[COLUMN] Wes Anderson's Roald Dahl Shorts Are a Crash Course in Adapting “Problematic' Art” | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

With the release of Wonka this weekend, it seems like a good time to consider this year’s other big adaptation of Roald Dahl’s writing, the four shorts that Wes Anderson produced for Netflix.

These shorts are interesting for a number of reasons. Netflix has a longstanding relationship with The Roald Dahl Co. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Netflix paid “a nine-figure sum” for the rights to sixteen of Dahl’s stories in November 2018. In September 2021, Netflix purchased the whole company, seeing it as a vehicle for “the creation of a unique universe across animated and live-action films and TV, publishing, games, immersive experiences, live theatre, consumer products and more.”

Given the huge amounts of money and the grand ambition involved in these deals, Netflix has moved surprisingly slowly to adapt the author’s work. The company has “a Roald Dahl Collection” for subscribers to peruse at their leisure, but it is relatively sparse. Before the release of these shorts, the only Netflix Original contained in that collection was the company’s adaptation of Matilda. Even then, it was an adaptation of the stage musical rather than a direct adaptation of the source book.

There is probably a good reason why Netflix hasn’t bullishly committed to their Roald Dahl shared universe. The past decade has seen a public reckoning with the beloved author, an interrogation of his legacy tied to his well-documented antisemitism. Dahl never went to any effort to hide his antisemitic views, telling The New Statesman that “Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” Shortly before his death in 1990, he bluntly stated, “I have become antisemitic.”

While Dahl’s views were a matter of public record, there was no real attempt to grapple with them until his centenary in 2016. Articles at places like The BBC and The Independent argued that it was necessary to discuss Dahl’s antisemitism as part of his larger cultural legacy. This was before Netflix entered its partnership with The Roald Dahl Co., but it was a sign of things to come. Over the ensuing years, Dahl’s reputation would be subject to scrutiny and interrogation.

In November 2018, the same month that Netflix began its relationship with The Roald Dahl Co., the Royal Mint refused to mint a celebratory coin for Dahl, specifically citing his antisemitism. In December 2020, Roald Dahl’s relatives apologized for his public statements, acknowledging “the lasting and understandable hurt caused by some of Roald Dahl’s statements.” In July 2023, the Roald Dahl Museum erected a plaque, acknowledging Dahl’s antisemitism as “undeniable and indelible.”

As ever, when dealing with the shifting legacy of an iconic and influential artist, there is the question of how best to grapple with these contradictions. It’s a larger cultural debate, one that applies to other important historical works like Gone with the Wind. Earlier this year, there was a minor controversy around the decision to rewrite Dahl’s stories to remove offensive or stereotypical depictions. It was a stupid decision, but it gets at the thorniness of the situation.

Indeed, it’s interesting to wonder whether the modern strain of anti-auteur-ist thought in pop criticism is in some way tied to this complicated question. After all, the past few years have forced audiences to confront the reality that many creators are imperfect human beings at best. For fans of particular works by these sorts of figures, it may be easier to believe that the work itself exists in a vacuum, as if conjured into being from nothingness. The “death of the author” is a source of comfort.

Obviously, everybody approaches art in their own way. This neat separation between author and text obviously allows the consumer to enjoy the work without being burdened by context, but it devalues the larger idea of art as something created by human beings that reflects the human experience. It is the thinking of tech bros who want movies made by algorithms. In reality, human beings are messy, and that messiness spills over into untangling the relationship between creator and creation.

Wes Anderson objects to any attempt to rewrite Dahl’s words. “Certainly, no one who is not an author should be modifying somebody’s book,” Anderson stated when premiering the first of these shorts. “He’s dead.” This is not a surprise. For a director whose work has been constantly and lifelessly imitated by proponents of these digital models, Anderson spends a lot of time drawing the audience’s attention to the artist’s hand. Anderson’s movies are about how art is made by people. Even these shorts place an emphasis on stores within stories.

Anderson’s four shorts - The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan, The Rat Catcher, and Poison – offer an interesting illustration of how best to grapple with something like Dahl’s tarnished legacy. Anderson doesn’t do this by erasing the author or changing the work. Quite the opposite. Anderson’s four shorts foreground Dahl in a way that forces the audience to grapple with the inherent contradiction of Dahl as both a deeply flawed human being and a brilliant storyteller.

Anderson makes it clear that these four stories do not exist in a vacuum. Dahl is a character, played by Ralph Fiennes. The opening stretch of The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar draws attention to Dahl and his methods. He speaks directly to the audience, narrating his process. “Hmm,” he begins. “Yes. Well, here we are now in the hut where I write. I’ve been in this hut for 30 years now. Well, it’s important, before I start, I like to make sure I have everything around me that I’m going to need.”

Anderson lays all of this out for the audience. “Cigarettes, of course,” Dahl explains. “Some coffee, chocolates. And always make sure I have a sharp pencil before I start. I have six pencils, and then I like to clean my writing board. See how many bits of rubber. There. And then, finally… one starts.” It is very meticulous. It is very precise. As Dahl begins telling his story, he guides the audience through a set dressed as “Gipsy House”, Dahl’s real-life residence.

