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" Published in the May 2012 issue    FIG. 1: The first sign that Anderson is verging on self-parody? His recent Hyundai commercials, a slice of dysfunctional handmade Americana to sell a smooth Korean car that never breaks down.    Quirkiness is by now a well-established global brand \u2014 as preprocessed as the Oscars, as uniformed as the military, as predictable as corporate rock. In the great tide of consumerist culture, which is in the process of sweeping away all local distinctions, making the shopping in Beijing the same as shopping in Buffalo, every city has at least one alternative neighborhood, with its cloverleaf coffee shops and knitting stores and health-food co-ops. In East Berlin or Silver Lake or Brooklyn or Brick Lane, you will find much the same people picking out identically unique pieces from vintage shops. Comparing their tattoos of David Foster Wallace quotations. Putting birds on things. And watching Wes Anderson movies [fig.1]. This month, the arrival of Moonrise Kingdom \u2014 a return to the form of Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums after the stop-motion experiment Fantastic Mr. Fox \u2014 is an opportunity to check the boxes: Bill Murray French pop music Retro palate Affected, slightly old-timey dialogue Eccentric, overbearing parents Calligraphy Overhead shots And most important, most vital of all, precocious child on the cusp of adulthood As eagerly expected as it is unsurprising, Moonrise Kingdom is Fast &amp;amp;amp; Furious Five for hipsters.     FIG. 2: Following Anderson at Cannes will be Madagascar 3, written by Noah Baumbach, who knows a few things about sad rich boys.    Whimsy became mainstream somewhere in between Zooey Deschanel&amp;#039;s advertisements for cotton and the appearance of writer and filmmaker Miranda July on the cover of The New YorkTimes Magazine. Moonrise Kingdom is opening the Cannes film festival, which is also a marker: The French begin their adoration of American styles only once they&amp;#039;re so sufficiently accomplished that Americans start to question them (see: Jerry Lewis, Woody Allen, rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll). Mainstream quirk-iness is more than just a fey style; at its core is a classic character type and a classic story: the whip-smart rich kid who rebels, briefly, against society [fig. 2]. The original of the type was Holden Caulfield, but hardly a literary season goes by without the release of one prep-school-rebel novel or another. The great postwar creative explosion that followed in the wake of prosperity produced a magnificent collection of rebels \u2014 Marlon Brando and James Dean were archetypal outsiders \u2014 but the model that survives today is the inside-outsider, the rebel within the system of privilege. Moonrise Kingdom lands smack in the middle of this tradition: a twelve-year-old boy and his girlfriend run away from their New England homes in the most inconsequential rebellion possible.    FIG. 3: No possible act of womanhood could be more irritating than whimsical girls intermittently breaking into song. Their counterparts, of course, are Ivy League men wearing ties and banging on drums like Vampire Weekend.    The story of the precocious rich-kid rebel is a stark case of art failing to imitate life: The privileged self-pitying brat is one of the most despicable specimens of the northeastern United States, and yet his fictional appeal is boundless. If you met Holden Caulfield on the street, you&amp;#039;d want to smack him in the mouth. The would-be Holden Caulfields who fill up the exclusive pockets of commodified rebellion provoke much the same reaction: the sad young literary men, the musical thumbsuckers, the masters of the refined and melodramatic sulk. Their vulnerability is a cover, obviously. I may be rich, white, and connected, but look, I, too, suffer. I, too, am a Victim of Society. For those of us who have not been whelped from superconnected East Coast families, the character serves a double fantasy, indulging the fun of rebellion and the fun of pretending that you&amp;#039;re so safely ensconced that any youthful errors you may make don&amp;#039;t matter.     FIG. 4: The genius of Portlandia is its whimsically vicious approach to the viciously whimsical \u2014 how completely trite are even those who have moved to a rain-drenched small city in order to be original.    Whimsy is the desire for rebellion swallowed and digested by conformism, and not just in obvious cases like New Girl or A Very She &amp;amp;amp; Him Christmas album [fig. 3]. At the end of the elite&amp;#039;s minor rebellion, the young man is always reconciled one way or another with the world as it is, the necessary conclusion to his variance. The mothers of Silver Lake or Brooklyn or Toronto or Portland or East Berlin live in a world as demanding and restrictive as those of the Stepford Wives \u2014 you must swaddle your baby this way, you must eat raw kale, you must jog this many times a week, you must have experimented with these drugs, you must listen to these bands, have sex this much, in these positions; Williamsburg possesses an aesthetic as imposed and artificial as the court of Louis XIV. The creative class as a rule is very tolerant, so long as you tune in to Portlandia [fig. 4] and don&amp;#039;t embarrass yourself even the tiniest fraction.  And yet they want to feel rebellious, or at least to remember a brief period of youthful rebellion, which they can then treasure during the elaborate hoop jumping of the rest of their lives. It makes them feel like real people instead of algorithms. But the rebellion must never possess danger or consequences, any actual threat to the tidy system of privilege that sustains and nurtures and protects them. Andersonian tweeness is a negative vision of life as a process of continuous disengagement: no anger, no resentment, no unresolvable conflict, no worry, no messiness. Narrative tension disintegrates into a celebration of actions without consequences. Bill Murray is perfect in Wes Anderson films because literally anything he does is funny [fig. 5].     FIG. 5: But never twee. For that, try Jack Black, the Robin Williams of whimsy. Or Michael Cera, the George Clooney of fey. Or Owen Wilson, bless his gentle heart. Dirty Harry would waste each and every one of these super-adorable rebels.    The whimsical arts are bubbles that float and amuse, but they leave behind only the faintest of residues when they pop. Their rebellions, so elaborately constructed and perfectly articulated, ultimately don&amp;#039;t matter very much. The great American tradition that stretches back through the hippies to the abstract expressionists, the jazz artists, all the way to the original freethinkers, to Thomas Paine, had one shared tenet: At all costs, be yourself. Whimsicality follows that faith but as cheaply as possible \u2014 personal expression as socially acceptable lifestyle choice, a bauble to make the rich kids feel ever so slightly different until they finally grow up. It wants to call itself free without the bother or the sacrifice of being free. Quirkiness is a blind alley, a false escape hatch. It makes originality itself just another hoop to be jumped through. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a14040/quirkiness-in-america-0512/>