Wes Anderson, Seeing Like a State, and the Triumph of the Particular
This article attempts to analyze Wes Anderson’s work through the lens of James C. Scott’s 1998 book Seeing Like A State, using Asteroid City and The Phoenician Scheme to try to understand auteurship as a form of quasibureaucratic control, a form of control that these films, despite their pervasive stylization, subtly yet consistently undermine. Many have accused Anderson of retreating into pure mannerism, but these films can be read as dramatizations of resistance to their own stylistic schemas.
