The world on a grid: Accidentally Wes Anderson and empty aesthetics

‘Accidentally Wes Anderson’ is a social media phenomenon. Starting life as an Instagram account which curates photographs – produced by its audience – of locations that bear an aesthetic resemblance to the US filmmaker’s unique visual style, last year the ‘project’ (if that’s the right term) was published as an attractive coffee table book. While this in itself is interesting – what does it mean when something built out of the practices and affordances of new media finds its way back to old media? – Accidentally Wes Anderson raises questions that go beyond new media vs. old media debates, forcing us to consider the ways our experience of social media – and what Nathan Jurgenson calls the ‘social photo’ (Jurgenson, 2020) – structures and shapes notions of aesthetics and how we perceive and view the world.

‘New Sincerity’ and the aestheticization of everyday life

Before we get to the Instagram account, let’s begin with Anderson’s aesthetic. It’s worth reflecting on, as there’s something about it that makes it well suited to a platform like Instagram. Primarily this is because it is distinct, and distinctiveness is easy to parody. Anderson’s use of symmetry, planimetric shots, and arresting, overly-intentional colour palettes almost invites replication, as a cursory YouTube search demonstrates. Furthermore, the deliberate and composed nature of Anderson’s aesthetic make it the perfect foil for a platform that has encouraged and enabled the aestheticization of everyday life.

The suitability between Anderson and Instagram is further emphasised when you consider the way Anderson’s work is typically framed in the context of the ‘New Sincerity’ cultural trope: “a contemporary sensibility based on dynamic tension between two opposing forces: sincerity and irony” as Film Studies scholar Warren Buckland puts it (Buckland, 2019, p.19). Given Instagram offers a platform in which a combination of authenticity and performance can be played out, Anderson’s New Sincerity stylings are particularly appropriate. On Instagram, the aestheticization of everyday life can communicate both authenticity (‘this is how I really am’) and ludicity (‘my identity is a construction, a playful process of self-fashioning’).

Aesthetic recognition

So, there is a curious affinity between Instagram and Anderson’s films. But we can’t focus purely on aesthetics. What’s significant about Accidentally Wes Anderson is the way in which Anderson’s aesthetic becomes a reference point for a community and an invitation to a particular form of sociality. This is a sociality that combines participation and recognition: first recognising the aesthetic and then finding, capturing, and sharing Anderson-esque scenes out there in the world.

More specifically, participation requires recognition. The ability to identify scenes that are reminiscent of Anderson’s visual style and then (re)produce them requires considerable visual literacy. This is twofold – both in terms of understanding the components of the Anderson aesthetic, and then translating this understanding to a perceptual or interpretive approach to the world – indeed, to everyday life. To a certain extent, this reflects the character of Jurgenson’s notion of the social photo: “the considerations involved in creating social photos are often more social than technical,” he argues. (Jurgenson, 2020, p.13.) However, perhaps the Accidentally Wes Anderson also presents a challenge to this assertion; in this particular context, the consideration of aesthetic technique is fundamental to the account’s appeal.

The world on a grid

Accidentally Wes Anderson, then, is a kind of aesthetic game built on aesthetic recognition. However, it’s important to note that this isn’t so much a recognition of particular architectural modes or periods, but rather a flattening or reduction of the world to a set of Andersonian rules and motifs.

This is particularly notable when looking through the account. You’re presented with a vast range of scenes, locations, and buildings, but they are all wrenched from the specifics of geography and history by the repetition of its particular visual style. A Viennese swimming pool sits alongside an Icelandic church; a luxury hotel in Athens follows a locksmiths in New York City. While each photo is supported by a caption detailing each location, the experience of scrolling presents each image as a fragment that is merely an occasion for style. “The social photo is often viewed through the grid, stream or story” Jurgenson writes; the question is, how does this change how we view the world? The camera might teach us how to see, as Dorothea Lange argued, but what about the photo? What about the social photo on ‘the grid’?

Jurgenson constantly returns to a theme of “documentary consciousness” in The Social Photo, in which “social photography turns the ephemeral into something tangible, and our life into something collectable.” (Jurgenson, 2020, p.26) But is this what’s happening in Accidentally Wes Anderson? Is it not more the case that the tangible – the world itself – becomes ephemeral and transformed into style?

For contributors to the Instagram account, the referent is (almost literally!) immaterial: what’s captured is a style or mode of looking – the process of capturing itself.

Empty aesthetics

If Accidentally Wes Anderson shapes the way we look at the world, we should also be sensitive to what it says about aesthetics. For just as the repetition of Anderson’s visual style effaces the world we see, it also effaces the social and historical embeddedness of those aesthetic decisions.

This isn’t to say that we need to treat Anderson with more reverence as an auteur of course. Instead, it’s to highlight how the repetition and rearticulation of his style merely as a technique for producing images turns that style into a kind of commodity, a form of currency in the exchange of participation and recognition.

So, while it’s true that Accidentally Wes Anderson encourages a certain level of collective visual literacy, it also obscures an important dimension of literacy: the recognition that visual style is a construction, a set of decisions intended to communicate meaning and affect. In the context of a cinema space – where the boundaries of the image are clearly defined, and in which the link between viewer and image is part of the very design of the building, those aesthetic decisions are exagerrated by virtue of scale. In the context of social media – a multiplicity of images consumed through a phone screen as a sequence – those aesthetic decisions sink into the background like wallpaper.

This isn’t to say that all this was the account creator’s intention. Accidentally Wes Anderson is a celebration of Anderson’s style, where parody is intended as a tribute. But the account is nevertheless a good example of how the notion of the way Jurgenson’s ‘social photo’ is shaping the way we view the world and our sense of what aesthetics is and what it’s for. It’s important that we recognise this: we can’t let the affordances of platforms like Instagram undermine our ability to judge and interrogate how things appear and to wrench style from its connection with materiality, history, and society.

References

Jurgenson, N. (2020). The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media. London: Verso.

Buckland, W. (2019). The Wes Anderson Brand: New Sincerity Across Media. In C. Vernallis, H. Rogers, L. Perrott (Eds.) Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry, and New Audiovisual Aesthetics. (pp. 19-34). United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Publishing.