The Great Frame-Up: Wes Anderson and Twee Narrative

Contrivance
Tom Hertweck

Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Volume 60, Number 2, Summer

2018, pp. 129-150 (Article)

Published by University of Texas Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/697027

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The Great Frame-Up:
Wes Anderson and Twee
Narrative Contrivance
TOM HERTWECK

A
mong popular media outlets, KEYWORDS: The Darjeeling
Limited, The Grand Budapest
Wes Anderson–bashing has taken Hotel, frame story, framing
on something of a life of its own: device, narrative, twee

called “callow” and “narcissistic” ABSTRACT: Wes Anderson

(Edelstein), named a source of a frequently utilizes narrative

“queasy feeling” that stems from the racial politics double-framing, both as embed-
ded frame stories and as rep-
(Weiner), dragged—albeit lovingly—by Whoopi resentational frames from other

Goldberg and others for the lack of characters of media. In The Grand Budapest
Hotel and The Darjeeling Lim-
color (Maas), and generally made the whipping ited this double-framing offers
boy of the hipster establishment (Lorentzen), distance from the viewer’s estab-
lished sense of reality and creates
Anderson has come to stand for a disengaged flam- a space for taking seriously
boyance. Early in Anderson’s career, Anthony Lane Anderson’s exaggerated situa-

in a reasonably ambivalent review of The Darjeel-

tions. Anderson’s twee aesthetic
works together with these in-
ing Limited (2007) in The New Yorker described novative narrative contrivances

the general charges that were regularly levied to provide a coping mechanism
appropriate to the vexed and
against the filmmaker: anxious cultural context in
which he operates.

Is this itself a diversion . . . a cheap doodle,

masking the director’s inability to sustain
a strong emotion? Or could it be that his

Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 60, No. 2, Summer 2018
© 2018 by the University of Texas Press
DOI: 10.7560/TSLL60202
 greens and blues, like his other trademarks (the head-on shots of people
bunched together, the bursts of song, the desires so acute that they beg
to be deflected into gags), are the shadings of an ironist, who knows how
easily movies can slide into the maudlin?

Though the specifics have changed as the work developed in the past ten
years, the basic form of the arguments against Anderson has stayed the same:
too pretty or too clever, Anderson is a pleasure to watch but has little of sub-
stance to say.
This essay serves neither as a defense nor an excoriation of Anderson’s
work. Rather, from a vantage now (in late 2017) eight features into his career,
we are in a position to take better stock of precisely what his style is made of
and how it works as an integrated aesthetic-conceptual project. To that end,
this essay places Anderson’s work within a unifying rubric of twee. Drawing
on Marc Spitz’s recent popular history of the term, twee serves to press to-
gether aspects of Anderson’s formal contrivances and the disparate content
he brings into frame. Personal and retiring, twee aesthetics serve as a kind
of protection from the outside world so as to fixate on the passionate invest-
ment in personal expression. Indeed, as I will describe, this notion of frames
and framing is essential to his work and has too often gone overlooked. In my
view, which emerges from twee’s aesthetic-affective basis and applies itself at
a fundamental narrative level, frame—as both frame story and the varying
genres that come to bear on and reorient his films’ diegetic realities—is both
essential to presenting the particular twee aesthetic as Anderson invokes it
and also a technique used to help the director forge a space in which he may
produce narrative in the first place. In short, twee provides the formal register
and raison d’être for Anderson to articulate fidelity to individual artistic prin-
ciples, in his case an intense focus on stories where personal trials become the
subjects of deeper individual contemplation—a drastic departure from both
the “statement” pictures of social consciousness, meant to win awards, and
the explosions of big-budget action fare, meant to win dollars, which domi-
nate the mainstream film marketplace. While this state of affairs may do little
to dissuade some from thinking of his practice as solipsistic, my assertion is
that when viewed with a better understanding of his framing’s deployment
against the backdrop of ever-increasing social anxiety and unrest, Anderson
approaches something close to a radical politics of the worried individual,
not by producing an escape—a fantasy, to be sure—but by refiguring the very
terms of modern political aesthetics.

130 | TOM HERTWECK

Twee and the Practice of Passionate Anxiety
This essay asserts that twee contains an immense, untapped power. In short,
twee ceases to be a pejorative term used to dismiss Anderson’s films as fash-
ionable nonsense (to borrow another phrase) and instead provides a setting
within which to find value: first, in the appreciation of craft, and second, as an
attempt to retreat from real-world social issues by focusing on what is person-
ally accessible and practicable: stories of individuals framed by hyperparticu-
lar circumstances not unlike our own. However, to understand this requires a
reexamination of a term that has had over its lifetime a range of meanings, all
effectively condescending.
Twee has a semantic history dating back some hundred years to the
beginning of the twentieth century, and during that time has maintained a
generally negative connotation: “excessively or affectedly quaint, pretty, or
sentimental” (Oxford English Living Dictionary). And yet, Marc Spitz be-
gins his celebration of “twee” culture from precisely this conceptual point by
lauding those same characteristics in our own changing times as a marginal/
mainstream “gentle revolution in music, books, television, fashion, and film”
(as the subtitle claims). More than simply saccharine, he defines twee much
more provocatively as the desire for “the freedom (and often the daring) to be
soft in an increasingly hard world” (4). Set against the backdrop of the post-
war era, twee responds to the same types of social pressures well defined by
thinkers of postmodernity, but rather than volley back their own fragmented
psyche as a parodic counterassault, twee figures respond by retiring from
the assault and tending their own garden. Ranging from a cast of sugges-
tive pre-twee icons (Anne Frank, Charles Schulz, Truman Capote, François
Truffaut) to masters of the contemporary movement (Belle and Sebastian,
Noah Baumbach, Miranda July, Jonathan Ames), Spitz’s popular-press take
makes the case that somewhere beneath the noise and grinding of modern
life, a reserved approach to making meaning is taking place.
Taking Spitz’s defense of twee as a starting point, we can extrapolate
a story where twee serves as a placeholder for an aggregate, deeply per-
sonal aesthetic-intellectual response to the felt affective reality of the post-
war era generally, but which undergoes intensification during the last thirty
years. The twee figure, a low-fi hero, serves as (very) light counterfriction
to several currents: the ever-increasing industrialization and commercial-
ization of art, homogenizing trends in mass media, the sense of ceaseless
international warfare, dangerous globalism in the threat of pandemics and
terrorism, and so on. Taken this way, twee aesthetics suggest not so much

