Isle of Dogs: a commentary on the skeletons in our collective closet

I honestly thought Wes Anderson wanted to make a cute doggo movie set in Japan.

I mean, that's what people saw in those trailers, right? Dogs saying funny things, the Japanese kid not doing much, the obligatory cultural tourism of Japan that's somehow more passionate than Logan Paul throwing plush Pokéballs at random taxis in Setagaya AND somehow more stereotypical than the '80s "Japan economic conquest" imagery of contemporary pop culture and early vaporwave, the symmetrical framing, the usage of chapters as if you were reading a storybook, etc.

Wes Anderson is a pretty controversial figure. I've heard the racism angle many a time, all the way when he did The Darjeeling Limited. Now, I hadn't seen the film - I saw the opening, but not the rest of it - so I can't say for certain if he was aiming at the same subversive critique of power structures that I think he was getting at here, but I know a lot of people have problems with it due to its cultural tourism and his more cynical use of cultural appropriation (i.e. he made the film to make a quick buck off of being that mainstream director who sang the praises of Satyajit Ray and the Parallel Cinema pioneers, but not actively push to get a really good Bollywood movie into more than 300 theaters over here), not to mention that the story's mostly centered around three white guys dealing with their own set of problems.

I even heard the racism angle when people gave negative reviews of The Royal Tenenbaums. Royal's loyal Indian servant, his ex-wife's black fiancé - those ticked off some people. I get it. I really do. Like, as captivating as Danny Glover is in that film and how he can get a pretty good zinger here and there, he doesn't have something equivalent to the emotional weight of Ritchie's attempted suicide nor something as funny as Chas trying to hold a fire drill, only to declare his own sons "dead" because they took a bit too long.

Hell, even I heard people cry racism when people reviewed Fantastic Mr. Fox because of how Fox was scared of wolves, but I saw that more as him being scared of the unknown (some people see it as his abandoned potential due to him having to raise Ash; others see it as his fear of growing old, dying and not contributing anything of note) and his midlife crisis really getting to him - he's afraid that if he comes face to face with the literal symbol of what he used to be/could have been, he'll feel empty.

And I'm sure there's some people who didn't like The Grand Budapest Hotel - his best movie by the way (or at least until today) - because Zero himself wasn't as charismatic compared to the inimitable M. Gustave

But I haven't seen the racism critiques en masse as much as Isle of Dogs.

First, it was the Los Angeles Times' critique. Then it was a series of Tweets by Will Toledo (of Car Seat Headrest fame - off-topic: I love the hell out of Teens of Denial. One of the best albums of all time), stating that it's the worst/weakest Wes Anderson film he's seen, asking "like. why. why is it racist. why is it written as a joyless kid's film when it's specifically designed to be alienating and inappropriate for kids. why is it so fucking ugly."

Even SlashFilm put out an article regarding the film's idiosyncrasies and its racial shortcomings.

Slate even came out with an article about what it was like to watch Isle of Dogs as a native Japanese speaker. The consensus: kinda boring, since most of the Japanese dialogue was pretty straight-forward and had little of the character of the "translated barks" or the conviction of Koyu Rankin's determined and heartfelt performance as Atari Kobayashi. Also, half the dialogue was muffled as an artistic choice that might have backfired a little too hard. Just a little. A smidge.

But when I watched it - with all of those perspectives in mind - I got a chilling narrative of coming to terms with the skeletons in our collective closet. Through imagery that I thought was more befitting of K-Tel Presents the Best of Japan (the country), the white savior, the dogs having more personality than the humans, the soba shops, the sushi poisonings, the toxic wasabi, the black-and-white TVs straight out of the early "made in Japan" era of manufacturing, etc., I was fooled into a movie that used imagery from the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, Dr. Josef Mengele's horrifying surgeries, Hitler's Final Solution, the smallpox blankets of Native American extermination lore, the creation of Native American reservations, the Fukushima disaster, and even the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to communicate a story about how utterly monstrous and ultimately self-destructive racism is.

I am convinced Wes Anderson used cultural tourism to show us the skeletons in our closet.

