Mise-en-Abyme in the Films of Wes Anderson

One of the central aspects of Wes Anderson’s cinema, characteristic of his authorial style, is the use of the mise-en-abyme both as a narrative and as a stylistic resource. Starting principally with his second feature film Rushmore (1998), Wes Anderson has been using a number of reflective and metadiscursive strategies related to the mise-en-abyme, such as tableaux vivants conceived as theater stages, theater plays, texts such as films or books that work as framing devices of the film diegesis, extradiegetic presences, complex shots that use mirrors - or the camera lens itself as a mirror -, silhouettes, narrations within other narrations, etc. All these mechanisms make up one of the most recognizable trademarks of Anderson’s disruptive use of the possibilities of the medium; accordingly his cinema refers to a sort of ubiquitous matryoshka-like aesthetics, related to the collector’s quality of Anderson’s cinema as defined by Donna Kornhaber (2017). The paper focuses on the mise-en-abyme as a fundamental, underlying narrative strategy in Wes Anderson’s cinema that can be considered as a meta-sign of the enunciation, thus recognizable in many of the visual expressions of the director’s unmistakable cinematic language.