[ Alternate Takes ] The Squid and the Whale

The Squid and the Whale

Written by James MacDowell. Published on Fri Apr 28 09:07:23 2006 in the Alternate Takes section.

Photo from the article

Printer friendly format [Normal view]

"Interesting" is the highest compliment The Squid and the Whale's family patriarch, Bernard (Daniels), can give something. His constant overuse of this one non-commital, cold, academic word for everything made me feel a pang of shame since it is also one of the first adjectives I myself jump to to describe a work of art I admire. The film as a whole made me feel somewhat ashamed to be the kind of person who says "interesting".

This is due to the fact that the film feels one of the most impassioned, persuasive, and yet even-handed, arguments against 'intellectuals' I have recently come across, one that combines a number of different styles and influences, most of which could probably be described as variations on stories of New York intellectual life. I want to look at these influences in relation to Squid to try to find out quite how it made me ashamed of the part of me that wants to call everything I like not "wonderful", or "beautiful" but "interesting".

Anderson's take on New York intellectualism.

Beginning with the most recent, and perhaps most instantly obvious, the film holds many undeniable echoes of the world of Wes Anderson - in particular the world of his The Royal Tenenbaums (2000). The high-flying New York family of intellectuals-turned-misanthropes seen in Anderson’s film is given a decidedly less idolised treatment here however, perhaps partly because whereas the Texas-born-and-bred writer/director of the earlier film was dealing with an imagined image of what such a family might be like, Baumbach is writing from his own actual experience of being the son of novelist Jonathon Baumbach and Village Voice film critic Georgia Brown. This would go some way to explaining why, though its subject matter is similar, the tone of Squid is so hugely different - i.e: primarily realist rather than gently surreal and detached.

Whilst Anderson’s picture of family dysfunction - and, ultimately, reconciliation - was critical but finally idealising of its subjects (as if the writer/director himself was Eli, the outsider who’d always wanted to be a Tenenbaum), Baumbach instead truthfully details from experience the potential destruction that the egotism often accompanying large intellects can wreak. This is shown mainly through the level of control Bernard exerts over his son, Walt (whose name, surely inspired by Walt Whitman, already shows the creeping literary pretensions the father has instilled), encouraging him to favour hypothetical life experience over a loving relationship (with Sophie) and accepted intellectual opinions of aspects of culture (of Dickens, Fitzgerald, Kafka) over personal reaction. Seeing Walt blindly following his father's example in all things is truly painful - particularly when it comes to his attitudes towards women. As a result, whereas The Royal Tenebaums is touching, whimsical and patently hilarious in its almost cartoon-like theoretical vision; Squid's picture manages to be moving without being sentimental, entirely authentic and quietly damning.

Bernard dismisses Walt's troubling behaviour.

Such (self-?) criticism of the life of the intellectual points us towards another clear influence on Baumbach: Woody Allen, the established king of self-hating/egotistical New Yorkers. Despite his romantic yearnings, Allen has confirmed in fits and starts, and with more-or-less subtlty (a Hannah and her Sisters [1987] here, a Match Point [2005] there) that he is at heart something of a nihilist. The way his characters are capable of high-mindedly debating morality and philosophy, whilst simultaneously acting in the most casually heartless ways towards (usually) their loved ones, suggests a worldview not so much of "the heart wants what the heart wants", but rather "the ego takes what the ego feels like". There are hints at this kind of disturbing moral relativism in Squid (Linney's "multiple" affairs, Bernard's attempts with Paquin), yet this is where the generous humanism and typically conservative moral stance of the current wave of quirky Hollywood independents comes to rescue the film from pessimism (or potentially more interesting ambiguity, depending on how hip you are)...

As such, Bernard is unsuccessful in pushing his affections onto the too-young (we are encouraged to feel) Paquin, and - though he manages to persuade Walt to attempt "playing the field" - we see the regret this causes when the confused young man begins to semi-stalk Sophie like they were in The Graduate (1967). As well as this, the William Baldwin-Linney relationship is presented as being unequivocably happy and healthy (romantic meals, trips away), and the connection between the tennis coach and his young protege, Frank, points towards a potentially more loving alternative family unit for the future. This friendship also suggests a somewhat optimistic possibility that will never be even considered an option in Allen's universe: that being uneducated (or, rather, not an intellectual) and happy is a valid or realistic lifestyle.

