A
taxi hastily makes its way down a narrow city street in an overhead long shot
that soon movies in a zipping, zooming motion to meet the car head on,
destabilizing the viewer and isolating this small vessel in a sea of
stereotypical exoticism that, the soundtrack informs us through the shorthand
of the theme from Satyajit Ray’s Jalsaghar,
must be India. Throughout the scene, the business-suit-and-fedora-wearing
passenger, played by Bill Murray, alternates nervous glances at his watch with
nervous glances at his surroundings as he’s jolted the backseat of the tiny
cab, whizzing through colorful, crammed South Asian scenery full of
pedestrians, animals, buildings and cars that present nothing more than
obstacles on a hurried drive to the train station. It’s clear he’s on a time
table, not taking in the environment as much as moving through it as fast as he
can, the tension increased by jumpy, jagged juxtaposition of quickly traveling
shots. There is something specifically American in Murray’s appeal, and seeing
him in the opening sequence of Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited only works to further emphasize the
foreignness of the setting relative to its protagonists.
Charting
unknown territory no less than in the director’s previous film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,
Murray’s unnamed character presents a stereotypical image of the privileged,
white, insensitive, ignorant American abroad. Of course he is late, and when
the cab driver pulls into the station, Murray runs away without paying and,
barely looking back at the people behind him, cuts the line at the counter to
buy a ticket, all before breaking into a sprint after the moving train, in the
first of four of Anderson’s signature slow motion processions in the film, this
one to the Kinks’ elegiac “This Time Tomorrow.” As he awkwardly strives forward
he’s slowly overtaken by Adrien Brody’s character, who enters frame and film
from right, outpacing Murray and clambering aboard the racing titular train as
Ray Davies wonders “This time tomorrow where will we be/ On a spaceship somewhere sailing
across an empty sea… This time tomorrow
what will we see/ Field full of houses, endless rows of crowded streets/ I don’t
know where I’m going, I don’t want to see/ I feel the world below me looking up
at me/ Leave the sun behind me, and watch the clouds as they sadly pass me by/
And I’m in perpetual motion and the world below doesn’t matter much to me.” The sequence is
undoubtedly comedic, but there is something mournfully poetic in the use of
music, in Murray’s silent, defeated figure, slowly receding into the background
as the train passes him by, and in the soft, bittersweet smile that plays on
Brody’s lips as he watches the older man left behind, a soulful and ultimately
sad expression that will take the rest of the film to explain.
Parts of this essay have previously appeared in “Baggage: Objects and Spaces as Markers of the Emotional Journey in Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited.”
Parts of this essay have previously appeared in “Baggage: Objects and Spaces as Markers of the Emotional Journey in Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited.”
If
the ultimate conclusion of the trip sounds hackneyed or simplistic, one must
understand that the blatant—and blatantly, self-consciously clichéd—nature of
Anderson’s exploration of the journey theme is ironic and intentional.
Francis’s explanation of the purpose of the brothers’ cross-country journey in
the beginning of the film (“A: I want us to be brothers like we used to be and
to find ourselves and bond with each other. B: I want to make this trip a
spiritual journey where each of us seeks the unknown, and we learn about it. C:
I want us to be completely open and say yes to everything, even if it’s
shocking and painful”) is delivered to Jack and Peter while directly facing the
camera, and thus the audience. This is a performative gesture that sardonically
acknowledges and engages with the audience’s genre expectations of the road
movie.
In
“Balancing Act: Exploring the Tone of the Life
Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” John Gibbs identifies the four dimensions of
tone as the film’s attitude towards 1) its characters and subject matter, 2)
its audience; 3) the conventions it employs or invokes; and 4) the film as film
(137). This structure is helpful as we discuss the self-reflexivity of The Darjeeling Limited. Anderson and the
audience are fully aware of the clichéd nature of the film’s spiritual journey.
Yet the characters themselves are completely and genuinely invested in the
pursuit of their emotional fulfilment within the film’s diegesis, even as
Francis is situated, from the very beginning, as a self-referential character
performing these viewer expectations. The constructed nature of the dialogue
and the deadpan performance style of this scene are consistent with the
director’s cinematic milieu and self-reflexive engagement of the
tourist-traveler dichotomy employed in the development of character.
