A video essay about Wes Anderson's "The Darjeeling Limited" (2007). Narration script: THE DARJEELING LIMITED: A Train Between Worlds Wes Anderson's movies often show the conflict of private worlds with public ones, the intersection of real worlds with fantasy worlds, the collision of dreams with cold, hard reality. The Darjeeling Limited extends these conflicts, intersections, and collisions with great precision, serving as both an extension of Anderson's art up to this point and a significant development of it. Written by Anderson, Roman Coppola, and Jason Schwartzman, The Darjeeling Limited's story actually begins with a short film made a year before: "Hotel Chevalier", written and directed by Anderson, which tells the story of Schwartzman's character, Jack Whitman, who has become a hermit in a luxury hotel in Paris. There, he is visited by his ex-girlfriend, played by Natalie Portman. Many of the details in "Hotel Chevalier" will gain meaning in The Darjeeling Limited, where Jack meets up with his brothers, Francis and Peter, for a journey through India that Francis has organized, complete with a daily laminated itinerary provided by an assistant who has been instructed to stay out of sight. The brothers haven't seen each other since their father's funeral, and Francis seems to think this spiritual journey will do them all some good. To understand some of what the film is up to, we need to first separate its worlds, because it is easy to see a movie as a single representation of a particular reality, but Anderson's movies work more as separate realities that, by the end, find at least a moment of unity. First, we can define two basic realms: the realm of determining influences outside the film, and the realm of the film's own story. The most important outside influence, aside from the influence of the filmmakers' own personalities and tendencies, the production limitations, etc. — the most important outside influence is that of other movies, particularly movies set in India. These influences are not only acknowledged by Anderson, but are given life in The Darjeeling Limited through allusions and, especially, through music — much of the musical soundtrack of The Darjeeling Limited comes from the movies of Satyajit Ray, Ismail Merchant & James Ivory, and Nityananda Datta. An additional significant influence was Jean Renoir's first color feature, The River. Within the film's own story, we have a plethora of worlds. There is, to start, the separate worlds of each brother. Though from the same privileged American family, the brothers are, like the Tenenbaum siblings, quite different personalities. Their father seems to have been the uniting force that kept their family together; with his death, not only have the brothers gone their separate ways, their mother has also completely disappeared, having refused even to attend the funeral. But the family itself, or at least the unit of the brothers, is a world as well, despite personality differences. They have shared experiences, shared memories, shared expectations, but especially they share a cultural, linguistic, racial, gender, and class background. This is significant because, for all their differences as individual human beings, it is this shared background that will create many of the meaningful contrasts throughout the film. For instance, there is India. Within The Darjeeling Limited, India is both a place and an idea, and it is not at all a single world — it is, rather, a series of fantasies and realities. Francis, for instance, has a fantasy of India as an exotic place of spiritual power, a place he and his brothers can go to get in touch with their souls or their destinies, then return, cleansed and invigorated, to their regular lives. Francis, though, is a bit of a control freak, and this side of his personality is humorously at odds with the intuitive, even random, nature of spiritual quests. In his mind, a spiritual quest should be like traveling on a train, able only to go forward or back, a clear route ahead laid out by the rails, with good views from the windows and stops along the way and then a destination, a terminus, clearly marked on the ticket bought at the station. This is related to another world within The Darjeeling Limited: the world of objects and commodities. Francis wants a commodified spiritual journey: he wants to be able to do what he's always done, which is buy what he thinks he needs or desires, thus to possess and control it. Places and people that survive on tourist money do so through such commodification, but the tourist and the merchant of products for tourists do not look at the world through the same vantage point. The Darjeeling Limited's story is told through the point of view of three tourists, but again and again the audience is given reason to be skeptical toward, amused by, or aghast at their tourism. If anyone is being made fun of, if anyone is worth laughing at in this movie, it is the Whitma

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