Twee Narrative Contrivance | 131

nostalgia but rather the sense that one is better off, given the complexity
and worry of contemporary life, just attending to one’s own interests to the
extent that they do not interfere with those of another. Absent the irony and
formal disaggregation of high postmodernism, and easily mistaken for self-
involvement, twee aesthetics are suggestive of a world in which people could
find something that they themselves valued, and then could pursue such a
thing on their own terms—not as a way to indulge the ego but instead to avoid
or shield against mistrust and antagonism generalized in society. In this
way, handcraft, the cultivation of esoteric collections and specialized knowl-
edge, and the development of passionate personal commitments reveal an
ethical relationship to the world in which contextual self-determination
provides a source of freedom to experience one’s own life that is a moral
end to itself. As such, twee suggests an intellectual undercurrent that runs
through Christopher Lasch’s post-Vietnam social psychology in The Cul-
ture of Narcissism (1979), through Susan Cain’s corporate-training vindica-
tion of the rights of shy types in Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World
That Can’t Stop Talking (2012), or more abstractly, through the apprecia-
tion of “cozy culture” in the mainstreaming of hygge and Danish-style living
(Altman).
In this more robustly critical image of twee that I suggest based on Spitz’s
work, it is difficult not to see Anderson’s work shining through—making it un-
surprising that Spitz spends a portion of his chapter on indie films of the late
1990s celebrating Anderson, albeit in rather shallow terms: for Anderson’s
DIY aesthetic and fidelity to his own artistic principles. More importantly,
however, from this we can begin to see how a more critical vision of twee also
provides a rubric to unite many forms of thinking that exist already in work
on Anderson’s films. On the one hand, twee does much for the formal, visual
aspects to the extent that it helps explain his relationship to the fetish object
as central to his image economy, whether this functions in ironic relation to
his characters’ plights or simply as a method of producing artifice. Some, like
Donna Kornhaber, see Anderson’s films participating in an ethos of collection,
of ordering and presenting a lifetime’s private interests “against the encroach-
ments of a disordered world” (5). Others, like Jeffrey Sconce, orient Anderson’s
aesthetic toward participating in a new indie project of “smart cinema,” where
a broad-based “tone,” suffused with ironic posturing, avoids mass-market Hol-
lywood production values and therefore is able to more intimately interrogate
hegemonic social structures (352). Still others, like James MacDowell, define
Anderson’s sensibility as neither innocent nor ironic but as the enthusiastic
“commitment” of quirk that merges embarrassment with a sincere desire for

132 | TOM HERTWECK

engagement with society (165). Each of these makes strong contributions to
our understanding of Anderson’s world; however, the positive spin on twee I
want to focus on has the power to capitalize even on these gains. It augments
the collector’s impulse toward building communal connection by allowing us
to see that Anderson’s narratives serve this function very well on their own,
as statements of contained narrative meaning that actually need not refer to
the external world, because representation aligned with twee principles of
knowledge and intensity is already a moral position. Twee draws into conver-
sation these surface aesthetics and gives credit to the efforts of understanding
artifice as producing something more than ironic detachment that may or
may not contain within it radical ethical potential. Rather, I would suggest,
the content of twee is itself a radical potentiality in that it contains both the
figural energy needed to unmoor the viewer as well as the conceptual frame-
work necessary to carry it off.
To that end, on the other hand, twee’s insistence on the active personal
positionality of a passionate artist grants it a certain energy to delve into
the moral quandaries of Anderson’s work in a more robust way. Twee asks
the viewer to reconcile the entire image-system as a means toward coherent
narrative construction. In this regard, the established tropes of childhood
and innocence have expanded our understanding of his films, but they also
blinker to an extent critical interpretations, becoming a regular feature of
Anderson criticism attempting to theorize its whole.1 MacDowell’s quirk, as
just one example, contains the important limit that irony is never properly
innocent, leading him to suggest that “it certainly appears unlikely that the
Andersonian could ever become a politically radical aesthetic” (165). To be
sure—and yet, it seems the case that this has more to do with how we fixate
on those aspects of childhood first that lead us to this conclusion. While a
central part of Anderson’s work, childhood and innocence are still a relatively
minor part of a body of film that is also engrossed by problems affecting all
periods of life. Recognizing their stylistic diversity, we might consider how the
films singularly focus on individual interpersonal relationships (rather than
on, say, the characters’ social dramas) that have been conditioned by past
experiences that are not always very youthful, or pause to question whether
youth is a condition to which many Anderson characters might want to re-
turn—or perhaps yet more radically, whether we might actually benefit from
keeping aspects of our younger selves alive, as the twee project demands,
albeit among other simultaneous concerns. Likewise, twee also serves as a
mild corrective—or, more properly put, focusing tool—for the repeated use
of the term “hipster” in reference to Anderson’s project (also frequently cited

