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The Grand Illusion Hotel

作者: 淼淼    人气: 2385    日期: 2014/6/11

The Grand Illusion Hotel I took some time to wade through my exhausting collection of film and television collections the other day. What I found when I tried to start organising them was that when I changed one of the toolbar options to ‘Most Played’, Wes Anderson’s work had the most appearances in my Top 10. It was definitely a delightful surprise, like all Wes Anderson films are-grandiose humour and overblown yet dream-like intricate sets and characters with quaint quirks all with a sophisticated aesthetic veneer and dialogue. When you walk away from one of his films, you leave with a light-hearted joy and one of those little half-smiles that will surface time and time again when you think back to one memorable scene or another. It was with his latest and 8th feature film-The Grand Budapest Hotel that I choose to base my words today on. Here is the plot from Empire.com: An author recalls a visit he made in the ‘60s to what was once one of Europe’s most luxurious hotels. There, the young author meets its owner, Mr. Moustafa, who tells how he came to inherit the building from M. Gustave. One of the themes present in the film, is that fading world of gentility and culture giving way to one of brutish crudeness represented by the violence of the Fascist troops. In this, I was perhaps reminded back to my own selfsame desire for the illusion of high school to stay with me in my first post. M. Gustave: You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. Indeed that is what we provide in our own modest, humble, insignificant... oh, fuck it! It is within all of us, I think, for some little part at least, that thinks and regards society as a collections of blunt uncultured brutes that cares little for what truly matters in life. Or not? I am told I assume and presume too much for my own good, extrapolating my own views onto others as I argue. As the movie moves on, we realise that M. Gustave’s world is one that is quickly fading and being taken over by a new world order one that strips away the grandeur and refined elegance to simplicity and monochromes of colour-in attention-seeking orange and yellow. He maintains the hotel as the solid illusion of his civilisation. I can see why he and others would want to maintain an illusion of sorts, *hint hint* Blanche DuBois. It is because we all have a need to believe in them. No, I don’t believe all life is an illusion, but there are moments when we must delude ourselves or a section of our lives for namely personal and psychological reasons-for hope. The great part of these self-created illusions is that they can also be self-fulfilling. When one gets oneself into believing in the illusion that you can master a certain thing well, one will very often also learn to master it with due time. This can happen, even if in the beginning one could just be flying without wings, We are often kept afloat just by an illusion. Losing these illusions could again easily lead into desperation and despair. However, even most of the time we just need to fool ourselves up to some point. If we would really know the true limits of our understanding, expertise and knowledge, we would not dare do anything demanding. Happily all of the people live in the same kind of bubbles of illusion. We do live in a world of commonly build illusions. We think that the other people do have the necessary understanding, expertise and knowledge that we deep down always will suspect that we are lacking ourselves. Similarly other people do trust us in a similar way, mainly because nobody ever reveals their real self-doubts to others. One could say that it is a really good thing that the true state of things is never revealed to us. Maintaining the common illusion of understanding, expertise and knowledge keeps us safe from despairing on the fact with how little true understanding, expertise and knowledge the world is really run on. It brings me to the virtue of honesty, maybe something I will talk about next time. But here I leave with Zero’s words. Mr. Moustafa: To be frank, I think his world had vanished long before he ever entered it - but, I will say: he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvellous grace!