Bernard warily regards a 'philistine'.

Allen's less educated (usually lower-class) characters - no matter how warmly they are presented - are always, at best, comically condescended to: see, for example, Mira Sorvino and Michael Rappaport as the hooker and boxer in Mighty Aphrodite (1995), or Maureen Stapleton as the gaudy floozy in Interiors (1978). Though he has dedicated his career to showing that wealth and intellect certainly do not guarantee happiness (sometimes, he suggests, they bring the opposite), he simply cannot conceive of a life without these privileges. In Squid, however, Baumbach’s more forgiving world allows a sense of triumph when Frank rebels against his father’s (and, it would seem, Allen’s) definition of a philistine as being “someone who doesn’t like interesting books or films”, and proclaims matter-of-factly “then I’m a philistine”.

Like Allen in Annie Hall (1977), Bernard drags Walt and his girlfriend to see an “interesting” film (Blue Velvet [1986]) instead of what they really want to see (Short Circuit [1986]). What would be so wrong, Baumbach asks us, with just letting these teenagers be teenagers and allow them to enjoy the comic antics of Steve Guttenberg and a jive-talking robot? Since Walt is more than happy (until the film’s conclusion) to be moulded into an intellectual in this way, Bernard takes an interest in him; Frank, having rejected his father’s colonisation of his psyche, is of no further use. Perhaps the most damning indictment of Bernard and his egotism is that he pays no attention to the alcoholic breakdown his youngest son is clearly having.

Watching Blue Velvet.

Speaking of breakdowns, I should briefly mention that the final influence we can feel strongly in Squid is one that has also clearly driven Wes Anderson: J.D. Salinger. Usual echoes of the prototypical New York teenage outsider, Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caulfield, can be felt in both Frank and Walt (the former's attempt to lose himself in drink, the latter's reminiscences about a childhood visit to the Natural History Museum); perhaps more instructive though are the reverberations of Salinger's ex-child-genius Glass family of Franny and Zooey and other stories.

The Glass family comprised a collection of characters who were not intellectuals exactly, but who teetered on the edge of being destroyed by their own intellects. Learning from the eldest son, Seymour (a more-or-less Buddha-like figure of spiritual enlightenment who killed himself for no rational reason) the younger children become walking philisophical question marks, so unable to deal with day-to-day-living that misanthropy, self-hatred and mental collapse seem to be their only options.

Yet - and this is where Squid comes in - they tend usually to find a way out of the downward spiral of over-intellectualising and self-pity through some kind of transcendant experience that results finally in a spiritual sense of understanding and tolerance. Though Baumbach's film doesn't pretend to touch on spirituality in any real sense there is something almost holy and undeniably Salinger-esque about the run Walt makes in the film's final moments - not to the girl he may or may not love - but to the giant Natural History Museum sculpture of a squid and a whale locked in mortal battle. A beautifully ambiguous final image, it seems to suggest some kind of breakthrough for Walt that allows him to see a frightening image of his childhood as it really is - with the distance that comes with maturity granting him understanding. Indeed, who is Walt becoming but - essentially - Baumbach, the son of thoroughbred intellectual stock who has now, years later, reached a point at which he can simply stand back and observe his family for what it really was/is.

The squid and the whale frozen in mortal combat.

The image he, and we, now see is critical of Bernard and his brand of intellectual imperialism, yet is also critical merely because the facts of the case point to his inadequacies as a father, and not because of any harboured bitterness or rage. The understanding found here has brought with it an enlightenment-like tolerance that allows us to see his father not as a monster, but - it must be said - merely as a troubled and sad man with his own reasons and logic. Yes, the film judges him for his lack of warmth and compassion (there is no remorse and no life-lessons are learned in the hospital towards the end): he is still the kind of man who will describe life only as "interesting" till the day he dies. Baumbach, one feels, no longer is (if he ever was), as proved by his ability to make a film as tender as this about a character as mired in intellectual detachment as Bernard Berkman.

Read the short review for this film