Samantha Jespersen is pursuing dual degrees in Creative Media Production and a Planned Program in Multicultural Studies as well as a minor in French, comes from Broken Bow, Oklahoma, and wrote this essay for Timothy Bradford’s “American Writers in Paris” class.
For hundreds of years, Americans have been obsessed with Paris. Or so I had been led to believe. It’s true—Americans have been obsessed with something. But is their obsession truly with Paris, or is it with their idea of Paris? One could argue these are the same, but I would say otherwise. Americans have been fascinated with the images of Paris shown to them, and how it has been represented through the arts. But these images and representations haven’t always lined up with the Paris of reality. Paris has been represented through the lenses of many art forms, including American cinema. Film is particularly important to study in this context because it is a new art form compared to the ones classically associated with Americans in Paris, such as literature, drawing, and painting. Paris has been represented in many ways since the birth of American cinema, and many of these representations, from the early 20th Century up through the early 21st, have been stereotypical. French culture in American film needs to be discussed as the art form continues to evolve. Representation is discussed frequently in the film industry today, and much effort is directed toward ensuring that marginalized communities are represented accurately and with respect. But the conversation often pits Western cultures against non-Western cultures and omits the reality that Western cultures can have untrue assumptions and stereotypes about each other.
Two years ago, director/screenwriter Wes Anderson released The French Dispatch. It instantly caught my attention as its self-aware exposé of Americans in Paris connected with my studies in creative media production and French. An additional draw of the film is that this is the only Anderson film other than The Grand Budapest Hotel that names a location in its title, making its setting significant. My questions about The French Dispatch were how Anderson was inspired to make the film and whether French influences are present that add authenticity to his image of Paris. I was also curious how Anderson’s representation compared with earlier American films about Paris, specifically Gene Kelly’s Gigot, released in 1962. I posit that Wes Anderson was greatly inspired by American expatriates of the early 20th Century, especially the authors; that he employed characteristics of the historical French New Wave movement; and that his representation of Paris is markedly different than Kelly’s. This claim raises a philosophical question about the roles of imagery and truth in representation, to be posed at the end of the essay.
One of the leading scholars on Americans in Paris is Adam Gopnik, who published an essay on the image American expatriates of the 20th Century, primarily authors, had of the city. In the introduction to his anthology Americans in Paris he says, “This book is a history of the worlds Americans have made in the city where they have gone to be happy. It is in part, therefore, the history of an illusion” (xiv). He claims that American expatriates had a glorified opinion of Paris that was never quite realized when they actually lived there. If that was the case, why would Paris continue to be a haven and inspiration for so many Americans? I believe the answer can be found in Gopnik’s statement, “Paris becomes not a place you visit but a place where you can stay and still be an American writer” (xix). Paris drew creatives not because it was particularly special, but because Americans could maintain their values and ways of life outside of their own country. Americans could leave their homeland seemingly without significant cultural consequences.
Gopnik’s lens makes Gene Kelly’s perspective more understandable. While I began with Anderson, I believe his impact can be better seen when examined through the context of history, so I turn to Kelly’s Gigot. Gigot tells the story of a nonverbal janitor who lives in his employer’s basement. This movie is notable because its setting is not obvious for most of the runtime, despite being filmed and set in Paris. The first few seconds include a shot of the Eiffel Tower so American audiences know what city it’s about, but the camera pans away and creates a feeling of distance from the popular city center. Kelly’s locations, such as the street Gigot lived on and a public park, were more realistic than many featured in American films about Paris. On the flipside, Kelly’s film was strikingly American. The Paris the viewer sees feels like a set. As part of the New Wave movement, films made in France at the time were often shot in public locations and often included the people that lived there (Flitterman-Lewis 254-255). Kelly’s film, however, feels more manufactured, with each person appearing in the shots having choreographed roles and being set extras for the film. Another characteristic of New Wave films is the idea of the film director being an auteur, namely the author and designer of the project with a definable style that stretches across the body of their work (Flitterman-Lewis 253). Gigot has a definable style, but I would attribute it more to the style of the American studio system and less to the artistic style of the director. Overall, I didn’t see in Kelly the desire to represent Paris as much as the desire to make a story that Americans would love set in an “exotic” location.