Think of how Crispin Glover tried to have a discussion on the value we put on symbols in his movie What Is It? You know the movie - the one where people with Down syndrome salt snails, wear blackface and call themselves Michael Jackson, insert kitsch art of a naked Shirley Temple doing things she shouldn't be doing with a riding crop, blah blah blah, the one that Kyle Kallgren of Chez Apocalypse and YouTube video essay community fame had a total breakdown over (before having to take it down because the film hasn't officially been released on home video)?

It seems to me that Crispin Glover was trying to talk to us about how using Michael Jackson as an example of the good black celebrity despite turning him into the same sort of minstrel show stereotype for our amusement - and also tried to deconstruct the inherent goodness and inherent evil of people with mental and physical disabilities, trying to destigmatize disability by showing these people as three-dimensional.

The problem is: he wasn't that good at communicating his ideas. It just feels like simple edgelordery for the sake of being an edgelord. He even expressed it in his official thesis of the film, one he's stated at several screenings: what is offense? Why are the things we consider offensive considered offensive? Rather than look at the history behind the imagery, he merely tries to recast it in his collage-esque style - the offensive imagery he uses ends up being just another tool for him to make an increasingly surreal film. The blackface, the sexualization of child stars, the use of disabled actors in sociopathic and seemingly symbolic roles - all of those are there just so Glover can make something that feels like him. In summary, he wants to make a film that feels weird for the sake of being weird. And with that, he takes out of a lot of the weight of his thesis and the intent behind using the offensive imagery - and turns it all into mere set dressing that happens to be extremely offensive.

I know the reason why he doesn't have a home video release for What Is It? is because he'd rather explain what each symbol means at live screenings, but I have a feeling that if he were try to release it on video, he'd have a difficult time trying to find a distributor, much less outlets that can carry copies of the film. Everybody knows it as the "salting snails and Down syndrome actors" movie - Glover's usage of those actors would cause something of a minor moral panic since, unlike similarly provocative films like Irreversible or Medium Cool, you can't figure out on most casual and in-depth viewings what everything means. And besides, if Glover would rather keep the film as a live experience, then so be it. At least Matt Barney released DVDs of the Cremaster Cycle so we can figure out what's going on. At least Ryan Trecartin - one of my favorite video artists (thank you for showing A Family Finds Entertainment, Minky) - uploads his work on Vimeo so that you can experience his stuff even when it's not being exhibited.

By the way, I'm still waiting for Hollywood to let Ryan Trecartin make a movie his own way. I'd pay top dollar for that.

At least I can understand where Barney and Trecartin are coming from, unlike Glover.

Here's a much better example of what I was trying to talk about: think of how Tom Green echoed the sentiments of his studio heads and producers in the film Freddy Got Fingered, a film that was, until really recently, almost universally reviled as one of the worst films ever made. Several bits of dialogue mirror conversations and their intent - albeit reworded so that studio legalese is turned into Dave Daveson (Anthony Michael Hall) giving Gord Brody (Tom Green) a somewhat in-depth critique on why X-Ray Cat doesn't work as a pitch or a customer at a sandwich shoppe asks why Gord is skimping on the cheese - so that you're given what they actually mean.

The cheese the customer demands, in tandem with the cheese sandwich factory (in Hollywood, no less), are the cliches in movies: the family crisis, the romance, the feel-good message about being yourself, the American Dream being fulfilled. Dave telling Gord the pitch is bad and asking him to revise it feels like an out-of-touch studio head trying to tell Tom Green that an over-the-top slapstick prank film about his attempts at selling The Tom Green Show to American cable networks circa 1997-98 is bad because "I don't believe you followed a pizza guy around and stole his delivery client by offering an less pricey pizza just to make a joke on how competition in capitalism is an ineffective joke."

Thank of that sort of subversion: taking the stuff that people want to leave out of movies...and using them to such a sickening degree in order to comment on why that stuff is commonplace/why it even exists. Freddy Got Fingered uses the cliched sentimental moments and the studio-mandated romance subplot - combined with decoder scenes like Dave chewing out Gord, Gord piling way too much government cheese on a sub sandwich, or the background actor holding up a sign at the end saying "when the fuck is this movie going to end?" as if to comment on the insane ending fatigue the film deliberately invokes, of course - to comment on terrible cash-in products, Hollywood becoming more about commerce than art, and why the major studios are not your friends. Also, Tom Green swinging a baby by the umbilical cord is funny.

