Wes Anderson's Symbolic Storyworld

A Semiotic Analysis

Warren Buckland

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501316531
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Wes Anderson's Symbolic Storyworld presents a theoretical investigation of whatmakes the films of Wes Anderson distinctive. Chapter by chapter, it relentlessly pulls apart each of Anderson's narratives to pursue the proposition that they all share the same deep underlying symbolic values – a common symbolic storyworld. Taking the polemical strategy of outlining and employing Claude Lévi-Strauss's distinguished (and notorious) work on myth and kinship to analyze eight of Anderson's films, Warren Buckland unearths the peculiar symbolic structure of each film, plus the circuits of exchange, tangible and intangible gift giving, and unusual kinship systems that govern the lives of Anderson's characters. He also provides an analysis of Wes Anderson's visual and aural style, identifying several distinctive traits of Anderson's mise en scène.

Part One

Theory

1

Symbolic Storyworlds

Within the framework of a theory of codes it is unnecessary to resort to the notion of extension [reference], nor to that of possible worlds; the codes, insofar as they are accepted by a society, set up a ‘cultural’ world, which is neither actual nor possible in the ontological sense; its existence is linked to a cultural order, which is the way in which a society thinks [and] speaks.

Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, 61

Cultural meanings are inherent in the symbolic orders and these meanings are independent of, and prior to, the external world, on the one hand, and human subjects, on the other. Thus, the world only has an objective existence in the symbolic orders that represent it.

Simon Clarke, The Foundations of Structuralism, 2

In his discussion of auteur structuralism in Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, Peter Wollen reminds us that it was Jean Renoir who said that directors spend their whole life making one film (1972, 104). Wollen used Renoir’s comment to align auteur theory with a fundamental tenet of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology: just as the anthropologist collects and studies variations of the same invariant archi-myth (or tale), for Wollen, each film an auteur makes is a variation of his or her archi-film: ‘Underlying the different, individual tales was an archi-tale, of which they were all variants’ (Wollen 1972, 93).¹ The ultimate goal of auteur structuralism was to construct a model or simulacrum of an auteur’s underlying, abstract invariant archi-film. This paralleled the more general goal of continental structuralism and semiotics to construct the complete system of abstract codes or system of intelligibility underlying each symbolic language:

For every process [e.g. manifest messages] there is a corresponding system, by which the process can be analyzed and described by means of a limited number of premises. (Hjelmslev 1961, 8)

The goal of all structuralist activity, whether reflexive or poetic, is to reconstruct an ‘object’ in such a way as to manifest thereby the rules of functioning (the ‘functions’) of this object. Structure is therefore actually a simulacrum of the object, but a directed, interested simulacrum, since the imitated object makes something appear which remained invisible, or if one prefers, unintelligible in the natural object. (Barthes 1972, 214–15)

The individual, concrete work will be considered as the manifestation of an abstract structure, merely one of its possible realizations; an understanding of that structure will be the real goal of structural analysis. (Todorov 1969, 70)

Traditional worldviews oppose two realms – an everyday external reality (res extensa) and an inner reality (thought, or res cogitans), and posit that each is separate and autonomous. The structural and semiotic worldviews introduce the ‘symbolic order’ as a third realm, existing between the two realities.² Lévi-Strauss spelled out the multifaceted nature of the symbolic order: ‘Every culture can be considered as an ensemble or a set of symbolic systems, amongst which the most important are: language, marriage-rules, economic relationships, art, science, and religion’ (Lévi-Strauss, quoted in Wilden 1981, 255). The symbolic order is not simply an inert system of representation passively reflecting an already meaningful external world to an already structured mind, but is enabling – in the sense that its system of codes constitute and organize both realms, as Umberto Eco’s and Simon Clarke’s epigraphs opening this chapter attest. The behaviour, experiences, thoughts, beliefs, sexual desires, fantasies and identities of individuals are made possible by the anonymous and impersonal symbolic order. Individuals cannot voluntarily opt in or out of the symbolic, for their identities and worldviews are constructed by and in the symbolic. The various dimensions of the symbolic became the primary object of study for continental structuralists and semioticians, including Barthes, Greimas, Jakobson, Kristeva, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, Saussure, Todorov and Žižek. (We can follow Herman Parret and refer to the tradition of ‘continental structuralism and semiotics’ using the more manageable term ‘structural semiotics’ [see Parret 1983].)³

