The French Dispatch — Ode to Newspapers not Forgotten
Wes Anderson’s film is beauty, and the beauty of The French Dispatch (2021) emanates from the form of narrative, of journalism and curation.
I read at first about the publicity of this film with interest [1], knowing merely it is about the life of a newspaper, or a press room. There has not been a film dedicated to the love for the written word in a good while, and my missing The Great Passage (2013), a romance set in the editorial department of dictionary publishing, remained a regret.
I appreciate how The French Dispatch is described as a “love letter” to journalists. Albeit inspired by the director’s love for The New Yorker, the paper and its events are all fictitious. To render journalism, a profession so tethered to reality, as a work of art, one has to fictionalise — and idealise — it. Through delightful chapters on travel, art, politics and gastronomy, readers develop a perspective of the paper’s birthplace, ironically called Ennui-sur-Blasé, as if seeing their own hometown.
The sections remind me of how editor-turned curator Wu Jianru said curation is like editing, in a different medium. Translated into textual terms, I could see how judgements of storytelling, aesthetics and economy apply to both the curation of literature and space.
Another irony, or genius design, is that the stories reported in The French Dispatch, abstracted to be representative of our time, are too great for the world to afford to create. Hardly any prisoner has been spotted by a devouring art industry, and hardly any artist is capable of hacking the game as well as Rosenthaler. (One may say Banksy who shredded his artwork after an auction, but even that was a performance and lubricated the game.) More remarkably, in an era of police violence, it is costly to share a dining table with a police commissioner and publish what he eats. If speculative fiction imagines and prototypes the future, The French Dispatch predates a world we have yet to see.
The final issue and the entire paper end with an obituary of the late founding editor. Collective voices breathe life into the father of the press room, one anecdote after another, and the story does not end here. Remembering and speaking of the dead renews its spirit in the living, and so is everything that soon passes. All that lives has its time, and doing what you do like it is the last, infinitely, is life.
[1] Journalism is a profession close to my heart, to be practised by my alter ego I imagine. In my childhood, my family and I were ferocious consumers of mass media: TV, radio, newspapers and magazines. One of my most memorable assignments in primary school was to create a newspaper. Classmates submitted print-outs of prosaic texts, whereas I printed fictional daily reports and recipes (perhaps even horoscope readings), typeset in columns, onto a two-page spread. It was modelled after the now-defunct Apple Daily. Exposure to the medium granted my work verisimilitude, and on this I took great pride. However, it never occurred to me to join the media brigade as I grew up, as I did not feel comfortable nor ready to be under public scrutiny.