“This genre of
discourse, though deployed in relation to travel, has nothing do to with
tourism, either ancient or modern; neither is its orientation such as would
simply exploit the figure of travel as a metaphor for the movement of
development of philosophical thought. Rather, the travel to which such writing
submits takes place as a discovery of evocative places, of places that, because
they are evocative, give focus to the visit, in contrast to the accelerated
distraction of tourism” (1-2).
This
“accelerated distraction of tourism” is precisely what the Whitman brothers are
engaged in throughout roughly the first half of the film. Three greedy tourists
grabbing at epiphany, they go from one Spiritual Place to another, ringing
bells, kneeling, praying and donning ridiculously undersized ritual head-wraps
all in an attempt to heal their emotional and,
in Francis’s case, physical wounds. Carefully planning and trying to
control everything through a preposterously over-detailed schedule leads,
paradoxically, to a state of passivity in which the characters become objects
stripped of agency. This is perhaps less obvious in Francis’ case, because he,
or, more appropriately, his assistant Brendan, is the one making the
itineraries. But Jack and Peter are, by Anderson’s own admission, just
following along. “I feel like two of the brothers have just sort of been
assigned to go to India,” the director has said in an interview. “They’ve been
told, ‘Here are your tickets, here’s where you need to be, just follow this
path and you should end up in this compartment. You’ll find me there.’ I don’t
think these brothers are exactly the most open-minded to the world” (Seitz
208).
The
filmmaker tells the story of a friend who used to travel all the time and kept
detailed journals which he called “The Musings of a Completely Unfeeling
American Abroad.” He never allowed the experiences and information he gathered
on his journeys to change his worldview or enter into his daily life in any
way; he refused to change or adapt to the places he visited. According to
Anderson, the Whitman brothers are, similarly, as a group, “pressing right
through the middle of it, and they’re kind of interested. They like the idea of
picking up a little of this and a little of that, but they’re not studying it
for long. They’ll just put it in their suitcase with the rest of their stuff.
And it takes them a lot to really open their eyes, because they’re very fixated
on their own problems. They’re just very selfish, narcissistic people” (Seitz
209).
The
objects they buy are significant in analyzing their relationship to the place
they find themselves in. Francis immediately sets about trying to find a power
adapter, which becomes a symbol of his inability to understand and relate to
his new environment without feeling the urge to change it, to artificially
translate it into something that he knows rather than adapting himself and his
needs to the situation. Peter buys shoes and a deadly, poisonous snake, and
Jack gets pepper spray. The latter two items come as a surprise, considering
the sheer hostility and violence inherent in them. One wonders if the brothers
are not, indeed, trying to protect themselves from this strange land and its
inhabitants, feeling threatened and in danger because of their contact with the
Other. Their behavior in the temple itself is hardly an improvement. Francis
offers Jack and Peter some rupees “to put in front of the deity here,” then
realizes Peter has borrowed his $6,000 belt and asks for it back before he
starts arguing with Jack about taking his passport, and Peter decides to go
“pray at a different thing.”
The Darjeeling Limited brings up
questions of the authenticity of the brothers’ experience in a way that
negotiates some of the crucial ideological anxieties and contradictions around
traveling, most significantly the image of the undertaker of a journey as both
explorer and explored , simultaneously an active observer and what Dimitris Eleftheriotis, in Cinematic Journeys: Film and Movement,
calls a “parcel” (77). In works such as Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in
the 19th Century and David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural
Change, modern means of transportation are discussed in the context of the
construction of a type of movement that seems to depersonalize, if not
annihilate, space itself, reducing the world to a series of destinations and
the traveler to a passive, indifferent package that is shipped and received. Taken
even further, the train itself, through its fixed, linear movement down the
tracks provides a narrow, neatly ordered and pre-planned version of travel that
is not conducive to the brothers’ emotional progress.
This
reading of the Whitman brothers as parcels moved from one location to another
without any will of their own seems especially appropriate in the context of
Anderson’s work, in which the line between character and setting is so often
blurred. Stefano Baschiera has gone as far as to suggest Anderson in effect
overcomes the separation between subjects and objects, human and non-human
(118). As Thomas Dorey observes in “Wes Anderson: Contemporary Auteurism andDigital Technology,” the director links
his characters and the objects that surround them not only thematically, but
stylistically as well through the use of
his most easily recognizable visual signature, the inserted God’s-eye close-up.