Each of the shorts ends with a title card that offers hand-written context for the story that was just told. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar was written “between February and December of 1976.” The Swan was inspired by “a newspaper account of an actual event” and written in October 1976. Dahl wrote The Rat Catcher “in the late forties.” The audience is asked to not only embrace these shorts as stories, but to consider them in the larger context of Dahl’s life.

As with a lot of Anderson’s work, these shorts repeatedly draw attention to their artifice. Set dressers and prop-masters appear in frame. Crates are marked as belonging to the “property department.” An ensemble rotates through roles. Wigs and make-up are applied in shot. Backdrops are moved around. When Henry Sugar, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, drives his car, the edges of the rear projection are visible. Actors often speak to or glance at the camera.

While the shorts aren’t grouped together on Netflix, it is important to watch them in order. The first two, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and The Swan, are beautiful and sincere stories that demonstrate both Dahl’s power as a writer and Anderson’s skill as a director. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is a fairy tale about an imagined man, a degenerate gambler who uses his skills selflessly for the greater good. The story is presented as true, but the man’s identity is hidden behind the pseudonym “Henry Sugar.”

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is structured as nested stories within stories. At the end, Dahl asks the people asking him to transcribe the tale, “Don’t you want me to say who he really was when I do the story?” They decline. The implication is that Henry is best left as an imagined construct, unburdened by the messiness of reality. As his name implies, it’s a very sweet sentiment. However, things take a turn towards the macabre with the third short, The Rat Catcher. As the title implies, this is a story about an exterminator, played by Ralph Fiennes in his most significant role outside of playing Dahl.

The eponymous eradicator is a creepy man who has taken on the attributes of the animals that he hunts. He seduces and repels his two clients – the narrator, played by Richard Ayoade, and Claud, played by Rupert Friend. When the catcher boasts of having enough poison “to kill a million men”, he offers to show them. “Yes, please,” Claud replies. Later, he asks, “You want to see something far more amazing? Something you'd never believe unless you're seeing it with your own eyes?”

When the exterminator offers a demonstration of his skills, the narrator admits, “I looked at the rat that was to be killed and began to feel sick, not because it was going to be killed, but because it was to be killed in a special way, with a considerable degree of enthusiasm.” He continues, “The sick sensation in my stomach was increasing. But there was an awful magnetism about this business. I found myself unable to walk away or even move.” The nastiness is both revolting and alluring.

Given how Dahl haunts the narrative, the subtext is clear. The rat has long been a stand-in for some dehumanized outgroup. The idea of “the Rat Catcher” has a long history in antisemitic propaganda, such as an infamous German poster from 1899 telling the story of “Der Rattenfaenger.” Hitler known as “the Rat Catcher of Braunau.” Consider works of fiction like Netta Murray Goldsmith’s Magda and the Rat Catchers or the opening scene of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds.

When the rat catcher viciously murders the rat with his teeth, Anderson shoots the scene like something from a German expressionist horror movie, making an implicit connection to mid-century fascism. There are quick cuts, intense close-ups and black backgrounds. It’s a deeply unsettling sequence, particularly in the context of Anderson’s larger career. Anderson is well known for his “benign, cozy worlds.” However, this horror is just setting the stage for Poison, the final of the four shorts and the one that renders the subtext as text.

Poison tells the story of Harry Pope, played by Cumberbatch, a British officer in India who wakes up one night believing a krait snake is inside his pyjamas. His friend Woods, played by Dev Patel, and a doctor named Ganderbai, played by Ben Kingsley, intervene to help. However, Anderson films this seemingly straightforward premise in an unsettling way. It looks like the other shorts, it’s beautifully designed, it draws attention to its artifice. However, there’s something different about this one.

Anderson is fond of symmetry. He also likes camera movements at right angles. His camera can push in or out on an actor or dolly in parallel to them, but rarely moves in two dimensions at once. As Kyle Buchanan argued, after Grand Budapest Hotel, “Wes Anderson characters have lost the ability to walk in diagonal lines.” So there’s something unusual in how the camera pushes in on Woods as he arrives at Harry’s room. It spins, shifting the angle of the shot in a way that’s unusual for Anderson. It’s not how the sets are designed to be shot.

In Poison, Anderson’s camera repeatedly acts in ways that it normally wouldn’t. There are low-angle shots, in contrast to Anderson’s tendency to shoot actors head-on. As Harry jumps up, the camera shakes. The climax features handheld camerawork, unusual for Anderson. It’s especially odd as the sequence isn’t particularly thrilling. There is no snake. When Ganderbai suggests that Harry imagined it, Harry lashes out in an overtly racist way, calling the doctor “a dirty, little, Bengali sewer rat.” The choice of vermin seems quite pointed.

This racism breaks Anderson’s picturesque fantasy. No amount of beautiful production design can hide this. This artificial world is literally shaken. Given that The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Poison feature extended sequences set in India, starring Patel and Kingsley, they may even represent a mea culpa from Anderson, who was criticized for his portrayal of India in The Darjeeling Limited. It also acknowledges the paradox of Dahl, who could recognize racism as a metaphorical poison while still holding horrendous beliefs.

Over the past few years, there has been a lot of debate about how to acknowledge art by problematic figures. Anderson finds a way to grapple with the more uncomfortable aspects of Roald Dahl’s legacy not by erasing or ignoring the author, and not even by heavily altering the text. Instead, Anderson draws the artist into the work and asks the audience to confront him in his totality, no matter how uncomfortable that may be.