Wes Anderson and the Omitted Center

The best way to explain his style is to invoke the woman, the legend, Emily Dickinson.

Some people find the filmography of Wes Anderson cold. My roommate said that to her the characters in Moonrise Kingdom “were hard to relate to.” Even Cinemantics Czar Tyler MacQueen thinks Anderson’s films “lack heart.” 

Although for some, his coldness may be an insurmountable obstacle, I find him riveting. The same feature that confuses my friends is exactly what I love about Anderson: he requires his viewers to read between the lines to engage with the emotional core of his films. The best way to explain his style is to invoke the woman, the legend, Emily Dickinson. 

19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson is famously tricky to understand. She practices her own poetic advice to, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” using misdirection to obscure the heart of her poems. 

Critic Jay Leda popularized the term “omitted center” to explain Dickinson’s characteristic method of obscuring meaning in her poems. He points out that she refuses to state the obvious in her poems, yet they always contain significant revelations within them. Leda writes, “All her puzzles had keys, and it was not her fault if the reader was too impatient to seek them.”

Dickinson wrote about the most common subjects in poetry without falling into cliches: death, God, and love. Anderson does the same. His self-conscious film style is noted for its perfect symmetry, perpendicular angles between camera and subject, and delightfully eclectic color palettes. All these contribute to the compelling imaginary realms Anderson constructs to tell his human-centric stories.

Though some find Anderson cold, his plots center on prevalent human experiences such as adult children dealing with a narcissistic parent in The Grand Budapest Hotel, struggling through adolescent angst and alienation in Moonrise Kingdom, and managing the loss of a parent and spouse in Asteroid City. Sometimes viewers miss the point of Anderson’s stories with the whimsical set design, ambiguous dialogue, and subversion of realist monotony.

So the question remains: why make intentionally enigmatic movies?

Here I have to refer to Emily Dickinson again. She writes, “Too bright for our infirm Delight / The Truth's superb surprise.” Dickinson communicated in her own particular slant to transmit a deeper truth. Leda argues that the omitted center of the poem “impresses itself on the mind and memory more than if bluntly stated.” 

In the same way, Anderson meets his audience where they are. He creates movies for people who struggle to enjoy the latest blockbuster, even if it is well-made. The melodrama, tears, and debaucheries strike us as disingenuous or tired. We’ve seen it before and need Anderson to reinterpret these experiences so that we can feel them again. Ironically, Anderson's approach is not to amp up the volume, like Christopher Nolan does in Oppenheimer, but to turn it down.

Nolan’s decision to portray the Trinity test contrasts with the booming soundtrack animating the rest of the film. In this case, noise – the expected choice – would not have been as impactful because the audience is too accustomed to catastrophic explosions and their accompanying sounds for the magnitude of the first atomic explosion to properly resonate with them. Contemporary directors face the challenge of an audience that is inundated with exciting visuals and numb to the emotions that would naturally occur if they had encountered the situation in real life. 

Anderson performs the same operation by paring down dialogue to his signature one liners, allowing his actors to remain unreactive, and generally omitting the center. This counterintuitive approach conjures otherwise zoned-out audience members into his magical worlds. He intrigues us with mystery and rewards attention with beauty. 

Anderson’s characters are never ideal. Narcissists, depressives, drug addicts, and weirdos abound. They are loved almost without exception, lovable and beloved.

In Moonrise Kingdom, love blossoms between two strange and lonely children.

In the Fantastic Mr. Fox characters seeking personal glory find meaning in familial love.

The Royal Tenenbaums tells the story of a narcissistic father as he reckons with the damage he has done to his children and ultimately ends with some healing.

Frankly, these stories would be unapologetically saccharine if not for Anderson’s choice to obscure the beating heart of his films. He is capable of portraying heartwarming stories to audiences who hate oversentimentality above all else. Anderson creates for the outcast searching for connection in a world they find as strange and perplexing as we sometimes find in his films. He attempts to combat alienation through companionship that readily admits its flaws. 

Granting that Wes Anderson is not for everyone, he is definitely for some of us – the disturbed children, weirdos, and wannabe manic pixie dream girls. He is willing to meet us in our alienation and boredom. He prioritizes artistry above clarity and delivers beautiful if enigmatic films time and time again.

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Reader, what are your thoughts on Wes Anderson’s films? What is your favorite movie of his? Let us know in the comments below!

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