Twee Narrative Contrivance | 133

in parallel to certain stances of youth). Used with little precision, the term
provides at best a vague notion of an ill-defined aesthetic, at worst a kind of
rebuke for the works’ felt simplicity or depth (see Lane above). Taking the
term to mean something like a style without substance, academic critics tend
toward the former version, while popular critics tend toward the latter. In the
single instance of extended contact between Anderson’s work and the term,
Michael Z. Newman bifurcates the idea of hipster films as either those mar-
keted toward this loosely defined demographic or those usually nonmain-
stream films that present themselves as models of a certain hipster style,
of which Life Aquatic stands as an exemplar. Though his discussion of the
“hip” as involving a negation adds much to our understanding of the hipster,
his depiction of Anderson’s work seems contingent on the application of the
term to Anderson by others, and on his particular, narrow reading of Aquatic,
one that does not account for the totality of the filmmaker’s work. Concerns
like childhood/innocence and hipness are certainly important parts of
Anderson’s works and should not be denied; what is more, they are imbri-
cated within Anderson’s particular formal style. However, at the present mo-
ment, provisional readings that focus on such concerns take up too much of
the critical terrain and miss the striking personal dramas being presented.
In short, twee, as I use the term, gives credit to the holistic vision Anderson
has seeded throughout his films.
My purpose here is not—the efforts just made notwithstanding—to sub-
sume all other thinking about Anderson under a single header for the sake
of lumping. Instead it is to suggest that there is a certain tendency of aca-
demic critics (to shamelessly repurpose a phrase) wherein Anderson’s work
is understood as exhibiting a variously lush and off-putting richness that de-
mands the generation of a variety of critical frameworks to extract or impose
meaning—and that to produce such readings has necessitated an industry
of too much hair-splitting, one that frequently wants to reach beyond the
films themselves to find it. Twee provides a regimented conceptual approach
that explores but also maintains the complex attitude toward storytelling
with which Anderson imbues his films. Put another way, the depiction of
Anderson as too aloof, disinterested, and bent solely on concerns of style
strikes me as wrong and does a disservice to the work. As a director aware
of his own position as a maker of meaning, and who comes to the practice
of filmic fabulation with an extensive knowledge and appreciation of film’s
history, Anderson is the quintessential twee figure, because he knows much
and cares a great deal about how that knowledge is deployed—diegetically,
that is, in the structured presentation of hand-tooled narratives.

134 | TOM HERTWECK

Framing and Twee Distance

Twee techniques in film may take many forms; indeed, a full discussion of
Anderson’s twee vision would take an entire book. For our purposes, a nar-
row, more specific look at one—narrative framing—is sufficient to illustrate
his proclivity and generate further discussion, in that beyond the material
construction of Anderson’s films, the ways in which they are plotted as various
types of frame narratives transcend the usual surface conventions that mark
something as twee.
Narrative framing—the relation between frame story and embedded
narration—provides a useful way for the artist to signal the artifice of some-
thing to the audience. Intricately related to narrative levels, these frames
come into being by a narrative act: specifically, the act of producing narra-
tion about events outside of or within the present plot, sometimes even com-
menting explicitly about the present plot.2 By drawing attention to a plot’s
relative embeddedness, a filmmaker provides a measure of distance between
the characters and the events under discussion in a way that calls attention to
that distance. Most Anderson criticism mentions the various frames at work
in his films in passing, though little extended discussion exists.3 A focus on
the frames themselves, however, begins to reveal a relationship between his
figural practices and his apparent larger commitments to narrativizing twee’s
more conceptual concerns. That is, framing provides access to twee precisely
because it offers an opportunity to disengage from the real world by creating a
space in which the more personal stories of his films can make sense on their
own terms and within their separate worlds. Of course this is not to say that
Anderson’s twee aesthetic has nothing to say about our own world. Rather,
because twee orients itself around the kind of anxieties that attend modern
living, twee practitioners need to distance themselves from the totality of so-
called real life in order to maintain fidelity to their own personal expression of
fictive private stories. In this way, Andersonian double-framing, as I will de-
scribe it, serves to make the story strange in the production of a more distant
artifice, but simultaneously forms an intimate (that is, wholly separate) space
for his stories to take place.
Framing becomes a buffer zone delimiting fantasy—but a fantasy that is
always just about to rupture, because the diegesis continually points back to
ideas, images, and places from our own world. As Ali Arikan elegantly describes
in an essay on the triply framed Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson’s approach to
framing functions precisely because of his repertoire of reference and a sincere
appreciation for the aesthetic choices that others have made before him:

Twee Narrative Contrivance | 135

 It is a tribute to Zweig by an American filmmaker eight decades and an
ocean removed from the events that shaped his fantasy. It is a fanciful
feature-length motion picture by a writer of literate films who would not
have made this one if he didn’t adore Zweig, but who nonetheless seems
conscious of himself as an image-maker—a storyteller for whom words
are one part of the texture of movies whose stories unfold in realities
adjacent to reality. . . . (213)

