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[COLUMN] Wes Anderson's Roald Dahl Shorts Are a Crash Course in Adapting “Problematic' Art” | by Darren Mooney
🕑 Added 2023-12-17 19:00:06 +0000 UTCWith the release of Wonka this weekend, it seems like a good time to consider this year’s other big adaptation of Roald Dahl’s writing, th
With the release of Wonka this weekend, it seems like a good time to consider this year’s other big adaptation of Roald Dahl’s writing, the four shorts that Wes Anderson produced for Netflix.
These shorts are interesting for a number of reasons. Netflix has a longstanding relationship with The Roald Dahl Co. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Netflix paid “a nine-figure sum” for the rights to sixteen of Dahl’s stories in November 2018. In September 2021, Netflix purchased the whole company, seeing it as a vehicle for “the creation of a unique universe across animated and live-action films and TV, publishing, games, immersive experiences, live theatre, consumer products and more.”
Given the huge amounts of money and the grand ambition involved in these deals, Netflix has moved surprisingly slowly to adapt the author’s work. The company has “a Roald Dahl Collection” for subscribers to peruse at their leisure, but it is relatively sparse. Before the release of these shorts, the only Netflix Original contained in that collection was the company’s adaptation of Matilda. Even then, it was an adaptation of the stage musical rather than a direct adaptation of the source book.
There is probably a good reason why Netflix hasn’t bullishly committed to their Roald Dahl shared universe. The past decade has seen a public reckoning with the beloved author, an interrogation of his legacy tied to his well-documented antisemitism. Dahl never went to any effort to hide his antisemitic views, telling The New Statesman that “Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” Shortly before his death in 1990, he bluntly stated, “I have become antisemitic.”
While Dahl’s views were a matter of public record, there was no real attempt to grapple with them until his centenary in 2016. Articles at places like The BBC and The Independent argued that it was necessary to discuss Dahl’s antisemitism as part of his larger cultural legacy. This was before Netflix entered its partnership with The Roald Dahl Co., but it was a sign of things to come. Over the ensuing years, Dahl’s reputation would be subject to scrutiny and interrogation.
In November 2018, the same month that Netflix began its relationship with The Roald Dahl Co., the Royal Mint refused to mint a celebratory coin for Dahl, specifically citing his antisemitism. In December 2020, Roald Dahl’s relatives apologized for his public statements, acknowledging “the lasting and understandable hurt caused by some of Roald Dahl’s statements.” In July 2023, the Roald Dahl Museum erected a plaque, acknowledging Dahl’s antisemitism as “undeniable and indelible.”
As ever, when dealing with the shifting legacy of an iconic and influential artist, there is the question of how best to grapple with these contradictions. It’s a larger cultural debate, one that applies to other important historical works like Gone with the Wind. Earlier this year, there was a minor controversy around the decision to rewrite Dahl’s stories to remove offensive or stereotypical depictions. It was a stupid decision, but it gets at the thorniness of the situation.
Indeed, it’s interesting to wonder whether the modern strain of anti-auteur-ist thought in pop criticism is in some way tied to this complicated question. After all, the past few years have forced audiences to confront the reality that many creators are imperfect human beings at best. For fans of particular works by these sorts of figures, it may be easier to believe that the work itself exists in a vacuum, as if conjured into being from nothingness. The “death of the author” is a source of comfort.
Obviously, everybody approaches art in their own way. This neat separation between author and text obviously allows the consumer to enjoy the work without being burdened by context, but it devalues the larger idea of art as something created by human beings that reflects the human experience. It is the thinking of tech bros who want movies made by algorithms. In reality, human beings are messy, and that messiness spills over into untangling the relationship between creator and creation.
Wes Anderson objects to any attempt to rewrite Dahl’s words. “Certainly, no one who is not an author should be modifying somebody’s book,” Anderson stated when premiering the first of these shorts. “He’s dead.” This is not a surprise. For a director whose work has been constantly and lifelessly imitated by proponents of these digital models, Anderson spends a lot of time drawing the audience’s attention to the artist’s hand. Anderson’s movies are about how art is made by people. Even these shorts place an emphasis on stores within stories.
Anderson’s four shorts - The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan, The Rat Catcher, and Poison – offer an interesting illustration of how best to grapple with something like Dahl’s tarnished legacy. Anderson doesn’t do this by erasing the author or changing the work. Quite the opposite. Anderson’s four shorts foreground Dahl in a way that forces the audience to grapple with the inherent contradiction of Dahl as both a deeply flawed human being and a brilliant storyteller.
Anderson makes it clear that these four stories do not exist in a vacuum. Dahl is a character, played by Ralph Fiennes. The opening stretch of The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar draws attention to Dahl and his methods. He speaks directly to the audience, narrating his process. “Hmm,” he begins. “Yes. Well, here we are now in the hut where I write. I’ve been in this hut for 30 years now. Well, it’s important, before I start, I like to make sure I have everything around me that I’m going to need.”
