The Geometry of Wes Anderson

Right now, mid-sentence, I have The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou running on the other screen—Bill Murray in a red beanie, Owen Wilson doing his slow-burn confused thing, the always-half-naked Robyn Cohen somewhere in the background. I’ve seen it five times at least and it still works. Part of what works, I think, is that it looks like nothing else ever made.

Kogonada, a video essayist who’s been quietly producing some of the best film criticism on the internet, cut together a supercut called Centered that isolates the thing Anderson does compulsively across every film: he puts everything in the exact middle of the frame. Actors, objects, doorways, ships. Perfect symmetry, every time. It sounds like a tic. Watching six films’ worth of centered shots cut together, it reveals itself as something closer to a philosophy—the world as a place of formal order, every element weighted and placed, nothing accidental. The joke is that real life is all accident. The comedy comes from the collision between Anderson’s rigid geometry and human chaos trying to fit inside it.

The video makes the obvious feel newly strange, which is what good criticism does.