Beauty Among the Ruins: The Painful Picturesque and Sentimental Sublime in Wes Anderson’s Aesthetics

Abstract

This chapter elucidates fundamental principles of Romantic aesthetics—the concepts of the sublime, the beautiful and the picturesque—as they relate to Wes Anderson’s films The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Working from descriptions of the sublime and beautiful in Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry, it shows how both films’ aesthetic components create picturesque representations through mise-en-scène that combine beauty and sublimity in varying degrees. The Royal Tenenbaums aesthetic paradigm is termed the ‘painful picturesque’, a programme that systematically develops the middle-ground eighteenth-century picturesque ideal of perfected nature by creating shabby but pleasing, controlled yet chaotic visual systems in the urban pastoral environment of a fantasy New York City. The Life Aquatic accomplishes a similar aesthetic effect, although this time the film’s settings invoke the sublime more so than the beautiful, while resulting in a similar sense of picturesque anxiety. In the film potentially sublime locales are undercut by a commitment to creating pleasurable, non-threatening images that coincide with a deadpan comedic style, dubbed the ‘sentimental sublime’.