Wes Anderson, Seeing Like a State, and the Triumph of the Particular

There is an authoritarian impulse inherent in the concept of an auteur. This is true in a literal sense—in all but rare cases, a film set is a deeply hierarchical place, and when a director’s style has certain requirements as to acting style, production design, and cinematography, the agency of the various roles in the production is necessarily subordinated to the vision of the auteur. This question of vision, however, brings out the deeper authoritarian ramifications of film style. For us to describe an artist as possessing a ‘singular vision’, they must necessarily give form to that vision—any Tom, Dick, or Harry might possess a ‘singular vision’, but it is irrelevant to us unless we can see it too. The organizational principle, then, of an auteurist work is to give form to sight; to manipulate reality in order to make a work identifiable as belonging to a specific vision. Thus, the camera’s eye doesn’t simply capture images, in the process of seeing, it is changing and in a sense creating its content. The director’s i changes reality: that is the whole point.

This is, in an oblique sense, the subject of James C. Scott’s 1992 book Seeing Like a State. In it, Scott deals with the ways in which high-modernist attempts to make reality more legible to state or corporate actors invariably have effects on what is trying to be measured (which, under certain conditions can have cataclysmic effects). In the introduction, he writes:

State simplifications, the basic givens of modern statecraft were… rather like abridged maps. They did not successfully represent the actual activity of the society they depicted, nor were they intended to; they represented only that slice of it that interested the official observer. They were, moreover, not just maps. Rather they were maps that, when allied with state power, would enable much of the reality they depicted to be remade. Thus a state cadastral map created to designate taxable property-holders does not merely describe a system of land tenure; it creates such a system through its ability to give its categories the force of law (Scott 3). (emphasis mine)

This, I would like to suggest, is not so different from the way a director manipulates reality in order to substantiate their vision. By seeing something with the camera, a director is remaking it to match their own manner of seeing.

Nowhere is this truer than in the oeuvre of Wes Anderson. When Scott writes “the carriers of high modernism tended to see the rational order in remarkably visual aesthetic terms. For them, an efficient, rationally organized city, village, or farm was a city that looked regimented and orderly in a geometrical sense,” (Scott 4) he might as well be describing Wes Anderson’s visual style—with his rigidly planimetric compositions and his careful placement of actors and props, Anderson’s vision is likewise an organizational principle, highlighting the double sense of ‘plot’ as both a mathematical concept (as in to ‘plot’ something on a graph) and a narrative one. In this sense, Anderson’s distinctive style is a dramatization of this process of stylization—the organization of reality to allow for the possibility of legibility itself.

This homology of legibility and control is, to lesser and greater degrees, the subject of Anderson’s last two films, Asteroid City (2023) and The Phoenician Scheme (2025). Not coincidentally, it is also the basis for much of the criticism of them. Browsing Rotten Tomatoes, one can find many such critiques: Ellen E. Jones writes in The Observer that “Anderson’s shot compositions always were pleasing to the eye. It’s the heart and the brain that are starved when every emotion is kept at such a vast ironic distance”, Rick Romancito of The Taos News agrees, writing that “one may find themselves wondering if all this self-indulgent art school style fantasy is worth it.” Anderson’s late style, these reviewers seem to say, has sacrificed real life at the altar of (over)substantiating his vision—the organizational principle has killed that which it aimed to make visible in the very process of making it so. When one reads in Scott that “the formal scheme was parasitic on informal processes that, alone, it could not create or maintain. To the degree that the formal scheme made no allowance for these processes or actually suppressed them, it failed both its intended beneficiaries and ultimately its designers as well.”, one could be forgiven for thinking they were still reading a pan of The Phoenician Scheme. These critics are wrong: through the intensification of his late style, Anderson is able to stage the limits of auteurist narrative control—far from stifling reality, these films are the site of reality’s reassertion of itself, the triumph of particular knowledge over top-down control. They are some of the most hopeful films of Wes Anderson’s career.

