Boys in the Corner

Time was, everyone who wanted to wear the Artist Hero's wreath of flowers had to step into the ring. Norman Mailer cemented this routine by decamping from Harvard to combat in the South Pacific, returning to write the jaundiced great American war novel at the salty age of 24. He perpetuated this model by sussing out his literary rivals' weak spots in the cruel, clear-eyed essay "Evaluations: Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room" (a model for harsh literary criticism ever since). After Norman and his spiritual godfather Papa Hemingway, every American artist had to play, to some extent, the hard-hearted paterfamilias. Even the epicene Gore Vidal, who lived in a Roman villa, made his bones by getting into near-head-butting matches on TV with Mailer and William F. Buckley. By the '70s, female artists who wanted to share the glory had to strap on fatherly postures and grip brass knuckles. The filmmaker Lina Wertmüller, turning the Holocaust into a coarse porno cartoon; Patti Smith, donning the sweat-stained wifebeater of her forefathers; Erica Jong bracing her hips against the airplane's bathroom sink--all of them had to get their bad-ass ticket punched before they could take center stage.

Where a Scotch-sozzled Big Bruiser once ran onto the fire escape with a roar, rolling up his or her sleeves to challenge the whole U.S. of A. to step outside, now a smallish fellow in a knit cap and woolen sweater sits in the corner with a box of chocolate milk, giggling at his own inadvertent burps. Where Pops built skyscraper-sized mirrors to reflect a metastasizing society, Junior lives in a world we might call Mini-Micro-Narcissus. Son of Big Bruiser, I name you LittleBlue SmurfBoy™--after the fetish of your patron saint, Donnie Darko, the most sensitive and martyred of your kind. I take this moment to examine the markings of your race, as evinced by your most applauded manifestations: novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, filmmaker Wes Anderson, and musician Conor Oberst.

Of all the celebrated SmurfBoys of the moment, 24-year-old Oberst is for sure the most little and most blue. I can't recall a single live performance that filled me with as much rage as Oberst's unsmiling warm-up for Belle & Sebastian at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles, in which an anti-Iraq war variation on his current song "Road to Joy" climaxed with Oberst closing his bright eyes and rendering the mock-ecstatic windup--"Let's fuck it up, boys, let's make some noise"--as a literally shivering paean to his own too-raw nerve endings. "Let's fffffuckitup, boys!" Oberst shuddered, his plosive F a talisman of his too-sensitive-to-live fragility. (Even serenading Leno with "When the President Talks to God" can't redeem that long evening.) On his early 2005 album I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, Oberst the composer devises variations on Robbie Robertson's shambling antebellum melodies that have a crawling-kudzu creepiness, like Matthew Brady photos of carpetbaggers staring shell-shocked into space. But damned if every song isn't shellacked by Oberst's penchant for teen-drama-queen melodrama. No lyric clink of image-shards or exhausted wheeze of Jon Brionesque hurdy-gurdy is permitted to stand its own ground. No, all must be subjugated to the sniffly one's deluge of sensations, impressions, and feelings. (Maybe that's why the title suggests the first, early a.m. words of a demonically overprecocious child.)

Wes Anderson is perhaps the dean of the LittleBlue SmurfBoys™, having plied his middle-schooler wares for the past decade. Of this trinity of Smurfs, Young Master Wes seems to show the most promise as, if not a Big Bruiser, surely a Soigné Uptown Sophisticate. Where a stunted self-regarder like Oberst seems condemned to an incommunicative trance, the 36-year-old Anderson is aware enough of the lineage of movie auteurs as lion-taming showmen to, some day, escape his autistic fugue state.

In his bizarrely engineless recent effort, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Anderson left the Broadway aspirations of The Royal Tenenbaums to plunge headlong into a silo stuffed with a haut-bourgeois 12-year-old kid's fetish objects. No longer concerned with suspense or surprise, or even story or character, Anderson gives himself a consolation massage as the screen widens with little red ski caps, zany matching Nike tracksuits, Hottentots out of Master Wes's moth-eaten National Geographics, and a series of nautical vehicles that recall the playthings of bath time. Never mastering the rhythm or even the plastic elements of a satisfying tale, Anderson contents his hipster audience by asking, "Wasn't it cool when you were 12 and you really loved [ A Wrinkle in Time/the wallpaper in the Plaza/old New Yorker cartoons/brown Izod shirts on girls...etc. etc.]?" Still, the winning noblesse oblige of Anderson's audio commentaries on the Criterion DVDs of Rushmore and Tenenbaums leave me thinking that the director might one day possess the character traits of a functioning adult.