Shot from above, the actors begin to look like objects themselves, their agency
removed as their authorial dominance undermined (68-71). In Darjeeling, the most memorable of these
inserts happens not only when the brothers are at their lowest point—about to
be evicted from their temporary “home,” the train, but specifically while they
are fighting about objects, the
familiar things they have chosen to cling to for control and security in the
face of uncertainty, so much so that the first items they lose, Francis’s belt
and shoe, are not discarded willingly, but stolen from them.
Similarly,
it is not of their own free will that the brothers leave the luxury hotel on
wheels that is the Darjeeling Limited, making the film’s title superfluous.
Reprimanded like unruly children for bad behavior, they get kicked off in the
middle of the countryside, away from the security of laminated daily timetables
and of material comfort, “where they might enjoy the sort of unmediated
revelation you just can’t plan with TripAdvisor,” as Jonah Weiner writes in the
Slate article “Unbearable Whiteness: That Queasy Feeling You Get When
Watching a Wes Anderson Movie.” Although meant sarcastically, Weiner’s point
resonates with ideas of passivity and agency central to the understanding of
the tourist-traveler dichotomy. In the beginning of the film, we see Peter
ascend through the various classes of the train, passing—and probably, like
Murray’s character in the opening sequence, not noticing—the people and animals
on the train as he makes his way through the luggage car and coach before
arriving to the comparably lavish private sleeper that Francis has reserved for
the trip. This compartmentalization on the train only expands the gulf between
the Whitmans and the space around them as well as the people who inhabit it, supporting
the preservation of their individualism at the expense of community.
Only
when they leave the train and let go of its relative safety can they become
active participants in their own spiritual journey. Supposedly, the characters
have left the city to enter a diegetic world that goes against and beyond the
conventional, everyday, regulated and sheltered life at home, an environment
which the train only simulated.
Following the brothers’ eviction is a long tracking shot of them walking
through a field at night; we come to realize this is the first time we’ve seen
them walking in the entire film, actively going through the most basic and
fundamental action of any journey instead of simply getting delivered to
different places by rail. In Getting Backinto Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World, Edward S.
Casey writes that “legwork is the main means by which a journey is
accomplished. Whether on a long-legged horse (e.g. Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza, or the legendary Crusaders) or literally on foot (e.g. Dante and
Virgil), the journey is made by maintaining bodily contact with the underlying
earth” (276). This contact with the earth, the literal touching of the ground
as they travel on foot in Darjeeling
also comes to represent a deeper connection with the space and land that the
characters travel.
Anderson
places the three brothers in situations which test their certainties,
preconceived ideas and beliefs, and their comfort. The change of environment
and the physical act of moving through space propels characters again and again
towards self-discovery, the exploration of new places revealing well-hidden
emotions, memories or traumas. This inadvertently brings to the forefront
anxieties of mastery and control as the travelers are pushed out of the comfort
and stability of the home (or the train) into unknown and uncertain
territories. Cees Nooteboom describes the fascination with the unknown, with
standing “at the edge of the Sahara” in Nomad’sHotel: Travels in Time and Space as “The same old sense of excitement.
Seeing things
you do not understand, signs you cannot read, a language you cannot fathom, a
religion you do not have any real conception of, a landscape which rebuffs,
lives you could not share…. The shock of the wholly unknown is one of gentle
sensuality…. And that makes this type of travel a pleasant sort of void, a
state of zero-gravity in which, although the self does not lose all
significance, a good deal does get written off…” (93-94)
This
partial loss of self is expressed most obviously in Darjeeling in the characters’ renouncing of their possessions and
their decreasing levels of material comfort. At first, the brothers are
unwilling or unable to fully accept or become immersed into their new
surroundings, holding onto the familiar and the comfortable, namely their
belongings, which they lug around in their dead father’s suitcases, blatant,
boxy, bulky Marc Jacobs-designed metaphors for emotional baggage. “There are
these sorts of talismans the brothers carry—things like a pair of sunglasses or
music box or the father’s luggage, and these various objects that a character
is placing around the room at a certain point,” Anderson has stated. “They
affix a meaning to each of those things. Sometimes when you’re traveling, you
do that. When you’re going to be away for a long time, I find you tend to put
the things you’ve decided are your familiar objects around you” (Seitz 205).
