Professional Life, Childhood, and Fantasy Solutions: Middle-Class Alienation in the Fiction of J. D. Salinger and the Films of Wes Anderson

David Frost: What was the most miserable thing about your childhood?

Woody Allen: Um, probably the fact that I was young. It was. If I could have been older at the time, I think I could have carried it off more.

— The David Frost Show, 1969

In The Catcher in the Rye and the Glass family stories, J. D. Salinger crystallizes the postwar celebration of youthful innocence and the correlative suspicion of adult experience. Yet Salinger avoids allegories of saintly innocence and fallen experience that defined earlier characterizations of the child and the adult, from William Wordsworth to Frances Hodgson Burnett. The most compelling version of youth that Salinger creates is a strange, paradoxical figure: an innocent child who possesses all the knowledge and ability of an experienced adult. Salinger presents these children as fully autonomous beings who operate with greater insight, ability, and enlightenment than the adults who surround them. Salinger's children are defined by their extreme formality, their careful deportment, their stringently organized spaces, and often their actual practice of a profession.

Salinger's peculiar idealization of childhood has become a major influence on contemporary writers and filmmakers, particularly Wes Anderson. Deeply informed by Salinger's themes and aesthetic, Anderson creates visual worlds inhabited by Salinger's paradox of the professional child who possesses all the powers and capacities of an adult. Like the extreme prose stylization and narrative involutions in Salinger, the mise-en-scène of Anderson's films creates a palpable sense of the scale model, a dollhouse's perfect reduction of proportions, and a storybook flatness that marks his characters' worlds as impossibly idealized as the fictional children themselves. Salinger's and Anderson's all-but-emancipated professional children have little in common with either contemporary childhood or the Victorian cult of decidedly unprofessional juvenescent innocence.1 We will argue that Salinger's and Anderson's fantasies of childhood are not really about childhood at all. Rather, Salinger develops this fantasy of the child as a response to the profound alienations and disappointments of middle-class adult professional life. Both Salinger's Glass family stories and Wes Anderson's films featuring child-professional characters index a specific cultural imaginary that addresses the impossible paradoxes of adult professional life in consumer capitalism. Through their child characters, Salinger and Anderson develop fantasies of what it might be like to fully enjoy an adult professional's life — defined by autonomy, objectivity, knowledge, ability, power, and pleasure — in all of its potentiality without any of the accompanying symptoms that constitute the price of adult experience and success. These child characters show what it might be like to achieve the "good life" as a professional without the myriad symptoms, from physical stress to emotional collapse, that define adults in these narratives and in our actual experience.2

The Paradoxes of the Professions

Images of professionals in the works of Salinger and Anderson are grounded in two quite different historical contexts. Salinger writes at the very acme of prestige and power for the professions in the mid-twentieth century, when a faith in expertise was broadly shared. By Anderson's career at the end of the twentieth century and beyond, technological and economic transformations have significantly weakened the professions. Where Salinger writes about professional life as a given and a trap for his white, middle-class characters, Anderson evokes the prestige and power of professionals with nostalgic aspiration, and his work unfolds in the context of popular skepticism of professionals and emerging economic precarity. Yet, for both Salinger and Anderson, the defining characteristics and ironies of professional life remain largely the same.

Colloquial uses of the word "professional" denote a number of related and sometimes contradictory concepts. A professional is one who earns a living through the practice of an occupation, as opposed to an amateur, but also a "competent, efficient" individual with "the skill, knowledge, experience, standards, or expertise of a professional."3 Yet, through its etymological roots, the professional invokes a thoroughly spiritual dimension that directly contradicts engaging in an occupation for profit. The oldest sense of the word "professional" "relat[es] to or mark[s] the occasion of entrance into a religious order," as in a profession of faith.4 This sense of a profession is still at the heart of our imagination that a profession is more than an occupation: it is a calling, a career, a practice of public service imbued with greater meaning than the pursuit of private profit.5 While this animating contradiction between public good and private profits remains plausible when applied to some of the oldest professions — religion, law, and medicine — the sense of a calling and the fantasy of serving a higher good by the end of the twentieth century clings tenuously to white collar occupations like engineering or banking, teaching or public relations, manufacturing or real estate brokering, or even human resources management. This tension between private profits and public service is at the heart of both Salinger's and Anderson's professional characters' drive, aspirations, and dilemmas.

At the very height of optimism about the professional class just after WWII, authors like William H. Whyte, Jr. would make the case that the consolidation of professionals working in large organizations and living in homogenous planned suburbs resulted in abject conformity and horrific alienation. In his 1956 bestseller, The Organization Man, Whyte surveys the lives of managers, engineers, scientists, lawyers, and other white-collar men. Whyte argues that the professional's existence within huge, bureaucratic institutions oriented towards social collectivism was a betrayal of the bedrock values of the American capitalism's "protestant ethic" of thrift, hard work, and entrepreneurship based wholly on naked self-interest.6Whyte's praise of the "protestant ethic" already belies the fact that this "universal" bedrock was already a betrayal of working professionals who happened to be people of color and/or women.7 Yet in Whyte's idealization of the protestant ethic, the new emphasis on professional objectivity and disinterest undercut the competitive, self-interested, heroic subject of capitalism. In the place of a white-male protestant ethic, Whyte sees the middle-class world of mediocrity and conformity revealed in the rise of bureaucratic, ubiquitous personality testing of the midcentury corporations. Furthermore, poor outcomes produced by such mediocrity were shielded by the New Deal's safety nets. Whyte's conservative critique emphasizes the rise of middle management in large corporate and government bureaucracies in the 1950s and its role in favoring group consensus over individual initiative, even for traditional professionals, such as scientists and doctors, who were increasingly working within large organizations. He writes,

The corporation man is the most conspicuous example, but he is only one, for the collectivization so visible in the corporation has affected almost every field of work. Blood brother to the business trainee off to join Du Pont is the seminary student who will end up in the church hierarchy, the doctor headed for the corporate clinic, the physics Ph.D in a government laboratory, the intellectual on the foundation-sponsored team project, the engineering graduate in the huge drafting room at Lockheed, the young apprentice in a Wall Street law factory.8