The following study of Wes Anderson aims to construct his ‘archi-film’ – the invariant themes at the core of all his films – via the concept of the ‘symbolic order’, supplemented with the narratological concept of ‘storyworld’. Storyworld, outlined at the end of this chapter, refers to an abstract totality encompassing everything that fictionally exists across a director’s films. To reduce the vagueness of the term ‘storyworld’, and to avoid discussing each film’s storyworld as a distinct entity (see Kunze 2014, 4–5), its system needs to be studied structurally, using the basic methods of structural semiotics. A storyworld emerges from abstract codes and structures – paradigms, kinship structures, binary oppositions, mediators, systems of exchange and rules of transformation. Each film Wes Anderson makes is a partial manifestation of the same abstract symbolic storyworld.

Syntagms and paradigms

To define [ … ] messages is to undertake the task of discovering what code enabled them to be produced [ … ]. Tailoring the [messages] into minimal units, identifying the paradigmatic classes, discovering the rules which obtain in syntagmatic series – all this is daily fare for the semiologist. (Descombes 1980, 100)⁴

The term ‘meaning’ within structural semiotics is defined narrowly: it is synonymous with ‘sense’ or ‘signification’ rather than ‘reference’. Signification is an internal value generated from the network of structural relations between codes; a sign is a code that has been manifest in a message in a communicative situation: ‘Codes provide the rules which generate signs as concrete occurrences in communicative intercourse’ (Eco 1976, 49). Codes are fundamental (they constitute the underlying system) whereas signs are transitory effects and partial manifestations of this fundamental system. Structural semiotics replaces the atomistic theory of meaning, which posits a one-to-one direct correspondence or link between a sign and its referent, with a theory in which a sign’s meaning is dependent on a series of differential relations to other signs. The structural semiotic method of analysis identifies two permanent axes of relations: the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic. More specifically, the method of analysis aims to segment and classify messages (speech, myths, kinship relations, literary texts, films, etc.) to identify their ultimate constituents – their invariant system of codes (paradigms) and their rules of combination (syntagms). From these analyses, structural semiotics constructs an abstract object, or model.

Analysis is based on several premises: for every message, there is a system of codes that generated it; messages are potentially infinite, codes are finite; messages are continuous observable surface phenomena, codes are discontinuous non-observable latent abstractions; messages are composed of distinguishable parts arranged into linear syntagms, codes are arranged into a system of paradigms. The concept of the paradigm is fundamental to structural semiotics. Paradigms are virtual systems of available options, a network of potential meanings from which one meaning is chosen and realized. A paradigm is therefore a set of latent codes that can occupy the same place in a manifest message.⁵ A particular code selected from a paradigm to be manifest in a message gains its meaning in relation to the codes in the paradigm that were not selected to be manifest; although the manifest code appears to be a separate self-contained entity (a sign), it is in fact linked to numerous latent codes. The codes in the paradigm cannot be observed but only inferred, yet they contribute to the meaning of manifest codes by shadowing or ‘resonating’ with them. Saussure presents the following example of a paradigm (which he calls an associative series):

Outside discourse [the syntagm], on the other hand, words acquire relations of a different kind. Those that have something in common are associated in the memory, resulting in groups marked by diverse relations. For instance, the French word enseignement ‘teaching’ will unconsciously call to mind a host of other words (enseigner ‘teach’, renseigner ‘acquaint’, etc.; or armement ‘armament’, changement ‘amendment’, etc.; or éducation ‘education’, apprentissage ‘apprenticeship’, etc.). All those words are related in some way. (Saussure 2011, 123)

If some of these words in the paradigm disappeared, the semantic value of the remaining words would change; they would become more diffuse, for the remaining words would need to cover the meaning of the missing words. The opposite happens when new words (such as technical terms) are invented: they divide up the realm of meaning into smaller segments. This is another demonstration of the structural (as opposed to the atomistic) theory of meaning, in which meaning is generated from the network of syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations: the meaning of one sign is dependent on other signs, rather than a fixed relation to a referent. A sign manifest in a message therefore signifies indirectly – in terms of its differential relations to other signs in the message and by invoking the underlying codes not manifest in that position in the message.

