Is Wes Anderson the Next Great Short Story Editor?
The Wonderful World of Wes Anderson’s Four Roald Dahl Shorts
When Netflix gave a bunch of money to Wes Anderson, one of the most famous film directors alive, to make whatever he wanted, he decided out of all the movies he could conjure from scratch to instead take four Roald Dahl short stories and turn them into short films. Anderson, noted fan of The New Yorker, has always put a clear literary flair and appreciation into his work. He also already adapted Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox into a stop-motion animated film in 2009. Anderson’s adoration of Dahl extends to one of the major creative decisions in his short film Netflix project, which is that the shorts use, almost entirely, the exact words of Dahl’s stories, descriptions and exposition included. Following the text of the stories nearly verbatim, the actors narrate and address the audience directly for long portions of the films. Along with the Wes Anderson’s pin-perfect sets, these four films make his stage-like aesthetic even more explicit as the actors often stand still in these dioramas and talk straight at the camera.
However, unlike Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, which was greatly enhanced on screen by Anderson’s dynamic animated vision of the novel (not surprisingly, given the iconic illustrations of the book itself) with these four Dahl shorts the straightforward Anderson hyper stylization makes one start to question exactly what his visual style adds to the storytelling or the emotional impact of each film. Sometimes, especially if you’ve read the stories, it makes these shorts feel like listening to an audio book with a Wes Anderson movie playing on mute in the background. And yet Anderson is still a master craftsman, so there are visual tricks that keep the affair at times unexpected or funny. For instance, Ralph Fiennes in “The Ratcatcher” miming holding a rat and a ferret, instead of actually showing it, and then later in the same film when Fiennes takes out a second “sewer rat”, and it appears cartoonishly skinny in Wes Anderson paper mâché style. Or take the lightly camouflaged box, which blends into the scenery, that the yogi in “Henry Sugar” sits on top of to illustrate the levitation.
Said “Sewer Rat”
But these are small moments in shorts that otherwise feel somewhat flat. Anderson’s “Poison”, “The Ratcatcher”, and “The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar” all suffer from the same flaw, which extends from his big choice to honor Dahl’s stories so faithfully and literally. Anderson edits each of these stories down for the brevity of the screen, but keeps the main beats of the narrative, the dramatic turns, exactly the same as Dahl’s originals. While this is great for introducing these stories to audiences who watch Wes Anderson but don’t read books, as adaptations they suffer from Anderson being too respectful of the source material.
Wes Anderson as Book Editor
The major flaw of the first three shorts reveals what a triumph, the final short film in the series, “The Swan”, is. This happens to be the story just before “Henry Sugar” in Dahl’s collection of stories, and is also my favorite Roald Dahl short story ever written, one that has haunted me since I was first read it at around six-years-old. But even with high personal expectations and investment with “The Swan”, I found that Anderson brilliantly captured and even enhanced the intense energy of the story. Anderson does this not strictly by visualizing “The Swan” but by…editing it! Rewatching the short a second time with a copy of the story in my hand, it became clear how much Anderson took out of the story, in addition to a few key changes not only make it better for screen, but to improve an already great story.
*Spoiler Alert: if you haven’t read or watched “The Swan” feel free to pause: watch the Anderson film, listen to the original short story and/or read the short story*
Reading alongside the film we see that Anderson has done a Gordon Lish-level of editing on Dahl’s story. Below are the first 2-3 pages of Dahl’s story. In black is what was unchanged and kept by Anderson, in red is what Anderson cut, and in green is what Anderson slightly rewrote or added that’s new.
Thus, the entirety of Dahl’s setup to “The Swan,” with all of its layers of class, abuse, character backstory, and foreshadowing thrown in, is reduced, post-edit, to:
Ernie had been given a rifle for his birthday. He took the gun and the box of bullets and went out to see what he could kill. Outside Raymond's house, Ernie put two fingers in his mouth and gave a long, shrill whistle. Raymond was Earnie’s best friend. He lived four doors away. He held up the rifle over his head.
“Cripes!” Raymond said. “We can have some fun with that!”
The two boys set off.
Anderson continues editing the story down in this way to the very end, stripping out the details in a way that, miraculously, doesn’t change the core tenor of the story, which is a harrowing tale of a young boy being held hostage by Raymond and Ernie, psychological tortured, and nearly killed. But Anderson’s text edits make the premise of “The Swan” in many ways even more intense: with no motive or rationales supplied for the viewer, his short film is a realistic act of cruelty and suspense rendered well. Much like a Carver story—I’m reminded of “So Much Water Close to Home”—leaving out these details adds to the underlying dread and uncertainty already at the heart of the Dahl story, rather than detracting from it.
While Anderson clearly shows great literary editing chops in the script, he shows similar ambition to diverge from the original in other ways. The film is narrated by an adult (played by Rupert Friend) and although we see an age-appropriate version of the tortured boy named Peter Watson at various times during the film (standing with his hands bound with rope behind adult Peter, for instance), very early on our narrator reveals something that’s not in the original Dahl story, delivered rapidly, almost as an aside, between exposition of the story: “This happened to me 27 years ago. My name is Peter Watson.” Then we watch the boy version of Peter and the adult version of Peter switch in the scene before us, as adult Peter takes boy Peter’s place and is tied to train tracks by his captors as he continues to narrate.
Anderson’s choice to make the subject of the story its narrator shifts “The Swan” from being a short story reproduced to film into a more classical stage monologue, one that is in perfect harmony with the Anderson theatre aesthetic. This also allows for Anderson to make a second brilliant decision which further improves upon the original story. Having already communicated to the audience that Peter survives into adulthood, Anderson chooses to end “The Swan” a paragraph earlier than Dahl does. In Dahl’s version Peter ends up on his mother’s lawn alive, and then is taken to the hospital to let us know he survives the ordeal in the end. Instead, Anderson, ends the short film with Peter’s mother crying out finding him on the lawn: “My Darling! My darling boy! What’s happened to you?” If Anderson’s text edit of “The Swan” is a masterclass in taking out the details to focus on the essentials and inject ambiguity, then his ending is the final masterstroke of this particular adaptation, finishing the story with white space rather than a neat, comforting resolution.
The intensity of focusing it down, the point of view, and the ambiguity of “The Swan” the short film—the least faithful to its original text of the four shorts—reminded me of those emotions I felt when I first heard Dahl’s story 20-some years ago as a kid: the thrill, the strangeness, the nerves. In the way the best translations sometimes do, Wes Anderson’s “The Swan” diverges from its origin text in order to become closer to its origin text’s emotional truth.