Arikan gets Anderson’s style right in the sense that there is nothing clever or
ironic about his invocation; rather, his auteurism foregrounds a fanatical de-
votion to the crafting of narrative such that Anderson is effectively in ongoing
“collaboration” with those he admires. Just as the various framed narrators
(old Zero, the young and old authors) and perspective characters (e.g., young
Zero, the young woman) collaborate to form the narrative we see, Anderson
collaborates with Zweigian uber-narrative at the same time as he invokes a
host of film references.4 What Arikan describes as Anderson’s “humility” and
“litera[cy]” in these regards are hallmarks of the twee aesthetic such that he,
like the young woman, “worship[s]” at the same altar of passionate apprecia-
tion irrespective of whether or not it is cool (213).
The affective resonance in these moments has the potential to be read
as merely allusive, in the sense of postmodern pastiche, as Jameson used the
term, meaning “blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs”—empty repeti-
tion (17). Instead, Anderson uses these films of the 1930s through the 1960s
and these soundings of Zweig’s work to frame and encode his own stories.
Anderson’s twee sensibility wants to pull images and forms from the dustbin
of history in order keep them alive out of a sense of care, because they are still
powerful and relevant ways of telling stories. Extending more traditional nar-
ratological work, Marie-Laure Ryan conceptualizes this narrative potential of
the framed story to include such far-flung points of reference:

Embedded narratives . . . are the story-like constructs contained in

the private worlds of characters. These constructs include not only the
dreams, fictions, and fantasies conceived or told by characters, but any
kind of representation concerning past or future states and events:
plans, passive projections, desires, beliefs concerning the history of [the
textual actual world], and beliefs concerning the private representations
of other characters. Among these embedded narratives, some reflect the
events of the factual domain, while others delineate unactualized pos-
sibilities. (156)

136 | TOM HERTWECK

This language of the “private worlds of characters” lends itself well to the
twee sensibility inasmuch as twee embraces the fantastic potential of fabula-
tion—to say nothing of Anderson’s particular films in which the narratives
constantly negotiate longing related to the individual characters’ regrets, their
“unactualized possibilities.” For Anderson—as with all filmmakers to some ex-
tent (e.g., Tarantino, in a different register)—narrative framing provides the
space to dream and bring disparate references into contact, to remind us of
film history as appreciators.
Also for a director like Anderson, the twee possibilities of the frame story
occur in the further manipulation of narrative distance across media. Specifi-
cally, in his films framing takes place at two levels: in a narratological frame
story as I’ve just described, and in the application of a secondary media genre
that forms another frame around the film’s primary narrative. Sometimes
these frames occur simultaneously and multiply. The latter has been noted
extensively (though often in passing) by critics looking at Anderson’s works.
The most obvious include the framing of Rushmore as a play within the film’s
diegesis, which reinforces Max Fischer’s own dramatic works, and the novel
The Royal Tenenbaums that is checked out from a library in the opening of
that film and that reappears between “chapters” as Alec Baldwin narrates both
film and novel. Beyond these two, I assert that all of Anderson’s films after his
more aesthetically traditional Bottle Rocket use one or both framing devices,
from the multiply embedded Grand Budapest to The Darjeeling Limited, a
film that seems as conventionally plotted as they come but that contains a
singular vision of innovative narrative framing.

The Well-Framed House of Fiction:

The Grand Budapest Hotel
Anderson’s Grand Budapest is his most elegantly and complexly framed film.
Operating as a series of inset frame stories complemented by a multigeneric
media apparatus, The Grand Budapest Hotel contains a rich depiction of the
possibilities of what framing can do to/for a story’s distance from the viewer.
But more importantly, Budapest’s framing focuses our attention on the deeply
personal plots of characters who are struggling in their own twee way with
fantastic, but consistently particular, circumstances. In this way, Anderson
enacts twee’s awareness of the cruelties of the outside world through a passion
project, here with a parallel of those characters’ investment in their own pas-
sions against the backdrop of war.
In terms of framing, the film centers on the story of how, in 1932, Zero
Moustafa came to own the hotel of the title (the Story). That story is told in

Twee Narrative Contrivance | 137

1968 by the older Zero to a young author convalescing at the Budapest, now
nestled within the fictional communist country of Zubrowka (frame 1). That
narrative is framed by an oration by the same, now older, author in 1985 from
behind a desk in his home, where he reads from cue cards while a grandchild
plays in the offing (frame 2). The final frame is the visual narrative of a young
woman in an undated time similar to the film’s present (2014) that shows her
enter the Old Lutz Cemetery in Zubrowka, pay homage to the statue of the au-
thor depicted in frames 1 and 2, and sit to read the book The Grand Budapest
Hotel on a snowy bench adjacent to his grave (frame 3). In terms of the film’s
presentation, the action moves from frame 3, to 2, to 1, and into the Story,
with occasional returns to frame 1, back out the way it came, such that frames
2 and 3 appear as two sets of bookends to the film. All except frame 3, we are
led to understand, are contained in the book the young woman reads, their
shifts in narrative level corresponding to the various frames and voiceovers
that move the Story forward. In this way, the narrative focuses intently on
the viewer’s distance from our own reality while also insisting on its familiar-
ity. The fictional country is said to be on the eastern edge of Europe, and its
similarity to Poland or Czechoslovakia, suggested in its annexation later in the
Story, locates it within a universe parallel to ours in the events of World War II
and Eastern European communism. The estrangement from our own world,
however, is essential for the twee storytelling that takes place, in that fiction-
alizing the framing devices—literally, such that the book is likely (though by
no means certainly) a novel in the style of Stefan Zweig, whose “works” are
credited as the “inspiration” for the film—allows the viewer to put aside a de-
sire to place the events in reality, so as to instead focus more intently on the
narrative that has been produced. No clear adaptation (as Arikan notes), the
film is therefore a new tale written in homage to a Master, one that repeatedly
refers us back to the process of storytelling and its self-invested purposes. The
characters Zero, the author, and the young woman, together with Anderson as
the director of the film—all are called to their vocations as makers of meaning
as an end in itself against the backdrop, fictive or otherwise, of a cruel world
that orients the twee sensibility.
Zero, the war-orphan and lobby-boy protagonist of the film, serves as a
centering twee character because he provides the main narrative of the Story,
and also because his sensibility is conditioned by his sincere desire to learn
and serve in the hotel after losing his family in his country’s various politi-
cal upheavals, which predate the Story. Ever the same, years later, in frame
1, when he meets the young author, he is the height of gentlemanly conduct,

