The auteur American filmmaker Wes Anderson admires the flabbergasting twentieth-century British writer Roald Dahl. Anderson’s fun film Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) poses the classic Dahl novel as puppetry with attitude as told in the movie’s memorable punk line “what the cuss”. Just as Dahl’s stories are intended for shock and whimsy for children and adults alike, Anderson’s movies mix emotions of pathos and comedic possibility for all ages.
Netflix recently dropped four short Wes Anderson films based on Roald Dahl tales: Poison, The Ratcatcher, The Swan, and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. Taken together, these fast talking and sparse vignettes feature seeing in new and transformative ways. In each of these films, offbeat characters see the scurrilous and the stupendous, or, what may be called by Christian theologians, law and gospel. Anderson meticulously reveals the underside of tragedy as comedy in order to see something new.
The four short films function stylistically like a kaleidoscope. Similarly, as a kaleidoscope sees the same in different ways, each of the four films shakes up perceptions and sees many of the same actors and styles in changing roles and patterns of transformation. As the recent Anderson film Asteroid City (2023) focused on the makings of a modern theatre production, these short films morph audio books and Reading Rainbow to make stories come to life in surprising ways. All of the stories are told in a minimalist style and the medium focuses viewers on seeing the different and the sublime.
Wes Anderson’s minimalist kaleidoscope takes on Roald Dahl tales compare to the art of visualizing stories from a pulpit. The Scriptures point out that in this fallen world humanity sees in an enigma, a distorted kaleidoscope. Through the grace of the Holy Spirit appears the promise to see the spectacular. In the dramatic dynamic of law and gospel, Christian preachers proclaim what the Holy Spirit enlightens by the enlivened Word.
In Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Comedy, Tragedy, and Fairy Tale, Frederick Buechner sees Christian preachers as envisioning the tragedy of sin and death, the comedy of a happy ending in Christ, and the fairy tale of lives transformed in the Holy Spirit in time and for eternity. Wes Anderson’s short films on stories of Roald Dahl preach – or project – in a secular way the scurrilous and the stupendous in the converging horizon of tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale.
Seeing tragedy: Poison shows the lurking evil of racism. The invisible snake of the film is the insidious venom of racism that infects the heart of the story’s white protagonist. Convinced that he sees a snake instead of his own enmity, the short film shows the unseen evil of hate that lies beneath so-called polite society. In The Swan, tragedy unfolds in the malicious shenanigans of two stupid pre-adolescent brutes against the innocent swan-boy. The Ratcatcher uncovers candy as containing rats’ blood. The vain and listless Henry Sugar compares to seaweed. Like shaking a kaleidoscope depicting the cruel and terrible, throughout the four films viewers repeatedly confront uncomfortable truths of everyday life.
Seeing comedy and happy endings: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar plays out the pathos of being turned from the self to the other, and the resulting new possibility of multiplying mercy. Henry Sugar sees a way to see without eyes. At first, he attempts to see without eyes in order to gamble and profiteer. Yet somehow with a powerful electricity beyond simple sight, the marvelous idea to give the money to orphanages and hospitals heuristically appears and changes everything. It is as if Henry Sugar puts down the kaleidoscope of the past, and sees in an original way. As the film notes, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar must have a true and not a cliché ending: the felicitous truth that even the vain find meaning and purpose in agape.
Seeing fairy tale: In The Swan the persecuted and near dead Peter Watson becomes a resurrected swan. As in a fairy tale, he can fly and return to his mother. As the film teaches, some have an indominable spirit. Little Peter Watson was one of these. He could survive and even soar amidst hate, and while some people crumble, those who see what could and indeed can be are unconquerable.
All of the short films involve seeing truth in different ways and converge in the hopeful transformation of Henry Sugar who changes from the scurrilous to the stupendous. Henry Sugar sees in different ways, and while the film never explains how this seeing happens, nonetheless, supranatural change occurs.
Faith is another way of seeing, not with the eyes, but with the heart, which enlightens sinners to see salvation for the scurrilous (law) in the stupendous love of God (gospel): the catharsis of the truth in tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale. The impossible is possible for even rogues like the Apostle Paul who against all odds see grace and live transformed by mercy. While Henry Sugar’s life was a conundrum of boredom and greed, he discovers what Saint Paul deems the most excellent way of charity. Stories like this, as Roald Dahl’s character himself tells us at the end of Henry Sugar, are indeed true: the stupendous is possible even for you.
Rev. Dr. Joshua Hollmann is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Concordia University, St. Paul, and a Wes Anderson aficionado who is currently writing Theology and Wes Anderson for Lexington Books and Fortress Academic.
