Thoughts on "The Grand Budapest Hotel"
I took some time to wade through my exhausting collection of
film and television collections the other day. What I found when I tried to
start organising them was that when I changed one of the toolbar options to ‘Most
Played’, Wes Anderson’s work had the most appearances in my Top 10.
It was definitely a delightful surprise, like all Wes
Anderson films are-grandiose humour and overblown yet dream-like intricate sets
and characters with quaint quirks all with a sophisticated aesthetic veneer and
dialogue. When you walk away from one of
his films, you leave with a light-hearted joy and one of those little
half-smiles that will surface time and time again when you think back to one
memorable scene or another. It was with his latest and 8th feature
film-The
Grand Budapest Hotel that I choose to base my words today on.
Here is the plot from Empire.com: An author recalls a visit
he made in the ‘60s to what was once one of Europe’s most luxurious hotels.
There, the young author meets its owner, Mr. Moustafa, who tells how he came to
inherit the building from M. Gustave.
One of the themes present in the film, is that fading world
of gentility and culture giving way to one of brutish crudeness represented by
the violence of the Fascist troops. In
this, I was perhaps reminded back to my own selfsame desire for the illusion of
high school to stay with me in my first post.
M. Gustave:
You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric
slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. Indeed that is what we provide
in our own modest, humble, insignificant... oh, fuck it!
It is within all of us, I think, for some little part at
least, that thinks and regards society as a collections of blunt uncultured
brutes that cares little for what truly matters in life.
Or not?
I am told I assume and presume too much for my own good,
extrapolating my own views onto others as I argue.
As the movie moves on, we realise that M. Gustave’s world is
one that is quickly fading and being taken over by a new world order one that
strips away the grandeur and refined elegance to simplicity and monochromes of
colour-in attention-seeking orange and yellow. He maintains the hotel as the solid illusion
of his civilization.
I can see why he and others would want to maintain an
illusion of sorts, *hint hint* Blanche DuBois. It is because we all have a need
to believe in them. No, I don’t believe all life is an illusion, but there are
moments when we must delude ourselves or a section of our lives for namely
personal and psychological reasons-for hope.
The great part of these self-created illusions is that they
can also be self-fulfilling. When one gets oneself into believing in
the illusion that you can master a certain thing well, one will very often
also learn to master it with due time. This can happen, even if in the
beginning one could just be flying without wings, We are often kept
afloat just by an illusion. Losing these illusions could again easily lead into
desperation and despair. However, even most of the time we just need to
fool ourselves up to some point. If we would really know the true limits of our
understanding, expertise and knowledge, we would not dare do anything
demanding.
Happily all of the people live in the same kind of bubbles
of illusion. We do live in a world of commonly build illusions. We think that
the other people do have the necessary understanding, expertise and knowledge
that we deep down always will suspect that we are lacking ourselves. Similarly
other people do trust us in a similar way, mainly because nobody ever reveals
their real self-doubts to others.
One could say that it is a really good thing that the true
state of things is never revealed to us. Maintaining the common illusion
of understanding, expertise and knowledge keeps us safe from despairing on the
fact with how little true understanding, expertise and knowledge the world is
really run on.
It brings me to the
virtue of honesty, maybe something I will talk about next time. But here I
leave with Zero’s words.
Mr.
Moustafa: To be frank, I think his world had vanished long before he ever
entered it - but, I will say: he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvellous
grace!
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