My reaction to Gigot sounds funny when compared to peoples’ reactions at the time of Gigot’s release. Cynthia and Sarah Brideson discuss these in their biography of Gene Kelly, He’s Got Rhythm. They say, “Americans may have had little appreciation for Gigot, but the French revered Gene for again featuring Paris in American cinema” (Brideson and Brideson 344). This statement speaks volumes about American films and Paris. While I included the film in the study of representation as it relates to imagery and reality, it appears that Parisians at the time weren’t as concerned with that. They revered the film not because they were represented well in American cinema, but rather they loved it because Paris was included at all.
Since Gigot, Paris has been featured often in American cinema, although often with stereotypical characters and representations of the city being limited to the Eiffel Tower. Some examples of this are two Disney movies from the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. The first is Beauty and the Beast (1991). I didn’t think much about it being set in France when I was younger, but Disney does definitively place the movie there through the song “Be Our Guest”. There, the character Lumiere sings, “After all Miss, this is France” in front of an array of dancing flatware, which shapes itself into an Eiffel Tower (Beauty and the Beast 41:31). The inclusion of the monument in Beauty and the Beast is an anachronism as the story would have taken place before the tower was completed, and as the movie doesn’t claim to be set in Paris. The second film is Ratatouille which does a better job at attempting to represent the city, focusing on the cuisine and restaurant culture. But its banner on Disney+ still features an Eiffel Tower, and the film wouldn’t be complete without a scene of the main character Remy staring contentedly out the window of an apartment with a Tower view, that somehow his friend, a busboy at a restaurant, can afford. The scene also fits Gopnik’s idea of the American vision of Paris. Even though most of the characters are supposed to be Parisian, the film was made by Americans for an American audience, and it includes the sentiment “What better place to dream than in Paris” (Ratatouille 32:52).
We’ve now surveyed Paris represented in American cinema from 1962 through 2007. After finding the truth of Gopnik’s words in each of the films we’ve seen, Wes Anderson is ready to turn our expectations on their head. He doesn’t contradict Gopnik so much as use the principles to his advantage. In so doing, I believe that Anderson supersedes Gopnik’s ideas of how Americans think and creates a well-thought-out, fictional treatise that Gopnik would not have expected.
Anderson’s work finds its authenticity in its awareness of its position in the world. Reflexivity is a concept I often see associated with Anderson. Devin Orgeron uses the idea in an essay abstract, saying that Anderson has a “highly self-aware authorial image” (1). The French Dispatch works so well not because it is completely accurate in its representation of Paris, but because it begins by announcing its American perspective. At its core, it is a film about Americans in Paris, and it does a wonderful job of illustrating the vision and experiences of American expatriates in the early 1900s. Anderson dedicated his film to 18 authors and journalists (The French Dispatch 1:45:18), the vast majority of whom wrote for The New Yorker, which inspired the fictional journal The French Dispatch in the film of the same name. Many of these authors were American and Canadian writers who spent time in France, including James Baldwin.
It’s easy to see how Baldwin inspired Anderson. The French Dispatch refers directly to a concept first brought up in Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Baldwin wrote, “I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them” (Giovanni’s Room 103). It appears Anderson thought about them too. While he didn’t reference suicide by the river like Baldwin did, Anderson twice mentioned drowning on the Blasé River (his fictional equivalent of the Seine). Zefferelli, who dies young by drowning in the river (we are not told quite how), is a young man comparable to David of Giovanni’s Room. Zefferelli’s and David’s roles are quite different in the two stories, but one can see in both a sort of self-centeredness, insecurity, and fear of growing old. While Zefferelli’s life is cut off before old age, David’s story merely ends before he gets there. Neither story promises a future for its characters.
Anderson’s connection to Baldwin continues through Roebuck Wright, a character meant to represent Baldwin himself. In Anderson’s story, Wright is a food critic. But he was more than a journalist, writing fiction and non-fiction on any number of subjects including, “the American Negro, the French intellectual, the Southern romantic, the anti-Negro, Scripture, mythology, folklore, true crime, false crime, the ghost story, the picturesque, [and] the bildungsroman” (The French Dispatch 1:28:37-1:28:49). Such a description of Wright’s body of work is comparable to Baldwin’s—especially as the famous article Baldwin wrote for The New Yorker concerns issues of race and religion (“Letter from a Region”).
We’ve now seen where many of the American aspects of Anderson’s films come from, but what about the French? Anderson has held an apartment in Paris for years, where he often spends long stretches of time (Amsden; Kahn). Perhaps it’s because he’s lived there, or perhaps he simply likes the aesthetic, but Anderson has a pattern of modeling his work on French film styles. While The French Dispatch is his first film to explicitly draw viewers’ attention to the country and style, Wes Anderson has been described by critics as a modern director who follows certain traditions from the French New Wave. Jennifer O’Meara writes:
The French New Wave is another important influence in both [Anderson’s and another filmmaker’s work], which is manifest in their general style and content, and also through their carefully selected allusions. Olsen identifies François Truffaut’s coming-of-age films as a point of reference for Bottle Rocket and Rushmore (O’Meara 111).
Bottle Rocket and Rushmore are Anderson’s first two films, made even before the acquisition of his Paris apartment in 2005 (Amsden). The collection in which O’Meara’s essay was published came out seven years before The French Dispatch was released. Looking at such sources shows us that Anderson had a foundation of French influences on his work that only increased for The French Dispatch. In the same essay anthology, Richter writes how Anderson’s Hotel Chevalier is comparable to the New Wave film Paris vu par …, which “features vignettes of different locations in Paris, from six New Wave directors” (20). I find it interesting how the first work Anderson filmed in France reminded a critic of a New Wave film made of vignettes and how the second, The French Dispatch, is an anthology film. It would seem then that France has intrigued Anderson for quite some time, first through aesthetic and then through location.
Now that I’ve explained Anderson’s patriotic, expatriate, and international influences, I can finally turn to how he represents Paris. By the time of The French Dispatch’s release, Anderson had held his Paris apartment for sixteen years and had released over nine feature films in his signature style, influenced by the French New Wave. If anyone has practice developing a French style of storytelling, with a working knowledge of Paris, it’s Wes Anderson. And yet, in the context of American film history, Anderson took a strange route to depicting Paris. He didn’t represent it overtly, like Gigot, Beauty and the Beast, and Ratatouille did. In fact, he renamed the city, saying his film took place in “Ennui-sur-Blasé”, which doesn’t exist.
Some may claim that Anderson didn’t intend to represent Paris at all, which would be understandable. But Ennui representing Paris is central to the story, the expatriate theme, and the purpose of the film. While Anderson didn’t intend to make it overt, he did draw parallels between Ennui and Paris to alert his viewers to the connection. First is the city’s name, Ennui-sur-Blasé (a rough translation might be “Boredom-upon-Apathy).” Blasé is the river that runs through the city that we’ve compared to the Seine in Baldwin’s writing. In the real world, there lies a residential district west of Paris called Neuilly-sur-Seine. This may sound like a coincidence, but the similarities continue. In the third segment of The French Dispatch, we see a close-up of the map of Ennui for the first time. Not only is the Blasé a central component of Ennui, as the Seine is of Paris, but the shape of the city limits is almost exactly the same as the shape seen if one searches “Paris” on Google Maps (The French Dispatch 1:16:10). The biggest difference between the two maps is the path of the river. Anderson had to make the Blasé much windier so the maps wouldn’t end up identical, but the similarities are unmistakable. Finally, we see in the second section of The French Dispatch an allusion to the May 68 riots, an allusion that makes Paris a significant location (The French Dispatch 44:00-1:09:48).
Unlike many American filmmakers, Anderson didn’t want his story to merely exist in Paris. He wanted The French Dispatch to be about Paris and American expatriates’ experiences of Paris. To do that—to show what he thought life in Paris was really like—he felt he had to remove excess recognizable landmarks. He kept the river, important to understanding mortality and the reality of the city, but he removed any vestige of national symbols, such as the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe. His characters are also shockingly vibrant and a step away from reality, so the film’s message is conveyed through metaphor and allusion.
Anderson and Kelly approached representation using different methods, raising a philosophical question about its execution. Gene Kelly filmed in a real Paris, but his film felt distinctly American. Wes Anderson manufactured a Paris, called it by a different name, and acknowledged his American perspective, yet still seemed to hit upon a reality of history—the experience of American expatriates. My question is this: which is better, a realistic image, or an unrealistic truth? Since its invention, filmmakers have often used film as a tool to represent truth. But what does it mean for a filmmaker to represent truth? In a chapter seeking to define the documentary art form, Bill Nichols argues that it serves as evidence of real events (7-8). Unlike documentaries, he explains, “Fictional narratives are fundamentally allegories… This is why we turn to fiction to understand the human condition” (7). People don’t watch fiction films to be told the truth. But they do expect some idea of reality. Maybe then the question shouldn’t ask which method of storytelling is better. Maybe it should ask whether each film is what it claims to be.