The sense of dislocation associated with the loss of a parent, the key trauma
of the three brothers, is only heightened in the film by the characters’ being
in motion, away from home, in a foreign country (Baschiera 127).
The
expensive clothes and accessories the three brothers own not only display their
social status, but help the audience visualize their profound displacement in
this new environment. The color of the characters’ clothes, for the most part
muted and monochrome (gray, black, white, tan, and beige) stands in stark
contrasted to the exaggeratedly bright, supersaturated surroundings that burst
with warm, lively yellows, oranges, and reds and vivid greens and blues, an
imaginary, candy-colored cinematic India of the mind.
The
Whitmans’ individual quest for experience, truth, knowledge or meaning in and
of itself articulates distinctly Western/European and modern sensibilities
around mobility, vision and subjectivity. Eleftheriotis argues that traveling, “as an essential tool of
scientific discovery and the extension of metropolitan imperial power on a
macro level, as a way to complete one’s education and acquire valuable cultural
capital on a personal level,” becomes indispensable not only in personal
pursuits of knowledge, accomplishment or pleasure, but also in providing access
to social and cultural power (77).
“We rationalists
perceive the reality of being members of a community in the reality of works
undertaken and realized; we perceive the community itself as a work…. In the
public works and monuments of North America we see inscribed the motivations
and goals of us North Americans; in our factories, airports, and highways we
see our reasoned choices among our needs and wants, and our plans. In our
system of laws and our social institutions, we recognize our formulated
experience, our judgment, our debated consensuses. In our rational collective
enterprises we find, in principle, nothing alien to us, foreign, and impervious
to understanding; we find ourselves” (Lingis 5-6).
Leaving
the security of home and venturing into the unknown carries with it a forsaking
of the systems and institutions in which the protagonists have previously found
themselves, as Lingis writes. “A potent factor of the undetermined, often of distinct
danger, attends the journeyer and eliminates the security of a predetermined
trajectory” (Casey 276).The train and the objects they carry represent the
Whitman brothers’ last attempts to hold onto the security of that which is
familiar, whereas the new environment they have entered, especially after
getting kicked off the Darjeeling and no longer passively moving through an
organized series of set destinations, is beyond their control, implying an
exposure to risk and vulnerability.
The
boy and the space he inhabits become one in this scene, to such an extent that
his presence is not easily noticeable at first. As Juhani Pallasma notes
regarding Andrei Tarkovsky’s work, characters do not appear as persons on an
architectural stage; “the space and the characters have been cast in the very
same matter, eroding towards its final destiny, a ‘horizontal death” (Pallasma
43). The same concept could be applied to Anderson’s film and this scene in
particular, in which the melding of character and space spells an awareness of
the inevitability of death.
The
encounter with the Other, then, is explicitly dangerous in the way it
challenges and disrupts the traveler’s comfort and familiarity with a certain
way of life: “Before the rational community, there was the encounter with the
other, the intruder,” Lingis writes.
“Beneath the
rational community… is another community, the community that demands that the
one who has his own communal identity, who produces his own nature, expose
himself to the one with whom he has nothing in common, the stranger. This other community is not simply absorbed
into the rational community; it recurs, it troubles the rational community, as
its double or its shadow. This other
community forms not in a work, but in the interruption of work and
enterprises. It is not realized in having or in producing something in common
but in exposing oneself to the one with whom one has nothing in common: to the
Aztec, the nomad, the guerilla, the enemy”(Lingis 10-11).
Traveling
opens up new avenues of possibility, but it also makes the traveler more aware
of his or her helplessness in the face of danger and death. As Lingis writes,
“in every advance
across the
landscape which promises to support our steps toward the possibilities of
vision, across its open planes and paths leading to finalities, we sense the
possibility of promises turning out to be lures, its paths turning out to be
snares, and in contours harboring ambushes. It is advancing unto the
exteriority of our environment that we advance unto our death. Death is
everywhere in the interstices of the world, the abyss lies behind any of its
connections and beneath its paths” (Lingis 160)
The
author of The Community of Those Who Have
Nothing in Common actually takes as his point of departure the mortality
that unites all people across racial, religious, economic, geographic, and
linguistic barriers. Death becomes the one thing all of us have in common. Similarly,
Matt Zoller Seitz points out in his interview with Anderson the constant
presence of death or the fear of death as an equalizing force, “the great
leveler”(151). The gradual seeping in of a spiritual sensibility, in Darjeeling, Seitz argues, is directly linked to the impact of death and the
awareness of mortality.
