Pssst! This post has been updated.
Have you ever woken up one morning and suddenly realised that an old and cherished friend doesn’t care about you or anything you represent, and actually either ignores or caricatures your existence?
Well, neither have I. But too many times I’ve realised that a director (or musician or writer or artist…) that I love like a friend actually creates art that exoticises, fetishises, or all out erases who I am.
I’ve managed to recover from the horror of finding that much of the music I used to like is grossly sexist, (see our little blurb about Jessica Hopper’s famous article on emo music here) but I’m still working on getting over my ex-friend Wes Anderson.
Before I identified as a woman of colour and started applying anti-oppression criticism to every inch of pop culture I could get my hands on, I loved Wes Anderson. But in my grand old age, I can’t excuse the racist caricatures that populate all of his movies.
Like Pagoda, the cute little Indian man in the Royal Tenenbaums (who also appears in Bottle Rocket and Rushmore) who exists solely to do Royal’s bidding, and has an adorable lack of morality. Or the slew of characters of colour - the Brazilian David Bowie (played by Seu Jorge who actually has quite an illustrious film and recording career); Vikram Ray, whose character’s main feature is that he was “born on the Ganges”; the Filipino pirates - in The Life Aquatic.
Characters of colour in Anderson’s films are always caricatures, hilariously exotic. Anderson uses “race as a novelty”, says salon.com, “suggesting an assertively white-kid view of the world.”
These characters are funny not because of their personalities or life situations - unlike Anderson’s white characters - but solely because they’re brown. It’s like Anderson is saying, “The pirates are Filipino! How hilarious is that??” Needless to say, I don’t get the joke.
As if that isn’t bad enough, Anderson also uses Asian cultures to demonstrate just how educated and well-travelled he is. It’s like the movie equivalent of “Some of my best friends are Laotian” and “I went backpacking in Vietnam.” The master of in-joke filmmaking, Anderson’s brown characters are like an inside joke for urban hipsters who’ve visited Little India a few times.
While Anderson devotees have brushed off criticisms of characters like Pagoda as being minor, and few and far between, it seems like things are about to get a lot worse:
