So, where next, Wes Anderson?

The Darjeeling Limited is a pleasant enough diversion, though not from Anderson’s concerns. Once again – see Royal Tennenbaums — he tells us a story about a dysfunctional and emotionally constipated well-to-do family, in this case three brothers led by Owen Wilson on a self-conscious spiritual quest by train through India in the hope of the sort of catharsis that you just know Anderson is going to pull away from you before feeling kicks in, after offering just a glimpse of it.

Last time round, in The Life Aquatic, I really thought Anderson had started to develop a new shtick, but it looks like once again I was glamoured by the whimsy and the ever-ravishing visual treats. The Darjeeling Limited is very linear, as you’d expect a train journey to be, and there are certainly some interesting stops along the way as the brothers fail to get to grips with each other or the culture they’re travelling through.

There’s a hint of something different when the brothers are exited from the train and get involved in the lives of some villagers after saving the lives of two out of three young boys from drowning, but pretty soon it’s back to business as usual for the siblings. Which, I suppose, is Anderson’s point. This is emphasised by the fact that one of the brothers is a writer who writes obviously autobiographical stories, and the ominous dialogue line ‘to be continued’: like the characters, Anderson has taken himself to India, and found only himself. Which is no surprise, as fans of Buckaroo Banzai will be aware: ‘Wherever you go, you’re always there’.

How then, does one account for the groove that Wes Anderson finds himself in, compared to the myriad of story types that someone like filmmaker Michael Winterbottom or comics writer Alan Moore gets involved with? In the case of the latter, he’s very conscious of his writing being part of a whole imaginative realm he calls Ideaspace, which all stories belong to, and which in Moore’s case he travels in freely to produce graphic fictions as varied as Top 10, Promethea, Swamp Thing and From Hell.

You may or may not believe in Ideaspace to the degree that Moore does, but I’d argue that his belief in it provides him with an endlessly rich source of potential material to work with. And that’s the important thing. Wes Anderson’s work clearly delineates a narrow range of concerns with a small palette of stylistic tics, both of which, if The Darjeeling Limited is anything to go by, he’s in danger of exhausting. He’s self-aware enough to know he’s in a box, but – at the moment at least – he can’t seem to get out of it. Moore, by comparison, is immersed in the wider world of story, and of the parameters which different genres and story types place on stories he’s interested in telling. That knowledge gives him the freedom to play with abandon in what seems to be the most limited of toyboxes, such as superhero comics.

Take a look at WildC.A.T.S, a collected edition of which is available. Not one of Alan Moore’s finest hours: it’s work for hire, a job he was given by publishers Wildstorm in the nineties and which he took on knowing he had the craft skills to accomplish thoroughly and with finesse. And that’s exactly what he does. Only, he does more than that. His awareness of the rules governing writing extends to his willingness to play with them, something that Wes Anderson and many other writers and film makers, could never do.

As an example, there’s a riff in WildC.A.T.S about a hotel on an alien planet with a low-level probability field: “You’re staying in Coincidence Mansion. Go between the fountains, straight across the plaza. If two of you start humming the same tune or speaking the same sentence, then you’ve found it. Have a pleasant stay.” It’s a neat background detail, the kind of thing Douglas Adams would come up with. But, of course, as writers we know it’s important not to use mere coincidence to move the plot forward. Only, Alan Moore does exactly that, using the notion of the coincidence field to generate a solution to the problem of a dying android his team mates can’t help: one of the other guests has been trained to repair just such a model of android. It breaks every rule in the writing handbook to use this device, and that’s precisely why – on this occasion — it actually works and why Alan Moore is celebrated as a shaman genius writing century and genre spanning narratives and why I get hired to write plays to train prison officers and brochures to promote kitchens sold by silver foxes who will seduce your wife with the promise of the kitchen of her dreams by painting a watercolour of it in the showroom. Harrumph.

So, how do you get out of the Wes Anderson rut and head for weirdbeard Moorish genius? For one thing, by becoming aware of the presuppositions going into your work, even before you’ve put a word on the page. For another, by learning to recognise your default settings, and opting to do something different. The more familiar to you the word is that you put after the ones you’ve already written, the less chance there is of surprising yourself – and your audience. Not that audiences want to be surprised every time, as the popularity of James Bond films bears out, but without something new in the mix, you’re not going to be pulling them in on a regular basis.