Twee Magazine

"Rushmore": There may be a ghost in this image.

"Rushmore" was Wes Anderson's second feature-length movie, but the first that felt truly like a Wes Anderson movie, thanks to Anderson and co-author Owen Wilson, inspired by the writing of Roald Dahl, setting the movie in a slightly heightened reality. "Rushmore" is still fondly remembered, and is a frequent fan favorite.

The film would also begin a long series of collaborations, including 17-year-old Jason Schwartzman in the lead role as the precocious but academically challenged Max Fischer. Schwartzman had never acted before, and was instead the drummer and songwriter for a band called Phantom Planet, but he's terrific fun in the film, mannered, smirking, and willing to completely throw himself into whatever the film asks of him, which is plenty. Schwartzman is also from America's most accomplished cinematic family: His mother is Talia Shire, who is, of course, Frances Ford Coppola's sister, and he came recommended by Frances' daughter, Sofia. Anderson would later have a series of fruitful collaborations with Sofia's brother, Roman, who collaborated with him on "The Darjeeling Limited " and "Moonrise Kingdom."

This was also Anderson's first of many films featuring Bill Murray, who liked the script enough to do it for scale and became one of Anderson's biggest supporters, most famously by offering to underwrite an expensive helicopter shot in "Rushmore," but also by appearing in every single subsequent Anderson film, sometimes just as a cameo. And Murray's affection for the filmmaker is understandable: His character, the aging and bitter millionaire Herman Blume, managed to transform Murray from the sorts of jokey manchildren that dominated his early career to the sorts of wounded older men he now specializes in.

"Rushmore" is also, in a lot of ways, the essential text for modern twee cinema. Although the marvelous cinematography by Robert Yeoman (who has lensed almost all of Anderson's films) draws largely from the French New Wave, the film's storyline feels borrowed from mid-20th century prep school movies, the soundtrack is almost entirely British invasion, and the troubled spirit of the movie seems lifted from 1970s films. Anderson was one of the first filmmakers that deliberately referenced filmmakers like Robert Altman, Miloš Forman, and Coppola (there's even a line in "Rushmore," "Couldn't we just let me float by? For old times' sake?, that deliberately borrows from Tessio's death in "The Godfather." (Even more directly, the teenage Max Fischer has a habit of mounting absurdly ambitious films based on 70s films and events, including "Serpico.")

For many, myself included, there was something essentially appealing about the story, in which a child and an adult man go to war with each other over the affections of a woman that rebuffs them both. Additionally, unlike the often cynical films that inspired it, "Rushmore" closes on a third act in which Max Fischer tries to make amends, mostly through small gifts and preposterously oversized gestures. Anderson's heroes, despite their abundant flaws, often earnestly want to be decent, and his films are filled with heartbreaking acts of decency as a result. This fact is the reason why Anderson's was labeled the leader of a movement called "New Sincerity," although it was never really a movement, he wasn't actually the leader, and the term fizzled.

Nonetheless, for all its affectedness, there was a genuine heart beating at the center of "Rushmore." This was undoubtedly informed in part by the fact that the film has a lot of autobiographical touches. It was inspired by Owen Wilson's own experiences of getting kicked out of a prep school and having to relocate to a public school, as well as Anderson's own young adulthood of staging school plays. There are hints of the film's creators throughout, such as Fischer sitting in class reading a newspaper, which Owen Wilson actually did in a playwrighting class he shared with Anderson. The filming location for Rushmore, St. John's School in Houston, Texas, was Anderson's alma mater (and, oddly, the location that acted as the film's public school, Lamar High School, is directly across the street from St. John's.) Anderson and Wilson had extensively mined their own experiences and then enlarged them to slightly cartoonish levels, and then set-dressed and costumed them within an inch of their lives.

The film's meticulous art direction isn't excessive or incidental, although they would contribute to an ongoing criticism that Anderson builds dollhouses instead of making movies. Instead, Anderson seemed to have latched onto an observation offered by French film theorists (and later New Wave filmmakers) that American studio filmmakers hid a lot of narrative details in art direction. It was director's way of introducing additional themes and story elements into films constrained by the studio system, but Anderson seemed to realize that it also gave him the opportunity to tell much of his story visually.

So let me discuss some of the visual elements of "Rushmore" and mention how they contribute to the story. Unlike the rest of the students at Rushmore, Max Fischer insists on wearing his school jacket with its Rushmore patch, which he has additionally decorated with two pins with bees on them, rewards from the school for attendance and punctuality. These pins have become something of a fetish item for fans of the movie -- it is possible to buy replicas of them online, and its no wonder, as they are a marvel of costume design, a marvelous icon in red, black, and gold. But the bees recall the fact that Fischer was the president of the Rushmore Beekeepers, one of the many clubs he belonged to. During Fischer's conflict with Blume, he makes use of these skills to fill Blume's hotel room with bees -- in fact, it is the incident that starts his war with the older man. Later, when he makes up with Blume, he offers him one of the pins as a peacekeeping gesture.

