The Fantastic Mr. Fox

Busy, funny, and (ahem) fantastic, w/ its endlessly inventive promulgation of densely industrious sight gags and word games, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson’s new Roald Dahl-adapted stop-motion extravaganza, invokes many of the sorts of things you might find in a typical child’s bedroom: shoebox dioramas, model train sets (an actual one of which is on display in Mr. Fox’s son Ash’s bedroom), ant farms (the geological strata of this autumnal toy world are presented to the viewer in cross-section through which the various animals dig and burrow, constructing rhizomes), doll houses, and lots of furry stuffed creatures anthropomorphically dressed. This is a child’s-eye-view of the world, then. This will not surprise viewers of Mr. Anderson’s previous films. All of them erect heavily art-directed childlike vantages (often pejoratively mistaken for “infantile” ones) w/ all the wonder and play that the term suggests, as well as the impalpable idea of a world-sense founded in an endless questioning, prodding, discovering – the very processes by which a child comes to an understanding of what all of this stuff consists in which his questions unquestioningly believe. The world that this child’s gaze looks upon in a Wes Anderson movie, though, the world that is having sense and understanding made out of it, cut out from cardboard, is a world of adolescence in perpetual relapse (one of the many obvious and not so obvious things it has in common w/ Spike Jonze's recent Where the Wild Things Are). Inescapable, unrelenting, painful adolescence is the preservative fluid in which Anderson’s fetal creatures are ultimately suspended. This is less a flaw inherent to his films than it is a reality at the heart of which is the genuine clinical sociocultural symptomatologies his films delineate: it’s a condition, in short, w/ which contemporary society is duly afflicted. And such is the case w/ The Fantastic Mr. Fox. All the men are animals who won’t – cannot – grow up. Mr. Fox himself is a chicken thief turned newspaper columnist, an unsatisfying career change made by virtue of a promise he makes to his soon-to-be wife at the start of the film. They find themselves in quite a pickle, trapped in a cage, about to be butchered, she announcing that she is pregnant. Mr. Fox (sort of) promises that if they survive he will reign in his wild ways. Cut to twelve fox years later, Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney as only a slightly toned down variation on the go-for-broke convivial Clark Gable chutzpah he brought to O Brother, Where Art Thou?), full of resentments toward the boring, hardscrabble domestic scene in which he’s stuck, living in a hole in the ground w/ wifey and bitter, ungainly, ‘different’ son Ash. Something’s gotta give. Against the advice of his Badger lawyer (Bill Murray doing his thing), uppity Mr. Fox, in the throes of his midlife fox crisis, decides to move his family into a beech tree on a hill, in plain view of the residences of nefarious farmers Bunce, Boggis, and the unremittingly nefarious cider-drunken sharpshooter Bean (Michael Gambon, likewise – and hilariously – doing his thing), and to secretly return to his thieving ways, w/ the assistance of bashful opossum pushover, Kylie (snout poking out of bandit mask). By virtue of Mr. Fox’s inability to keep his animalness and hubris in check, he enters a war of attrition w/ his tripartite farmer adversaries, putting his family, community, and self in serious jeopardy. And getting his tail blown off for his trouble. When Mrs. Fox confronts him and asks him why he has lied to her, been so selfish, and thrown the whole animal community into a state of crisis, he responds quite simply: I’m a wild animal. Who amongst us cannot relate? I am what I am, the confluence of the various drives that make me up; I fight, I fuck, or I flee. I’m a fox goddamnit! It is precisely the adolescent who holds up his unmediated, untrammeled drives for valorization. It is the adolescent who, as Julia Kristeva reminds us, “idealizes the drives and their satisfaction.” It is the adolescent who says “I am a wild fucking animal. What did you expect?” The adult knows to keep the drives in check, to make use of an ingrained, healthy shame to prevent indulgence in shameless behavior. The adult operates without the constant need to pursue his animal appetites, damn the torpedoes. Mr. Fox’s son Ash is the other side of adolescent striving. Unable to live up to the reputation of his one time whack bat star father, who dismisses him and instead focuses his attention and praise on hotshot maternal cousin Kristofferson – athletic, wise, disciplined and effortlessly able to seduce Ash’s foxy (ahem) lab partner – Ash desperately fails to attain the realization of infinite pleasure and perfect harmony in the object relation, so he blames himself for the failure of this relation, turns against himself, and ultimately enacts an inward-directed nihilism that causes him to act out in ways that differ from his cocksure father’s acting out (he acts shameless because he is actually ashamed), but which likewise put others in jeopardy and which can only be resolved by joining his father in a selfless acting-on-behalf-of-community. In the end, Mr. Fox indeed does bring all the animals together, in celebration of their animalness, listing off each of their Latin nomenclatures, putting the animal to use on behalf of, curbing the drives for the shared purpose of a collective overcoming. Still, these American-voiced animals in their war of independence against the British farmers whose law stands in for the paternal limit, the law-of-the-father, are still made intelligible, ultimately, in terms of an Oedipal transference which once again finds them, in their collective ideality, simply pulling one over on daddy. So for all its valuable children’s movie life lessons about community, selflessness, and the celebration of difference, the cute little beasties in Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox, having escaped certain death beneath the earth, but consigned to remain there all the same, under the law of the father, are unable to escape the prison of chimeras that is their adolescent ideation. For all the jubilation at hand, there is a certain sadness at work underground. These animals remain, like the human Andersoneans who precede them, as trapped as the rest of us when we find ourselves backstepping - when we refuse, or are unable, to grow up.