Similarly, Isle of Dogs uses decoder scenes - ones that state the themes of the film and what it's trying to state - in order to communicate the idea that we have been conditioned to accept otherism (read: racism, sexism, homophobia, cissexism) by our governments and culture. However, unlike Freddy Got Fingered, where the decoder scenes are inserted at random intervals during the film (thus requiring an obscene amount of views in order to fully comprehend the film), the set-up and world-building of Isle of Dogs is the decoder.

In America, we tend to exoticize outside cultures. It happens in most action films that take place outside of America - hell, it even happens in movies that take place in big cities that have specialty minority neighborhoods. Anything that isn't iconically American is foreign - and it's kinda boring, to say the least. When I'm watching a film that has a scene in any sort of Chinatown, we get open-air markets, dim sum restaurants, people on bicycles, etc. Similarly, when I'm watching a film that takes place in a low-income neighborhood or deep within the city, chances are it's gonna be full of antagonistic black people. It's that sort of visual shorthand that we've grown accustomed to. I've been raised on it all my life - mostly through the media I've consumed. Even comedy films I adore have elements of this - Mr. Wing's shop in Gremlins is your usual Chinatown antiques shop, full of objects that we don't immediately recognize but consider to be Chinese anyway (even down to the mogwais themselves); National Lampoon's Vacation has a gag (that doesn't age well at all) where the Griswolds drive into an inner-city black neighborhood and ask for directions, all the while various street kids steal the hubcaps from the new family car; even Big Hero 6, one of the underrated Disney films of the past decade. uses a lot of visual shorthand to properly define San Fransokyo (Asian architectural motifs mixed with the city-of-glass-mixed-with-a-small-town feel of San Francisco).

It gets worse when you go further back into film history. A lot of minority characters were left as basic stereotypes, which often meant that the actors playing them got all of the flack for even playing them. Actors like Sessue Hayakawa, Hattie McDaniel, Anna May Wong, Stepin Fetchit (yes, even that guy), etc. often had to play stereotypical roles because, as usual in Hollywood, they made films that had to "play in Peoria," which often meant that they had to appeal to their biases. And those biases were often infuriatingly racist. Asian people were either really meek or sly tricksters trying to get your white women and put them into slavery. Black people were either all buffoons, long-suffering help, or chronic criminals. Latino people were all slackers or car freaks - and trust me, it irks me whenever I listen to Uncle Meat and Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers, both made by then-leftist types.

Even predominantly white cultures often went through this exoticism - British culture is often summarized as Piccadilly Square, downtown London, the rural English countryside, etc; France is that, but replace London with Paris and Piccadilly Square with Champs-Elysees; Germans are usually humorless with very unimaginative architecture OR people still having those Nazi hunger pangs.

I get it, I really do - you think you can sum up every single nuance of a culture in two hours? No! You can't! You need visual signifiers in order to show what kind of world you're trying to depict. Like, I get it - it's just that maybe we don't need to have open-air markets in every movie that has an Asian locale.

With that said, there's the problem of "cultural tourism," where you try to look at things often ignored and yet are recognizably part of that culture. Well, I shouldn't say a problem since, as with all matters related to cultural appropriation, it's meant to be used as a neutral term. Anything, regardless of how much respect and effort you put into your piece of art, is going to be appropriative of something, especially when you're dealing with a work that takes place in a culture you weren't a part of. Not only do you run the risk of heavily exoticizing the outside culture and/or glamorizing the most popular parts of it, you can easily screw up the worldbuilding by focusing too much on what makes that culture comparatively weird. Focus too much on drag culture and leather bars and you don't have an accurate depiction of LGBT subcultures - well, I should say "focus too much on how weird drag culture and leather bars are compared to your suburban existence" to get the point home. Yeah, drag is going to be weird. Yeah, seemingly straight but actually bisexual people are going to weird.

Weird to you, the cisgender heterosexual person in suburbia. You rarely run into that subculture of a daily basis. Hell, outside of a few small-town LGBT folk - maybe the occasional ContraPoints here and there - you don't have much interaction with that part of the culture, so of course when you try to write a story that you have no direct part of, you're going to have a shallow understanding of it.