Anderson lays all of this out for the audience. “Cigarettes, of course,” Dahl explains. “Some coffee, chocolates. And always make sure I have a sharp pencil before I start. I have six pencils, and then I like to clean my writing board. See how many bits of rubber. There. And then, finally… one starts.” It is very meticulous. It is very precise. As Dahl begins telling his story, he guides the audience through a set dressed as “Gipsy House”, Dahl’s real-life residence.
Each of the shorts ends with a title card that offers hand-written context for the story that was just told. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar was written “between February and December of 1976.” The Swan was inspired by “a newspaper account of an actual event” and written in October 1976. Dahl wrote The Rat Catcher “in the late forties.” The audience is asked to not only embrace these shorts as stories, but to consider them in the larger context of Dahl’s life.
As with a lot of Anderson’s work, these shorts repeatedly draw attention to their artifice. Set dressers and prop-masters appear in frame. Crates are marked as belonging to the “property department.” An ensemble rotates through roles. Wigs and make-up are applied in shot. Backdrops are moved around. When Henry Sugar, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, drives his car, the edges of the rear projection are visible. Actors often speak to or glance at the camera.
While the shorts aren’t grouped together on Netflix, it is important to watch them in order. The first two, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and The Swan, are beautiful and sincere stories that demonstrate both Dahl’s power as a writer and Anderson’s skill as a director. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is a fairy tale about an imagined man, a degenerate gambler who uses his skills selflessly for the greater good. The story is presented as true, but the man’s identity is hidden behind the pseudonym “Henry Sugar.”
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is structured as nested stories within stories. At the end, Dahl asks the people asking him to transcribe the tale, “Don’t you want me to say who he really was when I do the story?” They decline. The implication is that Henry is best left as an imagined construct, unburdened by the messiness of reality. As his name implies, it’s a very sweet sentiment. However, things take a turn towards the macabre with the third short, The Rat Catcher. As the title implies, this is a story about an exterminator, played by Ralph Fiennes in his most significant role outside of playing Dahl.
The eponymous eradicator is a creepy man who has taken on the attributes of the animals that he hunts. He seduces and repels his two clients – the narrator, played by Richard Ayoade, and Claud, played by Rupert Friend. When the catcher boasts of having enough poison “to kill a million men”, he offers to show them. “Yes, please,” Claud replies. Later, he asks, “You want to see something far more amazing? Something you'd never believe unless you're seeing it with your own eyes?”
When the exterminator offers a demonstration of his skills, the narrator admits, “I looked at the rat that was to be killed and began to feel sick, not because it was going to be killed, but because it was to be killed in a special way, with a considerable degree of enthusiasm.” He continues, “The sick sensation in my stomach was increasing. But there was an awful magnetism about this business. I found myself unable to walk away or even move.” The nastiness is both revolting and alluring.
Given how Dahl haunts the narrative, the subtext is clear. The rat has long been a stand-in for some dehumanized outgroup. The idea of “the Rat Catcher” has a long history in antisemitic propaganda, such as an infamous German poster from 1899 telling the story of “Der Rattenfaenger.” Hitler known as “the Rat Catcher of Braunau.” Consider works of fiction like Netta Murray Goldsmith’s Magda and the Rat Catchers or the opening scene of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds.
When the rat catcher viciously murders the rat with his teeth, Anderson shoots the scene like something from a German expressionist horror movie, making an implicit connection to mid-century fascism. There are quick cuts, intense close-ups and black backgrounds. It’s a deeply unsettling sequence, particularly in the context of Anderson’s larger career. Anderson is well known for his “benign, cozy worlds.” However, this horror is just setting the stage for Poison, the final of the four shorts and the one that renders the subtext as text.
Poison tells the story of Harry Pope, played by Cumberbatch, a British officer in India who wakes up one night believing a krait snake is inside his pyjamas. His friend Woods, played by Dev Patel, and a doctor named Ganderbai, played by Ben Kingsley, intervene to help. However, Anderson films this seemingly straightforward premise in an unsettling way. It looks like the other shorts, it’s beautifully designed, it draws attention to its artifice. However, there’s something different about this one.
Anderson is fond of symmetry. He also likes camera movements at right angles. His camera can push in or out on an actor or dolly in parallel to them, but rarely moves in two dimensions at once. As Kyle Buchanan argued, after Grand Budapest Hotel, “Wes Anderson characters have lost the ability to walk in diagonal lines.” So there’s something unusual in how the camera pushes in on Woods as he arrives at Harry’s room. It spins, shifting the angle of the shot in a way that’s unusual for Anderson. It’s not how the sets are designed to be shot.