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Like The Grand Budapest Hotel, which I would argue is the inflection point between Anderson’s early and late styles, Asteroid City’s plot is a matryoshka doll of frame stories within frame stories. The Grand Budapest Hotel’s frame, however, functions to trace the passage of one story, creating a sense that we are hearing the story fourthhand, and in so doing mostly just provides an alibi for the aggressive stylization—we are far enough away from ‘reality’ to swallow whatever stylistic tics Anderson wants to throw at us, which are numerous. Asteroid City’s frames, in contrast, evince a hybrid approach—the outermost frame, that of a TV program recounting the writing and production of a play, share Budapest’s structure of distancing the viewer from an ‘actual’ event. But the intermediary frame, that of the play’s production, dramatizes the process of narrative construction itself—rather than hearing a story that presumably ‘happened’ within the story of the film, this frame allows the constructedness of the innermost story to reveal itself as constructedness, as a set.

One could construe this as simply a deeper form of ironic distancing, but where Asteroid City is most poignant is when this relationship of control begins to break down. This is most evident in the climactic moment when Jason Schwartzman, playing the protagonist, exits the play Asteroid City in order to confront its author. This does two things: firstly, by simply going against the script, Schwartzman’s character is reasserting his particular will over the top-down control attempted by the author; but more fundamentally, it recontextualizes the innermost frame not as a depiction of events, but as a depiction of a depiction of events. The production, the locus of auteurist control has, as it were, been invaded from above—the life outside the story has rushed in to disrupt it, and the particular wills of the characters/actors have refused to submit entirely to the singular vision of the author.

The Phoenician Scheme brings out the connection with Scott even more in the way it engages directly with statecraft and central planning. Scott writes that “the carriers of high modernism in remarkably visual aesthetic terms”:

For them, an efficient, rationally organized city, village, or farm was a city that looked regimented and orderly in a geometrical sense. The carriers of high modernism, once their plans miscarried or were thwarted, tended to retreat to what I call miniaturization: the creation of a more easily controlled micro-order in model cities, model villages, and model farms.(Scott 4)

The film’s titular scheme is an obscure development project undertaken by Benicio Del Toro’s Zsa-Zsa Korda, a scheme whose parameters are closely linked to the projects of control analyzed by Scott, and indeed, Korda represents his schemes as a series of shoeboxes—the film’s world represented in miniature, his own ‘micro-order’ through which he will understand and change the world. All of Anderson’s films have exhibited an obsession with miniaturization and schematization—his filmography is rife with models, diagrams, and maps—but in The Phoenician Scheme the association between high-modernist control and narrative organization latent in Anderson’s oeuvre (and indeed in auteurist film style more broadly) is made explicit: each section is titled ‘Box One’, ‘Box Two’, and so on—Anderson is understanding, and indeed creating the world through a schematization nearly identical to corporate or cadastral diagrams.

And for the first half of the film, the function of ‘the places themselves’ represented by the box stays at a schematic level. Either the sites themselves are placeholders perversely subservient to their model version—the tunnel project in Box 1 has tracks that don’t meet in the middle: its function is not as a usable tunnel but as a physical instantiation of capital—or else they are sites of negotiation—as in Marseille Bob’s nightclub and the ship captained by Jeffrey Wright. This logic pervades the characterization of Korda: he is a citizen of no country, his ‘actual’ home is a nondescript shack he never visits, and his customary location is in a plane flying over foreign land, which to him is all land—from the sky, the world looks like nothing so much as a map of itself.

