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This essay analyzes the fictional authors who populate Wes Anderson's films and his use of DVD technology to promote his own highly self-aware authorial image. Anderson's authorial logic is organized around the concepts of youth and dependence, positioning itself against the still quite powerful myth of the independent and solitary genius.
In a recent Framework article entitled "Possessory Credit," critic Adrian Martin makes several provocative claims with regard to the present state of "the author question" within cinema studies.1 He proposes first that the question as it was posed fifty years ago is no longer relevant since our contemporary culture trains us all to be faithful (albeit unwitting) auteurists.2 He then suggests that our collective hesitation over cinematic authorship arises from a crisis within world cinema, "an 'emergency' in the most positive sense: literally, a dynamic state from which something new is emerging."3 And finally, he posits (acknowledging the axiomatic quality of the statement itself) that "auteurism is only useful as a critical tool as long as it generates good, exciting results-helping us to generate new discoveries."4
The piece itself, while refreshingly manifesto-tike, is troubling in its reliance on a number of intriguing (though unfulfilled) positions. Martin's central idea regards some mysterious "something new" within the cinema itself, something signaling a changed relationship to authorship. Strangely, however, he ends the essay with something old, longing as he does for the nonpublic auteur buried within the enigmatic text: longing for, in his case, Terrence Malick and regretting the systematic inflation of fellow AFI alum David Lynch's auteur status.8 Déjà vu all over again, a less extreme and, I suspect, ultimately more noble version of the old and highly subjective logic embraced by Andrew Sarris: "my auteur trumps yours because... ."6
The "something new" in auteurist scholarship that Martin searches for, the "good and exciting results" (some of them at least), can be found in David Gerstner and Janet Staiger's 2003 collection. Authorship and Film, which does much in its excellent introductory essays to contextualize the history of the debate surrounding cinematic authorship.7 The collected essays fulfill the introductory promise in their ability to move far beyond the always quite delicate and largely imagined parameters set in classical and qualitative approaches to the debate. This...