Our next episode is on The Royal Tenenbaums — what should we talk about?

Wardrobe!

this movie fr the big sads, but also the funny hahas 😌✊

jimmy bolland

Along the lines of what others have pointed out, what strikes me most about the film looking back on it is the degree to which we have a pretty good sense of who the characters are, what they want, and what they’re missing, and yet there’s a huge cast of them. How does the film manage to juggle all of these characters while making them distinct and making them known to the audience? I think only a part of it is how Anderson makes them all super visually distinct and unmistakeably specific, but beyond that what is he doing to manage all of these characters and present them to the audience?

When I first saw the Royal Tenenbaums (that paper-cased DVD), Royal reminded me of my father a lot. My father was having many tiny strokes that made him drastically more selfish than he previously was. (This has now been resolved with medical treatments, and he is 82 now). I have always considered myself in the shadow of my father, and seeing the three kids’ relationship with their father, and his desire to be friends with them without resolving his actions (with Chaz especially) similarly resonated with me at the time. Basically, I am very interested in not only how the kids resolve their issues and move on from the trauma of their failure after such public success, but looking at it from the father’s POV as well - the story works well because every main character at least learns something or grows or changes in a very interlocking way. This was also the first suicide attempt I remember seeing onscreen, and seeing it as an attempt of escaping from a situation you feel can never be resolved illustrated it extremely viscerally - is this true for you all as well? There was a bit of tonal whiplash with it being resolved at the hospital, then the tent scene in such quick succession, but it is so good. Is the Morakai (hawk) scene the thesis statement of the movie? This movie hits so many buttons for me emotionally, and was my first Wes Anderson movie (probably my favorite director now), so it is hard for me to look at it objectively- it was like nothing I had never experienced - did it strike you all in a similar way?

John willis

I’m always amazed how well this movie presents a web of character relationships (with the dad as the spider in the middle). It seems to do so effortlessly, but there’s likely a structure to it?

Peter Desmet