The French Dispatch: A Critical Analysis

by Sebastian Tow

From Stranger Things, to Tarintino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, there is a trend in the film industry to profit off a culture of nostalgia. But, is this merely a trend, or a symptom of a deeper cultural sickness? Not only in film, but in music, media, and, indeed, all modes of popular culture and otherwise, there is a growing sense of nostalgia. Wes Anderson’s latest hipster dereliction, The French Dispatch, is the most prominent example of this. It is an anthology, featuring a large cast and following three different storylines within the overarching plot depicting the fictional Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun newspaper as it creates its final issue. The first story follows an inmate and painter (Benicio del Toro) as he falls in love with one of the prison guards (Léa Seydoux), and is commissioned to paint a fresco. The second depicts one of the paper’s journalists (Frances McDormand) as she follows a group of French students (Timothée Chalamet, Lyna Khoudri) plotting a revolt, reminiscent of the real May ‘68 Paris protests. The third story of the film features Jeffrey Wright, Mathieu Amalric, and Stephen Park, and follows the kidnapping of a police commissioner's son. Bill Murray also stars as Arthur Howitzer Jr., the paper's editor, while Owen Wilson appears in a short segment that introduces the film's setting in the fictional French town of ‘Ennui-sur-Blasé’.
 
The name ‘Ennui-sur-Blasé’ directly translates to ‘Boredom-on-Jaded’, and this phrase sums up the essence of The French Dispatch perfectly. Anderson’s style has gone well beyond that of self-parody, and it is clear that behind the meticulous aesthetics is nothing more than cynicism, and one could say, a vague boredom. But is Anderson to blame for this? On a closer, more sociological reading of the film, I would say no, not completely. Anderson as an artist and a director is, at least partially, unconscious of this, and can even be said to be attempting to counteract this. I intend to argue that The French Dispatch, and Anderson’s work as a whole, can be analyzed and understood as symptomatic of a bored and jaded culture, trapped in a deadlock of nostalgia and self-parody. 

To understand this assertion one first has to look at the context the film is coming out of. In our times art is a commodity. Art is in the business of consumer entertainment; the film industry simply looks to maximise consumption of their product, so there is no room for deviation from this goal. Authentic art is always a result of a deviation from the traditions that preceded it, it is an event that results in a bloom of originality. But in a society predicated on business for business’ sake, art is unable to perform this act. In this way, from the 1970s onwards, art has proliferated the postmodern by incorporating every anti-establishment attitude into the cycle of the establishment, the cycle of art as commodity. Anything deviating from the mainstream, or acting against it, is quickly sucked up into the vacuum of production, and sold as the very thing it sought to counteract. This can be seen in Anderson’s work from the outset.  In The French Dispatch, the very fact that art is commodified is known, and this is commented on within the film itself. The first story of the film makes the standard postmodern gesture of deprecating its own plot and imagery. The dance back and forth between Moses, the artist, and Julien, who wants to buy the art, reduces the character’s reverence for the art itself to nothing more than a joke. The story plays on this idea of art as trapped in commodification, as Adrien Brody’s character announces explicitly that “all art is for sale, you wouldn’t make it if it wasn’t.”  
 
Cultural theorist Mark Fisher would say that this is only natural. According to Fisher, there is no question of art enacting genuine deviation anymore. The concept of art as an ideal that seeks earnestly to create new horizons is laughable now. Fisher  pairs the commodification of art with this cynicism found in contemporary culture. Each story in The French Dispatch depicts characters who are artists and revolutionaries, yet through their self-mocking, blank style of delivery, the characters make fun of the things they stand for. Under the explicit content of the film, depicting artists and manifesto writers, is an implicit subtext of cynicism. This is one of the largest consequences of postmodern culture. And this is a major factor resulting both in a nostalgia culture, and in the nostalgia of Anderson's style. In a comment on Peter Sloterdijk’s book Critique of Cynical Reason, Slavoj Žižek says that “[today] ideology’s dominant mode of functioning is cynical. (...) The cynical [person] is quite aware of the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality, but he nonetheless still insists upon the mask.”  One can see this insistence in The French Dispatch. On the surface is the mask of nostalgic celebration of all things vintage, creative, modernist; yet beneath this is nothing but mockery. 
 