138 | TOM HERTWECK

itself a twee affect. He seems to sincerely downplay the tale’s importance, of-
fering, “If it genuinely does interest you . . . it will be my pleasure, and indeed,
my privilege, to tell you my story, such as it is.” Knowing its deeply personal na-
ture (as both we and the author come to find out), the older Zero hesitates and
devalues the story “such as it is,” understanding that something so individual
may be of no interest to anyone else. Of course, as the young author infers in
frame 2, such devaluation is also a sign of some restless energy of narrative
that often makes for a good story. There he tells the viewer:

It is an extremely common mistake: people think the writer’s imagina-

tion is always at work, that he’s constantly inventing an endless supply of
incidents and episodes; that he simply dreams up his stories out of thin
air. In point of fact, the opposite is true. Once the public knows you’re a
writer, they bring the characters and events to you. And as long as you
maintain your ability to look, and to carefully listen, these stories will
continue . . . to seek you out, uh, over your lifetime. To him, who has often
told the tales of others, many tales will be told.

No matter the demurral of the qualities older Zero may provide, the younger au-
thor understands that there are energies within the personal that insist stories
such as these be told. Likewise, the author’s discourse stands in for Anderson’s
position as director: while not a mid-century traveler, as in the film, or a Euro-
cosmopolitan like Zweig, Anderson has nonetheless had many stories told to
him through the body of literature and film he has consumed in his lifetime. As
such, when the author finishes by explaining that “[t]he incidents that follow
were described to me exactly as I present them here, and in a wholly unexpected
way,” we hear a description of Anderson’s framing and his mode of production.
In the first place, we see the Zweig-like author read Anderson’s take on Zweig
himself as faux-adaptation. In the second place, though, we hear the merger of
allusion (as resurrected images “exactly as I present them”) and his ecstatic, ref-
erential form (as recombination or assemblage in “a wholly unexpected way”).
As a maker of tales, Anderson has expressed within his own film a kind of guid-
ing principle such that the filmmaker need not always create something new
but instead must cultivate a habit of looking and carefully listening to the qual-
ity stories around him—as film buff, a mode of obsessive twee knowledge—and
put them together within his own imagination.
In this realistic-fantasy context, Anderson tells a personal story about
civility in a hard world, one in which having sympathy and humanity among

Twee Narrative Contrivance | 139

individuals (and not a collective ethic) expresses itself through sincere ca-
maraderie and a moral obligation toward one another on a one-to-one basis.
Because twee would reject forms of collectivity in favor of singular expressive
output and artistic pursuit, such an approach makes sense. One puts one’s
passions into the world, and should another hear the same call, so much the
better; if not, no loss, because at least one has been true to one’s vision. In
this context, Zero learns from M. Gustave that the life of the concierge is one
of ceaseless attention to detail and knowledge so personal and specific that
the concierge can anticipate things before the client desires them. Beyond
the day-to-day experiences where both see value in the little details and the
quiet good of serving others (as a vocation that oftentimes also has secondary
material benefits), we see this twee relationship develop in a purely aesthetic
register as well in Gustave’s passing on a reverence for Romantic poetry. First
seen as he attempts to calm Madame D., he recites some lines of verse, in-
sisting when she argues that she “just listen to the words,” presumably for
their melodic power. The first of many instances of his apparently unironic
appreciation for outdated poetry that no one else in the movie cares about,
Gustave’s enjoyment extends to the material, such that he lists his collection of
Romantic poetry among his only possessions of value—though one wonders if
this is another instance of his overvaluation of the personal, as when he vainly
claims a likeness to the stolen painting, Boy with Apple, that serves as a kind
of McGuffin. Even from prison as he awaits trial for the murder of Madame D.,
Romantic verse becomes an outlet for expression and reflection, and he sends
dozens of stanzas back in letters for Zero to read to the staff, unmoved as they
inhale their dinner.
The relationship that develops is one of care, in which Gustave serves as
another of Anderson’s father figures. Quick to chastise, but also just as quick
to apologize, Gustave extends his ethic of care to include Zero in his circle of
concern, as when he sincerely apologizes for overreacting to Zero’s inability
to provide for his speedy departure from prison after a daring escape. After
Gustave asks why Zero had even bothered to leave his homeland and to work
in such a demanding field as the conciergerie, he learns that Zero is a war
refugee. Reminded of the darkness that lays all around them, Gustave back-
pedals: “What a bloody idiot I am. Pathetic fool. Goddamn selfish bastard.
This is disgraceful and it’s beneath the standards of the Grand Budapest. I
apologize on behalf of the hotel.” Gustave confuses his vocation with his own
identity, placing responsibility to the hotel’s life of service at the center. But
more strongly, when Zero claims, “It’s not your fault,” Gustave goes further,

