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Although I may live in the provinces (suburban Minnesota, which can be more or less provincial, depending on the stereotypes to which you subscribe), I finally had the opportunity to see Wes Anderson�s Moonrise Kingdom. And what a delight it was! I had been anticipating the release of this film for several years (I seem to recall a time when Wes Anderson�s 2012 project was called The Rosenthaler Suite; whether that became Moonrise Kingdom, or whether it�s a film that didn�t (or has yet to) materialize, I can�t say) and you can imagine my delight when it made its way to the Eden Prairie AMC (it was first released in Minnesota at the Lagoon in Uptown a few weeks ago, but I had a �bad experience� at the Lagoon once and I have never been back since (I suppose this experience really isn�t all that �bad,� suffice it to say that if you go to see a Korean �spaghetti Western� at the Lagoon at noon on a Sunday, most of the clientele are going to be some of the most depressing-looking people you�ll ever see, and it will upset you and make you feel bad about life)). But fuck the Lagoon, we needn�t think about it now.
Moonrise Kingdom is an almost perfect film. It has the beautiful compositions and color schemes that we�ve come to expect from Anderson, and which place him firmly in the same league as Ozu and Tati. We also find in it the trademark Andersonian romanticism, perhaps worked up to its greatest and most effective pitch. Anderson is a sentimentalist (I say that in a value-neutral sense; there�s nothing inherently wrong with sentimentalism) and sometimes this serves him well and sometimes it doesn�t. For instance, in The Darjeeling Limited, the scene where the brothers abruptly have to rescue some Indian kids from drowning, and sure enough, one of the kids dies, is really tonally off(not to mention �white savior-y,� which is the last thing one would expect to find from Wes Anderson). But the sentimentality and romanticism in Moonrise Kingdom are largely enacted by adolescents and on an adolescent scale, and so they fit quite sensibly. T. S. Eliot once castigated the poets who thought that they �felt things more deeply� than others; he said (and I�m paraphrasing): �Bullshit, every grand emotion you think you�ve felt has been felt by everybody else already, and probably more �deeply��whatever that means�in certain cases. As a poet, your skill is in your ability to express and aestheticize these feelings, not in your capacity to have them.� Now, maybe poets don�t feel things especially deeply, but adolescents do (or at least, intelligent adolescents do. I highly doubt the fifteen-year-old punk with the backwards baseball cap and the pasty-white sobriquet of �Ryan� or �Jeremy� feels things particularly deeply. The only emotions he knows are lust, cruelty, and the atavistic sense of exultation that comes with an athletic victory, be it his own or that of �his� team. But that�s another matter altogether). Certainly, the adolescents in this film feel things deeply.
A brief description of Moonrise Kingdom�s premise: The 12-year-old �Khaki Scout� Sam Shakusky spends his summers at a scouting camp on one end of Penzance Island. On the other end lives Suzy, his wonderfully angsty paramour; she has a dysfunctional relationship with her parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand), who think she�s psychologically disturbed, and maybe she is, as her occasional outbursts of rage and violence would seem to indicate. But one gets the impression that she is a genuinely superior person, and so her impatience with her idiot classmates and a stultifying home life is understandable. Sam is a similarly superior non-conformist, and his fellow Khaki Scouts hate him for it. Well, Suzy and Sam meet one summer and they correspond over the intervening year, and upon Sam�s return to the island they decide to run away together, and the film follows their attempts to escape their pursuers, while in the process detailing their innocent romance, which Anderson portrays with a deeply moving sensitivity and compassion.
This is a very compassionate movie, and it�s a compassion that comes tinged with melancholy. In Japanese aesthetics, they have the concept of mono no aware, which can be translated as �an awareness of the impermanence of all things.� Now, this impermanence is very sad, but it is also very beautiful, as it renders all things precious. A sense of mono no aware pervades the romance between Suzy and Sam, because it will inevitably come to an end, and probably sooner than later (because they are being pursued, and because they are on an island, and because they are twelve-year-olds). More on mono no aware later.
I want to explain the title of this piece (and it should be a given that the title gets explained, but I realize that some of my posts have weird titles that never get explicated; for instance, one of my first posts was entitled, �And Then the Red Guards Ate Ice Cream,� and it was only later that I realized that I never actually explained what that was referring to). Moonrise Kingdom falls into a genre of art that I think we can call, �Children attempting to escape from the world of adults, who have failed them, and who will crush them.� Romeo and Juliet is probably the quintessential example of this, although the number of suitable examples would be innumerable, because adults have been destroying their children ever since Saturn embarked upon his grim, �infantophagal� feasts. According to the Wikipedia, the Phoenicians and the Canaanites would sometimes literally destroy their children, by sacrificing them to the god Moloch. Apparently one fed the children into a fire at one of Moloch�s altars, and the bloodthirsty god could thusly be propitiated.
