Quarantine Through Wes Anderson’s Lens
One Scene from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou as a Window into Life in Stasis
I’ve been gradually re-watching Wes Anderson’s catalog this quarantine, and to gradually re-watch Wes Anderson’s catalog is to submit yourself to a flip-book of exquisitely rendered frames. Even just his most recent films (Isle of Dogs, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Moonrise Kingdom), contain a barrage of immaculately staged stills, any number of which are worth analyzing in their own right.
It may seem counterintuitive, then, to focus on a relatively uncharacteristic shot from Anderson’s vast collection. Towards the middle of his fourth film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Pelé dos Santos — a Zissou crewmember with undefined responsibilities outside of performing scene-appropriate Portuguese covers of David Bowie songs — sits on the stern of the ship, strumming along to a scene-appropriate Portuguese cover of “Space Oddity.” It’s a picturesque dawn, or maybe a foggy midday, and the calm of Pelé’s music is silently broken by the emergence of a small boat on the left side of the frame. Unnoticed by Pelé, the ship and its passengers gradually come into view, automatic weapons and all. Pelé launches into the famous “countdown” pre-chorus, we zoom in on his perch, and the pirates disappear from frame — only to be replaced by a boarding ladder that startles Pelé from his gorgeous rendition of “This is ground control to Major Tom…” (one presumes the Portuguese translates directly). The pirates come aboard.
It’s a quick scene, over as soon as it begins, but its impact lasts. Freezeframe it right in the middle — with Pelé still blissfully unaware of the impending threat we can already see approaching — and you have a perfectly balanced yin and yang, at once symbolic of Steve Zissou’s inner conflict and Wes Anderson’s organizing philosophy and the larger balance of all life. A reach, maybe, but one the beauty of the frame almost justifies.
Let’s zoom out. The Life Aquatic, one of Anderson’s more argued-over works, chronicles one oceanographic explorer and his misguided search for vengeance (or maybe peace). Dead-set on hunting and killing his old partner’s murderer (a mythical jaguar shark), Steve enlists a ragtag crew consisting of his normal mates, a Kentuckian pilot who may be his long-lost son, his ex-wife, a pregnant reporter, and a bank representative, among others. Steve is endlessly narcissistic, constantly at war with himself as he simultaneously craves the closure and peace no one can offer him and harbors a directionless fury, content to aim it anywhere but inward.
When we reach the critical Space Oddity scene, the trip has been eventless for the most part (minus a few Steve squabbles) and devoid of any real danger. The aesthetics of the film pre-Major Tom have matched this maintained order, with typically-Andersonian diorama shots of the ship and carefully arranged symmetry everywhere the camera has panned. Each shot, it seems, is filled to bursting with naval knick-knacks and small details, adding up to a lived-in, meticulously arranged portrait of life at sea. It’s Anderson’s greatest trick, really — to create a world so purposefully curated and engagingly displayed so as to live and breathe on its own, a thousand personal histories conjured in a frame and then whisked away as quickly, their character implications lingering in our aftervision. He makes the kind of movies that single-handedly justify the existence of a Production Design Oscar.
Which brings us again to our frame of discussion. Divorced from its context (if you can ignore Pelé’s suspiciously twee jumpsuit), the shot wouldn’t jump out at the viewer as a particularly Wes Anderson-y one. The composition is beautiful, but in a more organic way than the usual choreography. It’s all a ruse, in that it is of course choreographed to both time and music, but it could just as easily be dissected from this film and dropped in any number of others to create a totally different scene in a totally different story. Its painterly tableau tells a salty tale all on its own. It’s a frame — in other words — you could frame.
But it isn’t divorced nor dissected. It’s placed with precision exactly where it is, serving at once as a tragicomic vignette and a reflecting pool for the film’s ever-shifting balance of moods. Wes takes all of the order and symmetry of the first hour (and of his other films) and riffs on it, trading it in for a pointed asymmetry: tranquility on the right, violence on the left. If we could truly freeze it here, holding back the impatient push of time, we may jump to the sort of inner balance Steve Zissou doesn’t achieve until the film’s poignant end. Alas: like most things and all frames, it can’t last.
The tranquility, as we know, is an expiring tranquility, complete with musical countdown clock. The catchy familiarity of Bowie’s song — made intriguingly alien in a different tongue — has us begging Pelé to keep playing, to fend off the pirates’ advance with just one more barre chord. Watching the scene for the first time in years, this tension felt newly personal to me. It didn’t take a surplus of time or deductive reasoning to figure out why, or to draw the easy parallel between Pelé’s predicament and the onslaught of out-of-nowhere predicaments that have typified the pandemic year of 2020. And — just like my peaceful, dissipated pre-March naivety — Pelé’s respite just can’t be. The ladder appears, the music stops, and the pirates come crashing aboard to rudely interrupt Wes Anderson’s scrapbooking party.