Using these insights, we can track the timeline of the emergence of nostalgia culture in Anderson’s work. According to Fisher, the artistic impotence created by these forces reached a new high in the 2000’s. By that time, it became conceptually impossible to create anything new, at least in the mainstream, and ultimately this is when nostalgia culture emerged. From ‘business ontology’ came artistic ‘hauntology’: a depressed nostalgia for new art forms, a nostalgia for a time that was not caught in a loop of recycled forms, endlessly commented on by the metalanguage of cynicism. Anderson's early films, made between the late ‘90’s and the early 2000’s, like Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums, still existed, at least conceptually, within the time period they were filmed. The development of Anderson’s acutely nostalgic aesthetic was already running counter to this in his early work, and by the 2010’s Anderson’s films began to lose all context of time altogether. Films like The Darjeeling Limited and Moonrise Kingdom bore the aesthetic of the 20th century, yet no one can say they are period films. They neither exist in the 20th century nor in the time they were created. Anderson’s films are packaged in the new-old, they give the viewer the fake experience of modernist artistic aesthetics, while their form remains within the harshest postmodern disposition. The characters of The French Dispatch, just as the characters of Anderson’s previous works, adorn a closet of perfectly coordinated outfits, pastel and perfect down to the hem. The set dazzles with its reminiscence, Ennui-sur-Blasé reminds one of the streets of Paris pictured in an early François Truffault film; but, unlike the earnestness seen in the eyes of Antoine as the camera follows him to the end of the beach at the climax of Truffault’s Les Quatre Cents Coups, Anderson’s characters speak in monotone voices, filled with mawkishness, and his sets are only the enhancement of recycled references. Anderson’s films are explicitly nostalgic, yet they do not repeat the true gesture of the past they imitate; every gesture, every line in the script, is but a simulation of itself, making fun of the very aesthetic referent its nostalgia is built on.

This style reached the threshold of tolerance in The Grand Budapest Hotel. It’s no wonder that The French Dispatch, Anderson’s first non-animated film since Grand Budapest, has gone past the point of recovery. The pace of the film is excessive, reducing the time for characters to utter a quip here and there, as the plot attempts to cram as much visual nostalgia into two hours as possible. In the third story, that of the police commissioner’s son, the levels of narrative are cramped and confused in pace. The story jumps back and forth to Jeffory Wright’s character, the journalist recounting the story to a TV audience, clad in a ‘70’s jacket that looks like it belongs to a guest on The Dick Cavett Show. The rest of the narrative is depicted by animation and hurried takes between the myriad of characters. In the second story, Revisions to a Manifesto, the logic of nostalgia culture built on business ontology is laid bare in its reference to Paris ‘68. We see here another hallmark of postmodern cynicism, the depoliticisation of culture. In this way, a past event such as the Paris student riots of ‘68, an earnest, yet failed attempt at political and cultural emancipation, is the perfect reference point for Anderson’s aesthetic. Out of the film's sense of nostalgia, covering an unconscious true nostalgia for earnestness and emancipation, it ends up mocking this nostalgia itself, visualizing it with black and white cigarettes, stacks of books, and stylishly dressed students playing chess in Parisian cafes. McDormand’s character blandly comments on the students, writing up their movement as nothing more than the  “touching narcissism of the young.” Anderson’s mocking depiction of the sixtyeight-er zeitgeist speaks to the central contradiction that sustains us as inhabitants of nostalgia culture: it is impossible to get out of the loop of cultural recycling, cynical distancing, and depoliticization, yet we long for earnestness and artistic emancipation in culture. We mock the culture of the past, yet we wish it were actualized today. In this way, The French Dispatch is completely turpitudinous; the finality of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun as it ends with its last issue, echoes the very finality of The French Dispatch itself. The cast that has remained in Anderson’s work for years are but variations of the characters they have played in films before, reduced to proliferating the deadlock of nostalgic logic further, so there is no out, no way to go forward. 

Analysis of the film raises a question as to how conscious Anderson is of these dynamics. From one angle it appears as though he is aware of the social and cultural dynamics at play in his own work, and one may venture to say that in The French Dispatch he chose to take the logic of nostalgia and cynicism to its endpoint in an attempt to critique this logic itself. This must be partially true, due to the very conscious choices made; was naming the setting for the film ‘Boredom-on-Jaded’ a mistake, or was it merely a sally of wit? Yet, whether or not Anderson is conscious of these dynamics does not redeem the film. I would predict that Anderson’s style has no place left to go but to reproduce a variation of the same blueprint pictured in The French Dispatch in his next film. It is not up to Anderson to break the postmodern logic inherent in nostalgia culture. For art and film in the wider sense, the only way to break from this deadlock is to be liberated from cynicism by emphasizing a new earnestness, non-referential to any imagined aesthetic of the past. The French Dispatch should be seen as the prime example of the existing order of cultural production that needs to be destroyed if there is any hope of taking art to a place of possible new creation.