When I was a kid, my grandma would take my siblings and I to the Art Institute of Chicago whenever we visited. My favorite exhibit was always the Thorne Miniature Rooms, where I could spend hours looking at the tiny furnished rooms, separated from museum goers by plexiglass windows.
What drew me to the miniatures? It might have been the fantasy of having the worlds coolest doll house, but perhaps there’s something about a perfectly designed room that allows the viewer to escape by viewing, always kept at a comforting distance by that glass screen (it wouldn’t be so nice to be stuck in those rooms, I don’t think).
I’ve always wondered why people were so into model railroads (ahem, Rod Stewart), but maybe they share the same appeal as the Thorne Rooms. Creating a world you’ll always be detached from; the pursuit of perfection via layout, design, and plaster of Paris. If there’s a mess in these worlds, its intentional. Every detail is under control thanks to an unseen creator.
It’s a more comfortable uncanny valley, a canny valley – no, a campy valley!
Watching Wes Anderson’s latest film, The French Dispatch (2021), I felt similarly to my days in the Thorne Rooms. This is nice to look at, I think. And: I feel nothing. My sense of detachment during this film, although not unexpected, unnerved me a little bit. I felt like I could stand up and leave the theater at any time, choose to stop actively looking whenever I wanted, like I was moving through a gallery.
His films constantly vary in terms of how emotionally invested the audience feels – there’s a reason why Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) or Moonrise Kingdom (2012) stand out to me while I love The Life Aquatic (2004) for its stop-motion animals. Indiewire’s David Ehrlich summed it up by calling this latest work Anderson’s “most visually inventive and least emotionally involving.”
But maybe this is what we need. Perhaps Wes Anderson provides the perfect antidote for our overstimulated, blue-light-glasses-needing selves, creating a world where we can trust the director to move us through his perfectly curated worlds without worry. Like a model train set, everything is in its place for a reason. We don’t have to do any work to keep up with the narrative – we have Owen Wilson or Tilda Swinton or Jeffrey Wright as our guide.
Plus, the movie is fun to watch (at some points more than others), well worth the price of a movie ticket in my opinion. A la the Thorne Rooms, you can leave your worries at the theater door and simply look.
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