Pointing
to the long “dream train” tracking shot towards the end of the film, Seitz sees
all of the characters, assembled within different compartments of the train, as
fundamentally equal, whether they are rich or poor, because of their own
mortality. It is significant that all of the characters are placed, against all
laws of narrative logic, in the same space, and shown as connected through the
style as well as there are no cuts between the different compartments. The
tiger in the bushes at the end of the sequence then then becomes an embodiment
of death, Anderson’s grim reaper, a constant reminder of danger and the
inevitability of the characters—and our—own demise, something we can neither
predict nor control, something which is always lurking, on the loose as the
tiger itself in Anderson’s film.
The
most obvious turning point for Peter, Jack, and Francis’s trip, occurs exactly
at the moment in which they come in direct contact with death, and their journey
and the film both take a sharp tonal turn. This change, portrayed in the river
scene, is announced with an abrupt, shaky hand-held zoom onto Francis’s face as
he unceremoniously announces, “Look at those assholes” while peering towards
three boys trying to cross a fast-flowing river. The boys’ raft overturns, and
the Whitmans race to save the boys. Anderson’s camerawork here has a
destabilizing effect on the viewers; we are momentarily jolted and made aware
of an abrupt transition. The potential to shock and displace of this zoom is
just one example of Anderson’s mirroring, through the movement in and of the
frame, of the shock and displacement of the characters’ journey.
Movements
of exploration and tropes of revelation are separated into two distinct
categories in Cinematic Journeys: 1)
slow, steady movements that explore space, discover significant objects and
lead to dramatic revelations, which seem to echo the perception of change as a
steady progression that gradually and incrementally unlocks the mysteries of
the world; and 2) fast and unsettling movements that reveal a key dramatic
object or narrative situation that echo moments of discovery as revolutions
which alter the course of knowledge, destabilizing certainties, revising
narrative trajectories and challenging the perceptions of characters and/or
viewers (Eleftheriotis 77-81). The brothers’ journey in Darjeeling falls into the latter category.
In
the river scene, the abrupt displacement of the exaggerated, rapid camera
movement towards the characters marks a radical shift in both the movie’s tone
and the progression of the characters’ emotional journey, an instance in which
their and our expectations are challenged. The unexpected, drastic tonal shift
of the scene, which James MacDowell links to the “quirky sensibility” of the
new American smart cinema, here takes on a narrative function, the switch to a
more serious mood after the boy’s death reflecting the characters’ realization
that they need to change as well (14-17). The characters’ immersion into the
Ganges River, a life-giving body of water that has been revered by millions in
India as a symbol of spiritual purity for over two millennia, becomes a symbol
of baptism and renewal directly tied to the historical and cultural
significance of the film’s setting. “Man becomes pure by the touch of the
water, or by consuming it, or by expressing its name,” Lord Vishnu, the
four-armed “All Pervading One,” proclaimed in the Ramayana, the Sanscrit epic
poem composed four centuries before Christ (Hammer).
This
is not to say the scene is not problematic in its depiction and role of the
three Indian boys. The first two are recovered safely, but Peter has trouble
with the third. He emerges further downstream, carrying a limp body. “He’s
dea—He’s dead,” he stammers. “I didn’t save mine.” The child becomes, in this
dry formulation, almost like an object or a lost pet, and we must wonder
whether he exists solely to provide impetus for these privileged white Americans.
“Turns out that a dead Indian boy was all the brothers were missing,” Weiner
writes. “This isn’t just heavy-handed,” he continues; “it’s offensive. In a
grisly little bit of developing-world outsourcing, the child does the
bothersome work of dying so that the American heroes won’t have to die
spiritually.” In this and other instances, Darjeeling
has been harshly criticized for its flat, fetishized and romanticized
depiction of India and its people as conduits or tools for white fulfilment;
the brothers are going through something akin to a rehabilitation program with
India serving as the clinic, and “an entire race and culture turned into
therapeutic scenery” (Weiner). Critical literature on the road movie points out
that the cultural significance of any journey is inextricably linked to the
geographical and historical specificity of the traveled space (Eleftheriotis
101). The question has to be raised, whether Anderson is simply using India as
shorthand for spirituality without ever engaging with the land or its people in
any meaningful way. Is he mocking the brothers’ fetishistic attitudes or simply
displaying his own?
