What does wit sound like?
Some people, when they talk, make their meaning plain at once — and it isn’t terribly interesting. Others circle, setting out a whole service-for-eight in words before you know their direction. I listen as if watching a ritual of butlers entering, clean towels folded neatly over their arms, pouring the glasses, placing the first course plate by plate, inventing the meal out of the space held - tensely or elegantly?- between the guests.
Then, all at once: dinner. The candlelight is dancing, the air tastes of roasted garlic and shaved truffle, and I’m too pleased to say a word. Other people can't wait to rush in after such sentences. I have seen them pick up a fork and put it down again, unable to savor the interval before the first bite. (Patience is a course no one serves anymore.)
Is this why I enjoyed watching The Phoenician Scheme? I had to take in an hour of it before it tipped into its full expression. The elusive subject and the consequential verbs finally pulled the pin on that repeated offer to "Help yourself a hand grenade." I might say that was the reason. (Or perhaps I only like to imagine myself patient.) My dear wife, a tad restless, had already checked her phone, the tiny bright screen cutting through the dark living room as sharply as the question of what time we're getting up tomorrow. But when the grenade went off—literally, figuratively, structurally—she forgot her phone entirely. We both did.
Until then, I'd been amused enough by the parental swordplay: "I'll tell you later." "Tell me now." "Get up." "Why?" "Obey me." Conversely, the toy crossbow between father and son tried me. Anderson’s “Bad Dad” props usually sting more.
An unexpected correspondence
The most unexpected flavor? The Phoenician Scheme kept reminding me of George Cukor’s The Women. The accumulating patter, the speed. Why did they talk so fast in those 30s films? After all, in spite of a propensity for Benzedrine inhalers, people a hundred years ago didn't talk faster than we do.
Fast talk was simply the rule: when talking pictures arrived, velocity was the only way to act. The tradition goes back beyond Hollywood, to Italian commedia dell’arte.
The Neapolitan elite called Opera Buffa uncouth and unserious in the 1700s. But Buffa's speed wasn't stylistic indulgence, it was merchant-class entertainment for people inventing themselves between servant and aristocrat, juggling ten contradictory loyalties before lunch.
Those audiences, navigating their new "middlebrow squeeze," didn't find meaning in noble betrayal or repertoire heroics. They cheered for characters with cunning street smarts—that wise-guy lineage stretching back to Odysseus, AKA "the man of many ways." The laughter arose from recognizing the farcical impossibility of doing the right thing in a world that could never be expected to stop spinning while you figured out what "right" meant.
Making impossibility visible
Fast talk has always been about impossibility—not resolving modern life's paradox but making it visible through sheer velocity.
When movies learned to talk, they didn't know how to convey plot through dialogue. So they accelerated. Anita Loos rewrote The Women to get past the Hays Code, then kept rewriting it live in real time, tossing ad-libs to the actors while the camera rolled.
Loos's Hollywood improvisation of Vaudeville-paced deadpan is straight out of the commedia dell'arte tradition founded on relatable, everyday people as stock characters: The Gossip, The Lamb, The Other Woman. (Oh, and The Nice One. I know she's the injured party but I can't stand her until she gets her hands dirty.)
The presence of absence
Still, the resemblance I sensed between The Phoenician Scheme and The Women isn't only the deadpan patter. The roux of correspondence is more complex, or it wouldn't have lingered on my palate. The Women breaks screwball comedy's fundamental rule: the "battle of the sexes" because men never appear on screen. For me, their absence made them more present than appearance could: men drove every second of plot, every gesture, every glance between the women. That screwball speed was both guilty-as-charged confession and nothing-to-see-here solution, moving too fast for censors or conventions to catch.
Anderson's The Phoenician Scheme breaks the same rule through opposite means. Where The Women erased men to reveal them, Anderson touches a hundred serious issues— corruption, assassination, spiritual bankruptcy— then refuses to slow down to admit their weight. The absence of engagement makes you notice the moral wreckage more, not less. His characters deadpan through catastrophe with familiar dodges: the spiritual arriviste, the semantic academic, the corrupt billionaire. Masks all the way down.
We’ve been told for a century to slow life’s pace. But who can do that? The world shifts underfoot so fast our ears pop: mass shootings, A.I. career displacement, tariff charts (I confess I no longer understand them), and each new altitude reached before we’ve caught breath from the last. (The news itself is a form of mountain sickness.)
The laughter we've lost
None of us is so complacent that we'd argue these aren't a heavy lift, or that our current-event exhaustion isn't a societal and personal moral challenge every single day. We haven't got the privilege of slowing down anymore. We are constantly called upon to keep up, whether it's getting back to the office or having the best right opinion today. And there's still the kids to get to bed. But what if you can't find relief, can't find soul satisfying meaning in the aesthetic pleasures of people who know they are better than you are?
An argument can be made for art that invites us to slow down, art that doesn't capitulate to chaos. It would point to Anderson's speed as giddy for giddiness sake, as aesthetic cowardice, not honesty. But this assumes we have a choice between fast and slow, whereas I wonder whether arguing for slowness isn't itself a kind of outsider art now—beautiful, irrelevant, like insisting on proper table settings while the house burns. (Though I admit I’d still lay the fork correctly, if only to calm myself.)
The "middlebrow squeeze" of audience laughter at The Phoenician Scheme isn't moral failure—it reflects the absence of cultural space for pleasure that doesn't buy us off with moral equivocating. It's a take on life that isn't simplistic, and as a consequence doesn't make its point right out of the gate. When chaos is an art form, you don't know what it's saying until you listen a while.
Savoring humor- and delight
The 1939 audience laughed knowingly at what couldn't be said. We laugh at what can't be processed.
Maybe I laughed at the effervescent crime of The Phoenician Scheme because giving it your best in real time takes a toll these days that being right about it can't address. Wes Anderson tenders us a painful, sophisticated firehose of updated opera buffa, complete with a deep voice in a big man, a man of many ways, at the center of an impossible-to-understand evil plot.
After the movie, my wife and I found ourselves talking about Peter Kálmán in last season's Barber of Seville at the Met—his basso buffo sparkling, the rapid-fire delivery genuinely astonishing. We were talking fast ourselves, excited, interrupting each other, circling back. I thought of all the gifted artists today making opera relevant, still proving that speed can carry meaning when meaning moves too fast to catch any other way.
Peter Kálmán's amazing performance in Il barbiere di Siviglia at the Metropolitan Opera in New York
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