True and False. New Realities in the Films of Wes Anderson,Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman
True and False. New Realities in the Films of Wes Anderson,Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman

Summary/Abstract: The filmmakers of the French Nouvelle Vague, in the spirit of post-war modernism, wanted to get at the truth of everyday life, and braved oncoming traffic to capture people living real lives. Since the turn of the millennium, Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman have taken the opposite track, showing a remarkable tendency to undermine their own representations of reality – often humorously collapsing the boundaries between the actual and fictional worlds. The particular filmmakers never content themselves with simple exercises in mimesis, but instead openly acknowledge the elusive objective of faithfully representing reality: examples include the subversively deceptively Godardian cut-away of a film set in Anderson’s Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), the symbiotic relationship between the diegetic writing of two screenplays and the events unfolding around the characters in Jonze’s Adaptation (2002), and the multiple mise-en-abyme structure of Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008). In the course of their films, Anderson, Jonze and Kaufman playfully yet confidently turn our perception of diegetic reality on its head, placing emphasis on the idea of “performance” – as it relates to the characters as well as the films themselves.

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