The turning point of the film is thus the moment when the plane carrying Korda, his ex-novitiate daughter Liesl, and their assistant Bjorn crashes into the jungle. This is the first time we have seen Korda in unrepresented territory, the first time we have seen him visit somewhere without mapping it first. It is at this climactic moment that Bjorn reveals to Korda and his daughter that he is a CIA mole, but that he is repentant, and that feelings he had evinced towards Liesl were sincere. It is during this sequence that something occurs which, though minor, seems to tear a hole in the fabric of the movie. Korda and his daughter ask Bjorn his real name, and he holds out his passport to show them, but it is out of focus, and he says he would prefer just to be called Bjorn. Anderson, in a totally uncharacteristic move, denies the audience access to the plans and diagrams of which he is so fond. Bjorn’s official name, the way it would appear in a census, no longer has bearing on his role in the narrative: his adoption of the name Bjorn is an embodiment of what Scott calls mētis, “the knowledge that can come only from practical experience.” (Scott 6) The characters have entered into a relationship that is founded on their particularity, and that cannot be generalized.

Ultimately, Korda cannot come up with the funds for the scheme, and he is bankrupted. At the film’s conclusion, Korda and his daughter have opened a restaurant, and we see Bjorn proposing to Liesl—they are now wholly immersed in the world of the particular, Korda has descended from his abstracted view from the sky. Thus, where Asteroid City staged the revolt of reality on narrative from the outside, The Phoenician Scheme plays out the same revolt from the inside, the world reasserting itself and thwarting any attempt to control it through abstraction.

This is, in one reading, a deeply conservative conclusion: centrally planned change, Anderson seems to imply, is impossible; the best we can do is try to carve out a small slice of reality and do well within it. But as Scott writes, “large-scale capitalism is just as much an agency of homogenization, uniformity, grids, and heroic simplification as the state is” (Scott, 8), and indeed it is notable that Korda is not a state actor. And though The Phoenician Scheme’s implicit critique of central planning is perhaps more comprehensive that I am personally prepared to agree with, if one understands the ultimate central planner to be Anderson himself, as I think one must, then what the film is dramatizes is nothing else than the failure of a stylized vision to capture (in a literal sense) reality. That this failure is itself staged in the very style the film disavows is perhaps just a testament to how deeply contested the question of control within the film is.

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This is by no means a comprehensive treatment of The Phoenician Scheme, Asteroid City, Seeing Like a State, or Anderson’s oeuvre in general. In The Phoenician Scheme, relevant factors might include the interstitial scenes of Korda facing heavenly judgment (perhaps the ultimate central planner is God, who Korda gets the better of by asserting his particularity); and the psychoanalytic underpinning of the film, where all of the conflict winds up being downstream of a fraternal rivalry, a game of “who could lick whom” (this could conceivably support or weaken my hypothesis, depending on whether we see this as another reassertion of the personal over the diagrammatic, or whether we see psychoanalysis as itself engaged in a form of simplification). And in Asteroid City the appearance of the alien as the ultimate other invading the innermost layer of the narrative seems laden with implication and evocation along the lines I have been drawing. Further inquiry could also extend this line of questioning to a deeper examination of film acting itself, specifically Robert Bresson’s philosophy of acting and to Stanley Cavell’s analysis of the structure of film acting as an embodiment of particularity (in contrast to theater acting); as well as Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of ‘chronotopes’ as diagrammatic staging ground for narratives. But the bottom line is that, as Anderson drills deeper and deeper into his stylistic tics, in doing so he is coming up against the limits of stylization itself, and dramatizing the triumph of the particular. It is heartening that he seems to be working at a rapid clip: I am very excited to see what further limits he explores.

Works Cited

Anderson, Wes, Asteroid City, 2023

Anderson, Wes, The Phoenician Scheme, 2025

Jones, Ellen E. “Reviews: The Phoenician Scheme, Mongrel, When the Light Breaks, Lilo & Stitch and Fountain of Youth.” The Observer, 24 May 2025.

Romancito, Rick. “The Phoenician Scheme.” The Taos News, 23 Aug. 2025.

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Conditions Have Failed. Yale, 1998

Tobias Broucke is a junior at Columbia GS studying film.

@tobiasbroucke_