- The word ‘quirky’ has become unavoidable in virtually all the discourses surrounding a certain kind of recent American movie.
- From film reviews on amazon to leading film critics, magazines and newspapers. The word Quirky is being used to describe low budget ‘edgey’ cinema.
- Mike Mills, director of Thumbsucker (2005), complains that his movie was ‘just lumped into this quirky independent box’ (Wyse, 2005: 1), and Jim Jarmusch, confronted with the term by an interviewer, exclaims, ‘Man, is that the only adjective they know? ... It’s like every time I make a goddamn movie, the word ‘quirky’ is hauled out ... Now I see it’s being applied to Wes Ander- son, too. All of a sudden, his films are quirky ... It’s just so goddamn lazy’ (O’Hagan, 2005: 1).1
- The term is merely a vague avatar of difference, it can be exploited to any number of ends.
- Marketing purposes ‘quirky’ suggests a film to be a unique
- For critics, the word conveniently allows them to express both a film’s distance from one assumed ‘norm’, and its relationship with another set of aesthetic conventions.
- Provide fans with ‘a sense of belonging to a particular kind of interpretative community’ (King, 2009: 31)
- I will argue that such films share a number of conventions, and that these conventions – which 1
- May be used in greater or lesser numbers, and with greater or lesser degrees of emphasis – together contribute to what I am choosing to call the quirky sensibility.
Problems of definition
- What sort of a category is quirky? I have so far called it a sensibility.
- I see the problems of categorising quirky as similar to those surrounding film noir: we may know it when we see it, but it can become rather difficult to demonstrate its boundaries or constituent parts
- quirky is not a genre, yet is also consistently drawn to certain genres.
- Quirky films contain similar characters and settings but none of which are essential
- key factor here is the notoriously tricky concept of tone
- A commitment to a certain comedic mode seems key to the sensibility.
- One obvious marker of the relationship with comedy is the number of actors with backgrounds in stand-up and sketch-comedy who have starred in quirky films, such as Bill Murray
- awkward emotional comedy is evident across many quirky films.
- Another style of comedy commonly used by the quirky is slapstick.
- Awkward comedy is a common decision but not essential.
- The tensions resulting from this effect are very important for the construction of tone.
Quirky and Style
- Wes Andersons symmetry
- The links between the initial aesthetic and the presentation of the dramatic action proper begin during the establishing shot of the Tenenbaum house, which fleetingly reveals Margo, Chas, and Richie (Amedeo Turturro) framed by their respective windows in such a way as to recall the hand-drawn picture from the ‘Prologue’ title screen.
- static, flat looking, medium-long or long shots that feel nearly geometrically even, depicting isolated or carefully arranged characters, sometimes facing directly out towards us, who are made to look faintly ridiculous or out-of-place by virtue of the composition’s rigidity.
- While such shots are not necessarily found in every quirky film – nor do other filmmakers use them so consistently as does Anderson – they are nevertheless common enough to be suggestive of the sensibility’s aesthetic inclinations.
- the most striking aspects of these kinds of shots is their apparent ‘self- consciousness’
- Self-aware
- Cartoon images and animations and posters are typically used. Savages and napoleon dynamite
- Quirkiness in the music
- The pitch, repetitiveness, and insistent prettiness of much of this music often lends it a sound and feel reminiscent of the tinkling purity of a child’s music box.
- Innocence in music
- Costume and props lending themselves to childish notions. Eagle and the shark
- Nostaligc artifacts
- often revealed that adult characters are still plagued by some form of trauma they experienced as children, which occasionally seems to have left them with a degree of emotional immaturity.
- Finally, adult characters will often behave like children.
Quirky and Tone
- ‘experimenting with tone as a means of critiquing ‘bourgeois’ taste and culture’
- ark comedies that play for (extremely uncomfortable) laughs such subject matter as paedophilia, unrestrained misogyny, and the accidental killing of a stripper, respectively.
- we might even say that the quirky is actually a particular type of smart film.
- Irony heavy
- Ultimately, all these elements help construct what is perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of the quirky: a tone that exists on a knife-edge of judgment and empathy, detachment and engagement, irony and sincerity.
- As I made clear towards the start of the article, I see the quirky as offering a sliding scale of representational possibilities, a spectrum upon which films can be placed closer to one end or another.
