Wes Anderson Week: The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Posted 2 years ago
via brightwalldarkroom

52 Notes

I know you’ll probably just think I’m being biased since I run the site, but in all honesty: Karina Wolf’s essay today on The Royal Tenenbaums is the best thing you will ever read about that film. And I say that as a huge fan of the film, and one who has read a whole lot about it over the years. This piece really is that good. So, go read it!

filmosophy:

“If you think you’re enlightened go spend a week with your family.” - Ram Dass

LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES

by Karina Wolf

When Royal Tenenbaum is found out by his family – when they discover (not a spoiler) that in order to live with them, he’s only pretending to have stomach cancer (while eating cheeseburgers and scoffing Tic Tacs from medicine bottles) – he accepts his eviction and retreats to the 375th Street Y. There’s something about this hyperbolically placed men’s association which locates the exact artistic terrain of The Royal Tenenbaums.

It correlates with the more modestly numbered streets of Washington Heights where you’ll find a hilly Manhattan full of shambling buildings. The neighborhood is downtrodden and grand: a reminder of a time when New York’s greatness was still under construction. One of my friends, a new New Yorker, moved up there because he thought that’s where he’d find the real city. Trying to find the real New York, of course, is like trying to live in the real Paris – the Platonic version exists only in novels and films. The Royal Tenenbaums is, in part, a love letter to this imaginary Manhattan, a fable which lifts liberally from other renditions of the place, a Calvino-esque invention in which the streets extend to infinity…