On the relationship between Wes Anderson and nostalgia and whether the charge of nostalgia is the right critique.

The most common charge against Wes Anderson's later work is that it is nostalgic: that it retreats into aesthetic systems of the past, that its color palettes and typography and production design represent a refusal of the present.

This charge is fair in one sense. Anderson's films are set in worlds where the aesthetics of the past have been preserved with a curatorial precision. But I want to distinguish between nostalgia as sentimental longing for a past that didn't exist and nostalgia as a structural awareness of loss.

Anderson's films are not sentimental about the past. They are elegies for it. The Wes Anderson world — the one with the perfect colors and the symmetrical compositions and the meticulously crafted objects — is always already gone. The films are full of death, of institutions in decline, of people trying to maintain order in the face of entropy.

The beautiful box is not a lie about the world. It is a formal acknowledgment that beauty and order are things that must be made and will eventually fail. The nostalgia, if it is nostalgia, is for the attempt rather than the achievement.