The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

directed by Wes Anderson

Moira McAvoy

I always wanted to be a Tenenbaum.

All I want right now is a cigarette. Ideally, a blue-pack American Spirit, the kind I occasionally smoked in front of my freshman dorm—nearly a decade ago—after seeing their packaging featured in DIY gifs reblogged on tumblr dot com. A respiratory pandemic holds America tightly in its grasp and I personally currently feel like my brain has been replaced by mucus, but my life, in the grand and small schemes, feels like it is simultaneously static and spiraling out, and as a result all I want is to cause just a little intentional self-destruction in the form of moodily dragging on an American Spirit on our fire escape, looking out onto Capitol Hill as the Cure plays from my iPhone.

I have spent much of my months-long coronavirus quarantine regressing. Quarantine life, in many ways, resembles a summer afternoon in early high school: there’s an entire world out there, filled with experiences and possibility and friends, but it can’t be responsibly accessed (then for lack of a license, now for fear of facilitating a global pandemic), so instead focus shifts to “exciting” mundane outings, like the grocery store or a walk, and then to reanimating the long-dead hyperfixations that used to fill endless Augusts before. I’ve listened to an immeasurable amount of One Direction, ska, and Fueled By Ramen-era pop punk, and I yet again have an uncomfortably intense crush on Taylor Swift. I have rewatched the entirety of Glee three times, and have nearly re-memorized Richard Siken’s Crush. Removed from the trappings of nine-to-five life and distant from any regular adult social mores, I find myself feeling smaller, more insular, more bewildered by the world around me and thereby more attached to the things which initially helped me make sense of that bewildering world in the first place. Naturally, I have also yet again been looping The Royal Tenenbaums on my overheating bedside laptop.

I don’t remember how old I was when I first saw the Royal Tenenbaums, or even how I first saw it. I say I was in high school, but I’m not entirely sure that that’s true. As a friend quips, it’s like a generation of quirky millennials simply had the film microchipped into our brains during adolescence; it wasn’t part of us until it was, and then its presence in our identities was impenetrable. The timeline doesn’t matter, anyway. I always wanted to be a Tenenbaum.

Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums follows the members of the eponymous Tenenbaum family as they navigate an adult life of disarray, deceit, and disappointment after a blazing decade in the spotlight as a clan of geniuses. The three Tenenbaum children—Chas the financier, Richie the tennis star, and Margot the (adopted) playwright—have all returned to their childhood home in hopes of respite in the wake of personal cataclysms, only to be followed quickly by their estranged father’s fallacious announcement that he is dying of cancer as a bid to win back his separated-but-not-divorced wife. Tension ensues with all of the Tenenbaums under the same roof for the first time in decades, the film blossoming into a twee tale of uneasy love and uneven growth. Like many Anderson projects, it has a terrific heart, biting wit, and an all-star cast to carry its more ludicrous plot lines and occasionally kitschy aesthetics into reality. It deftly navigates issues like substance abuse, mental illness, and trauma with an almost detached reverence, and allows all of its very flawed characters to find a small sort of grace when all is said and done. It is the perfect sort of film for a nebulously sad teenager searching for a sense of beauty in their suffering.

Below its highly aestheticized appearance, The Royal Tenenbaums is a deeply human, deeply lived-in film with deeply human, deeply lived-in characters. Its legacy nearly two decades down the line, however, tells a slightly different story. The first result upon googling “margot tenenbaum” a week ago was a video entitled “Margot Tenenbaum: Anatomy of a Style Icon,” the splash page a collage of Gwenth Paltrow’s face, Margot’s now infamous fur coat, loafers, an Hermes bag, a note pad, kohl eye-liner. Scrolling further finds much of the same, save for the literal Wikipedia article about the film. Though much of the movie’s emotional throughline revolves around her brothers, Margot has become the most emblematic member of the clan, the fulcrum of the discourse who has arguably grown into a cultural symbol beyond the memory of the film itself. She is stoic and aloof, secretive and seductive, simultaneously troubled and unbothered, a beautiful and tragic genius.

Margot’s aesthetic is iconic, of course—I have spent years trying to find a suitably similar fur coat—but her real appeal is how controlled her inner turmoil seems to be. Though she remains eternally cool in the face of her family’s dramas—and in the face of her own, like when her face stays blank as the tip of her finger is chopped off as a teeenager—Margot is not immune from her share of suffering: she hasn’t completed a play in seven years, is trapped in an ambivalent marriage while carrying on an affair with Richie’s best friend (and fellow writer) Eli Cash while actually being in love with Richie, and is very obviously depressed. She is flailing and unmoored like her brothers. Yet, while Chas has a panic attack and a fire-drill-fueled nervous breakdown, and Richie spends a year isolated at sea, Margot, in adulthood, engages in no exceptionally grandiose self-destructive coping mechanisms. She sleeps around, she smokes in secret, she soaks endlessly in the bathtub, watching television. Margot bears her pain in a pedestrian way, molding her sadness into a part of her; it’s not something which is performed, it simply is. She is a mess of a person who does not in any way have it together but who precisely, specifically exudes an energy of not caring to have any of it together. Her calamity seems to be enough—a tantalizing concept. Nobody says they want to be a Richie, but there are pages and pages of blogs devoted to wanting to be a Margot.

I always wanted to be a Tenenbaum.