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| Moloch! Moloch! |
Moloch figures in the Bible�presumably as one of the false gods that the Hebrews occasionally fell into worshipping, which is perplexing, because how could one lose faith in Yahweh when he was always making his presence known with plagues and slaughters and pestilences�and that�s how the image of Moloch�a god to whom one sacrifices children�comes into literature and the other arts. I haven�t read the Bible, but I was first exposed to the figure of Moloch in Allen Ginsberg�s Howl (which I must have read�wow�when I was little older than Sam Shakusky). A section of Howl is devoted to a denunciation of Moloch�which Ginsberg saw as a metaphor for the American social system, to which her children�sensitive souls like Ginsberg and Carl Solomon and everyone else he knew who had been destroyed�have been fed. Each line starts with �Moloch!� such that I remember this section of the poem as a ringing series of Moloch!s, �Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!� (That�s an example from Wikipedia; again, I read Ginsberg when I was thirteen and I�ve never gone back to him since; he made a great impression on me at the time, but I fear I�d be embarrassed by that enthusiasm were I to reread him. But what I just quoted isn�t bad. It sounds Poundian, if you replace �Moloch� with �Usura.�)
(Another example of the Moloch motif in art is in Aleksandr Sokurov�s 1999 film Moloch, which depicts a few days in the life of Hitler and his entourage in the fogbound heights of his Berchtesgaden retreat in 1942. I�m not quite sure how Moloch figures into the film. I suppose the obvious interpretation is that Hitler is Moloch, but whose children are being sacrificed to him? The children of Germany, sent off to die in his genocidal wars? Or the Jews, so many of whom were burnt like the burnt offerings made by the Phoenicians? That seems more likely, but it doesn�t seem to have the �sacrificial� element to it. I offer no definitive answer to the question).
Now, on a much lighter note:
When I was watching Moonrise Kingdom, and Suzy�s and Sam�s flight from the forces of adult life, I thought about Moloch. Perhaps all Romantic (with a capital R) flights are flights from Moloch, from a society whose structures are inimical to one�s sense of who one is and how one wants to live. While looking at the Wikipedia page for the film (I was seeking clarification on how to spell �Shakusky�) I came upon this quote from The Atlantic�s Christopher Orr (with whom I am not familiar; I cannot vouch for any of his other opinions), in which he praises Moonrise Kingdom as Anderson�s best film �[because] it takes as its primary subject matter odd, precocious children, rather than the damaged and dissatisfied adults they will one day become.� So Orr doesn�t� come out and say it, but he seems to understand that the forces of Moloch will be at work on Suzy and Sam, sooner or later, and that it will destroy them. Therein lays the pathos, the mono no aware of their flight.
When I was watching Moonrise Kingdom, and Suzy�s and Sam�s flight from the forces of adult life, I thought about Moloch. Perhaps all Romantic (with a capital R) flights are flights from Moloch, from a society whose structures are inimical to one�s sense of who one is and how one wants to live. While looking at the Wikipedia page for the film (I was seeking clarification on how to spell �Shakusky�) I came upon this quote from The Atlantic�s Christopher Orr (with whom I am not familiar; I cannot vouch for any of his other opinions), in which he praises Moonrise Kingdom as Anderson�s best film �[because] it takes as its primary subject matter odd, precocious children, rather than the damaged and dissatisfied adults they will one day become.� So Orr doesn�t� come out and say it, but he seems to understand that the forces of Moloch will be at work on Suzy and Sam, sooner or later, and that it will destroy them. Therein lays the pathos, the mono no aware of their flight.
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| Suzy and Sam. |
Moonrise Kingdom resonated strongly with my fondness for melancholy warmth. And romanticism, I might add. And desperate, quixotic flights, the sort that literary (and then cinematic) lovers have been taking for hundreds of years. It occurs to me that Moonrise Kingdom is the first American film that I�ve reviewed at any length in all the time that I�ve had this blog; I must have liked it a lot, as I like to keep this blog as cosmopolitan as possible; but I suppose America would have to be part of any cosmopolis. There are few really famous American filmmakers who I think are making films of global importance; Wes Anderson is one of them, and the cinephile would be wise to avail him or herself of any opportunity to see his films, but especially Moonrise Kingdom, which I think is one of his best films yet.
