Moonrise Kingdom: A Movie Review about Futility, French-Kissing, the Films of Wes Anderson, and the Search for Love and Self-Worth (not necessarily in that order)

The films of Wes Anderson have never been quite conventional or ordinary in any possible sense, and for that we should be very grateful.  After all, who else is supposed to provide us with a limitless supply of quirky characters, gorgeously lush visuals, and deceptively simple plots that wrench our heartstrings and force us to ask difficult questions – in the midst of summer blockbuster madness, no less?  

            Over the years, he's made a point of defying typical filmmaking convention, though he has created for himself a very distinctive style.  And, incredibly diverse though his stories may be, it is possible to discern very clear commonalities between them.

His films are usually marked by three defining traits: a very commonplace and ordinary conflict that sets the stage (usually related to domestic difficulty); a grand, elaborate solution to this mundane conflict, hardly proportionate to its significance; and a rather melancholy, if never fully acknowledged awareness of the ultimate futility of this solution, no matter how grand it may seem.

The conflicts may be commonplace and ordinary enough, but Anderson’s characters were born to be problem-solvers – and they never, ever think small.  In his first film Bottle Rocket, a naïve young man, desperate to escape the prospect that his mundane universe may be all he has and will ever have, won’t simply fill out a few job applications; he’ll pull his brother into an elaborate Robin Hood scheme set to cover them for the next ten years.  In The Darjeeling Limited, a recently widowed woman who has never experienced nor given any reasonable sort of love or affection won’t simply seclude herself in an apartment with her grief – she’ll abscond to become a nun in the Himalayas.  Her sons will hardly content themselves with that; they’ll fly to India, board a train and brave each other’s company in order to get her back.  In Fantastic Mr. Fox, a father going through a midlife crisis won’t simply threaten his family’s financial welfare in order to soothe his roiling emotions; he’ll deliberately endanger his own life, and put himself in a situation where his harebrained schemes/mad genius will be his only defense.    

            In his latest effort, Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson presents two twelve-year-old misfits from dysfunctional environments, who have simply decided that they’ve had enough.  Their solution?  Pack their most cherished belongings (however practical they may be), and run away into the wilderness.  They’ll journey through the woods, relying on the wilderness-scout training of the one and the farseeing binoculars of the other, braving all sorts of odds and adventures, until they reach a place where no one will find them, and build a home there.  

The choice to make this a story about children was a very shrewd one, because it forces the grand scheme of Anderson’s latest protagonists into that very clear, rather melancholy perspective only hinted at in his other films. The grand schemes in all his previous movies may have seemed enormous and important and significant to their originators, but it’s always woefully apparent that in reality, they are actually quite futile and childish.  It’s a knowledge never fully acknowledged in any of Anderson’s movies, but quite clear and present just the same.

 We knew that Dignan’s life-plan in Bottle Rocket would never really work in real life, even if he had meticulously planned every conceivable detail for the next ten years; but that knowledge was an inherent, prescient awareness, supplied by the audience itself.  Anderson doesn’t stress the point in that movie, nor does he need to.  There’s no need to be told that Dignan is an innocent young man who will never really become anything grand; we already know from the minute he shows us the chart drawn up in colored pencil.

            In Moonrise Kingdom, however, that knowledge is placed front and center.  Anderson makes sure his audience is not only aware of the grand futility of his young heroes’ dreams, but that we are immersed in it.  As awesome and elaborate as this scheme may seem to its protagonists, no one would ever lose focus as to how grand it is in actuality.  The trek across the wilderness seems long and adventurous to the children; but it’s a journey made in a few short hours, across the span of a small New England isle.  The young heroes’ destination seems a veritable paradise where no one would ever find them, but it’s a lone tent pitched out in the open, where literally anyone could stumble across them.  Indeed, perhaps the most pathetic, heartrending shot in the movie involves the reality of their new home, little Sam’s tent; in a moment of peril, the two young heroes stare out the open flap of the tent upon something that even Sam’s wilderness training can’t save them from.  There’s nothing they can do; only zip the flap back up, and cling to each other in their little, insignificant enclosure, awaiting the inevitable. 

            Even the protagonists themselves, Sam and Suzie, exemplify this struggling, desperate futility to a tee.  He’s a solemn young genius, orphaned and lonely, desperate to be acknowledged by a world that is baffled by him; she’s a solemn young dreamer, bookish and eccentric, desperate to be taken seriously by a family that is bemused by her.  Brilliant painting and clockwork thinking won’t help the one, any more than punching one’s reflection in the mirror in frustration will help the other.  They’ve exhausted every outlet they can think of, and they’re the only people who really understand each other.  Small wonder they run away together.  

