Francis Bacon, STUDY AFTER VELÁZQUEZ'S PORTRAIT OF POPE INNOCENT X, 1953
The Phoenician Scheme, Wes Anderson, 2025
It had been our intention as sovereign individuals to greet all who crossed our path with the requisite kindness and consideration, but once that became altogether impossible we did our best to make a clean breast of sticky situations with as much speed and finesse as we could muster. Like the old hag once said: I used to want everybody to love me, now I just aspire to leave the room with a modicum of dignity. We are not in the first place inclined to want to impress anybody and, besides, nobody’s taught us how. You may want the person you are today consecrated in gold and bronze as the forever you but that’s not the way we’d have it. We’re not the person we were ten minutes ago when we took out the recycling and attempted to engage a small, brown rabbit in polite conversation. He said his name is Ezekiel. The end of times, the end of the road, it’s all putty on the cheeks. We don’t mess with perfection and if that means total annihilation then we’re all for it, friend. The ultimate crime of humanity is humanity itself and eventually somebody pays the piper, no? You don’t get a clean slate using stasis as your model. We advance and build until inexorably pulled back. If the tide is to go out fast while we’re in up to our waist, well, so be it. If that’s the situation in which we find ourself then it’s us who put us in peril. You don’t outmaneuver the moon and tides with clever parley. If you weren’t forced into the hot seat by orderlies or goons then it’s you who opted to plop down and see what’s what. We arrive wherever we arrive, whether the correct destination or the wrong one, by planning a journey, gathering materials, and attempting to execute live and lithe in space-time. In his 1955 seminar on Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Purloined Letter,” Jacques Lacan famously for the first time declares that “a letter always arrives at its destination.” We like this line as much as does Slavoj ‘Mr. Sniffles’ Žižek, onetime Elvis of Critical Theory and heavyweight snoozer. To us it means plain as day that the letter you never received went to its real home instead. How do you like them apples? We’d be inclined to get stubborn and short-tempered, i.e. who needs you, impertinent letter? The letter went to its real home, you say? That sort of makes sense, its sufficiently probable. Go do your thing, sly fox. The great lens-crafter and, uh, materialist metaphysician Baruch Spinoza in his absolutely mandatory Ethics observes that most people are happy to settle for the first explanation that makes enough sense. This is the way critical faculties atrophy. I have to make a decision, I’m wondering if you could make it easy for me. An idiot good at providing simple explanations can conquer 95% of the motherfucking pie chart. You don’t really need us to tell you that. We knew an entrepreneur from Huston, Texas with a big white Stetson hat who used to say: nobody ever went poor underestimating the intelligence of the American public. What do we do? We broker deals for the spiders from Mars. We surge come Expo time. We hold your pecker while you pout and snivel. The art life is a hard row to hoe. Why do all the Alberta separatists look like the ugliest sea creatures from the deepest most unexplored of the oceanic zones and regions? Why do all the sloppily angling Alberta separatist punters make Danielle Smith look like a fucking Rhodes Scholar? This province has meatballs for brains, I tell you. Within the basically situated Calagry, Alberta situation, based you might say, we like the mountains and the prairie and the two rivers meeting, whereas the people we’d just as soon pawn off for beer money and bottle rockets. The other day we found ourselves out at Bragg Creek where in the coffee shop folks were discussing the news of the day—Alberta separatism and France’s meltdown of the social commons foremost in rotation—and we must honestly confess that we were pleased to find everybody more or less making sense and abstaining from bogus conspiratorial conjecture or what have you. It was kind of refreshing. Ordinary, decent people, merely trying to make sense of the blasted news. How much hypernormalization can Bridgette from Windermere even take? “This is difficult stuff,” offers Kevin Cline’s Mack in an offer to console his son in Lawrence Kasdan’s 1991 state-of-the-nation prestige pic Grand Canyon. “Making a left turn in L.A. is one of the harder things you'll learn in life.” Man, those sure were the glory days. Today we have to worry about being locked out of our bank account permanently because we used a different search engine. We don’t play games of chance because the house always wins and we, sir, are no house, sometimes finding it advisable to keep on the move and at the same time to break up and then reassemble later, under a more auspicious sign, as with the pack of wolves or the bustle and pump of the jazz ensemble in full swing. We’d go ahead and tip the waiter 20% no matter what horrible names he’s just called us. Fumbling through improbable eventuations it stings you to know are all too real, it might just so happen that you catch your reflection in the mirror ball as you hang upside down like a bat and you see that you’ve gone green as an eel, your hollow cheeks like lunar craters. Not just anybody is up for the challenge of loving the likes of us. We cannot set aside our explorations to consider them anew. That’s how people die out here. We know we’re best off finding a river and following it until we find people and their tools and machines and their speckled emblems of civilization. It is those who are lost who are liable to receive guidance. It is those who receive care who are most likely to communicate gratitude. We wouldn’t want much to do with someone