Whyte emphasizes what he sees as a dangerous contradiction for professionals between the rugged individualism defining protestant ethics and the aims of large organizations that demand conformity to strive towards a "social ethic." While Whyte emphasizes the conflict between the professional and "The Organization," his work suggests an additional tension between individual self-interest and the "sacred" call of the profession, whether that call answers to knowledge or ingenuity for its own sake or strives to forward a public good.9 Whyte's midcentury critique of both the ubiquity and dangers of professional desires for security and wealth, social status and its attendant conformity shares many aspects of Salinger's critique of the adult professional.10 Like Whyte, Salinger is profoundly concerned with the pressures of social conformity and the compromises they demand.11

Wes Anderson takes up the theme of the compromised white-collar professional in the 1990s and into the new millennium, at a time when professional life was becoming rife with cynicism about any profession's claims of disinterested service to the public.12 According to Valérie Fournier, economic and technological changes since the midcentury have driven a growing public distrust in professions, and what was once professional work is increasingly the domain of paraprofessional labor (the adjunct, the paralegal, the nurse-practitioner, etc.) and the gig economy. However, her most intriguing point is that much of the recent loss of status for professionals is driven by their inability to mystify their labor in a world of wider education and access to information. She writes that the earlier success of "professional practice must thus be seen to be based on an element of intuition and talent that cannot be taught or translated into techniques and transmissible rules, that hides professionals' activity behind a screen of 'mysteriousness,' and that puts their actions and decisions beyond the scrutiny of the lay public."13 Salinger constantly points to the impossibility of practicing a profession without succumbing to hypocrisy, and yet his work celebrates exactly these mystified professional ideals of disinterest and the religious sense of occupations as vocation that reveal a unique and superior talent. In Anderson's films, the adult, white middle-class, mostly male characters are revealed to be outright frauds nostalgically clinging or aspiring to recover the very professional mystification that Fournier describes. Where Salinger lauds the professional ideal but finds it impossible to achieve for anyone but his child professionals, Anderson's films ironically acknowledge the failure of professional mystification while nostalgically longing for, and often performing, its recuperation in the aura of accomplishment. To achieve this recuperation Anderson regularly turns to the fantasy of Salinger's professional child.14

J. D. Salinger's Child-Professionals

Though Holden Caulfield is not a child-professional, in The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger most clearly describes the horrors that define middle and upper-middle-class professional life. It is Holden's critique in The Catcher in the Rye that demands the Glass family as its compensatory fantasy. Published in 1951, The Catcher in the Rye follows seventeen-year-old Holden Caulfield's struggles with the demands and compromises of reproducing the professional class position. Holden emphasizes the contradiction between disinterested service and profit, exemplified by his father's work as a corporate lawyer, noting that "those boys really haul it in."15 His family expects him to take his place in this upper-middle-class professional world, and his education at private prep schools, like the Whooton School and Pency Prep, is undertaken on behalf of his family's desire that he reproduce their success. Excruciatingly aware that the primary goal of his education is the reproduction of class status, Holden becomes deeply troubled throughout the novel by the signs and ritual practices that perform class identification, so often marked by pretension and entitlement on the one hand, and humiliation, shame, and blatant unfairness on the other. Holden constantly obsesses over the relentless social friction produced by this negotiation of class status. For instance, he is mortified when a less privileged boy who rooms with him at school envies his luxurious suitcases. Holden desperately wants to hide this sign of class difference, but even the shamed student insists that Holden perform his class status by displaying the suitcases in the vain hope that other students might confuse Holden's suitcases with his own. When Holden meets two nuns in New York, he thinks about their sincerity in poverty, and how the women of his class only engage in charity "if they could dress up and wear lipstick" (CR 148). In one of the climactic scenes of the novel, Holden proposes marriage to Sally Hayes, asking her to run away with him to a rural town where they could live simply while he supports them with a working class job. She affirms his offer of marriage, but only through a self-interested negotiation of class status that marriage promises to ensure. Sally insists that they must wait until he completes his university education, echoing their parents' injunctions to assume their proper class position. Holden reads her desire as precisely what he had hoped to escape:

We'd have to go downstairs in elevators with suitcases and stuff. We'd have to phone up everybody and tell 'em good-by and send 'em postcards from hotels and all. And I'd be working in some office, making a lot of dough, and riding to work in cabs and Madison Avenue buses, and reading newspapers, and playing bridge all the time, and going to the movies and seeing a lot of stupid shorts and coming attractions and newsreels. (CR 172-173)

For Holden, whatever the content of his professional work might be, the meaning of that work would be lost in the demands of consumerism and the "phoniness" of class pretensions dramatized throughout the novel. At times, Holden imagines ways that such a life might be considered noble — even if one does play bridge — as though talking himself into accepting the professional career his family expects of him. Even Phoebe, his nine-year-old sister, asks him to consider being a lawyer, like their father. Holden's reply crystalizes his critique of the professional:

Lawyers are all right, I guess — but it doesn't appeal to me. . . . I mean they're all right if they go around saving innocent guy's lives all the time, and like that, but you don't do that kind of stuff if you're a lawyer. All you do is make a lot of dough and play golf and play bridge and buy cars and drink Martinis and look like a hot-shot. . . . Even if you did go around saving guy's lives and all, how would you know if you did it because you really wanted to save guy's lives, or because you did it because what you really wanted to do was be a terrific lawyer, with everybody slapping you on the back and congratulating you in court when the goddam trial was over. (CR 223-224)

Holden suspects that even the successful professional ostensibly acting on behalf of a public good is alienated from the meaning of their labor by their competition for social status. Even as they might do good and ethical labor in the world, class expectations and accompanying rewards compromise the defining features of the professional: disinterest and objectivity.16 This social status is all the more troubling to Holden, as it is to Salinger, in that capitalism and its consumer culture create a world of intolerable inequality. Holden imagines escaping to a rural life of working class obscurity, but the novel ends with his incarceration in a hospital in California as he recovers from his complete breakdown.

Despite his critique of class, Holden is no Marxist, and his imagination is not that of a revolutionary. As Carol and Richard Ohmann note, "The novel draws readers into a powerful longing for what-could-be, and at the same time interposes what-is, as an unchanging and immovable reality."17 Holden's complaints about the world are coherent, consistent, and pointed critiques of class conflict and the hypocrisies of professional life, but he offers no alternative to the state of the world other than dissociation and fantasy. In the face of what Salinger perceives as an immovable and eternal reality, he provides not a prescription for revolution but a fantasy solution: the professional child. Salinger will most fully articulate this fantasy in the Glass family stories, but even in The Catcher in the Rye, the fantasy is operative in Holden's brother Allie's precocious grasp of poetry, Phoebe's unalienated play in her writing, and in Holden's own fantasy of being "the catcher in the rye."