Of course, there comes a point when we realize that it’s not just happiness that they’re looking for; it’s significance, the knowledge that they are important and worth something.  That they run away together is actually a rational decision; since they can’t sate their emotional needs in their current environments, they logically turn to a person who will do it and go elsewhere.  That their plans ultimately, inevitably go awry isn’t just because the scheme itself is futile and childish; it’s because they are children, living in a world where bigger folk call the shots, and where sometimes the ones who should be the most loving give the most hurt. 

Do Sam and Suzie know that they’re deluding themselves, that their adventure could never really last?  Most probably.  They’re both intelligent children who’ve managed to outwit the adults (even if only for a short time); they must know that in the end, everything they’re doing to prove themselves, and give their actions any measure of meaningfulness and significance is only a temporary solution – and a rather poor one at that.  Even their first attempts at French-kissing come across as awkward and pathetic – if not for the fact that they’re only twelve (!), then certainly because it’s yet another failed attempt at striving for that higher level of something more profound that only the grown-ups can attain.  Another temporary solution, to a problem approached in the wrong manner.

Of course, the greatest hurdle to Sam and Suzie’s expectations is the fact that even the adults themselves are not exempt from issues of worth, and the need to feel significant and have their existence justified.  It’s a fact that Suzie is certainly aware of; she’s watched her parents’ marriage dissolve into a loveless relationship of apathy and self-parody, and discovered that her fed-up mother (Frances McDormand) is having an affair with the grizzled, sad-sack island police chief (Bruce Willis).  Sam also senses it, in the form of his hapless wilderness-scout troop leader (Edward Norton).  All of them are grown-ups, and all of them naturally awarded that esteem given those of superior age – and, in the end, all of them suffer from the same need to be taken seriously as Sam and Suzie.  In some ways, it’s the greatest example of hypocrisy and grand futility that the children will ever see.

But they would never admit it, because Anderson’s characters never speak with any great profoundness.  They speak matter-of-factly, in an almost stilted fashion, saying only what needs to be said – nothing less, nothing more.  Two characters discussing their backgrounds will dutifully supply the bare facts; it’s left to their eyes to communicate the hurt behind those facts.  Conversely, two family members engaged in a long-overdue heart-to-heart will give succinct ejaculations of emotion.  Only their facial expressions convey the intricacies behind those words.

Yet for all that, the world in Anderson’s film is just like our own: a difficult place, filled with difficult people seeking to justify their existence, and searching for the love and acknowledgement that they desperately crave, all in the wrong places.  It’s quite apparent that Sam and Suzie can’t solve their issues by running away, any more than Willis’s police chief can find his happiness with another man’s wife, or Norton’s troop-leader his esteem by being willfully oblivious to the world.

Not everyone realizes the answers.  Some of those who do simply acknowledge it as just another futility, another superfluous solution to a deep-rooted issue that, in their minds, can never be solved.  But perhaps the most surprising aspect of the characters who do find some resolution is not how they do it, but the fact that resolution is found in some manner of self-giving.  Not all the characters find such resolution; indeed, of all the characters, only a few find something remotely resembling happiness at the end.  But the film’s conclusion makes it very clear that though the characters’ efforts may have been futile, their purpose was anything but.  If one character can find redemption by doing something previously considered inconceivable, another finds just as much by realizing that true happiness entails doing for and genuinely loving another.  And even if, in the end, Sam and Suzie find no resolution in their immediate environments, they’ve at least grown in their understanding of the world, their own self-worth, and found a way to simply make things work with what they have.  As one critic put it, the solution to all the woes of Anderson’s characters can very probably be found in the film’s climatic image.  It’s shocking, striking, and borderline cartoonish in its unreality, but there it is: the ultimate portrayal of cherishing life and reaching out for one another. 

It’s unsurprising that not all of Anderson’s characters find closure, or even that, in some ways, nothing has really changed from the start of the movie.  Perhaps, for the movie’s purposes, that’s a good thing.  This isn’t the sort of story where everyone lives happily-ever-after, where every single character addresses their flaws and becomes a better person over the course of two hours.  Life is rarely that simple, and humanity, in its fallen nature, does have a tendency toward the downside.  But that doesn’t preclude the notion that hope exists for the people who do care, who do choose to reach out to one another and give of themselves.   The world is full of people who constantly disappoint and are disappointed by each other and themselves; it’s an unfortunate staple of humanity.  But we can choose to acknowledge the people who do understand, and take solace in the fact that we are worth something.

Hello From Zombieland...