In Poison, Anderson’s camera repeatedly acts in ways that it normally wouldn’t. There are low-angle shots, in contrast to Anderson’s tendency to shoot actors head-on. As Harry jumps up, the camera shakes. The climax features handheld camerawork, unusual for Anderson. It’s especially odd as the sequence isn’t particularly thrilling. There is no snake. When Ganderbai suggests that Harry imagined it, Harry lashes out in an overtly racist way, calling the doctor “a dirty, little, Bengali sewer rat.” The choice of vermin seems quite pointed.
This racism breaks Anderson’s picturesque fantasy. No amount of beautiful production design can hide this. This artificial world is literally shaken. Given that The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Poison feature extended sequences set in India, starring Patel and Kingsley, they may even represent a mea culpa from Anderson, who was criticized for his portrayal of India in The Darjeeling Limited. It also acknowledges the paradox of Dahl, who could recognize racism as a metaphorical poison while still holding horrendous beliefs.
Over the past few years, there has been a lot of debate about how to acknowledge art by problematic figures. Anderson finds a way to grapple with the more uncomfortable aspects of Roald Dahl’s legacy not by erasing or ignoring the author, and not even by heavily altering the text. Instead, Anderson draws the artist into the work and asks the audience to confront him in his totality, no matter how uncomfortable that may be.
Comments
Marshall Halleck
It is very hard to be empathic. As you said in your post about the role of critics, it seems the best movies are empathy machines. It is really easy to blindly hate or love Dahl, but to see him as the totality is very difficult, to avoid those easy traps is very hard. I think when empathy is done well you are left seeing them as people. Three dimensional and complicated, full of contradictions, this doesn't just describe Dahl but each and every one of us. What seems normal to us will, much like Dahl, seem abhorrent to future generations. To know that we did our best, he did his best, and to fully acknowledge the impact, both the good and the immense bad we like to forget about, I think it ultimately leaves one with an immense sense of sadness. Sadness for the people hurt, sadness for the people doing the hurt. We like to shunt the antisemitism into these convenient scapegoats, Dahl or Ford, but the fact of the matter is Dahl was saying these things as openly as he was and no one batted an eye. Antisemitism wasn't just some offshoot, it was mainstream. We like to pretend we're descended from the non-racists, from the people on the right side of history but that's just blatantly false. We have to acknowledge it, the depravity of it, the depravity in ourselves, if we're going to learn and grow and get to a world without. The first step is not dehumanizing anyone, be it the rats or the rat catcher. When we do we forget that we could be in either role.
Darren Mooney
Ha! I do try to source my statements, and hopefully give readers something to delve into.
walt m
i love these articles! takes me 2 hours read it cause i keep clicking all the links!
Darren Mooney
Thank you very much! It’s really lovely that people seem to enjoy them, and don’t see them as clutter and spam.
Darren Mooney
Thank you very much! To be honest, just thrilled to be on the team. I’m more a prose guy than a video guy. I’m really proud of the videos and they are just so much fun to make, but words cannot express how much of what works about them is down to Omar and Jesse just being the best at what they do. They make my work on those videos so easy, and frankly better, which I am forever thankful for. I’ve been quite open about being nervous about being a guy who writes at a video site, but I’m honestly thrilled that people seem to at least find the articles interesting. And Nick and Marty and the guys are very encouraging. We work together on the weekday pitches, which is great and leads to some wonderful stuff, but the weekend one is my dealer’s choice. Like, this one I’ve been stewing on since I first saw the shorts.
Darren Mooney
I hope you enjoy. At the very least, they are really lovely as a piece of craft.
Mithras K
I didn't think I'd care too much about the written articles here, but Darren is leading the way in proving me wrong; I'm very pleased to be wrong!
William Alexander
Darren is the unexpected MVP of Second Wind! Loving this series in particular. I will add this to my queue of things to actually watch instead of settling into my comfort zone as usual. Hope Second Wind gives you the opportunity to explore more less "of the moment", Big Names in Pop Culture (Marvel, Star Wars, etc). And hope this gives you some room to write ahead of time in case you get sick or actually want to take a vacation sometime!
ZhoRa13
Fascinating analysis. Definitely something I'll watch after 'Blue-eyed Samurai', thanks Darren 👍
Darren Mooney
"The Witches" is the one that really stands out as a text that I love that has become a lot more... complicated since then.
Ben Repton
Really good examination of the thorny issue of separating an artist from their art. I'm in the process of reading Roald Dahl's books to my young daughter and there a lot of themes that seem to develop a sinister explanation once his life and views are taken into account.
Darren Mooney
Yep. You can’t just erase the author’s hand and assume everything is fine. Anderson manages to deal with the stuff by barely touching Dahl’s prose, which I think is the perfect way to do it.
