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You might have noticed that TikTok’s been getting awfully Wes Anderson-y of late. You’ll have seen the caption: “You better not act like you’re in a Wes Anderson film when we [do X activity].” On a pastel background, a chapter title is followed by a location and an exact time.
Music from regular Anderson collaborator Alexandre Desplat – especially the twiddly harpsichord stylings of ‘Obituary’ from The French Dispatch – plays as an adventure to the laundromat, the walled garden of a flower farm or to Honest Burger is depicted in a series of flat, symmetrical compositions where nobody smiles. Tiny binoculars are tweaked back to being at exact right-angles to a notebook.
Now, getting all huffy about Wes Anderson is a particularly 2009 way of being a dick, and it’s lovely that people are trying their hand at Wes Anderson-ing – Anderising? Andercating? – their feeds. It’s a lot more fun and easy to engage with than if they were turning their daily lives into a tribute to Lars Von Trier. It’s just a bit of fun, romanticising an afternoon of your life into an arch, cute, immaculately production designed fantasy. Gatekeeping these things is not cool. If this trend gets more people watching Anderson films, that’s nice.
Thing is, they don’t look very much at all like a Wes Anderson film. The colours don’t have that vivid strangeness, while at the same time making you think it might be nice to have the bathroom redone like that. The cuts are way too quick. There’s nowhere near enough use of Futura. And they’re not much of a laugh either. Whether you like Anderson or not, you’ve got to admit the guy can write a script and has spot-on comic timing. His characters don’t just stand there looking artfully miserable.
One TikToker’s guide to making your life look all Wes Anderson basically boiled down to just making sure everything’s straight and getting some pastel colours going. “Also watching a Wes Anderson film will help,” snapped one commenter. Where’s your whip-pans? What about your voiceover from a hard-bitten journalist/pained writer and part-time derelict. This is basic, people!
Now, it’s easy to take the piss out of Anderson (something which these TikToks don’t do, I should add: they take him as a marker of True Cinema), to boil him down to a few tics and use his movies as an aesthetic. It’s also fun. A bit of faded mitteleuropean glamour for Americans, a bit of mid-century Atlantic chic for the Brits: it’s nice, and it’s bringing new people to Anderson’s movies.
After racking up 7.8 million views on his Anderson’d Honest Burger trip, Londoner Keith Afadi got a sponsorship gig with Adidas giving a trip to their Carnaby Street shop another Andersoning. And fair play to Keith. He told Rolling Stone he’d not watched any Anderson films before, and has since watched The Grand Budapest Hotel and enjoyed it. Lovely.
Now that it’s a genuine phenomenon things are changing. The big accounts have started hamfistedly jamming them together. BBC Sport’s attempt was middling, and then completely torpedoed by Peter Schmeichel grinning away at the end. (He could definitely play a stern, disinterested patriarch though. Pete, get onto your agent.) Michael Barrymore did one. It was rubbish. Labour’s shadow attorney general Emily Thornberry did one. It was even more rubbish. The Democrats’ attempt to give Joe Biden noodling about the White House the treatment is truly, truly rubbish. Crystal Palace’s training montage suggested Jordan Ayew will not be starring opposite Bill Murray anytime soon.
There’s a slightly acid tang to some of them too. It’s funny when it’s an introduction to St Helens, complete with shots of Pound Bakery and an artfully placed vape. But flaunting your perfect family life, for instance, or just showing off how nice your flat is doesn’t become less irritating just because you’ve made everything symmetrical. And anyway, Anderson’s families might look very aesthetic, but they tend to be pretty weird and unhappy.
If these TikToks use Anderson as a marker of an indie sensibility I’m also being curmudgeonly about it because it reminds me that I did the exactly same thing as a teenage would-be film guy. Our Wes was the sweet spot between the kookily off-beam indie scene and something anyone would actually want to watch, like Con Air.
And in the end, they’re doing Anderson a service. He gets ribbed for assembling his films from the same-shaped pieces, but these TikToks do at least show just how hard it is to do Wes Anderson things well.