In Holden's fantasy of "the catcher," he imagines himself as the only adult in a world of children, playing in a field of rye. The children are so absorbed in their games that they fail to notice a deadly cliff, and Holden imagines that he will catch them. In this fantasy, the children are defined by their unselfconsciousness. They exist without alienation, and their only occupation is play; they are wholly at one with their actions. Yet, the children play in a carefully tended field of a key commodity, a grain used for baking, brewing, animal feed and more. If the children appeared in a natural landscape, that would have suggested a Rousseauian innocence, but the field of rye shows them playing in a primary site of production, on earth already marked by a complex economy. They play, but they do not labor, recalling Holden's own fantasies of working without labor, like being a cowboy on a ranch where he could learn to ride a horse "in about two minutes" (CR 214). Just as Holden's invocation of Robert Burns's song invokes and then occludes the sexual dimensions of the bodies that "meet," the field of rye makes clear the presence of a complexly developed economy but holds the necessarily compromised and alienated realities of reproducing that economy at bay.18 Holden's fantasy is thus a clear attempt to find a solution to the impasse of professional life — to equate the powers and meanings of work with the unalienated pleasures of an impossibly pure children's game. While avoiding the romantic idea of a return to nature, Holden's fantasy still preserves an idealized vision of working-class and working-poor rural adult life that might not be embroiled in the hypocrisies and alienation of upper-middle-class city life. This parallels his other fantasies of supporting Sally Hayes by working in a gas station while living in the woods, or going to Colorado to become a cowboy. In these seemingly benign masculinist and classist daydreams of a simple life, no one really works (unskilled labor and domestic housework is not really labor), and thus no one is exploited. No one is really poor, either, an oversight that Sally seems to grasp, telling him "we're both practically children, and did you ever stop to think about what you'd do if you didn't get a job when your money ran out? We'd starve to death. The whole thing's so fantastic" (CR 147). In Holden's fantasy, the rye exists outside the world of adults, and neither he nor the children need to be sacrificed to the incommensurable realities of actual sexual or economic reproduction. In other words, this world more clearly resembles the practice of the sacred replete with mysteries, rather than the labor of a vocation.

Holden's characterizations of Allie and Phoebe are precursors to Salinger's idealization of the Glass children insofar as they not only play at being a professional; their games transform the rules of the game by engaging in practices that cannot be reduced to the winning and losing of professional life. The Glass children also "play some game" as contestants on the wildly popular radio show, It's a Wise Child (CR 224). The game show exists in a world defined by the context of a workplace; the Glass children labor as professionals, but, so long as they are juvenescent, they will remain untouched by the stain of experience. Holden idealizes his "terrifically intelligent" brother Allie, who had covered his baseball mitt with poems by the time he reached the age of eleven (CR 43). Allie also "plays" baseball while reading, seemingly showing no desire to win he is thus uncorrupted by status, playing the game but with disinterest. Phoebe's literariness also gestures at the figure of the unalienated professional. When Holden returns home to speak to Phoebe, he finds her in his older brother DB's room. DB is a successful writer but is alienated and compromised by the seductions of Hollywood money and fame. Taking over his spacious desk with her own writing, Phoebe creates stories about the "girl detective" and practices her new pen names — "Phoebe Weatherfield Caulfield / Phoebe W. Caulfield / Phoebe Weatherfield Caulfield, Esq." (209). She enters unselfconsciously into the masculinist genre, redefining the rules of that game. She evokes the figure of the unalienated writer DB might once have been but can no longer be. Allie and Phoebe anticipate the professional child that Salinger crystallizes in the Glass children. Wes Anderson will sustain this fantasy in the following century by foregrounding the sincerity of disinterested professionals who refuse to instrumentalize their practice and expertise. That disinterest — far from dooming the world of the professional to mediocrity as in Whyte — redeems if not the potentiality of an unalienated existence then the fantasy of the one we might have had as a child, had we been equipped to carry it off.

The Glass Family Stories, or, Seymour Glass is Never a Child

Very few of Salinger's "general readers" today know "Hapworth 16, 1924," Salinger's last published story, a novella really, that ran to almost the whole of the June 19th New Yorker in 1965 (see fig. 1).19 Salinger abandoned plans to publish it as a book, and it is still only available in the original New Yorker issue. At the time of its publication, "Hapworth" was widely panned. Subsequent criticism has not been any kinder. The story takes the form of a letter from seven-year-old Seymour Glass, away at a summer camp in Maine with his brother Buddy, to his parents and the other Glass siblings in New York. The story slowly reveals that Seymour and Buddy are not ordinary children. In a break from Salinger's earlier realism, the siblings find themselves experiencing some strange, Glass family karmic loop. They have lived entire lifetimes and experienced multiple incarnations of those lives. Only Seymour, however, has access to the memories of these previous lifetimes. Though inhabiting the body of a seven-year-old boy engaged in the childhood rituals of summer camp, Seymour also writes in the voice of an adult with multiple lifetimes of experience. Salinger emphatically has it both ways: Seymour is an innocent seven-year-old child in full possession of lifetimes of adult experience. However, by dragging the animating contradiction of the adult-child out so fully into the open, its status as fantasy is made too evident to be effective as realist mimesis. Salinger's fantasy can only successfully function when it is presented and carefully framed as nostalgia, as it is in the other and better known Glass family stories.

John Updike's 1961 review of Franny and Zooey is probably the most famous and often repeated criticism of Salinger's work, particularly of the Glass family stories. Updike accuses Salinger of creating a fictional universe that is too clearly read as deeply personal and compensatory fantasy: "He loves them more than God loves them. He loves them too exclusively. Their invention has become a hermitage to him."20 While Updike thinks that "'Franny' takes place in our world, in 'Zooey' we move into a dream world whose zealously animated details only emphasize an essential unreality."21 Updike's observation also precisely captures both the excessive idealization and the zealously animated artifice that define the films of Anderson, and thus shows just how deeply and pervasively Salinger's vision is still felt more than forty years later. Yet Updike saw this fantasy and the overwrought and naive emotions that it articulates as mostly a failure interrupting the reader's credulity. However, we argue that the fantasy of both the adult-child and child-adult functions remarkably for Salinger's and later Anderson's audiences as cultural imaginaries — that is to say as fantasies that are taken as "reality" that enable us to feel the culmination of our artistic, intellectual, and/or professional potentiality without the deadening realization that their promise might be flimsier than the stylizations of a small-scale model or miniature in Wes Anderson's films.

