Jonah Weiner‘s 9.27 Slate piece about what he believes to be unconscious racism on Wes Anderson‘s part (“Unbearable Whiteness”) is interesting reading, but what I liked the most was reading a line from Bottle Rocket — spoken by Luke Wilson‘s Anthony — that I’d forgotten.
“Anthony’s last girlfriend sent him into a psychological tailspin, we learn, when she made a bourgeois proposal,” Weiner explains. “Over at Elizabeth’s beach house,” Anthony says, “she asked me if I’d rather go water-skiing or lay out. And I realized that not only did I not want to answer that question but I never wanted to answer another water-sports question, or see any of these people again for the rest of my life.”
If you come from a well-tended family and you don’t have some kind of thought like this sometime in your teens or your 20s, you have no soul. Of course, sooner or later you grow out of this, and then down the road you start working your tail off — sometimes successfully and sometimes not — so you can make enough money to afford to be with people who ask each other on weekends if they’d like to water-ski or lay out. Not that you want to hang with them, but you want to be able to afford access to their realm.