140 | TOM HERTWECK

expressing something truly touching: “Don’t make excuses for me. I owe you
my life. You are my dear friend and protégé, and I’m very proud of you. You
must know that.” Gustave’s plaintive cries for forgiveness in both registers,
couched in a flowery rhetoric no doubt tinted by his love of poetry, all the same
ring honestly. He and Zero are not just alone outside a prison as escaped con-
vict and accomplice but alone in a world that seems bent on harming them.
Of course, as we see, Gustave and Zero are not alone, as they can count on
the support of a diffuse network of like-minded professionals in the Society of
the Crossed Keys, a concierge network that exists behind all the service desks
in the hotels of Europe. In an elaborately styled game of telephone, Gustave
arranges for pick-up after his escape from prison, each stop in the phone-chain
presenting parallel concierge-and-lobby-boy pairs. The idea that there is a co-
terie of identical service professionals holding high service standards across the
continent provides a pleasant sight-gag as well as an opportunity for a string
of cameos (stemming perhaps from Anderson’s twee impulse not to leave out
people whose work he admires). But also, taken in a twee vocabulary, the scene
serves up pinpoints of light in an otherwise dark world: like-minded individuals
who share a vocation, a pleasure Zero mentions near the end of the film. More
than vocation, though, the affective affinity of people caring about the same set
of undervalued and esoteric things is a buffer against the buffeting of life’s cruel-
ties far more valuable than the logistical assistance the concierges provide.
If anything, Budapest shows us that twee is a response to a world-weariness
against which only the powers of creation, service, and care are the antidotes.
Messages about loneliness pervade Budapest. The author claims it is a primary
symptom of his scribe’s fever, and on viewing the older Zero for the first time,
characterizes him as having “an immediately perceptible air of sadness” and
being “deeply and truly lonely.” Loneliness crops up again when their train is
stopped the first time and rather than being arrested, Zero is let go because
Inspector Henckels remembers that Gustave “was very kind to me when I was
a lonely little boy.” Moments of civility such as these are fleeting glimpses, how-
ever, not the status quo, as Gustave reflects as the train starts up again: “You
see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughter-
house that was once known as humanity.” It is an odd construction, more of feel-
ing than of logic, that equates humanity—as meaning both the race of humans
and the capacity for concern—with some abstract notion of civilization despite
their being in a moment of deep uncertainty not unlike the rise of Hitler’s fas-
cism. As such, it is with increased twee melancholy, approaching bitterness, that
older Zero repeats the line as Gustave is arrested in the repetition of the scene

Twee Narrative Contrivance | 141

at the end of the film and sent to a firing squad. The twee-est of sentiments,
Gustave—not to mention Agatha and Zero’s infant child, killed by an “absurd
little disease”—is swept up by the darkness leaning in from just outside the light.
Returning for the last time to frame 2 as the film draws to a close, the
young author, thinking that the keeping of the hotel must be more than sen-
timent, asks Zero why he chooses to be lonely. In asking the question, the
young author in voiceover suggests that the answer is “for his health,” recall-
ing the reason he reported for taking to the spa-resort in the first place: he is
attempting to recover from “scribe’s fever,” a “form of neurasthenia” of which
loneliness is a severe symptom. The question is therefore an expectant one,
which assumes that Zero has something to impart. Instead, Zero’s answer is
more elusive. Pausing after citing his affection for Agatha and thus affirming
the sentimental reason the author suspected but did not want to hear, Zero
offers an addendum about the world the hotel signifies: “To be frank, I think
his [Gustave’s] world had vanished long before he ever entered into it. But I
will say, he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace.” The senti-
ment is something like (but not quite) nostalgia. Of course, Gustave provided
a certain façade of elegance and civility that would never be sustainable given
the incredible inequality that was necessary to maintain it in the long run; the
rise of “common property” in reference to the communism the author men-
tions suggests yet one more similarity between our world and theirs. What he
imparts to Zero is, rather, a more robust notion of the self that, in the face of
incredible disorder, greed, and violence (all of which are represented by the
various characters in the film), we have only our commitments to one another
to the degree that we also serve our own sense of what is right with a passion-
ate intensity.
In this final twist of twee, the film’s closing moments of dialogue have
the author reflecting in both frames 1 and 2 about the hotel as “an enchanting
ruin” that is itself tinged with abiding loss. He remarks that he would never see
the hotel again, thus reenacting Zero’s loss. Jumping back to frame 3, then, the
young woman sits finishing the book of The Grand Budapest Hotel on a bench
next to the monument she came to see at the beginning. She has apparently sat
in the snow to read the entirety of the book, in what could only be described
as an act of twee self-flagellation to express her devotion to such an act of
literature. The moment not only returns to the original place of departure for
the film, but also expresses the yearning for quiet connection among sensitive
creators and appreciators, across time and across media. There is, in short,
nothing more twee than this.

142 | TOM HERTWECK

The Invisible Frame: The Darjeeling Limited

If Budapest pushes the limits of narrative framing, The Darjeeling Limited il-
lustrates the potentials of a minimally—or alternatively—framed story. While
at first blush a linear plot, closer examination extends and inverts Anderson’s
usual use of framing devices. The seeming lack of frame diminishes the level
of artifice at work, and causes us instead to focus on the plot’s realism by
keeping our attention on the affectivity of the Whitman family’s day-to-day
experiences of long-standing trauma. Certainly, it is the case that The Darjeel-
ing Limited is not actually all that quaint or quirky, more melancholic than
comic. And yes, while India serves as an admittedly culturally opportunistic
aesthetic backdrop, it seems reasonably clear that the film is capable of mock-
ing the characters for their assumption that “the Oriental Other” will save
them. Because of this, with relatively little of the amping up of detail usual in
Anderson’s other films, the viewer receives a portrait of a family that is op-
erating at a high level of dysfunction both as a unit and as individuals. The
film shows a bunch of emotionally injured buffoons on their way to figure out
what’s wrong with their family, only to find out that the newfound freedom (or
trauma) their mother has discovered after their father’s death puts them in a
position where they are not actually able to sort it out—in short, the expecta-
tion of resolution and, presumably, peace and self-fulfillment does not actually
come to fruition. Though the movie presents a narrative about the Whitman
brothers’ attempt to self-actualize against incredible odds, the three of them
find only limited, contingent, and likely temporary respite. While at the end
they are able to cast off their father’s baggage—a heavy-handed but ultimately
not terribly quirky visual metaphor played for minor (if any) laughs through-
out the film—they nonetheless enter their shared cabin on this new train and
are presented with uncannily familiar stewards and fall immediately back into
the old habits of “get[ting] a drink and smok[ing] a cigarette.” One has no
reason not to suspect the self-destructive tendencies of tossing back bottles of
questionable prescription medicine are next. Even so, in a twee register they
fight mightily to keep the darkness at bay.
At the same time, though we might labor under the assumption that
Darjeeling operates at a high level of realism, this is not to say that the film
is without framing devices that present the story through artifice. Instead,
the film exists in a more obliquely framed way, sensitive to the felt realities of
their shared and individual traumas. Just as their own anguish simmers un-
der the surface and escapes in unconscious or passive ways, Anderson figures