Critics have generally followed Updike's appraisal of the idealization of the Glass family, noting the obvious inconsistencies, exaggerations, and rhetorical excesses of Salinger's stories.22 But emphasizing them misses the powerful ways in which the Glasses reflect not a believable family, but a mood: a nostalgic longing, and the full articulation of a compensatory fantasy in a series of scenes and images that continue to resonate powerfully with postwar American readers and generations of writers and filmmakers who come after. There is only enough realism in the Glass family stories to support the fantasy image of the professional child. Supporting such a fantasy is, perhaps, what Seymour may no longer have been able to sustain in "A Perfect Day for Banana Fish," especially given the presence of the "good good girl" Sybil Carpenter.23

With their best days almost always narrated in a safely inaccessible past, the seven Glass children appear to be innocent, but not mere innocents. Rather than the empty purity of children like Sybil Carpenter, the Glass children represent something entirely different: knowledge without the fall. While remaining innocent, their intellectual capacities are unlimited, their learning impressive, and their religious quests absolutely sincere. Moreover, from early ages they are all active professionals, and between 1927-1943 each appears on the radio quiz show It's a Wise Child "with a freshness, an aplomb, that was considered unique in commercial radio."24 While the children are thus professional entertainers, the quiz show frame suggests that we should also see them as tiny, already accomplished academics, sharing the fruits of their research with the public. The children are not only professionals, but professionals whose performances are not the least bit childish. Tellingly, the narrator of "Zooey" notes that half the radio audience thought the Glass children "were a bunch of insufferably 'superior' little bastards who should have been drowned or gassed at birth" while the other half "held that they were bona fide underage wits and savants, of an uncommon, if unenviable, order" (FZ 54). What is clear in both responses is that these are not ordinary children, or, indeed, children at all.

Unlike adults, the Glass children do not have to suffer for their abilities. They neither suffer any difficulty in acquiring knowledge, nor do they have to make sacrifices because of the knowledge that they acquire. Zooey, for instance, is described at twelve as possessing "an English vocabulary on exact par with Mary Baker Eddy, if only he could be urged to use it" (FZ 55). He remembers things effortlessly, and all the children are capable of similar feats of intellect. As panelists on It's a Wise Child, the children do not have to fight for their position of national fame, nor do they suffer from the horrors of stage parents, as so many child stars do.25 We are not told how Bessie and Les Glass were able to create and maintain an eighteen-year dynasty for their children on a national radio show, and there is no sense of backstage drama, despite the fact that the show generated enough money to send all of them to college. Throughout the stories, both Bessie and Les are depicted as loving but completely ineffectual clowns, characterized mostly by their nostalgia for their own days as Vaudeville performers.26

With the exception of "Hapworth," the Glass family stories narrate the childhood of the Glass siblings and their days of intense study and professional triumph exclusively in the past tense, from the perspective of their alienated or failed adult lives. The primary subject of the Glass family stories is, instead, their complete undoing as they enter the fallen world of adulthood. Seymour kills himself after serving in World War II, and Zooey struggles to deal with the horrific realities and compromises of a professional actor's life. Franny falls apart as she encounters the sexism and egotism of academic life and the professional study of literature. Buddy, Salinger's fictional double, has retreated into the woods where he supports himself as a teacher, a more realistic fictional scenario than Salinger's own remarkable fate. Waker has disappeared into the obscurity of a monk's life, without a single story devoted to him. Even Boo Boo, often described as a "homemaker," faces, in the single story devoted to her, the ugliness of explaining a fully adult anti-semitism to her own son. In Franny and Zooey in particular, Zooey blames their childhood for their inability to negotiate or be at home in their adult worlds.

Zooey declares to Franny that "we're freaks" because of the strange education and upbringing that define the Glass children, but the descriptions of the Glass childhood worlds are the most seductive elements of Salinger's stories. Take, for instance, Zooey's description of the room Seymour and Buddy shared as boys in the Glass family apartment:

A stranger with a flair for cocktail-party descriptive prose might have commented that the room, at a quick glance, looked as if it has once been tenanted by two struggling twelve-year-old lawyers or researchists. And, in fact, unless one chose to make a fairly thoughtful survey of the reading matter extant there were few, if any, certain indications that the former occupants had both reached voting age within the predominantly juvenile dimensions of the room. (FZ 179)

The room itself is "unsunny and unlarge" and stuffed with furniture, including "two boyishly small knee-cramping desks" that are completely surrounded: "Tall cases lined three walls of the room, filled to and beyond capacity. The overflow had been piled in stacks on the floor" (FZ 180). The room gestures toward the miniature, proportioned to the two juvenile bodies of the brothers. Indeed, as the narrator points out, there is nothing to suggest that the boys ever grew up physically. And yet, everything in the room speaks to their full adult and fully professionalized intellectual abilities, revealed both by a careful catalog of the books they have read, as well as by the beaverboard on the back of their door, which has been covered by a collage of quotations from the most serious philosophers, theologians, and poets, their words reproduced in perfect, miniature penmanship: "The lettering was minute, but jet-black and passionately legible, if just a trifle fancy in places, and without blots or erasures" (FZ 176). This last detail is key, for we see a total transparency in this image of precision and capability. Zooey enters the room only after covering his head with a white handkerchief, reiterating as Amy Hungerford has pointed out, the Jewish tradition, in which men cover their heads before entering into a sacred space (FZ 11). For Hungerford, Salinger develops a profound vision of religious syncretism, seeing it as Salinger's answer to the problems of religious pluralism in postwar America.27 While Hungerford's reading offers a compelling insight connecting Salinger's religious commitments to the unique voice that so defines his fiction, we argue that what is most sacrosanct in Salinger's work, and indeed what many readers have responded to most intensely, is not the religious quest or insight that Salinger or his characters offer, but rather the image of the professional child: the "wise child."28 Despite the promise of religious insights in Franny and Zooey, we never see the fruit of them. We do not see Franny recover and become an unalienated adult. While religion functions in Salinger to guarantee the depth of his characters, it never holds the emotional center of the story. That place is always occupied, in the Glass stories and in The Catcher in the Rye, by deeply nostalgic visions of the professional child's ability and potentiality. What then makes Seymour and Buddy's room sacred to Zooey? In it, as children, both Buddy and Seymour were able to fully and perfectly realize abilities that can belong only to an adult professional, but they are able to realize them in innocence, without labor, and untainted by the horrors and alienation of actual adult middle-class existence. If it is a sacred space, it is so because it functions as the site of a fundamental fantasy that might mediate "the systemic crisis or 'crisis ordinariness'" that defines almost every dimension of everyday life in conditions of late capital.29

