Popular Culture Review - Volume 26, Number 2 - Summer 2015
“The Young Person’s Guide” to Moonrise Kingdom:
Wes Anderson’s Theme and Variations on a Theme
and Variations of Benjamin Britten
Todd GilesA
A
Moonrise
Kingdom (2012) explores the trials and tribulations of trying to hold
onto one’s innocence in a world of surrogate families and estranged
or deceased parents. One of the ways Anderson accentuates this theme is
might argue that Anderson is seemingly able to hold on to his own childhood
(and those of us who were born in the late 60s and early 70s) by making his
presence as the director aurally and visibly felt on the screen through his
diegetic and extradiegetic musical choices. As with The Royal Tenenbaums
(2001) and The Life Aquatic (2004), Moonrise Kingdom deconstructs the fourth
wall by experimenting with what music can and should do in the medium. Even
Moonrise utilizes music to frame the story’s action
in both subtle and obvious ways. In the latter sense, Moonrise is narratively
framed around two children’s works by British composer Benjamin Britten:
The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra (1946) and Noye’s Fludde (1958).
diegetically with the beginning and ending narration of The Young Person’s
Guide
performance of Noye’s Fludde a year earlier—and the cancellation of its
more subtly, though, Anderson mimetically structures the plot of Moonrise
around the program of The Young Person’s Guide itself, in which listeners
are introduced to the four families of instruments—woodwinds, brass, strings,
and percussion—playing variations on an earlier theme. Moonrise’s theme,
or recurring “melody,” if you will, like the four “families” of instruments The
Young Person’s Guide breaks down and then reassembles, is seen in the
four surrogate families our young hero, Sam Shakusky, tries to establish
interest, Suzy Bishop, and with his future foster-father, Captain Sharp. What
links these four families together are a series of “variations” in the form of an
escape motif from one family to the next, as each is subsequently introduced,
A
Midwestern State University
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