Replicating Wes Anderson’s style is not easy. I would know; I watched a sea of TikToks thinking that they nailed it with very few actually doing a good job of it. His style is not necessarily just about the aesthetic of it all because while you could easily spot a Wes Anderson movie from a mile away, the movie itself and the themes present within it are what truly make Anderson’s style. Take his most recent film, Asteroid City, for example. Anderson marries his colorful aesthetic with a story exploring grief and how we unpack it. He has, consistently, done this and done it well.
And now everyone with a TikTok account thinks that they’ve nailed it. The problem with this is that it’s all surface level. Not one of the videos feels authentically Anderson and yet it is the confidence of these videos that just feels weird. Each user thinks they know better than Anderson and that they understand his style and have successfully recreated it.
They haven’t, and Anderson himself doesn’t want people sending him videos of people trying to replicate his style. In a new interview with The Times, Anderson talked about the videos and how he’s good at keeping himself protected from them.
“I’m very good at protecting myself from seeing all that stuff,” he said. “If somebody sends me something like that I’ll immediately erase it and say, ‘Please, sorry, do not send me things of people doing me.’ Because I do not want to look at it, thinking, ‘Is that what I do? Is that what I mean?’ I don’t want to see too much of someone else thinking about what I try to be because, God knows, I could then start doing it.”
This isn’t just about aesthetics
One of the most frustrating things to come out of it is a video that many people on Twitter spent the weekend dunking on, which claimed people on TikTok have mastered his aesthetic because it isn’t that hard, and that he should feel some kind of way about it. It’s an absolutely frustrating video because it diminishes the legacy that Anderson built to claim that some TikTok users did it just as well as him.
Diminishing someone’s life work because of a TikTok trend is frustrating, especially when not one of these videos has perfected the style that Anderson made famous. Homage for fun is one thing, but to try to draw that conclusion out of it isn’t leaving Anderson as the one who looks bad.
Some of the videos are good—the key word being some—but they would not exist without Anderson’s films in the first place. The lack of understanding that none of this would exist without Anderson in the first place is baffling. Tie that into the fact that none of these styles are quite to the level Anderson has, and it just feels frustrating to see videos like this on top of people trying to send Wes Anderson these imitations.
(featured image: Pop. 87 Productions/Focus Features)