The French Dispatch never explicitly claims to be about Paris. While I’ve proven his intent for Ennui and Paris to be connected, Wes Anderson never claimed to represent the city accurately. Rather, one could argue that he claimed the opposite. By renaming the city, he lets the audience in on the joke. It’s as if he’s saying, “What you’re about to see looks a lot like Paris, but it’s not. I won’t stop you from making comparisons but remember—this isn’t real.” What Anderson does claim is that he tells a story about American journalists in France. This test he passes with flying colors, using an unrealistic setting to share a truth of history.
Gigot upholds most of its claims. The entire focus of the trailer is the title character (“Gigot – (Original Trailer)”). Kelly wanted audiences to know that if they go to this movie, they will see Gigot. Gigot was played by Jackie Gleason, an actor famous at the time. The promise of the movie was to present a beloved actor at work. While this was fulfilled, an important thing to note is that the Eiffel Tower made an appearance in the trailer as well (“Gigot – (Original Trailer)” 00:01). For some reason, it was important that audiences know the setting of the film. As mentioned earlier, Paris was not central to the plot, and so Gigot is not all it claims to be, presenting a mere image of historical Paris while still using the realistic setting of Parisian streets.
Wes Anderson’s work stands out. Inspired by American authors in France, he owned his American foundation, utilized techniques from a well-known French movement, and represented Paris through imagery rather than reality. His work may be the first step to reimagining the Paris many Americans have been taught their entire lives. Anderson is an inspiration to me, both as a filmmaker and a storyteller. People may agree or disagree with his method of representation, but no matter their opinion, they can’t deny his innovation. He doesn’t allow them to sit with their long-held obsession with Paris. He calls it out instead. His is a leading voice in the film scene of the 21st Century and one that I hope to hear discussed in classrooms for years to come.
Works Cited
Amsden, David. “The Life Obsessive with Wes Anderson.” New York, 21 Sept. 2007, www.nymag.com/movies/filmfestivals/newyork/2007/38024/. Accessed 12 May 2023.
Baldwin, James. Giovanni’s Room. 1956. Vintage Books, 2013.
Baldwin, James. “Letter from a Region in my Mind.” The New Yorker, 9 Nov. 1962, www.newyorker.com/magazine/1962/11/17/letter-from-a-region-in-my-mind. Accessed 12 May 2023.
Beauty and the Beast. Directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, performance by Jerry Orbach, Walt Disney Pictures, 1991.
Brideson, Cynthia and Sarah Brideson. He’s Got Rhythm: The Life and Career of Gene Kelly. University Press of Kentucky, 2017.
Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy. “Varda in Context: French Film Production in the Early Sixties—The New Wave.” To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema, University of Illinois Press, 1990, pp. 248-267.
The French Dispatch. Directed by Wes Anderson, performance by Timothée Chalamet, Searchlight Pictures, 2021.
Gigot. Directed by Gene Kelly, performance by Jackie Gleason, Seven Arts Productions, 1962.
“Gigot – (Original Trailer).” Turner Classic Movies, www.tcm.com/video/954782/gigotoriginal-trailer. Accessed 12 May 2023.
Gopnik, Adam, editor. Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology. Library of America, 2004. pp. xiv, xix.
Kahn, Howie. “The Life Aesthetic with Wes Anderson.” The Wall Street Journal, 26 Feb. 2014, www.wsj.com/articles/the-life-aesthetic-with-wes-anderson-1393432864. Accessed 12 May 2023.
Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary, Second Edition. 2nd ed., Indiana University Press, 2010. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16gznjb. Accessed 13 May 2023.
O’Meara, Jennifer. “A Shared Approach to Familial Dysfunction and Sound Design: Wes Anderson’s Influence on the Films of Noah Baumbach.” The Films of Wes Anderson: Critical Essays on an Indiewood Icon, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 109-124.
Orgeron, Devin. Abstract of “La Camera-Crayola: Authorship Comes of Age in the Cinema of Wes Anderson.” Cinema Journal, vol. 46, no. 2, 2007, pp. 40–65. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4137181. Accessed 13 May 2023.
Ratatouille. Directed by Brad Bird and Jan Pinckava. Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar Animation Studios, 2007.
Richter, Nicole. “The Short Films of Wes Anderson.” The Films of Wes Anderson: Critical Essays of an Indiewood Icon, edited by Peter C. Kunze, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp.13-24.