Twee Narrative Contrivance | 143

his frames in glimpses and shadows. Beyond the many visual puns on fram-
ing (the father’s prescription glasses that reframe Peter’s sight, the train win-
dows that make secondary image frames looking into and out of the train),
this takes place in three distinct but overlapping ways. First, Anderson gives
us a false frame in Bill Murray’s running to catch his train. Viewers familiar
with Rushmore’s curtain-pulling and Max’s daydream, Tenenbaum’s novel,
and Aquatic’s nature documentary would be susceptible on first viewing to
thinking that Murray’s businessman, not obviously placed in time with his
older-style suit and no clear signs from the background about when this is
happening, is there to set up an idea or affect rather than kick off the story’s
plot. And, of course, he is almost immediately left behind (narratively speak-
ing) as Peter Whitman overtakes him—though the viewer catches sight of him
briefly in other moments, turning this framing red herring into a quasi frame.
Second, the film is framed with the visual metaphor of the train(s). In a
rather simple way, the film opens and closes with trains, already in motion,
suggestive of the ways that life is always already on the move and waits for no
person. More than this, Anderson, perhaps expectedly in this reworking of the
road movie, pushes the semiotic capabilities further by undercutting such ex-
pectations. In the crucibilic spaces of their train compartments, the Whitmans
make little progress toward their goals of reconciliation. They have to leave
the train, or experience the train as a kind of dreamworld, the function Ryan
(above) ascribes to embedded narratives. Unsurprisingly, Seitz refers to the
moment in the second half of the film where the camera pans down a series of
compartments containing all the characters and events in the film up to that
point as the “dream train” sequence (175). Linked compartments and linked
sequences, trains and films provide a way of framing narrative experience.
Third—and most provocatively—the film is framed by Jack Whitman’s
short story. After having his brothers read his recently completed “Luftwaffe
Automotive,” Jack forcefully reiterates the fictionality of the events described
after the other two comment on its accuracy. And yet, late in the film, as they
arrive at the funeral for the young boy who died during their rescue attempt
after having been kicked off the eponymous train, the film reveals the source
material. In flashback—the only such time-jarring moment in the film—the
action of the brothers’ story of riding to their father’s funeral begins precisely
where the manuscript shown on-screen in the time-present narrative begins: “I
was in a rented funeral car with my brothers and. . . .” Something like a primal
scene for their year-long grief and silence toward one another, the moment is
strangely touching as it sees them at near-breakdown emotional intensity at the
beginning but then working their way back together. They are shown in frame

144 | TOM HERTWECK

together at the climax of the flashback scene, shirtless under wool coats, staring
down a menacing truck driver who might have, were they not united, beat them
all to a pulp for their cutting him off. In this way, it is possible to see the story
as a framing device doubly. In one light, as a dramatization of the short story,
the scene functions as a mise en abyme in that it introduces a self-reflexive,
narratively aware set piece into the film: it looks through the film’s story into
the abyss of their sorrow. From another vantage, though, the scene at Luftwaffe
Automotive, viewed as the memory of that moment (rather than a dramatiza-
tion or film adaptation of Jack’s short story), could be refigured to be the story
of Darjeeling, in that the time-present journey by train becomes a frame story
for the flashback. Just as Conrad uses the frame of Marlow’s time-present recol-
lection to reveal the unspeakable horror to Kurtz’s fiancée in Heart of Darkness,
the movie frames a single traumatic memory that takes but a moment in its pre-
sentation. What seems heartbreaking, then, in the Whitmans’ overcoming of
their disagreement over the relative importance of their father’s busted Porsche
and rallying to get to the funeral is that the seed of their impending silence is
sown in the flashback: we learn that Francis already knows their mother is not
coming but does not tell—a fissure that only the viewer sees opening because
of the story’s placement within the time-present narrative, a moment of old-
fashioned dramatic (not hipster or postmodern) irony.
Between the two inseparable stances—as both memory and its fictive re-
presentation—Anderson suggests the figural limits of storytelling. Flashbacks
obviously require a frame story to be comprehensible. This is a narratological-
structural fact. However, the relationship between frame and flashback also
introduces a level of ambiguity worthy of greater consideration. What is the
difference between a flashback that provides contextual or character infor-
mation and a flashback that suggests its own explanatory value by seemingly
filling a gap? At what point does the scene presented in flashback come to
rationalize and explain the existence of the frame story? Given that it seems
likely the film could have done without the flashback—viewers know quite
enough about the disappointments that clutter the Whitmans’ lives to ener-
gize the time-present story—the film opens up the possibility that something
we might call the short film Luftwaffe Automotive is the thing that “matters”
to Darjeeling. More pointedly, is the drama of the scene that goes by the same
name as the short story “Luftwaffe Automotive” a dramatization of Jack’s
story, or a dramatization of an aggregated, objective memory the brothers
have of that moment? It is impossible to tell, given that by this point both
Francis and Peter have read the fictional account that they both recognize as
representational. In this way, Anderson’s metadiscourse on the function of