who showed up unannounced in order to visibly disapprove of us. There is a brief interval at the start of a person’s reaction where they don’t have any control of the reaction. Is their body language open or guarded? Where do the eyes intuitively go? Which direction does the body lean? Does a hand suddenly go into a pocket or behind a back? That’s our criminal justice bonafides accounted for, we suppose. Hot dog. If Donald Trump can make a deal then so can we. We are as gay as the day is grey. Vengeance and terror are the bully’s heartening loot. Fuck with us and it’s on you. If you knew better you would do better. What happens if we go out there and we’re pounded into the dirt? Then God rest our souls, I guess. You can always tell a Nazi from his stupid-ass haircut but you can’t always stop him from doing you dirty. In his stately and razor-sharp 2023 masterpiece The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer builds a narrative passage or tunnel through an extremely complex interior and exterior topography built out of the posh home of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family—the cramped kitchen and spaces adjoining it very much remind us somehow of the house in Jacques Rivette’s 1985 adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (though the choice of lenses predictably harkens to Kubrick)—and extending in concentric waveform rings outward from the grounds of the estate and into the immediate surrounding area while the SS begin to set in motion the monstrous and diabolical Final Solution (Endlösung) on the unseen periphery. All is as it should be in the garden. Slightly aggrieved to have it be known to just anybody, we confess all the same that The French Dispatch (2021) and The Phoenician Scheme (2025) are at the present time our most highly esteemed Wes Anderson pictures. He and Benicio Del Toro are simply a match made in heaven. In Paul West’s 1980 historical novel about him, Claus von Stauffenberg, the tall, handsome Nazi who plotted the assassination of Adolph Hitler on July 20, 1944, denigrates the moody dictator as nothing more than a “wallpaper hanger.” Alexander Theroux called Paul West a “vital writer and man of irrepressible spirit” who is “able to analyze his every last dilemma.” “I believe that Paul West listens to music, earphoned for the night through which he writes,” gushes William H. Gass in a 2004 interview, “so that the rhythms will get into his blood, and for the energy he can draw from sounds that at the same time block out everything of the world but art.” We are melody, rhythm, and sound before we give you so much as our face. That’s the gospel according to Robert Bresson: “I’d rather people feel a film,” he insists, “before understanding it.” The eyes are directed whereas the ears roam. For the prisoner, auditory reach extends well beyond the cell and the canopy of night issues its own special hum. “One of the arts of being human, in whatever era,” writes Paul West in his 1995 reminiscence A Stroke of Genius: Illness and Self-Discovery, “has been to control ourselves and our lives even while having to live incoherently, as blank about tomorrow as about the purpose of life itself.” There is nothing left for a people who cannot generate kinship and support networks. We are after something that endures, encourages networks of care, and which encourages participation (especially if that participation is a little unorthodox). The Baby Boomers sit on a Money & Care time bomb and it’s still too early to prognosticate with respect to how that’s going to play in the near future. What happens when a hefty portion of the world’s wealth is held in the hands of the elderly and the dying? We can only hope that it might help to encourage better organized and more robust systems of care, supply following dutifully on the tail of demand. Atomized and divided communities impoverished in innumerable respects are not encouraged to care for one another and have never been provided with a healthy model of how to do so. In interfacing with the homeless community we find that what are even more ubiquitous than addiction and mental health disorders in the lives of these folks are bad communication skills and bad problem solving skills. That really oughtn’t surprise you. It isn’t any more their fault than who their parents are, who runs ExxonMobil, or…contracting pancreatic cancer. We do admit that the administration of education and healthcare are among the most confounding earthly conundrums we know of. People are resistant, people are stubborn, and it could not be more clear that God wanted it that way. How do we make everything better? I don’t know…pretend? There might actually be something to that. Fake it ’til you make it. We’ve been there and done that. The major downside is that it can get mighty Sisyphean. When we start to get anxious we on occasion find relief in the realization that nobody has dirt on us except for dumb shit. Sometimes in his work with Wes Anderson, it seems like right after Anderson has called action there is a brief moment where Benicio Del Toro discovers that he’s wearing unfamiliar clothes in a strange place he does not recognize before somehow recollecting nevertheless that he has scripted lines he must deliver. People don’t have to make sense. They’re basically burning with yearning, in several senses several. It is easier to understand cruel acts in the abstract than to bear witness to them directly. We can’t mourn everybody but we can definitely remember what we’d rather not. Lighten your load, it ain’t nothing but lampoon. Right? We do not advise occupying the seat of judgement. Put $100 in your tank and go buy some groceries. Take in the evening air. Just don’t come around here complaining about the gas prices. Kindly follow that there Yellow Brick Road.
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