I have elsewhere argued that the imagination is less a
faculty of “invention” and innovation and more like a preconscious comportment
to the world—a tacit “understanding” of the world that is fundamentally aesthetic. I think this has important implications for
how the imagination is invoked in the encounter between theology and the
arts. On this alternative account, the
imagination is not a unique skill or capacity peculiar to artists; the
imagination is a fundamentally human “faculty” by which we orient
ourselves to the world. So while artists
are without question creative, that does not mean that they have
cornered the market on the imagination.
Instead of placing the imagination on the production side of art
(the inventive, creative pole), we should recognize the power of the
imagination on the reception side of art (though not only art): it is
our imagination that “receives” the work of art, and such works of art can (and
do) function as imagination-training-sites, formative encounters that both
appeal to—and “trigger”—the imagination while also shaping and forming our
imaginative horizons. (This has
extra-artistic implications as well.)
If a
Christian theological engagement with the arts is going to focus on the
imagination, I’m suggesting that this should be less fixated on the dynamics of
creativity and invention and more focused on the irreducible “know-how” (praktognosia) that is named by “the
imagination.” In that case, the
imagination will be an occasion for thinking about the dynamics of truth—the
unique, affective way that art tells the truth about the world rather than just
“expressing” my interior sincerity. Our
most powerful works of art are not just products of the imagination; the
truth they tell is truth fit to our imagination. They can only be understood on a “poetic
register,” can only be understood by the imagination. And that understanding is itself
irreducible.
If we
were to make that move, it would lead to a new Christian appreciation for what
I can only describe in a ham-fisted way as “formalism”—an appreciation for form
as truth. In Imagining the
Kingdom I get at this through Cleanth Brooks’ notion of “the heresy of
paraphrase.” Here I’d like to try a
different tack with a different medium—through an engagement with the films of
Wes Anderson, focusing on The Royal Tenenbaums as a case study. One could think of this as an
expansion of a terse footnote in Imagining the Kingdom (p. 48n.31).
I
should confess that this case study was prompted by Michael Chabon’s recentmeditation on Anderson’s oeuvre in the New York Review of Books. (Chabon’s essay is one of those
disheartening works of genius that make you lose any hope that you’ll ever be
able to write. “That’s it; I
quit. I’ll never be Michael Chabon.”) He looks to Anderson as both a chronicler of
brokenness and a quiet, humble evangelist for the hope that things might be
otherwise. “The world is so big, so
complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises,” Chabon observes, “that it
takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably
broken. We call this period of research
‘childhood.’” It is a difficult education.
“Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in
brokenness. The question becomes: What
to do with the pieces?” Some hunker down
atop the pile of brokenness and “make do;” others take out their frustration by
breaking the fragments that remain. But
“some people,” he says, “passing among the scattered pieces of that great
overturned jigsaw puzzle, start to pick up a piece here, a piece there, with a
vague yet irresistible notion that perhaps something might be done about
putting the thing back together again.”
Wes Anderson, he argues, is one of those people.
Granted,
because we only get glimpses of how it’s supposed to be, “through half-closed
lids,” our efforts at rebuilding will be, at best, approximations: “A scale
model of that mysterious original, unbroken, half-remembered. Of course the worlds we build out of our
store of fragments can only be approximations, partial and inaccurate. As representations of the vanished whole that
haunts us, they must be accounted failures.
And yet in that very failure, in their gaps and inaccuracies, they may
yet be faithful maps, accurate scale models of this beautiful and broken
world. We call these scale models ‘works
of art.’”
Wes
Anderson is that kind of artist. As
Chabon goes on to highlight, Anderson’s films are often compared to Joseph
Cornell’s boxed collages that reproduce a world in miniature. Indeed, such miniature panoramas often appear
in Anderson’s films. But the entirety of Anderson’s filmic
aesthetic does the same thing: it is not a surrealist or fantastical invention
of a world so much as a re-framing of
our world. (And the framing is not just visual; soundtrack
is also essential. Cue Jeremy Begbie.)
Chabon captures this brilliantly:
“For
my next trick,” says Joseph Cornell, or Valdimir Nabokov, or Wes Anderson, “I
have put the world into a box.” And when
he opens the box, you see something dark and glittering, an orderly mess of
shards, refuse, bits of junk and feather and butterfly wing, tokens and totems
of memory, maps of exile, documentation of loss. And you say, leaning in, ‘The world!’”
I would
suggest that Anderson’s films tell the truth on the register of the imagination
in ways that we might not realize, or even be able to articulate, and yet
nonetheless feel. A Wes Anderson
film plays the strings of your imagination in a way that has you sort of
grinning and longing and smiling and mourning, all for reasons you know not
why; and yet you can’t stop. Chabon’s
essay helped me to excavate something of my visceral reaction to Anderson’s
2001 movie, The Royal Tenenbaums.
The
world of the Tenenbaum family, framed in this film, is certainly a broken world: an absent scoundrel
of a father who has abandoned his family; a son who is a young widower; an
adopted daughter who has always been “other;” a suicidal son who is in love
with her; and a dear family friend beset by addiction. There’s nothing pretty about this
family.
And yet
the movie is so oddly gorgeous. (I’ll
say more about the “oddly” in a moment.)
But its aesthetic does not beautify this brokenness; it doesn’t “pretty
up” fragmentation or paper over the horrors.
To the contrary, it is the frame—the
very form of Anderson’s shots—that attests to the fact that things should be
otherwise. In some way, the story of an
Anderson movie is almost—almost—irrelevant. Or better: the story Anderson tells is told
in the form.
Royal’s character is
a study in this: Anderson cultivates our sympathy for him, despite almost everything he actually
says. (Gene Hackman’s acting here
is an incredible dance with the director—a stunning performance.) Royal is shot in a way that exudes sympathy,
and clothed in a way that testifies to the fact he wants to be something other
than he is. The narrative force of an
Anderson film is carried visually. It’s
not that screenplay isn’t important, but that the story is (also) told on the
register of frames and shots and sets—and that this “telling” is a narration
that uniquely and irreducibly speaks to the imagination.
For example, how might this help us make sense of Anderson’s near-history aesthetic—the indescribable way that he cultivates a feel that is at once old but timeless, un-placeable and yet vintage. What’s at work, for example, in the mix of elegance and ugliness in The Royal Tenenbaums? The majestic oak paneling and the beat up old Gypsy cabs; the Pellegrino on the dingy old refrigerator; the sumptuous beauty in a shot of a suicide returning home on a vandalized city bus? [with Nick Drake’s “Fly” as the soundtrack, pleading “Please, give me a second grace…”]. What we see is the sad dignity of the formerly bourgeois, the air of civility that clings to the nouveau-pauvre, you might say. And yet it is in that tension between elegance and ugliness, a tattered sophistication, that we absorb a sense of how things could be—how things ought to be—at the same time we sense that the world is askew, that it’s not the way it’s supposed to be.
Despite
a common criticism, I don’t think this is just nostalgic. (In the spirit of Kurt Cobain’s “Just because
you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you,” we might also say: Just
because you’re nostalgic doesn't mean things didn’t used to be better.) Indeed,
I think Chabon gives us a frame to see anew Anderson’s aesthetic: he cultivates
a sense of order in the very frame of his camera. The function of line and color in his
portraiture is a geometry of normativity.
The unapologetic artifice
of Anderson’s frame is an aesthetic form of hope—a form that bears
witness to order, harmony, perhaps even peace.
Despite the chaos that is captured in the frame, the framing of
the shot registers that someone is in control. And that is a truth that we absorb on the
register of the imagination.
