Wes Anderson, uber-hipster

This really ruins it all for me. Yes, of course, I've long read reports on Wes Anderson's ironically-worn old-man shoes and his vintage-clothing-deconstructing girlfriend, designer and Chloe Sevigny pal Tara Subkoff. And fair enough, I found The Royal Tenenbaums to be overdone visually, with the red track suits and the Gwyneth used as stand-ins for any larger point to the film. But when I first saw Rushmore in the theaters, in 10th grade, I had never heard of hipsters, and if they existed, they hadn't yet made it to Stuyvesant. (The cool older kids were still ravers.)

If I saw Rushmore for the first time now, I doubt it would move me as it did then, not because the dialogue would seem dated or dull, nor because you have to be 15 to get the most out of it, though the latter is certainly possible. No, I'd take one look at Max Fischer's vintage ski-jacket and geek-chic glasses and roll my eyes. While the plot suggests that Max dresses this way because he is poor, in retrospect it's just so convenient, his being a scholarship student at a prep-school just gives Anderson a plausible way to put his protagonist into hipster garb. The clothes in the movie, which seemed when I first saw it to give the whole film a unique mood, would now seem like an unnecessary distraction from the story.

I hope N+1 magazine is right, that hipsters as we know them are waning. Because how else will future generations watch Rushmore and actually enjoy it?

Via The American Scene.