The room in "Zooey," a miniature of adult life, nostalgically gestures at the impossibility of these characters. Susan Stewart links the narrative of nostalgia to objects that anchor it and make the nostalgic fantasy legible, particularly souvenirs and miniatures.30 Stewart points out that miniatures create a different order of narrative time, reducing the world to a microcosm that suggests an impossible wholeness we can fully grasp, quite literally: "The miniature world remains perfect and uncontaminated by the grotesque so long as its absolute boundaries are maintained" (FZ 68). Seymour and Buddy's room functions as just such a miniature. While Salinger's description of the room can pass for a plausible realism, the reduced scale, "boyishly knee-cramping desks" and souvenirs of every kind, including books like Seymour's copy of The Way of the Pilgrim, summon up an impossible, nostalgic world, one that provides a profound resonance for generations of mature readers and artists. As Stewart has it, "hostile to history and its invisible origins, and yet longing for an impossibly pure context of lived experience at a place of origin, nostalgia wears a distinctly utopian face, a face that turns toward a future-past, a past which has only ideological reality."31 This perfectly describes the very mood of longing in Salinger's Glass family stories. For both Salinger's narrators and his readers, the nostalgia for the childhood of the Glass family is an impossible, utopian longing: "the nostalgic's utopia is prelapsarian, a genesis where lived and mediated experience are one, where authenticity and transcendence are both present and everywhere."32 Yet in Salinger, that nostalgia, those objects, all have a particular imaginary articulation, the mise-en-scène of the professional child.

The Miniaturist: Wes Anderson's Professional Children

Anderson's critics remark on two main features that make his films distinct: a focus on upper-middle-class family conflicts and an extreme stylization in everything from the acting to the obsessive details of the mise-en-scène.33 Despite clear thematic and formal elements, that description could just as easily describe the works of Salinger himself.34 To grasp Wes Anderson's complex relationship to these themes, styles, and figures, and to assess his relationship to Salinger, it is critical to situate his work at a pivot point between postmodern irony and new sincerity, as the most nuanced recent criticism has done.35 As we will argue, where Anderson endlessly ironizes and pastiches the many genres he uses throughout even a single film (the heist, the road trip, the romance, the prison movie, the war film, etc.), and, however ironic and distant the use of these genres might be, characters in these pastiches are affirmed as unironically sincere at moments of tragic recognition and epiphany. Furthermore, his characters are especially affirmed in their experiences of shared belief at the moment of revelation.

Childhood innocence and wonder is at the heart of Anderson's films, and almost all of his films acknowledge Salinger, from outright variations on Salinger's key characters and themes in films including The Royal Tenenbaums and Moonrise Kingdom to subtle allusions and thematic rhymes in Bottle Rocket or The Life Aquatic. Some of his films, like Rushmore, Moonrise Kingdom, and The Grand Budapest Hotel, feature an able but newly tragic child-professional as protagonist. In other films, like Bottle Rocket and The Life Aquatic, and in the later sections of The Royal Tenenbaums, alienated adults try desperately to recapture the sensibility of their fantasy of childhood innocence in their attempts to practice a profession in the spirit of unalienated play, epitomized by Bill Murray, the endearingly flawed perpetual man-child of the American screen. While the first narrative follows the child-professional directly, the other narrates the tragic present of adult loss and the longing for childhood potential. Anderson thus takes up Salinger's figure of the child-professional; the films emphasize not innocence without stain but instead children who already possess the competitive strain and emotional alienation of adult life. In all of Anderson's films, the adult characters look back on their childhoods through an idealized nostalgia, projecting a sense of their lost potentiality, imagining a wholeness that a careful viewing of the films shows to be provisional if not illusory. Thus, Anderson's variations on Salinger's key themes develop and complicate the figure of the child-professional, maintaining a sense of potentiality while depending on new layers of irony, judgment, and doubt. Ultimately, however, Anderson both invokes and rejects an idealized understanding of childhood while somehow managing to preserve a sincere relationship to the world, often expressed in moments of cinematic wonder. In the following section, we trace the development of Anderson's complex response to Salinger's influence in The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic, and Moonrise Kingdom.

Like Salinger's obsessive focus on minute descriptions of rooms, particular objects, excerpts from notes, letters, and notebooks, Anderson's mise-en-scène foregrounds the miniature and the souvenir, rhyming with the flat affect in the actor's performances to suggest a theatrical unreality similar to sections of "Zooey" and Nine Stories where realism gives way to stylization. In his introduction to The Wes Anderson Collection, Michael Chabon writes movingly of this stylization and the miniature worlds that Anderson creates, linking this focus on small details and stylization to coming of age and the traumatic discovery that human life is irretrievably broken:

[the child] discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher's heart: an intimation of vanished glory, or lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. We call the moment at which this ache first arises "adolescence." The feeling haunts people all their lives.36

For Chabon, like Stewart, literary and visual miniatures attempt to create a world of wholeness, to suture over the traumatic wound, and he compares Anderson's films to the boxes of Joseph Cornell, noting the role of the box itself as the limiting boundary of the miniature while the objects within it serve as powerful souvenirs of the lost wholeness of the world.

"For my next trick," says Joseph Cornell, or Vladimir Nabokov, or Wes Anderson, "I have put the world into a box." And when he opens the box, you see something dark and glittering, an orderly mess of shards, refuse, bits of junk and feather and butterfly wing, tokens and totems of memory, maps of exile, documentation of loss. And you say, leaning in, "The world!"37

It is just this recognition, and of course the mood of that nostalgic ache, that Salinger is able to create so effectively, both in the profound intimacy of his voice but also thematically in presenting the Glass family, and Seymour in particular, as fantasy images of this impossible wholeness.

Like Salinger's rooms, Anderson's small scale-models, "dollhouse" bisected sets, and focus on small objects and detail captures and elicits an imagination of the impossibly perfect whole that is evoked even as almost all of his characters acknowledge that wholeness as something already lost. In fact, we are reminded of J. M. Barry's description of childhood's imagination: "Of all delectable islands the Neverland is the snuggest and most compact, not large and sprawly, you know, with tedious distances between one adventure and another, but nicely crammed" (7). Barry emphasizes the smallness of childhood, but also the nostalgic relation we must have to these worlds: "On these magic shores children are forever beaching their little boats. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more" (7).