And there is more embedded in this pin. There are two ghosts that haunt the film: Fischer's mother, who died years earlier of cancer, and Edward Appleby, the deceased husband of teacher Rosemary Cross, who is the subject of Fischer's unwanted romantic affections. They aren't ghosts in the traditional sense, but their presence haunts the movie anyway, a source of submerged but occasionally visible pain for both the teacher and the student. Fischer's mother was responsible for Max's entry into the school -- he wrote a play and she submitted it to the prep school, gaining him entry and a scholarship. Fischer makes occasional visits to her grave, and she gave him a portable typewriter inscribed, heartbeakingly, with the words "Bravo, Max!"

Appleby, in the meanwhile, has an entire room of his own, his childhood room, where his widow lives under his awards and photos. (It is Owen Wilson in the photos, by the way.) Appleby drowned, and this is represented by a book by Jacques Cousteau that he gave his wife and she passed on to the school library. But Appleby, who attended Rushmore, is represented in one last way: He founded the Rushmore Beekeepers, and is therefore the source of the bee that now is Rushmore's logo, and is on their pins.

There is one last detail regarding the pins that I especially like, and it is this: Max Fischer is never on time and frequently simply leaves class to do something he is more interested in. There is no way he could have received awards for punctuality and attendance. But Fischer is also skilled at manipulating his teachers and the school administration, and so it is entirely believable that he would have gotten the pins anyway, just because he wanted them. As they would be for audiences, the pins were fetish items for Max Fischer.

I want to mention the Jacques Cousteau book as well. Never mind that it inspired "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou," or that it is one of the first of many books to appear in Anderson's movies. It becomes meaningful to Fischer because he finds a handwritten note in it. And never mind that Anderson loves handwritten notes. These are just the specific form the art direction has taken. It is important because Max Fischer also writes in books: When he first meets Blume, it is at a chapel meeting, when Blume is lecturing the students. Fischer grabs one of the prayer books and jots down excited notes about the lecture.

The subject of Blume's lecture is class. Despite being a millionaire, Blume comes from a troubled past, including a tour of duty in Vietnam. And so he tells the students to take aim at the rich kids, "Get them in the crosshairs. And take them down." Aside from the fact that he is using military metaphors to encourage class war at a prep school, it is a prep school his twin sons attend, and he despises his twin sons. After the lecture, Fischer hurries to Blume to tell him how much he liked the speech -- inadvertently outing himself as one of the poor kids, although he'll spend most of the movie pretending his father is a brain surgeon.

Through Fischer's notes in a book and Rosemary Cross's notes in another, a disastrous (and, for Cross, unwanted) love triangle develops. More than that, they lead to events in the rest of the film: Fischer does take aim at a rich kid, although the kid he chooses in Blume, and Fischer also decides to make one of his oversized gestures to Cross by building her a multi-milllion dollar aquarium. "You think Edward Appleby would've built you one?" he asks Cross. (He's also likely inspired by another visual in the film: Cross has a number of smaller aquariums in her class, and Fischer helps her feed the fish when they first meet.)

Parenthetically, the ghost of Edward Appleby actually does make an appearance in the film, sort of. One of the early shots of Fischer has him in goggles, seated at a go-cart, inspired by a fanous photograph by Jacques Henri Lartigue. Several people in the background rise go-karts around a circle, and one of them is Owen Wilson, the movie's Edward Appleby. And I'll note there are two autobiographical elements in this scene: Firstly, it is no accident that the movie recreates a famous photograph: Owen Wilson's mother is Laura Wilson, herself a professional and rather extraordinary photographer. Secondly, Anderson had a childhood love of go-karts, and he's in one of the other karts in the shot.

I'll leave off here, but I don't really need to, as there are so many additionally visual elements in the movie that communicate a wealth of information about the films story, from the stage curtains that open the various scenes to the Russian fur cap that Fischer wears when he's especially depressed (it's the same one he wore in Rushmore's student UN.) The film is filled with what Guillermo del Toro calls "visual protein," and Anderson would increasingly rely on this to deepen his stories and sometimes provide a counterpoint to the unreliable narration in his film's dialogue.

But this increasing reliance on art design as a storytelling tool is, I think, part of the reason Anderson finds himself often subject to criticism that his films are shallow and obsessed with style. It's very hard to read a film in the same way you would a painting -- viewers don't have the time to luxuriate on small details as they rush by. Or, at least, they don't on first viewing, and most directors can't rely on their audiences to watch films twice, or dozens of times, to catch the nuances embedded in the mis en scene.

I don't know if it's deliberate, but, nonetheless, Anderson's tendency to fill the art design of his films so full of fetish items (at least, to tweer audience members) serves the purpose of encouraging viewers to watch his films repeatedly. We may be doing it as a sort of cinematic version of Pinterest, mentally pinning wallpaper and books and songs and costume elements in order to buy them later. (At least, I am.) But nonetheless, we end up absorbing these nuances, and Anderson's films become richer on each viewing as the secret language hidden in the wallpaper, books, songs, and costume elements reveal themselves.