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by Jessica Grose
The Darjeeling Limited, 91 minutes
dir. Wes Anderson
When I went to see the BAFTA screening of The Darjeeling Limited, I was kind of in a pissy mood. I hadn’t slept well the night before and wasn’t fucking feeling particularly precious. Which is to say, probably not really in the mood to see a Wes Anderson movie.
That said, the first half of Limited made me want get all up on my feminism 101 high horse and jab Anderson with a spear. The movie is about three dysfunctional brothers called Whitman who take a train ride across India, monogrammed suitcases in tow, to repair their fraught relationship and find some sort of spiritual awakening. The only woman they encounter for the first hour is an Indian stewardess on the train named Rita (though the brothers Whitman refer to her as “sweet lime.”)
“Hymn to the Alcohol” — Hefner (mp3)
Max Fischer and Sweet Lime.
Jason Schwartzman plays Jack, the somewhat lecherous brother with the chi-mo mustache. He fucks sweet lime in a bathroom while the train is in motion.
The exotification of her “otherness” — she gingerly places a small red dot on each of the brother’s foreheads each morning — coupled with her almost complete lack of discernable personality, made me wonder exactly what she was doing in the movie at all.
Rita doesn’t really move the plot forward, she has few lines, and mainly serves as fetishized eye candy for the brothers: note the reflected shot of her lower back in her bedroom mirror later in the film. Her sari has flopped open to reveal just the hint of buttock. Her face is not shown. Laura Mulvey would piss herself.
“Modern Inventions” — The Submarines (mp3)
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’s own Laura Mulvey
Much has been made of Wes Anderson’s “racism” but I’m more concerned about his sexism. This article from Slate mentions Inez from Bottle Rocket, another fetishized non-Anglo Anderson heroine, but I was more bothered by Natalie Portman in the opening short to Limited, Hotel Chevalier.
Critics have been creaming themselves over this 12 minute distilled essence of Anderson, but I think it’s just an excuse to show Portman’s scrawny posterior. She disrobes completely, while her lover Jason Schwartzman remains clad in his three-piece suit.
At the end of The Darjeeling Limited, when Schwartzman reads the dialogue from Hotel Chevalier to his brothers as if it’s from a short story he’s written, one of them says “I think it’s your best work yet. I like how mean you are.”
“Fleets” — Cedars (mp3)
Cedars myspace
Bam!
Even after all that, I didn’t hate the movie. I could watch Adrien Brody all day, every day. I would do dirty things to that lanky Heeb, and I don’t even like Jewish boys!
Also, the movie is really gorgeous to watch for non Adrien Brody-related reasons. All those yellows and oranges and the movement of the train — it’s pretty cool. I guess I just wanted to let you know that Wes Anderson is limited when it comes to considering/ portraying women (ha — see what I did there?).
Jessica Grose lives and writes in Brooklyn. She hopes that Owen Wilson is laying off the junk.
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so im assuming that the film is better than the short.
By the way, props on listening to the submarines.
~AT
Comment by audiotaco October 3, 2007 @ 8:37 pm[...] possibly be bad. And I still enjoy watching The Life Aquatic. We have slammed Wes Anderson’s misogyny and racism in these pages, and for the most part rightly so, but the Criterion Collection was dead-on-balls [...]
Pingback by In Which We Try to Give Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson a Break But End Up Giving Them a Hard Time « This Recording October 7, 2007 @ 8:12 pm[...] could not pardon Wes Anderson for his sins, and Jess Grose got all feministic and brought Laura Mulvey and the patriarchy into the [...]
Pingback by In Which Boys Become Men and Men Become Wolves « This Recording October 13, 2007 @ 7:03 am[...] malaise that has plagued Anderson’s heroes ever since Luke Wilson checked himself into a mental hospital for “exhaustion” in Bottle [...]
Pingback by In Which We Suffer A Vague Paralyzing Leisure Class Malaise « This Recording October 18, 2007 @ 9:07 am“Much has been made of Wes Anderson’s “racism” but I’m more concerned about his sexism.”
This says it all. If your concern was motivated by idealism and a desire for equality, you would not have said this.
I didn’t enjoy The Darjeeling Limited, but I really think this piece was the most adolescent I’ve seen on this blog.
“I could watch Adrien Brody all day, every day. I would do dirty things to that lanky Heeb, and I don’t even like Jewish boys!”
It is very noble that you have taken it upon yourself to rid the world of objectification and unnecessary attention to ethnicity.
Oh, and I’m Indian. Have you been there?
Comment by Amina October 19, 2007 @ 3:00 am[...] Jess vs. Wes Anderson. [...]
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