Twee Narrative Contrivance | 145

film form turns back on the characters, for whom these matters of truth are
inescapable sources of pain. In Jack’s case, when he repeats that it is fiction
when his brothers comment on it as memoir, we understand he cannot emo-
tionally bear telling their story as nonfiction—he needs the artifice of fictive
storytelling much like Anderson needs artifice to get to the heart of authentic
relationships. For viewers, Anderson has framed a twee response to pain—the
short story—and inserted it as an ambivalent part of the Whitman narrative,
giving the viewer pause to question storytelling’s ability to do anything beyond
simply existing for its own sake.

Conclusion: Other Frames, Others’ Lives

The trailers for Anderson’s films do him no favors to the degree that they focus
on the visually appealing, star-studded, and otherwise superficial parts of his
films rather than allowing the expansiveness of his total vision to make sense.
Part of this is merely logistical: of course these visual and celebrity elements
are the eminently salable parts of film commodities. Further, it is simply dif-
ficult in the span of a trailer’s two-and-a-half minutes to deal with the weighty
expressions of the personal affects attending matters of suicide, murder, fam-
ily disintegration, depression, drug abuse, and anxiety that appear regularly
in his films. As a result, many viewers don’t see the films because they think of
him as just a cute director. For those who do, there is a totalizing vision that
combines the so-called quirkiness of his aesthetic with a strikingly honest (one
should call sincere) vision of the world that uses that aesthetic to separate and
explore emotional reality for its own sake. And yet, as I have demonstrated
above in an analysis of the overt and implicit frame-story devices at work in
his films, it requires a degree of effort to uncover such a reality. One cannot
be blamed simply for wanting to consume the candy of his confectionary; for
those who want more, however, the rewards are richer, because they enter
into a transaction with Anderson’s knowing assemblages seeking out mutual
appreciation.
This is something that Anderson’s characters appear to know quite well in
following their own folly. Gustave reads Romantic poetry to masticating house-
keepers irrespective of whether anyone is listening; Bottle Rocket’s Dignan’s life
works for him, because he knows in his heart that he is “fuckin’ innocent” de-
spite the fact that his truth seemed to be robbery; Max Fischer, ever unsatisfied
with his own work, comes to feel “OK” about it and his life, settling for others
not getting hurt. Such self-reflexive and self-aware visions live in Anderson’s
movies because the vision he presents of twee requires them. That vision, so

146 | TOM HERTWECK

deceptively self-involved and detached from actual reality, is not for everyone.
At the same time, what film is actually supposed to be for every viewer? Twee
sensibility, in its uncaring relation to audience size, asks us to understand some-
thing about a filmmaker’s vision that is so specific that if one “gets” it, there is
a real chance for one’s identification with the young author and old Zero as
morally invested connoisseurs of the well-wrought narrative. As a thinker of
film as much as a maker, Anderson too seems to know this very well when
older Zero comments on the original state of the Budapest’s baths in a way that
also seems to describe Anderson’s popular reception: “Too decadent for current
tastes.” While this diminishes the importance of the political by referring to it
as “taste,” it nonetheless provides a moment where Anderson’s appreciation of
robust aesthetics and deeper, more allusive film knowledge could be redeemed
as a moral goods in the absence of firm knowledge about how to act in the face
of such widespread difficulty. Similarly, in another moment in regard to yet
another medium, Moonrise Kingdom’s very twee wise-child Sam Shakusky re-
minds us that “poems don’t always have to rhyme, you know—they just have to
be creative.” Poems, like movies, are determined by the stylistic choices of their
makers, not by rulebooks or predetermined notions about correct form. Twee
in these ways makes sense of increasing fractures in society by their artists’
retreating from the anxiety the world causes and literally reforming it around
a more personal vision. If established means aren’t working, Anderson’s work
suggests, then we might as well simply make something that we like.
If we are to better understand Anderson, the first step might be in recog-
nizing this and accepting that his vision needn’t be redeemed to begin with.
This shouldn’t serve as an apologia. Rather, I have been interested in parsing
the mechanics of Anderson’s filmmaking techniques so that we might better
interact with the films themselves, and focus on our interpretations of them as
aesthetic objects assembled for particular purposes instead of beginning from
ideological or critical positions that seek to devalue them. To be sure, it is pos-
sible, and in some cases desirable, to express disappointment with Anderson’s
films to the extent that they chafe against our dispositions and sensibilities as
viewers. But those criticisms must come into contact with the films’ particular
expressions of the value they seek to present; they can only be understood as
we recognize the high level of artifice at work in their very narrative founda-
tions precisely because of the twee sensibility that orients Anderson’s gaze.

University of Nevada, Reno

Reno, Nevada

Twee Narrative Contrivance | 147

NOTES

1. See, e.g., Gilson, Orgeron, and Kunze, “From the Mixed-Up Films”; family, a
not unrelated rubric, also orients much of criticism.
2. Frame stories, embedded narrative, and narrative levels as a response to these
two concepts have a rich and nuanced history in narratology. For a technical over-
view, see Pier. Genette’s is the best early theoretical work in terms of literary fic-
tion, while Bordwell provides an entrée into film.
3. For a rare treatment of an Andersonian frame, see Joseph.
4. See Dilley, who efficiently tracks these references in Budapest (188–90).

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