the Royal Tenenbaums: a review (of sorts).

 Had nightmares all of the nights. But slept far too much: nearly fifteen hours. I woke up and watched the Wes Anderson movie   The Royal Tenenbaums. It was always one of my favorite movies and my favorite Wes Anderson movies.

It’s about east coast over achievers and the absurd tragedy protégés face for the rest of their lives as they face a world that will judge the worst of the world on a spectrum of achievement and the slightly above average… with the same contempt. 

The comedy is nuanced jokes on the public broadcast television crowd. An educated class that whole identity is founded on aspirations of slight over achievement rather than that of punk rock culture that wallows in its underachiever status.

I always related to Owen Wilsons character wanting to fit in more than any of the inspirational middle class but always being a charming punk (not necessarily the rock n roll kind.) 

Once even I had a review of my writing say I was not like Edgar’s Allan Poe.  When I told one of my brothers about this I said “do you think I am especially not like Edgar Allan Poe?” I think he liked that joke… if it didn’t land for you I will assume you haven’t seen the movie. Or the self awareness of it went over your head.

For me the film is commentary on the Wes Anderson aesthetic while like Thomas Pynchon writing it creates an allusion of transcendence…. With a reframing of itself. With an argument that can be paraphrased as “If I am aware of what I am. If there is a deep self awareness and true deep self hatred accompanied by absurd jokes and a quiet joy… what do you call it if not a kind of peaceful transcendence?”  

I remember a bar interaction where I was talking to a group about Nabokov novels at the pilot light and a woman “I don’t believe you have read Ada because it doesn’t have an auxiliary title!” I rember stewing in it for a while “I don’t know what to tell you except the book is titled Ada, or Ardor: or a family chronicle.”

I guess as a self educated person frustration is I have done the work: read all of Joyce (except finegans wake), all of Pynchon except his newest book, and read all of Ada in a manic two days of reading when I was fifteen.

Wha really bothers me then is most of the middle class highly educated people I talk too. Ether resent me for having read the books they have claimed to aspire to. Or they hate me for being a kind of proof it is not that hard to the read the books they hold up as the standard to be reached. When they wont even read them.

I have horrible grammar still I study trying for my lack of fundamentals in the language I use daily.

I know this tirade in neurosis and inadequacy has most little to do with most people lives but… it’s a little funny and has everything to do with Wes Anderson and his movies?

A+