There
are, moments—such as when Francis grandly declares, “I love these people,”
seconds after a shoeshine boy has run off with one of his $3,000 loafers—or
when Peter says, “I love how this country smells; it’s … spicy”—in which the
irony-laced portrayal of the characters’ words and actions bespeaks a critique
of the Western view of travel, and of colonialism itself, most obviously in the
choice of Joe Dassin’s “Aux Champs-Elysee” for the end credits sequence. But
the most significant way in which Anderson moves beyond simply using the people
and culture of the film’s setting as a stereotypical, simplified, and
caricatured representation of non-Western spirituality come in his depiction of
the dead boy’s funeral.
There
is nothing funny or ironic in Anderson’s view of the Indian funeral, the entire
ritual played, with almost surprising sincerity, for pathos. The scene prior to
the funeral, in which the dead boy’s father bathes his body while the Americans
wait for their bus, displays a seemingly sincere respect, and even admiration,
for the proceedings. The level of artifice in Anderson’s style seems to drop
momentarily as the soundtrack changes to incorporate quiet, realistic sounds of
the natural environment. It is as if the whole movie takes a step back and
waits in silence for the funeral to begin as the Whitmans start to interact
with the Indian characters in an atmosphere of hushed, unhurried simplicity. This
might be the longest stretch of any of Anderson’s works in which there is
absolutely no dialogue and no hint of self-consciousness or ironic
distanciation from the characters, their surroundings, or the audience. For the
first time the brothers forego their usual attire in favor of traditional
Indian clothing, starting to become immersed in their environment. Long
tracking shots connect the Whitmans with the native community in mourning, and,
when they get on the bus to leave and the dead boy’s brother comes after them
to invite them to stay for the funeral, the camera zooms in on him in as it had
done on the American brothers throughout the rest of the film. For the first
time, Anderson is “looking” at the Indian characters the same way he has his
protagonists. They are all on the same plane, no longer separated through the
framing, cutting, or, as in the scenes at the temple or on the train, production
design and physical placement of the actors within the frame. When Francis
stoops to tell his brothers that they are invited to the funeral, he again addresses
the camera directly, as he did when he explained his expectations of the
Whitman’s trip. This time however, the gesture doesn’t seem as self-conscious,
and it definitely is not played for laughs. Perhaps this is Anderson’s way of
including the viewers into the proceedings of the Indian ritual and inviting
us, as well, to participate as quiet and respectful observers.
The
Indian funeral and that of the Whitmans’ father are combined as the director
flashes back to a year prior, cutting from a three-shot of the brothers in
India, dressed in white, to the near negative-image of the scene, an
identically framed shot of the three characters, all in black, on their way to
the American funeral. The differences between the two settings is stark, the
funeral in India bright, open, and inclusive in comparison to the tense and
almost claustrophobic scenes of the Whitmans in the car and the dealership on
their way to bury their father. We never see this funeral, instead only getting
a glimpse of the brothers driving there. Peter insists on picking up the father’s
car at Luftwaffe Automotive before the funeral, frantically trying to restart
the red Porsche even though the battery is dead, an obvious attempt to not let
go of his father. All three brothers want desperately to go to the funeral in
their father’s car, asserting that it has to be done that way; they are
clinging to the significance and security of objects and rituals to create the
illusion of control. In contrast, the Indian funeral flows naturally and offers
a much stronger sense of closure and fulfilment, the moment suggesting an
emotional undercurrent that binds the brothers with the villagers through grief
(Stephenson).
It
is interesting to note that most everything throughout the movie is only
presented in bits and parts, and often portrays characters in motion. The film
starts with Murray in the car, then moves to the train, from which the brothers
are soon evicted, includes the incomplete memory of the father’s funeral, the
car ride and the failed resurrection of another car, finally ending as the
brothers board another train—it is clear the characters find themselves in a
state of in-betweenness, of arrested development, unable to move on or even to
adequately mourn their loss. Characters
haunted, if not stunted, by mourning are a hallmark of Anderson’s work, but in Darjeeling, more than any other of the
director’s films, we are able to discern the characters’ progression towards
fulfilment, a process that significantly involves the formation of a new
community.