Anderson's third feature, The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), is directly inspired by the Glass family. Indeed, one might go so far as to call it an adaptation, or something like a musical variation on the Glass stories. The name of the film itself derives from Boo Boo's married name, Tannenbaum, and like the Glasses, the Tenenbaums are half-Jewish. Though seemingly set on a larger scale than the Glass family's cramped apartment, the Tenenbaum house on Archer Avenue turns out to be a series of rooms, each presented like a Cornell box and rhyming powerfully with Salinger's evocation of Seymour and Buddy's room in "Zooey." Each room evokes the feeling of a dollhouse, a stylized collection of objects idealizing the identities and the unlimited, professional capacities of their tiny occupants. Like the Glass stories, Anderson's film focuses on the Tenenbaum's adult failures but depends upon flashbacks for an idealization of their own childhoods. In the elaborate montage that begins the film, each of the Tenenbaum children is presented in their childhood bedrooms, and like Seymour and Buddy's room, these are not the typical spaces of children. The tiny Chas, the oldest son, lives in a fully functioning office. He is dressed in a shirt and tie, drinking coffee at an All-Steel desk with a Dazor drafting lamp and a multi-line phone (see fig. 2). He is fully engaged in a profitable business, breeding and selling Dalmatian mice, and investing and trading in real estate. Margot is a playwright whose professionalization recalls but goes beyond Phoebe Caulfield's aspirations. Her room has a writer's desk, an extensive library of plays by the modern masters from Brecht to Pinter, and a miniature model of a stage. We see her typing while the voiceover (Alec Baldwin) informs us that in the ninth grade she won a Braverman grant of $50,000 and later a Pulitzer prize (see fig. 3). Like Chas's business success, the grant and the prize leave no doubt that Margot is not playing at writing. She is a child who earns the full financial and aesthetic recognition of a professional artist. More than any of the other children, she is presented as fully adult, particularly when we see her at a party, surrounded by adult men, wearing an evening dress, a fur stole, and holding what appears to be a cocktail (see fig. 4). Richie, the youngest son, is a champion tennis player, and we are introduced to him in his room as he strings his own racquet, a task requiring great skill and the use of a precision machine (see fig. 5). His status as junior tennis champion also underscores that he is not merely playing a game, as his wall of trophies makes clear. They are all, in the fullest sense of the phrase, practicing professionals.

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Where Salinger's stories present an idealized portrait of the young Glass siblings, particularly Seymour and Buddy, Anderson's Tenenbaum children are already deeply alienated as children. The Tenenbaum children's success is predicated on the much more intensely stressful expectations of their power-couple parents, Ethylene, an archeologist, and Royal, a high-powered litigator, in contrast to the Glass children's loving but ineffectual vaudevillian lineage. We see that Ethylene's "highest priority" is cultivating her children's education; she pushes them to excel, all while writing her book, A Family of Geniuses.38 Royal puts them all under tremendous emotional strain through his inexplicable favoritism towards Richie until his adult professional "meltdown" at age twenty-six (RT 09:01) and through Royal's almost sadistic inability to acknowledge either Chas or Margot, particularly the latter, regularly referring to her as his "adopted daughter, Margot Tenenbaum" in front of colleagues, friends and even Margot herself (RT 03:54). Their professional accomplishments therefore are already enmeshed with familial trauma. While inspired by the Glass family and deploying Salinger's figures and techniques, Anderson offers a critical and ironic take on them. Importantly, like Salinger's stories, Anderson's film mainly focuses on the horrors of the adult lives of the Tenenbaums, only flashing back to their childhood triumphs or aspirations, often in quick montages or brief scenes, frequently suggesting the successes of their lives as child-professionals through the beautifully constructed sets. As the voiceover tells us, with ample backup from the Beatles' "Hey Jude" as the nostalgic soundtrack to the professional-child's montage, the adult Tenenbaums have not really survived their remarkable childhood: "In fact, virtually all memory of the brilliance of the young Tenenbaums had been erased by two decades of betrayal, failure, and disaster" (RT 05:29). Like the Glass children, who are nationally famous and fully accomplished as children but live adult lives of disaster, unhappiness, or obscurity, the Tenenbaum children become failed adults, and as in Salinger, those failures strongly suggest that adult life is simply a catastrophe.39 Central to this version of the child-professional is the irony between how the audience sees this childhood and how the characters themselves see it. While the flashbacks and montages make clear just how emotionally traumatic their childhood was, the dense object world of the mise-en-scène emphasizes an impossible idealization that each character seeks to reconnect to, as if their childhood holds the key to their lost wholeness and adult flourishing. Anderson thus presents a far more nuanced and arguably postmodern reading of the figure of the child-professional whose sincerity is not yet "new."

The entirety of The Royal Tenenbaums, particularly the flashbacks to childhood, has an air of fantasy that strives to present an image of impossible, lost potentiality. As Dilley describes it, we have to see "the larger structure of the film, which is based on a book that does not exist, and told by a narrator who may not be entirely reliable, using locations that are entirely invented (the Lindberg Palace Hotel, or the 375th Street Y) to represent a New York that may never have existed, or exists only in memory."40 Just as this New York is a better, more gentle fantasy of the real city, the very mise-en-scène suggests that the narrative of the Tenenbaums' childhood of professional accomplishment is similarly fantasmatic, taking a sad song and making it better. For instance, Chas returns to the Tenenbaum house seeking a sense of safety that he cannot find in the world, even though the old brownstone has none of the safety features of his modern apartment. Underscoring the point even further, Margot's decision to leave her husband and return to the Tenenbaum home is set to the Vince Guaraldi's "Christmas Time Is Here" from A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965). The song is heavily laden with nostalgia for Anderson's generation, recalling the central theme and conclusion of the animated short: true sincerity and childhood innocence that wins out over cynicism, "pantophobia," and consumer culture.41 Even given the unflinching narration and Royal's uncensored, brutal dialogue accompanying the early montages,42 the song suggests that from Margot's adult perspective, the move back into her childhood home might lend access to or at least approximate an idealized childhood that she never had, and everything might come together in the end.

In the film's conclusion, the adult Tenenbaums seem to accept their compromised adult states. Margot breaks through her depression and writer's block to complete an autobiographical play produced at the Cavendish Theatre, entitled The Levinsons in the Trees, although the narrator tells us that "it ran for just under two weeks and received mixed reviews" (RT 01:39:53). Chas makes some peace with Royal, and seems the most joyful of the adult Tenenbaums, but only because he is seeing the world through the eyes of his two young sons. Richie also finds a way out of his suicidal depression, and now teaches young children tennis. As Ethylene marries Henry Sherman (Danny Glover), the film literalizes its tragicomic form by closing with Royal's funeral, driving home the point that the adult world is one of compromise and death redeemed only by contact with fantasies of a childhood that never existed.