Ah, the infinite pleasures of living in a world overrun by the undead: lack of sleep, constantly worrying about the lives of one's friends (both the intelligent who can never stay in one place for too long, and the stubborn who will stay put in the face of an approaching horde), trying to devise alternatives to flying overhead and swinging your broadsword like a lunatic...  shall I go on?  There's lots more.

Not that isn't initially rather gratifying to see a row of zombie heads fly at one's swordstroke, or work on a series of trebuchets with one's (absolutely brilliant) engineer badger friends, but it would be rather satisfying to see some impact as a result of one's work.  We destroy dozens every day - perhaps even hundreds, especially with the trebuchets - but it doesn't seem to faze them in the slightest.  Quite the contrary, actually: despite our greatest efforts, they just keep coming.  More and more of them, pouring over the countryside like ants.  We keep them at bay, but we can't stop their numbers increasing and piling.

It would help very much if we knew where they came from.  All we currently know is that they came from a northeasterly direction, beyond the meadow, and have been sweeping the countryside for about six weeks now.  No real motive except a craving for flesh - particularly brains.  No real physical capacity - it's a wonder how they can keep those limbs moving at all.  Ridiculously easy to decimate - even the rabbits have been participating in the defense.  The rabbits!!  Indeed, the things are so fragile that the last good storm nearly did a week's worth of work for us in one night.  It would have been the end of it...but then more came.  And more after that.

Thus far the eagles have found nothing to give us the slightest hint of where they come from, except that they all proceed from a small wooded area, too small to really be called a wood, some miles beyond the meadow.  They reported that when they tried to go deeper to investigate further, they were "repelled."  By what, they couldn't say.  My alter ego suggests a force field; I personally have no alternative suggestion.

Until such time as we can get to the root of the situation, Rory Badger proposes two options for keeping them at bay. 1) Build a wall across the meadow, or 2) create a ravine with their rudimentary explosives (yes, explosives.  Pure, mad geniuses, those badgers...).  For the past few weeks we've been constructing small, crude versions of the first idea.  They usually hold for the first few days - and then such a huge pileup accumulates on the other side that the freaks come climbing up, and it's that much more wood wasted.

The woods around us are thick, lush and resplendent in botanical glory, it is true; we have absolutely no want of wood.  But at the moment, these woods really are the only thing keeping them back: not the trebuchets, not our crude attempts at walls, and most certainly not my lunatic sword-swinging.  And at that, they're still pressing on and getting through. 

So basically, our defense tactics have come down to this: we either go for the wall idea in full force, using all the wood at our disposal and thereby sacrificing our only real defense for one that could potentially take weeks to properly complete, leaving us somewhat vulnerable for those weeks; or we go for the ravine idea, thereby sacrificing all our explosives in what could quite easily go terribly awry, and, even should it work, would only pose as a temporary solution...just like the wall.

And in the meantime...they still keep coming.

We'll be officially deciding on what to do tomorrow.  After that, I'll be flying with the eagles, just to see for myself what this "repelling force" is all about.  Force field...hum.  We shall see.

An Open Letter to the Vlogbrothers

Dear Hank and John,

The idea for this letter was originally conceived when Hank posted his video on May 11.  Since I lacked both the time and the technology to make a video response, I did the next best thing: write.  However, when John posted his own video that Tuesday, I had to do some extensive revisions.  So here it is finally, extremely belated, but hopefully still useful.

John, regarding what you said about marriage (at least, in the contemporary sense), I did agree with most of what you said.  However, there was something that went unaddressed in both your and Hank’s videos: an issue that is not only integral to marriage, but also, ultimately, the very thing which marriage is and always has been about.  I speak, of course, of childbearing.

When you gave your history/explanation of marriage, you did a marvelous job of giving us an idea of what marriage has been throughout the years; you described how most of the time, it was often just an intrinsically personal affair, and, not infrequently in ancient times, it was not monogamous at all.  However, in addition to the pledge of lifelong commitment, the primary purpose of marriage (especially in those times) was not political reasons, or emotional, or what-have-you, but having children and bringing new family members into the world to continue with family trade, noble/royal lineage, etc.  There was often much abuse toward this end, especially regarding the polygamy in those times, but the simple fact is that marriage - whether between a lower commoner and his one wife, or a king and his hundreds of wives - has always been about procreation.

Even King Solomon, whom you mentioned in your video, did not have his 700 wives and 300 concubines solely for the sex; it was also for the continuation of his line.  And, if you want to keep citing the Bible, even the most perverse stories (Lot's daughters committing incest with their own father; Jacob, Rachel and Leah using each other for their own ends; Abraham's ambiguous adultery) were toward the end of having children.  Depending on your tolerance/credibility for the Bible, it's not a coincidence that Lot's daughters (kind of) got away with their incest, and conversely, that Onan was zapped into oblivion for his masturbation, and Sodom and Gomorrah were incinerated for their citizens' homosexual acts.  Those latter two divorced the concept of childbearing from sex; Lot's daughters, perverse as they were, did the exact opposite.

