Dispatching My French

Wes Anderson, Mother, Art

J. Y. Gao

HSC Common Module Task 1a) Submission

There have always been two pairs of eyes in my life, my own and my mother’s. My mother’s unwavering eyes; they were menacing in a sort of way too – in a dictatorial way that worked like the imperius curse. 

We have a small family portrait dangling from the rearview mirror just above the dashboard in my mother’s car, it has been there for nearly as long as I can remember. Her hard eyes didn’t match the smiling half-moons of my own, nor my dad’s. From the day I was born, she treated me like I was Van Gogh who hadn’t yet found brush, paint and canvas. “Your cello lesson is in half an hour son, you better finish up your homework because you won’t have time after fencing tonight,” she would say. I wouldn’t protest. How could I? I was driven here and there across the city every weekend; her hard eyes would dangle mockingly in front of me everywhere I go.

It was during one of rare work-free weekends in the holidays when I decided to watch a late showing of Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch” by myself at the local Hoyts. Three minutes into the movie, as I recovered from her parting comment, “make sure you pay attention to the movie, sometimes it will teach you something,” I was caught by one of Arthur Howitzer Jr.’s (Bill Murray) aphorisms: “Try make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.” And in a popcorn frozen in mid-air sort of moment, I understood Howitzer. Despite the dwindling popularity of his publication, he remains a staunch supporter of writer autonomy – artistic expression – with little regard for economy, interpretation, and split infinitives. “I’m not killing anybody!” Howitzer proclaims, “Shrink the masthead, cut some ads, and tell the foreman to buy more paper.” Indeed Howitzer sacrifices his editorial austerity to make room for his writers’ artistry. 

The doll house mansion, the cross section of his burial hamper, and the boxed frame of the 3:4 ratio over the following shots, overlaid with the voice recording of Howizter’s will, the calm expression of a narrator recounting his grim burial, and the flat playback of light accompanying music, was nothing less than an egotistical flaunting of the director’s freedom. At the centre of Howitzer’s esteem is his choice to sacrifice himself and dominate others to make way for an unhindered and true expression of artistic voice. In the same way, Wes Anderson’s choice to suppress expectations and his ‘editorial self’, risking his name and reputation, gives birth to four coherent voices in an act of artistic resurrection that not only fabricates four distinct narratives about artistic potential using the uniqueness of their narration, but inspires with the honesty of their words.

Two hours later, I found myself tapping my foot against the curb, planning my long-awaited push back against my mother’s dictatorship. This was serious. And yet, when a pair of dim headlights appeared sparkling through the tree line, and I heard the faint hum of tyres among the cacophony of nesting birds, croaking toads and rattling cicadas, I felt a surge of warmth swell in my eyes. There, alone, at midnight, was my mother who has loved me from the day I was born, and has sacrificed her job and her name, her nights and her days – her life – so that I might reach my own potential. As our dangling portrait jostled over a speedbump, I saw, for certain, a warm glow in her frozen stare, and so I turned to her real eyes and smiled, “thanks for picking me up mum.”