The appropriative aspect of it comes when you profit off of your story. You, the outsider, making money off of something that isn't yours. Again, it's not a bad thing - it's just how the intersection of art and commerce works (I'm pretty sure Andrew Lloyd Webber isn't related to any of the early Christians in any way, but even though Jesus Christ Superstar is technically appropriative of ancient Israelite and early Christian mythos, it's in no way an infuriatingly evil work of art) - but it can be if you're so cynical and set in your ways that you don't want to explore the nuances of the culture you're exploring but rather do it to make a quick buck. Think of how those foodies tried to make "authentic Mexican-style tortillas" by looking at somebody make their own homemade recipe and then profit off of it by opening up a restaurant celebrating their "unique spin" on that food. It's that cynical level of appropriation that people don't want.

Isle of Dogs obviously has a ton of love and care for Japanese culture. Sure, it's the usual gamut of kabuki, sushi, haikus, technological concerns, and whatever, but a lot of its aesthetic borrows heavily from what Tokyo looked like in the 1950s. With the black-and-white old-style TVs, the oddly low-tech robot dogs (compared to the shiny, sleek futures of Blade Runner and Johnny Mnemonic), the sense of close community, the lack of anything we relate to modern Japan (maybe outside of the security camera footage being 2D drawings of the real-life puppets - apparently that borrows heavily from anime, but even then, it borrows more from Astro Boy than it does Dragon Ball), and even the fear of outside cultures trying to undermine Japan's own autonomy (down to the choice of the citizens of Megasaki City understanding loud and clear what Tracy has to say, but responding in their own language because, by God, it's their right to speak in whatever language they want) all hint at a 1950s-style future. Think of Fallout's pre-War future - looks kinda like 1950s suburbia, but with a lot of futuristic tech, but that futuristic tech looks more like your TV set more than your neighbor's Space Age bachelor pad (where he won't turn down his Esquivel records EVEN THOUGH YOU HAVE TO WAKE UP IN THE MORNING because he has to be more of a Space Age bachelor than Aaron Clarey of "I'm one of Davis Aurini's dumbass friends" fame).

This even kinda applies to one of the running gags I didn't care much about the film. Every time a piece of technology crashed and burned, a mushroom cloud pops up in the sky. A casual viewer - including me at first - can rightfully view this as extremely tasteless. Japan already has enough demons - you don't need to throw on the atomic bombings. Wes probably threw it in as a little joke - like, "it's set in Japan, so I'm gonna throw this in to really show that it's set in Japan."

But given my interpretations of the film's future tech and the way it uses its aesthetics, I'm convinced that it's all nuclear-powered. A visual shorthand for nuclear power going horribly wrong or having a destructive capability is to use a mushroom cloud. Wes could've easily have thrown in the mushroom cloud running gag as an effort to troll the audience - similar to how Tom Green would troll his audience in Freddy Got Fingered - but he could've easily as well thrown in it in order to tap into anxieties of the Atom Age and to really hammer home the point that even though Isle of Dogs takes place in the future, it is not a future we're conditioned to be familiar with. It even took me a day to realize that the future was supposed to be a Japanese version of the 1950s future, even though they have the auto-translators and recording systems and TVs and computers be extremely outdated (the computer Japanese Hackerman uses is an old IBM reel-to-reel mainframe, for example). Even the fact that the Kobayashi family owned every business consortium and concern in Megasaki City should've reminded me a little bit of Vault-Tec's ownership of almost everything during the pre-War period (and how their unscrupulous business practices weren't done in the favor of the people but in favor of doing whatever they wanted, hence why one of the main lines in any Fallout-related work is "the vaults were never intended to save anyone"), but I didn't realize this until today.

Going back to my point regarding how Isle of Dogs uses cultural tourism to comment on the wrongs we have done, the fact that the future has been established as a variation on 1950s Japan helps tie in some of the themes, especially when you read Megasaki City as a stand-in for us. The mushroom clouds, the homegrown culture, the reliance on traditional dress - it's pretty much how we were and still are. It's our anxieties, just given a bit of a Tokyo Story feel.

This makes the themes of the film that much more potent.