However, all those cases represent that opposite extreme, of having children with absolutely no thought for the other person.  Of all the things that can be said about marriage, there is one that can positively be agreed upon: that it is supposed to be a voluntary and loving commitment to the other person.  Even when the thingmajigs and whoziwhats were married in the olden times, they stayed with each other and made things work because they had pledged themselves to each other, and had promised to love and care for the other person in a way that was exclusive to everyone else but them.  That’s why the traditional definition of marriage really has been monogamy; a person can’t really pledge himself wholly to another person if there’s a third party involved in the same way, or a fourth, or fifth, etc.

Things haven’t changed to this day: marriage still carries that aspect of selfless, lifelong love; it still places a high value on the other person’s welfare; and, above all, it’s still about starting a family.  It’s why men and women were joined in a lifelong union for generations, it’s why they still do it today, and yes, it’s also why gay couples adopt.

However, Hank, that is also precisely the reason why homosexual unions can never be considered “marriage.” Even if they do love each other, even if they do sincerely wish to pledge themselves to one another for life, gay people can never be considered “married,” because marriage is an indissoluble union between a man and a woman, from which a new person is then produced.  A gay couple can never start a family of their own; they don’t even have the potential to start a family of their own.  Even if they adopted (as many "traditional" families do), theirs would not truly be a family, because in one scenario the child would have no mother-figure, and in the other the child would have no father-figure.  What they would instead have is a woman pretending to be father, or a man pretending to be mother, which is not only a form of deception, but also just simply does not work.  Even overlooking all the technical difficulties that this would entail, there are some things that only a mom (being a woman) can teach and provide that a dad never could, just as a dad (being a man) is responsible for some part of a kid’s upbringing that a mom could never substitute for; I’m sure both of you could relate to this.  As much as the ACLU would probably disagree, a kid needs both the male and female influence of two genuinely loving parents in their lives; and to put them in any other environment would simply be depriving them of that. 

Hank and John, no matter how much “traditional” marriage may differ from what has happened over all the turbulent years of human history, it’s an undeniable fact that marriage has always been about the kids, and that procreation has always been brought about through the union of one man and one woman.  All family units have been based on this model since time immemorial, and for a gay couple to say or think that they can replicate it by “marrying” and then adopting is simply self-deception.  A man cannot play mother to a child, nor can a woman play father.  Even should the courts change the “traditional” definition and throw procreation out altogether, and just call marriage a loving and lifelong commitment, a union between a gay couple still wouldn’t be a proper marriage, because any real relationship off the street between any two people, married or unmarried, could be loving and lifelong.  What makes marriage so special is that something is produced from this particular union – and that’s something the courts can’t deny.

Conservative people (and the state of North Carolina) are not demonstrating hate or violating a civil right when they put a ban on gay marriage; they’re stating the fact that such a thing simply does not exist, and for them to change the definition of something that should be so concrete would be as absurd as changing the definition of the word “human.”  I understand that there have been some terrible atrocities and discrimination against gay people, and I wholeheartedly agree that any such thing directed toward another human being is wrong.  However, it is not discrimination to state the truth and live by it; and the truth is that there really is no such thing as gay marriage, and it is not a civil right to request an official legal change stating that there is.  Civil rights exist to protect a citizen’s dignity and freedom; they do not extend to the distortion of truth so that the citizen can live according to the dictations of their libido.

...and that, Hank, is not an invalid argument.

Sincerely,
Valkyrie

Welcome to the Lair of the Squirrel

Greetings, and welcome to all who enter here.  For all ye weary travelers, passive observers, or interested readers, these are but the humble communications of a winged squirrel warrior from another world, passed on by her alter-ego in this one.  This blog was created primarily to provide a response to Hank Green's recent video "Your Arguments Are Invalid: Gay Marriage" (previously titled "Legalizing HATE in America" - and yes, I do pay attention to that sort of thing).  However, after the starter editorial, the blog will consist of a series of articles, with the occasional movie or book review by my alter-ego, and (possibly) an infrequent update from me on the latest status of our efforts against the zombie invasion in my own world, should anyone be interested.  I realize it may be a bit difficult for the average reader to take seriously a blog written by a self-described warrior squirrel, but it seems to me that if the world is grim enough to warrant articles reinforcing the value of common sense, it could use a bit of lightness; why not have some fun while we're writing? :)

So have fun, and remember to always keep an active mind!