remain part of the American middle class? Why do I need to be told over and over again that money fucks you up? The Darjeeling Limited more or less arrives at that point, but without any sort of certainty or conviction. It just shrugs it off like “uh, I don’t know, maybe, whatever…” and that grates on me in the worst way.