One of the themes, as explored in depth in this New Yorker article that has way more tact than I ever will, is the fallacy of translation. From the start, everything is translated, from the prologue to the important bits of dialogue to even the barks of the dogs. However, all translation has within itself a bias - a sign of something missing. The nuances of the language you're translating from are totally lost in translation, leaving you with a shallow understanding of what the characters are saying. This makes it easy for biases to be inserted - the official translator (who translates everything Mayor Kobayashi says when he's on his podium) often inserts a bit of herself into what's supposed to be a non-biased reading of what he's saying. The auto-translator the students have that allow them to listen in on black box recorders (and allow us to understand the cabinet meeting) is made by Kobayashi Electronics, so what's to say that the words being said through those boxes haven't been tainted by the interests of the Kobayashi family? The only times people get their message across without any shadow of a doubt are when Atari speaks with the dogs or when Tracy addresses the crowd at Kobayashi's victory speech - plain and clear. When people speak to each other and they understand what they're saying fully, they understand the heart of the conversation.

We have problems with translation. From our Internet-led ethics mobs towards so-okay-they're-average developers and adventure game makers and LGBT women running for Congress - to hashtag movements meant to expose the problems of a certain online video aggregator and give it an opportunity to apologize, fix itself and make amends (which it hasn't done yet), translation is fickle. People not of a certain in-group will never completely understand the nuances of a certain issue, such as why certain people are tired that there are a lot of popular games that have sexualized women or women that you don't play as that need rescuing or women that just act like men because it's easier to write a man with boobs than a person with some unique problems (no, I don't mean giving Lara Croft breast cancer) or why maybe taking true info about a person's unsavory past from unsavory people with a lot of sway over a community isn't a good thing not only for community solidarity but for what you're trying to stand up for (and why Monica Lewinsky still fights tooth and nail to get Bill Clinton recognized as a sexual abuser).

One of the ways films about other cultures made by Americans deal with the fallacy of translation - how they attempt to communicate the essence of ideas entirely specific to that culture - is to insert a stand-in for the viewer/audience. This character, often a straight white male because demographics or something, often has a proactive role and, if written very poorly, is effectively the hero de facto for the events herein. This character has been written in so many movies and has been botched so many times that people have come to call these characters "white saviors." It's why when people think of The Last Samurai, they don't immediately think of Ken Watanabe's character (the titular last samurai) but Tom Cruise's character. Capt. Algren takes away most agency Lord Katsumoto has, even going as far as the former helping the latter commit suicide. Part of it is by virtue of inserting a white character into an otherwise Japanese story - though the narrative of The Last Samurai is primarily about a conflict between American-backed forces (representing modernity) and the samurai rebellion (representing tradition) that has some basis in real life (though still highly fictionalized) - but part of it is by making Capt. Algren the force that makes Japan modernize on its own terms (i.e. mix modernity and tradition rather than being isolationist or being an American clone). He may have not been the last samurai, but for all intents and purposes, he's the driving force.

This use of the white savior often gives people a sense of ownership regarding the culture they're being exposed to. Since the white savior is, by design, the audience stand-in, they can imagine themselves as the ones who fixed all the problems in the country. "I'm Nathan Algren. I assisted Katsumoto. He let me overcome my alcoholism. I told Japan to keep its traditions but also modernize, thus giving it agency," I think as I watch the film that, honestly, I've only heard jokes about. The white savior makes you feel good. It makes you feel like you can do something, whereas the actual lead character feels like they're there to be assistant to the savior. It's why it's such a relief when films like Big Trouble in Little China, with its sardonic commentary on the white savior and presenting the film like Jack Burton is the white savior when, in fact, he's just the sidekick if he were given a lot of screen time, are green-lit because they show that we're sick and tired of the same old thing. However, you gotta denote it academically - this type of thing has happened a lot and it happens for some very specific reasons.

With that said, Tracy is set up as the white savior. Not only is she pale as day, she's one of the few human characters who exclusively speaks in English. She can perfectly understand the people in Megasaki City, which is a relief, but she doesn't know how to speak Japanese or dog barks. Then again, she's already listening. She can understand them. And in case if you really wanted to know that she's painfully white, she also has the tackiest Afro in the world. Granted the film takes place in an oddball '50s-inspired future where everything runs on nuclear tech, but still, she looks like the definition of a woke white character. She even runs a campaign to help decriminalize dogs. And the film sets it up to where she's gonna be the one who makes the change - the one who fixes this whole mess to begin with. Even her dog has some involvement with Atari and the others on the trash island.

