ABSTRACT
It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that in a recent article for Cinema Journal Devin Orgeron suggested that both Wes Anderson’s fi lms and the director himself engage overtly with authorship debates in ways that refl ect the impact of DVD technology; moreover, Orgeron did so in a way that aligned Anderson’s work, albeit trepidatiously, with what he called the “‘director as auteur’ hardliners.” 3 In short, Orgeron argues that DVD technology has inaugurated a new age of the cinematic author, and Anderson not only engages with the technology in order to mediate his own self-image but also creates fi lm characters who — in addition to often literally being authors as playwrights, novelists, and academics — are in a sense ‘authors’ of the stories of which they are a part. As such, these characters might be seen as refl ections of the director himself; they offer a means to acknowledge the centrality of Wes Anderson as an ‘auteur,’ complicated as that might be both by the charged debates surrounding authorship discourse in fi lm studies and Anderson’s desire to ‘deauthorize’ himself by situating his creative contributions in a more collaborative framework.