The all-or-nothing binary logic constitutes the ultimate type of differential relation between signs. What this means is that a sign or code receives its meaning via its opposition or similarity to other signs. Binary oppositions – such as raw/cooked, male/female, East/West, consonant/vowel – constitute a form of absolute, mutually exclusive relation of difference that symbolic systems impose upon the external world and the human mind. Nonetheless, the mutually exclusive binary opposition is just one type of symbolic difference. Daniel Dubuisson identified no less than fifteen relations of difference in Lévi-Strauss’s work, including ‘contrary’, ‘antithetical’, ‘alternative’ and so on, but the mutually exclusive binary opposition remains the dominant relation (Dubuisson 2006, 124–5). Semantics identifies additional oppositions, including ‘contrast’, ‘antonymy’ and ‘converseness’ (see Lyons 1977, chapter 9). In terms of the similarity between codes in the same paradigm, Barthes noted that ‘the terms of the field (or paradigm) must at the same time be similar and dissimilar, include a common and a variable element’ (1984, 133).⁶ A. J. Greimas identified three fundamental relations of difference: two based on opposition (contrariety, contradiction), and one based on similarity (implication), which form the foundation of his semiotic square (1987, chapter 3). It is via these specific types of relations that signs signify.

Signs are therefore structurally co-dependent: they reciprocally presuppose each other. A syntagmatic structure is, after all, a combination of paradigmatic codes. Structural semiotics re-conceptualizes all cultural artefacts in terms of reciprocal structural relations, not intrinsic properties. Kinship, one of the most basic symbolic systems governing human societies, is exemplary in this respect, for it creates relations between individuals: an individual’s identity is defined by the specific set of symbolic relations he or she enters into with other individuals – who are consequently defined as ‘relations’, or siblings, people one can/cannot marry, enemies and so on. The kinship categories ‘brother’, ‘sister’, ‘son’, ‘daughter’ ‘father’, ‘mother’ and ‘uncle’ do not signify by themselves as individual signs. Instead, they only signify in relation to each other, and are distinguished from non-kin. Social relations are based on an individual’s identity being defined unequivocally in terms of symbolic kinship categories. Oedipus’s crime is not just a biological transgression; his symbolic kinship status is equivocal: ‘Oedipus occupies all possible (male) positions (within his own family) but can act appropriately in none’ (Jonnes 1990, 226). That is, Oedipus is both husband and son to Jocasta, and brother and father to the children they had together. Such equivocal symbolic identities undermine social relations.

Structural semiotics is based on three additional premises (Descombes 1980, 93–4): the code precedes the message (the system of codes must be in place before it can be manifest); the code is independent of the message (the virtual system of codes is separate from the material message); the code is independent of the emitter (the system of codes determines meaning, not the code user; the code user does not ‘express’ himself or herself – does not express some authentic experience; instead, his/her intervention simply involves selecting from a pre-existing system of codes).

For both paradigmatic and syntagmatic studies, meaning lies below the immediately perceptible surface content and is generated by an abstract system of differences. Remaining on the perceptible surface gives the false impression that meaning is singular, fixed, natural and self-evident – it simply needs to be experienced. A study based on these assumptions ends up repeating this surface in a description; it does not go beyond the information given.⁷ Lévi-Strauss remarks, in relation to these types of studies, ‘They demonstrate the obvious and neglect the unknown’ (1972, 37). In his analysis of everyday myths, Roland Barthes (1972) followed Lévi-Strauss by deploying structural analysis to expose ‘the obvious’ (the surface, common sense level of lived experience) as a contingent construction that conceals a prescriptive series of social, political and moral values embedded in the symbolic order.⁸ In the early 1960s, Barthes also applied this demystifying approach to the plays of Racine (Barthes 1992), provoking a strong reaction from traditional critics, including Raymond Picard. Serge Doubrovsky identified the conservative premises behind traditional criti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part One  Theory
• Part Two  The Films
• Part Three  Finale
• Works Cited
• Index
• Copyright Page