But when she dares propose her idea, the Kobayashi government immediately expels her from school, strips her of her journalism credentials, and schedules her on the next flight back to America - all without her dog. Her actions do not give her victory - she may have some influence, but she's not powerful. People view her as merely coming in and not really understanding where they're coming from - why they locked away the dogs, why they're adamant about not returning her dog, etc. By trying to act as savior, Tracy has failed to understand the whole ordeal because she thinks she's the one who can fix everything. If she's a white savior, she's doing a piss-poor job at being one.

Now you know how Katsumoto feels. Now you know how Asian audiences feel when their characters play second-fiddle to yours. At least with Jack Burton, you could laugh - he's a sidekick who thinks he's the hero - but with Tracy, you don't get any of that. Even people that ask "why is Tracy in this movie? she does nothing!" - this is for you. This is Tracy's point: she makes you feel what everybody else has felt for years. Wes Anderson is throwing your comfort back in your face and refusing to release any of that tension - kind of a Hannah Gadsby "I'm not gonna tell a funny joke so your ass can forget the pain that I went through" thing going on.

This ties into what I believe Isle of Dogs does very well: it exposes us. Because if you're already that far into the film to see Tracy being stripped of her white-savior power, you've already noticed something a bit odd about the predicament of the dogs and just how everything has been engineered. You've seen the government confess to releasing a lab-created virus designed to only target dogs - and have it be enough of a threat to where the dogs can actually die. You've seen the government actively suppress a cure for the canine flu, going as far as murdering scientists and relying on their assistants to stay silent. You've seen the government round up the dogs into even more cramped quarters on the island, all designed to look like low-quality army barracks. You've seen the government propose to use the same poison that killed the scientists working on the canine flu cure...on the dogs. And you've seen the government manage to convince most people that it's okay for them to do these increasingly fascistic things. That it's alright to mistreat the dogs and murder all of them because they're a threat to public health.

If that's not a blatant allegory for how Germany's mistreatment of the Jews became quickly normalized as "the necessary thing" and the lengths they'd go just to prevent any of this from leaking out, I don't know what is. The government engineers a problem, blames it on people who had nothing to do with it, and kills them because the government doesn't like them. Remember: the Kobayashis are cat people. They do not like dogs. Never have, never will - except for Atari. Also, you might've noticed some elements with dogs being used as guinea pigs for a virus that was deliberately given to them by an already discriminatory government AND any treatment for them outside of letting them die from their disease or by wasabi poison with a certain clinical study the US government did on black men in the '30s regarding the effects of untreated syphilis. And you may have noticed some parallels between our historic mistreatment of the Native Americans. And you may have noticed some parallels to the Japanese interment camps.

Let me cut the crap: Isle of Dogs is screaming at us about our poor treatment of any sort of minority. It doesn't care if the minority if Jourdain Searles or Natalie Wynn or the guy writing this blog post - all of us in the in-group have been taking minorities for a ride that they don't even wanna be on. All so we can brag about how powerful we are and get our favorite things in America. Get our own Lisa Land theme park location built. And anybody who tries to speak out is a nobody - they're de-powered just like that. They're mocked on Internet forums, they're harassed on social media, they're humiliated in front of the whole world - and for what? So we can feel powerful. So we can be Nathan Algren, the people all of us - even the ones who actually liked The Last Samurai and know what that title refers to - want to be. We want to be the guys who fix the world. We want to be God, shape the world into Our own image. We want to fix this whole mess - but we end up destroying lives. We end up pushing people down for way too long. And yeah, it's all over jealous power plays in the end. Dogs get more love than cats from Megasaki City? I'm sure they'll be okay if we kill all the dogs and replace them with cats and robots! What a meaningful idea!

Overall, Isle of Dogs is a great film. It's about as good as the weird film about the horse people and the black guy speaking like Patton Oswalt. And that film about the big purple guy who killed three billion people just so he could finally chill and drink a Mai Tai over at Sandals Beach Resort.

I should've finished this essay back in April.