Wes Anderson
2001
109 minutes
Most people have at least one movie or TV show they've never seen. They may be proud of this fact or ashamed or some weird combination of the two. This is one of those films for you. Back in the day you took a bit of stubborn pride in never having seen this now-classic film. All you knew of it made it seem a bit twee and cutesy. Most of this boiled the film down to its stylistic elements. Ben Stiller's tracksuit and the matching ones of his children. Owen Wilson's cowboy hat. Luke Wilson's tennis garb. The typefaces. All of it came together to make something you vowed you would never watch.
Around the time this was out and its massive popularity was echoing through hipsterdom, a local newspaper columnist wrote an obnoxious column laying out a manifesto that later turned into an obnoxious book (which to be fair you never read either). Her obsession was with a concept she called being "quirkyalone", which was some sort of aspiration to be a manic pixie dreamgirl grafted onto a sort of asexual persona. "I'm too adorably weird for any guy to be interested in me," says the girl in cat's eye glasses with thrifted clothes who likes comic books and anime and Star Wars, while getting a lot of attention from male hipsters sporting their own Buddy Holly glasses. Meanwhile she innocently denies that pop culture is breathing down her scenegirl neck and chasing her down a rabbit hole toward things that will be mainstream very, very soon. All the veneer of quirkiness seemed less like a personality trait than a prop that could be dropped at any time after serving its purpose. A fake pair of glasses for the "homely nerdy chick" to toss in the garbage along with the snood holding her hair into a side ponytail as she shakes out her hair to look like a slightly disheveled sorority girl.
You inherited a disgust for this deliberately quirky aesthetic from your own punk persona that you were somewhat unwittingly mimicking. Punk culture has always been a bit reactionary and contrarian, and you were all too willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater sometimes in having violent reactions against some of these aesthetic trends, especially when you saw the popular kids with money and trust funds able to weaponize their privilege to seize even authenticity away from the deeply unpopular pioneers who were on the vanguard. Ironically, you would even resent the pioneers on the vanguard themselves, whose scenes were often too cliquish and incestuous and exclusionary to be welcome to anyone with a genuine interest.
The Royal Tenenbaums and other films of that time with extremely strong visual seemed to attract a lot of boring people who wanted to strongly profess some sort of disposable "quirk kink". People who were taking their styling cues from these films were a blinking danger sign for you of being obnoxious poseurs who would want nothing to do with you or any of your genuinely weird friends. They were only there to ironically amuse each other. They were one shave and a haircut and a discarded pair of chunky eyeglasses away from looking like Luke Wilson on the red carpet instead of Luke Wilson being awkward and nerdy on film. You distrusted them instinctively and were wary of any of the culture they were consuming as being suspiciously tainted by their obnoxiousness.
But at some point a dislike of things needs to become an informed dislike of things. And in many cases in your life you learned a bit too late that you missed out on something magical because of obnoxious fans. It may not have been possible for you to enjoy this film in the decade it came out. But now you're older and well-removed from the more toxic and obnoxious elements of the stew this was brewing in at the time. You now have friends and relatives who love this film who were ten or fifteen years younger than you when it came out and saw it much later or at quite a different time in their lives than you did. It's finally time to watch it, for the first time or with fresh eyes as the case may be. See what you think!
One thing is clear though. If you don't laugh at the 375th street YMCA scene, then you're a fucking hypocrite. That street address is a hilarious gag for anyone even remotely familiar with New York geography.
Time to choose something different: