Anderson's movies -- the static, stilted "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou," the eccentric-family quirkfest "The Royal Tenenbaums" -- have always left me cold. I remain unmoved even by the aggressively fey charms of "Rushmore." "The Darjeeling Limited" -- which opens the New York Film Festival this evening, and opens elsewhere beginning tomorrow -- is the first of Anderson's movies that has elicited even the mildest scrap of affection from me: I feel warmly toward it, although I reserve the right to remain wary of its aging-hipster gimcrackery. It's as if Anderson, yesterday's next big thing, heard the homemade coffee-can drumbeat of new young DIY filmmakers like Andrew Bujalski and Joe Swanberg and realized that what the kids are into these days is shambling, sincere naturalism; his stock in trade, whimsical, deadpan irony, all meticulously orchestrated from the master control center of his brain, is starting to seem as outmoded as an old Mantovani record. Better inject some juice, and attempt at least an approximation of spontaneity, fast.
In the first sentence, see how the author qualifies "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou" with the adjectives 'static' and 'stilted'. Now read the next section of the same sentence, where "The Royal Tenenbaums" is qualified by 'eccentric-family' and 'quirkfest'. A cursory scan of the remainder of the paragraph reveals a similar pattern, that of placing at least two adjectives before every noun -- she speaks of the "aggressively fey charms of "Rushmore"", of the director exhibiting an "aging hipster gimcrackery", of "new young DIY" filmmakers, and so on unceasingly.
Adjectives have an important role to play in any piece of prose, but that role is a supporting one . You can't just go on and sprinkle adjectives before each noun in the hope that you will sound smarter, or pithier -- it doesn't work that way. Let me take an(other) example to show you what I mean --
Before --
The chair reposed in the corner by the fireplace.
After --
The chair, whose wooden legs gave off a grim, suffocating smell of nascent varnish and whose seat, with its abbreviated edges and too-small base, seemed to invite only the most elliptical of posteriors, reposed smugly by the flickering fireplace, as if cocked in wait for its next unsuspecting occupant.
See what I mean? By inserting an arbitrary number of adjectives before each noun, my prose achieves a garishness it previously did not have. More importantly (and worryingly, at least for me), its meaning is hidden. What do I want to say here? Do I really need to describe the chair reposing by the fireplace in such excruciating detail? Does my description even 'work'? (The answer, of course, is that it does not).
I think such prose stems from authorial self-consciousness, when the writer degenerates from a person who wants to tell the truth to a person who wants to sound intelligent. There are two stages that accompany such a degeneracy. First, the writer scans his piece of writing (an article, say) looking to improve it in some abstract way. He doesn't yet know how, only that he must. When a perfunctory perusal reveals no means by which he can accomplish such an improvement, the writer grows a little anxious. This is the time of his greatest peril. If the author can somehow recognize the clouds of self-consciousness asserting themselves in the otherwise clear sky of his mind (see how fraught that sentence was?), perhaps he can avert disaster. If he cannot, though, he begins to see -- and take -- the easy way out, interposing himself, as he does, between the reader and his prose.
What is the easy way out? Why, to use adjectives, of course. Let's see. I can use the word 'static' to describe "The Life Aquatic by Steve Zissou". What else, what else. I need one more adjective, something that will convey my erudition while still being condescending. I got it! 'Stilted'! And the beauty of the thing is, when I write "the static, stilted "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,", I will have an alliteration! What a great writer I must be! Now let's do the same thing with the rest of the article.
And so you have the beginning of the end. For the benefit of Stephanie Zacharek and others (including myself), let me say this -- no piece of writing, however small, can be improved just by inserting an arbitrary number of adjectives/adverbs as qualifiers. There are no exceptions to this rule.
Read the entire article, if you want to.
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