The
only event we witness from beginning to end is the Indian funeral, which starts
the Whitman’s healing process and links them to the native villagers. The
Kinks’ “Strangers” hints at the characters’ embracing of uncertainty and a new
way of thinking (“I’ve killed my world and I’ve killed my time/ So where do I
go, what do I see?”), respect for a different, pointedly less selfish,
materialistic, and individualistic way of life and a sense of connection with
the Other (“So I will follow you wherever you go/ If your offered hand is still
open to me/ Strangers on this road we are on/ We are not two we are one… So we
will share this road we walk/ And mind our mouths and beware our talk/ Till
peace we find tell you what I’ll do/ All the things I own I will share with you/
If I feel tomorrow like I feel today/ We’ll take what we want and give the rest
away/ Strangers on this road we are on/We are not two we are one”).
Francis,
Jack, and Peter must open themselves up to the Other in a way that goes beyond
mere surface and recognize the humanity and subjectivity of the people
surrounding them. “To recognize the other,” Lingis writes, “is to respect the
other” (23). The author makes a distinction between a depth-perception and a
surface-sensitivity to the other. Depth-perception extends beyond a superficial
encounter so one can envision “the road the other has traveled, the obstacles
he has cleared, the heat of the sun he is fleeting” (23).
To
recognize and accept these things is to begin to understand another person in
his or her own environment and to accept and embrace the experiences he or she
has lived through and try to see the world from the other’s point of view, not
only through its position in the physical world but through a deep engagement
with a different cultural coding that is inseparable from this perception
(24-29). It is at this level that the characters can start to understand and
connect with the suffering of another, which can only be grasped when one gives
oneself over to abandon and vulnerability, not to control or change it but
simply to partake in it, as they do in the funeral scene. “This sensitivity
extends not to order the course and heal the substance of the other, but to
feel the feeling of the other” (31). This encounter is always disruptive and,
hence, transformative: the other’s “approach contests my environment, my
practicable layout, and my social arena…. Her approach commands an
understanding that arises out of the sensitivity that is afflicted by her
suffering” (34). The formation of a community with the Other goes beyond the
obligations implied by kinship, a kinship that extends past family resemblance
to incorporate not only one’s lineage, but one’s clan, people, or race. Beyond
the recognition of kinship with those who are like oneself there is another
kind of community, the brotherhood of individuals who possess or produce
nothing in common, “individuals destitute in their mortality” (Lingis 157).
This
community is real not in the exchange on insights, directions, or resources,
but of the life of different individuals, a community in death. To create this
kind of community, “we should have to find ourselves, or put ourselves through
imagination, in a situation at the farthest limits of kinship—a situation in
which one finds oneself in a country with which one’s own is at war, among
foreigners bound in a religion that one cannot believe or which excludes one,
with whom one is engaged in no kind of productive or commercial dealings, who
owe one nothing, who do not understand a word of one’s language” (Lingis 157-58).
The
description above is strikingly similar to the situation the Whitman brothers
find themselves in throughout The
Darjeeling Limited. But, despite all odds, by the end of the film Francis
and his brothers have managed, clumsily and perhaps unexpectedly, just what
they set out to accomplish, a spiritual journey. “I guess I still have some
healing to do,” Francis ventures after he unwraps his head and the three
characters study his battered face in a bathroom mirror. “You’re getting there,
though,” Jack says, while Peter comments, “Anyway, it’s definitely going to add
a lot of character to you.” The obvious couching of emotional ailments in terms
of physical scars notwithstanding, these statements stand true in regard to all
three protagonists. The Whitmans still have some healing to do, but their
pilgrimage has served as an awakening to the need for change. Like all of the
flawed but ultimately redeemable characters of Anderson’s work, the Whitman
brothers start off their typically narcissistic journey concerned only with
their singular, superficial, stubborn, and selfish vision; eventually, they
learn to channel and their actions to move towards collective fulfillment. Traveling
encourages the characters to look inside themselves even as they relinquish
their individuality and need for control to become part of a group in mourning
and align more closely with the environment. Moving away from Western
rationalism and materialism, they undergo a journey of exploration, discovery,
and revelation not only of the world, the land, and its inhabitants, but also,
fundamentally, of the self.
Works Cited
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