Wes Anderson, Austin Auteur

When you think of Texas filmmakers, you almost never think of Wes Anderson. Even among his most loyal fans, there are probably those who don't realize that Anderson is a Texas native, his first two feature films shot entirely in the state. The markers of place in those works are subtle: the distinctive black-and-white Texas highway signs, emblazoned with an image of the state, that peek out of the corners of the frame in Bottle Rocket, the leafy streetscapes of suburban Houston in Rushmore. But since coming to the University of Texas at Austin, it's been hard for me to think of Anderson apart from his origins here. There's the fact that every once in a while, I'll have a student inform me that his or her high school back in Houston was once used as the location for a Wes Anderson film: St. John's School, Anderson's alma mater and the stand-in for the fictional Rushmore Academy, or Lamar High School, rechristened Grover Cleveland High in the film. Or the fact that the iconic Bottle Rocket motel beloved by Anderson fans is located just a couple of hours up the highway in the sleepy town of Hillsboro, which I pass through whenever I'm en route to Dallas. Or the fact that if I look out of my office window, I find myself gazing at Benedict Hall, where Anderson recounts having one of his earliest conversations with fellow UT classmate Owen Wilson as the two undergrads compared which courses they were going to take.

For me, Texas is marked by Anderson, and his films in turn are marked by Texas. Not the Texas of ten-gallon hats and John Wayne pictures, which were rarely the cinematic province of Texas-born directors. (John Ford was a native of Maine, after all.) Rather, Anderson's aesthetic seems to me imbued with the cinematic spirit of a certain coterie of what we might call "Austin auteurs"—filmmakers born to or drawn to this quirky capital city and its bumper-sticker mandate to "Keep Austin Weird." Richard Linklater, Terrence Malick, Robert Rodriguez: these are the marquee names of an Austin filmmaking community committed to the idiosyncratic vision of the writer-director, figures who are as deeply immersed in exploring and refashioning film history as they are insistent on remaining independent of Hollywood trends. To me, Anderson is an expat member of this particular Texas filmmaking culture, indebted not to the outward trappings of Texas identity but to the pioneering spirit it is meant to embody.

It is in the spirit of Anderson's Texas roots that this special issue of Texas Studies in Literature and Language is conceived. Eight feature films into his career (with a ninth just released), Anderson is at a point where academic consideration of his work is just beginning to proliferate. In addition to early assemblages like the German collection This Is an Adventure! edited by Christian Vittrup (Ludwig, 2010); Wes Anderson and Co., a special issue of New Review of Film and Television Studies edited by Warren Buckland (10.1, March 2012); and Peter Kunze's The Films of Wes Anderson: Critical Essays on an Indiewood Icon (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), there now stand Whitney Crothers Dilley's The Cinema of Wes Anderson: Bringing Nostalgia to Life (Columbia UP, 2017) and my own Wes Anderson (U of Illinois P, 2017), part of the Contemporary Film Directors series. This is in addition to popular considerations of Anderson's films like Mark Browning's Wes Anderson: Why His Movies Matter (Praeger, 2011) and Matt Zoller Seitz's landmark interviews in The Wes Anderson Collection (Abrams, 2013). The essays collected here both respond to and depart from these earlier investigations, continuing key lines of inquiry while also opening new directions in the study of one of the most literate and literary filmmakers working today.

The issue begins with works that consider the overall universe of Anderson's filmmaking, that special cinematic province often referred to as "WesWorld." In "The Great Frame-Up: Wes Anderson and Twee Narrative Contrivance," Tom Hertweck pays special attention...