It makes sense then, that while I say that I modeled much of myself after Margot Tenenbaum, that is only partially true. My attempt at an evolution into a Moody Distant Genius (not to be confused with a Manic Pixie Dream Girl) had begun long before I ever possibly saw the film, and one of its main characters happened to fit the perfect mold for my self-vision. I was a painfully emotional adolescent. My home life was tense, to say the least, featuring complicated relationships to parents who had complicated relationships with themselves, on top of my budding array of mental illnesses and desperate teenage insecurity. The entire world felt like too much, all the time, and like I had to be its emotional arbiter, the sole stopgap keeping everything—everything—from falling apart.  I threw myself into theater and writing and blasting music and staying out with friends and staying up too late on the computer in an effort to channel all of the pain of my own difficult family life (and the general experience of Being A Teen) anywhere but within myself, and I hated myself for it. I hated how small it made me feel, my need to act out or act against instead of just being. I hated feeling so controlled by something beyond me. I hated myself because none of it seemed to be working; I never felt any smarter, or more assured, or better. I hated feeling so uncool.

I had a perfect vision of who I wanted to be when I was young. I would live in an old brownstone in a bustling Northeastern city—maybe Manhattan, maybe Boston, somewhere with brisk air and leaves on the ground—after graduating from a Prestigious Institution where I had been popular, lauded, and fully engaged in student life. There would be a lot of cardigans, and Oxfords, and gallons of black coffee by day before switching to whiskey at night. Maybe I would have a dog, and a husband, and go on road trips up the coast in an impractical classic Woodie. I would be a writer and professor, of course—a tortured artist, still sad, but expounding upon my Feelings with clarity and wit and also feeling somehow fulfilled and whole after having done so, as if the act of writing about the emotions and traumas would absolve them, as if the sadness would have purpose. I would appear effortlessly put together, elegantly disheveled despite desperate Inner Turmoil. There would be a fascinating tension about the way I, someone so tortured, carried myself so stylishly and with such intelligence; I would be Cool. I wanted to be a character in a Vampire Weekend song, or a Salinger novel, or a Margot Tenenbaum, and of course I did. I was seventeen; I knew nothing about anything beyond myself and my sadness and self-destruction and the art that made sadness and self-destruction beautiful.

Though Margot is the character who most immediately comes to mind for me when thinking about Tenenbaums, Eli Cash is the character I think about the most. As previously noted, Eli is Richie’s childhood best friend turned literary celebrity, thanks to a series of revisionist Western novels. Whereas the Tenenbaums seem to be naturally acclimated to their success and ability, Eli exudes insecurity & a palpable need for approval. An early scene in the film finds Margot, in her first adult appearance, telling Eli over the phone—from the tub—that she thinks he is not a genius, after he asks, saying that she “doesn’t use that word lightly.” Her exhaustion with the concept is so visceral it still makes me want to crawl out of my skin. Despite his book sales, accolades, and the outward markers of success and approval—none of which the Tenenbaums currently have—we see Eli still desperately yearning for approval, spiraling out in his substance misuse and his pursuit of Margot while knowing she’s in love with Richie. Eli is a mess, and his success being, to him, never enough only seems to make it worse. Eli is not innately a genius in the way the Tenenbaums were, and he knows it all too well. As someone who wanted desperately to be a Margot, I could not imagine a future worse than being an Eli.

A scene that sticks with me: Richie and his father are interventioning Eli about his drug usage. Unpromoted, while Richie waits for an explanation or answer, Eli looks Richie straight in the eye, and earnestly says, “I always wanted to be a Tenenbaum, ya know?” Royal replies with, “Me too, me too.” The moment is played for laughs—Royal is THE Royal Tenenbaum—but it hits me to my core, especially when Eli coyly follows up with, “I guess that doesn’t mean what it used to, does it?”

I always wanted to be a Tenenbaum. I always wanted to be tortured, to be brilliant, to be stylish in a way that is anachronistic and inimitable, no matter how many Halloween costumes it inspires. I wanted to have a beautiful life in tandem with my sadness—because of my sadness—instead of in spite of it. I wanted my sadness to be admirable, respectable, successful.

Another scene that sticks with me: Royal is confronting Margot about cheating on her husband with Eli, and shouts, “You used to be a genius.” In one of the few moments of visible emotion in Paltrow’s perfectly muted performance, Margot’s eyes flit towards the door as she sighs, saying, “No, I wasn’t.”

More than just diving headfirst into the media that made me who I am, I am also spending quarantine analyzing every decision that has brought me to the life I have. I have very little of what I envisioned for myself a decade ago; no prestigious degree, no brownstone, no lauded literary career. I don’t want a husband. I’ve barely written in the six months I’ve spent in lockdown. I am, I think, definitively not a genius. I am also, notably, not as desperately tortured. I look very little like Margot, and much more like Eli, though maybe it is more like Eli at the end, twirling a lasso and talking about the weather.

For a character whose costume design is thoroughly dissected and replicated, we do not hear much about why Margot’s outfits are what they are. Her LaCoste tennis dresses and barrets are an exact mirror of what she wore as a child, as is Richie’s tennis uniform (worn well past his retirement). Eli, Chas, and the rest, meanwhile, wear different clothing, and ultimately get to grow as characters in a way Richie and Margot do not. Chas begins to overcome his anxiety and mends his relationship with Royal; Eli goes to rehab and seems to find a significant inner peace. Richie is no longer suicidal and Margot finally finishes a play, but they still seem trapped in their own angst-filled adolescence, the sadness they’ve carried seems to follow them, just as it did when they were children. Of course it does; it is part of them.

Moira McAvoy lives & writes in Washington, DC. Her work has previously appeared in The Rumpus, The Financial Diet, and Storyscape, among others, and she has served on the editorial staff of The Rappahannock Review and NANOfiction. You can find her on Twitter @moyruhjo.