Wally Hackenslacker
To me the author that has caused the most trouble in this sense recently is Arthur C. Clarke. Not the only one but certainly the most notorious and affecting to me. If there is any solution beyond foregoing whole oeuvres, pirating, buying second hand or just detaching the author from the work completely I don't know. Only thing I'm sure of is that going historical revisitonist in the way the The Roald Dahl Co. tried to go about Dahl's works is THE worst possible solution. Usually that sort of revisionism is done by people trying to mask evil intentions or deeds, but The Dahl's Co. approach was just so mindbogglingly stupid in a way that felt more like the dumbest possible parody of what they were trying to achieve than anything else.
Darren Mooney
Beautiful, beautiful film. One of my favourites of the year. (The list is a work in progress.)
John Cripps
Yes! had to watch it three times, one just to absorb the story, second to enjoy the artistic love letter to the 50's/60's that the cinematography was portraying, and third to pick out all the tiny details laid into every single scene!!! And man what a cast list!! every scene was "wait... they are in this?!?" then they would steal that shot! I mean, Scarlett Johanssen, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Maya Hawke.... and so many more!!
Darren Mooney
Did you see “Asteroid City” earlier this year? Nearly made me weep. Loved it.
Darren Mooney
Yep! And now “Lovecraft Country”, which I loved, has its own complicated artist involved. (And I think Majors is incredibly talented, and he was great in “Creed III” and “Lovecraft Country”, even if I - personally- don’t ever want to see him on screen again.)
Darren Mooney
Thanks! Yeah, I’m surprised at how little Netflix pushed these, given the pedigree involved.
Darren Mooney
This is part of the complicated aspect of it, where a large part of what resonated in Dahl’s work - what separated it from his contemporaries - was an inherent nastiness. And that nastiness - that venom, that… well, poison - was ultimately part of who he is, albeit expressed in different directions and intensities. And it’s reconciling that, for me, that makes it complicated. And art, like people, is complicated. It’s something that really stood out to me on watching “The Rat Catcher”, the idea that we respond to that unpleasantness on a subconscious level, that repulsion and attraction intertwine. And the what makes Dahl a great writer isn’t something neatly delineated from what made him an awful person.
Darren Mooney
Yep. I think it’s a personal thing. Everybody has to make their own choices, and involves some subjectivity. I think “X-Men II” is a great film, one of the best superhero films ever made, but I don’t know that I could watch it again because I - personally - can’t watch the scenes of Magneto seducing Pyro, in a metaphor the movie tilts towards homosexuality, without thinking of Bryan Singer’s predatory behavior to young men. (It’s very reminiscent of “Apt Pupil”, which also stars McKellen in a similar dynamic, a set on which we know abuse took place.) That’s a weird logical connection for my brain to make, but I can’t unsee it, even if I don’t expect everyone else to see it.
John Cripps
A thought provoking piece, thank you. I was brough up I with Roald Dahl's words, my Father collected many copies of the Collier's magazines when he was over in the states, a few of them had short stories by Mr Dahl within. For me, he will always me a man of great contradictions within his works. I don't know how I feel about Wes Anderson taking on his work. His cinematography feels unique. The ubiquitous use of almost pastel like colouration filtering, his framing that can make me weep from raw emotions, an artist who does make every frame a painting with punch and expression. I will want to see what he has created, at the same time.... I kind of don't... it's all very odd.
erakfishfishfish
Lovecraft Country (both the show and the book the show adapted) tackles this subject to a small degree. I wish they explored the idea of a Black man enjoying HP Lovecraft’s works while also acknowledging his abhorrent racism more, but the book/show plays it off with more of a what-are-ya-gonna-do shrug.
Adithya Kale
This was a really good read - thanks Darren. It really puts these into context and it's a shame netflix hasn't grouped or ordered them properly as I think that would help viewers to make similar connections themselves
Dark Jackel
Thanks for the column! I was much less critical of Dahl's stories as a kid, of course; but these days I find them pretty creepy, and not necessarily for the fantastical stuff. Before we even look at Dahl's RL opinions, I think the way he portrays children, adults, and the way they interact deserves a lot of critical attention. 😮💨
Earl Elmore
It's a complex issue, as a consumer I've wondered about how I feel about consuming (really, moreso spending my money on) media from "problematic artists." I have generally decided, for myself, I don't want to support artists that have views I find abhorrent. I won't knock their art, but I don't want to give them my money. If they pass away, I'm no longer providing financial support to the person. As with Dahl, many of these artists have the obvious asterisk added to their legacy, and I think that's reasonable to allow them their artistic legacy while acknowledging that they held views the current owners/curators/etc don't agree with. To be clear, it's a complex issue - I don't judge people for seeing it/maneuvering it differently, this is just how I navigate it.