Let’s zoom out again. This frame sticks out in this movie because it sticks out in form, but also because it has a lingering effect many of the others lose in their (gorgeous) uniformity. There’s an implicit yearning in its precarious balance (frozen between calm and storm) that resonates with a painful truth in our precarious world (frozen in what feels like both calm and storm at once). Sitting in my apartment, a place whose own delineation between safe haven and asylum cell has become blurred at best, it’s easier than one might think to map this frame onto my life in 2020: Pelé’s music becomes my own music, or else the movies, or books, or all the art I’ve desperately clung to as a temporary shield from the doom outside. And just as easily: the pirates have come relentlessly for my peace, sailing ominously nearer in boats built out of dropped Zoom calls and heartbreaking breaking news and rising case counts and the absence of loved ones. I play, and I play, and I play; they come, and they come, and they come. It is a mercurial balance of sorts; it’s Zissou’s inner turmoil writ large, and it sucks.
…And, it’s okay. There are moments, and days, and even delicate weeks where it borders on nice. Extra time spent with family here, an extra dent made in a pop culture backlog there. And then it sucks again. And it’s okay again. I rewind the short scene surrounding this Zissou frame, and the song starts, and the pirates come. Over and over, and yet the sudden halting of Pelé’s music hurts the same each time. So I rewind, and there it is, again and again: ground control buzzing out of the static, Pelé’s melodic cry for Major Tom. Yin, Yang, Yin. Okay, Sucks, Okay.
As this year has ripped away all that we claimed as ourselves, our attempts at reclamation can only mask the underlying deviation. It’s lucky, then, that Wes Anderson and his understated pirate attack exists to remind us that we’re occasionally most ourselves in the ways we diverge from our manicured “selves.” More plainly, Anderson’s entire identity as a filmmaker (crafted and perceived) is founded on order. It’s why we watch, and study, and love his films — so why is it that The Life Aquatic doesn’t come truly alive until that order is disrupted? We can pause the moment as it happens, watch an unraveling in slow motion, but the specific way it functions as a skeleton key to the entire film only comes into focus when you see the surrounding lock.
As within the frame itself, contrast illuminates. Anderson’s films are typically reliant on an almost obsessive maximalism instead of these types of pure contrasts; a foregrounded character is better known to us by the galaxy of congruent background details surrounding them, cohering to create a holistic, more three-dimensional life. It can feel like that’s all he does at times, as distance from his films obscures the nonconforming scenes from our memory and enlarges the most symmetrical ones. But closer examination reveals the macro-contrast at play within his best works: by placing incongruent shots carefully and infrequently, Anderson rejuvenates and emphasizes the more typical ones. So we see the frame above, notable in any film but especially so here, where its marked asymmetry clashes so starkly with the symmetry preceding it. Its economical beauty serves dual purposes: both outlining, by contrast, the real magic of Anderson’s best-designed scenes and demonstrating his clear aptitude for inventing splendor in any form. Well, and a third as well: synthesizing the various narrative and thematic threads of the film (and quarantine, by coincidence) in a small, gripping moment.
The contrast of our world now has served a similar purpose in casting our normal lives, our normal selves, in a new and gilded light. It’s clarifying, even as we search for some stopgap beauty in the constant struggle our day-to-day’s have become. Not to get galactic or anything, but it is in some ways how things have always been: order is replaced by chaos, ad infinitum. This frame (and watching and re-watching it) unlocks the more nuanced, complex truth within that larger truism: sometimes the chaos comes for good reason; sometimes it just comes.
Oh, to have a single frame or a single anything to so effectively encapsulate the emotional mass of a year spent in quarantine. But then again, in uncollapsing the telescope we’ve aimed at this nautical frame — until we’re out of COVID, out of Anderson’s collected works, and back on the stern with kind, unsuspecting Pelé — perhaps we have it. A boat approaches, a man stays the attack with his song for as long as he can. It’s not his fault the boat is coming, and it’s clear he doesn’t understand it fully, but he’s trying. Well, I’m trying too. Some days I particularly relate to Pelé’s unknowing helplessness, but I’m learning not to worry as much. Viewed through the filter of Zissou, there is some poetry in the balance, some humor in the absurdity. And after all, if the pirates board again, I’ll keep rewinding until we reach the sweet horizon of a new ending, where the ladders miss their mark and the songs don’t have to end.