The popular and critical reception of Anderson has tended to over-emphasize the role of parody and comedy in works like The Royal Tenenbaums. In these postmodern readings, Anderson deploys so much irony in deadpan acting styles, and the mise-en-scène is so stylized that it collapses tragic recognition into slick irony. While there is dark and cutting humor in all of Anderson's films, and a great deal of parody, particularly of the genres his films use to ground their narrative structures, the emotional core of Anderson's work is not the kind of parody that critics like Daniel Cross Turner emphasize. According to Turner, The Royal Tenenbaums "can be read as a self-reflexive investigation of the values and limits of parody as a cultural mode. The film's explorations of parodic substitutions dovetail neatly with its concern over the apparent depthlessness of both film and family as structuring agents of nostalgia."43 Moreover, Turner sees the force of nostalgia in the film merely "as a commodified style" that follows Fredric Jameson's sense that a vacuous nostalgia marks the contemporary "American sellscape."44 This take on Anderson undercuts the affective power of his films, and makes them indistinguishable from the kinds of obviously commercial films that merely traffic in nostalgia as a mode of consumption. We are much more inclined to see Anderson in terms of the "new sincerity," and as our reading of The Royal Tenenbaums suggests, again from Buckland, we see how the "new sincerity incorporates postmodern irony and cynicism; it operates in conjunction with irony."45 One can see this in the fact that though Royal's funeral is played for comedy, his actual death scene is a moment of profound and moving recognition for Chas, his harshest critic, who finally forgives his father in the face of his death.

The New Sincerity and the Affirmation of Fantasy Solutions

This mode of new sincerity buttressed by childhood nostalgia is even more clearly emphasized in The Life Aquatic (2004), a film that endlessly indulges in parody and yet ends with a moment of sincere, full, childlike wonder. The fantasy of childhood in The Life Aquatic works differently than what we see in The Royal Tenenbaums. Instead of flashbacks to a stylized, professional childhood, the film shows its main character, the "scientist" and filmmaker Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) as an adult only playing at his profession. The film makes it clear that he and his crew are not the scientists they claim to be (they cannot, for instance, correctly name the sea creatures that they encounter, make no important discoveries, and publish no scholarship). Instead, the action takes place in the miniature world of the boat, not so unlike the miniature of a stage that Margot Tenenbaum briefly holds in her hands or the actual setting for her first play starring herself and her brothers. Zissou gives the audience a tour of the ship, presented as a dollhouse, the set itself bisected so that all the rooms are visible to the viewer at once, and each emphasizing an aspect of the crew's life (see fig. 6): sauna with masseuse, the science lab, the kitchen — Zissou notes that the kitchen has the "most technologically advanced equipment on the ship" — the editing room, etc.46 Only the science lab looks empty and unused. The other rooms, bustling with activity, emphasize play and pleasure, making it clear that Zissou and his crew are not serious researchers. This world of the ship helps them articulate their imagination of themselves as professionals, but their life practice is one of play. Though Zissou and his crew are filmmakers, The Life Aquatic opens by establishing that their most recent work has failed to create an illusion of scientific professionalism or adventure. The cynicism of adult failure is palpable until the arrival of Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson), Zissou's lost son, who brings back a sense of childhood wonder and fantasy, and the cold hard cash that Zissou and the crew need to recapture their sustaining fantasy. Ned functions as a vanishing mediator, killed shortly before the climax of the film, but only after his work reconnects Zissou with the wonder of childhood wholeness. In his death, Ned relieves Zissou of the need to actually become a father, allowing him to continue playing at his life like a child. Ned's role is supported by Jane Winslett-Richardson (Cate Blanchett), the ostensibly cynical and objective adult reporter who, like Ned, was a childhood fan of Zissou and has taken the assignment only to redeem her youthful aspiration and identification with the fantasy of "Team Zissou's" adventurous mission of popular science. As an alienated adult professional, she seeks out Zissou's fantasy to help her sustain her life and imagine a future for her own unborn, would-be professional child — who she imagines is already becoming literate, as a fetus, as she reads the entirety of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu aloud to her belly.

In a rejection of postmodern irony, at the climax of the film, Steve Zissou finds the mythical jaguar shark of his quest, and we — the characters and the audience — all see it. The film thus ends without a hint of irony, its narrative mystery solved by the appearance of the MacGuffin. Rather than continued ironic distancing providing an armor of cynicism, or a veiled idealism necessary to bear the hypocrisies of an intolerably commodified world — rather than painful postmodern indeterminacy — Anderson's conclusion offers us full presence permeated with childhood wonder. The shark itself works so effectively that, like the Cornell box that transforms a bit of trash into sublime insight, the flimsy prop restores a precarious wholeness to Zissou's world encapsulated within the frame of the miniature sub. Zissou the scientist, documentarian, and lover is redeemed (see fig. 7). Crothers Dilley reads this moment of redemption, stating,

As [Zissou] sits, weeping, in the darkness of Deep Search, watching the beautiful shark swim by, everyone lays their hands on him, signifying not only their understanding of what is transpiring, but their forgiveness. With their eye on the breath-taking shark that looks like something dreamed up in Zissou's imagination, everyone finally sees what Zissou sees (his personal perspective, his approach to life) and is with him, their touch expresses their solidarity with him. (133)

The fantasy that sustains Zissou's life (that he is a real scientist making important discoveries and documenting them in riveting films) materializes as a complete, physical reality. And, that fantasy is not only his; it sustains and heals everyone around him (see fig. 8).

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Zissou is thus affirmed, as is his approach to life: playing at a profession with the imagination and wonder of a child instead of mastering either profession or personal relationships, a mastery shown to be more fictional than the jaguar shark. Both child-professionals and the child-adult of The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic thus demonstrate the crucial role of the fantastic, in Anderson's work as in Salinger's, where realism finally gives way to the articulation of fantasy narratives that, as Lauren Berlant formulates it, brings together our unconscious desires with the objects and images that make up a world:

Without fantasy there would be no love. There would be no way to move through the uneven field of our ambivalent attachments to our sustaining objects, which possess us, and thereby dispossess us of our capacity to idealize ourselves or them as consistent or benign simplicities. Without repairing the cleavages, fantasy makes it possible not to be destroyed by all that.47

Each of Anderson's films show characters engaged in building these same kinds of sustaining fantasy images not just to endure the inadequacies of their lives and worlds, but to love them, as Zissou loves the contained world of his boat in the midst of his professional failure.48 Anderson's films thus present fantasies of family life, professionalism, and childhood not only for his characters but for the audience too. Just as Salinger developed the Glass family for the pages of The New Yorker, read almost exclusively by middle-class professionals, Anderson's audience also mirrors his characters and themes. As Michael Z. Newman puts it, Anderson's audience "is generally mature, urban, college educated" and "sophisticated."49 Anderson's films open up inconsistent but operationally successful sustaining objects (a career and the material props of a profession, a home, parents, siblings, whole imaginaries attached to the object worlds of middle-class aspiration) without negating them. Deploying these objects with both irony and sincerity, Anderson's films articulate and sustain a desire to express our adult powers and abilities while retaining the innocence, playfulness, and the wonder of the child, even if that wonder is the product of fictional nostalgia so clearly articulated by both Salinger and Anderson. Anderson presents a vision of upper middle-class life that offers graspable worlds and beautiful miniatures that soften ambiguity, failures, and the characters' and audience's ambivalence toward them. This explains Anderson's appeal to predominantly white professional and intellectual audiences: his work speaks forcefully to a class that is always already in the midst of professional and familial (often middle-age) crisis given the inevitable failures of the fragile promises of the good life.

In Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson makes his most ambitious attempt to articulate the fantasy of both the child-professional and the adult-child as two elements of a coherent solution to tragically compromised adult lives. As we have demonstrated, Anderson's earlier films counter alienated professional life primarily through nostalgic fantasies of a childhood that never was, or through the cathartic deaths that relieve surviving adults of the responsibilities of their failures. In Moonrise Kingdom, however, two generations are brought together, and Anderson reimagines Holden's fantasy of the figure of the "catcher" who can unite the innocence of the professional child with adults who "play" at professions. And yet ironically, in this film Anderson sutures over the two structures that Holden resists most: phony families and the ethically compromised professionals lives that promise the good life but are making everyone sick. Anderson redeems the reproductive futurity of white, normative, middle-class families and the professional careers that sustain them through Holden's own two fantasy solutions: first, retreat into an untainted working class life, and second, become an adult-child "catcher" of lost, runaway children. Moonrise Kingdom thus marks the fullest expression of Anderson's debt to Salinger while his postmodern, ironic distancing wanes in the cruel optimism of the new sincerity.

Wes Anderson has described Moonrise Kingdom (2012) as "a memory" of a childhood "fantasy," and more than almost any other live-action Anderson film, Moonrise Kingdom gleefully abandons realist verisimilitude, uses miniatures, dollhouse stylization, and storybook themes to evoke a profound nostalgia for an idealized fantasy of the professional child.50 The film tells the story of Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) and Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward), two twelve-year-old misfits who meet, fall in love, and run away together on the pastoral island of New Penzance, a contained miniature in itself. Sam is an orphan, and his world is defined by the material culture of the scouts: badges, uniforms, and objects from pocket-knives to canoes (see fig. 9). Away from the domestic world of most children, Sam seems to exist as a pure — that is to say, a fully accomplished and sincere — child-professional. As a "Field Mate" in Troop 55 of the Khaki Scouts of North America, led by Scout Master Ward (Ed Norton), the world of the troop presents the activities and images of scouting (camping, braiding lanyards, etc.) but follows the narrative and dialogue clichés from the world of professional soldiering in cavalry films like Fort Apache (1948). The young scouts seem older than they are, as they address one another by their last names, have formal late-night gatherings, and play out their rivalries with the language and gestures of Hollywood soldiers: drawing lines in the sand, threatening each other with knives and arrows, aiming (BB) guns at one another, etc.

In contrast to Sam, Suzy lives with her parents and three younger brothers in a storybook house on the island. Like Zissou's ship, the interior is another bisected dollhouse set allowing the camera to move seamlessly from room to room, floor to floor. Suzy's world is densely textured with objects that suggest the lifeworld and tastes of the upper-middle-class Bishops and Glasses. Suzy's cultivated imagination is revealed to the audience in her relationship to culture in the novels we see her reading, the music she deems essential, the binoculars she uses to frame and contain the world, and the letters she and Sam are constantly writing. She is also an actress, taking a lead part in a production of Benjamin Britten's Noye's Fludde (see fig. 10).51 Her role in the theater makes her, too, a child-professional, and the images of her acting and her literary life link her closely to the female professional-child careers of Margot Tenenbaum, Franny Glass, and the burgeoning Phoebe Caulfield. Sam shares something of Suzy's imaginative world, writing letters to her and sending his paintings as they plot their escape. Much of the hope of the film seems to lie with Suzy's sense of these fantasy alternatives. Unlike the adult Glasses or the Tenenbaums — who answer to the alienation of adult professional life as tempered, morose neurotics — both Sam and Suzy as children already find things so unbearable that they are driven to violent outbursts and both are shunned. In this, they resemble Holden Caulfield more than Seymour or Phoebe. Indeed, it is almost as if the two act on Holden's proposal to Sally Hayes and run away to the woods to live without the pressures of an alienated life in late capitalism. Sam faces the very professional alienation as a scout that will define adult existence, as also expressed by the "sad, dumb policeman" and his soon-to-be guardian, Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis).52 Suzy is alienated from the appalling domestic world of her family — suggesting that neither profession nor normative family structure enables anyone's flourishing. As the children run away, Suzy complements Sam's everyday scouting skills with the imaginative world of her stolen novels and their capable protagonists (who also exist in worlds of absent or failed adults while idealizing the life of orphans). Together, they learn to navigate the island and their new found intimacy, connecting the physical world of adventure to their imaginative idealism and wonder. At times, however, they remind each other of painful realities of their social ostracism. For example, when Suzy remarks, "Sometimes I wish I were an orphan," Sam calmly exposes her idealization: "I love you but you don't know what you're talking about" (MK 44:01). And yet, both children seek recognition in one another and build sustaining fantasies of and for each other, for instance in Sam's recognition of Suzy's "magic power" that resides in her binoculars. In their private intimacy, they embrace their fictive attachments as they rename and colonize the beautiful tidal inlet, share their first kiss, and create an idealized miniature of early "American" pioneer domesticity, albeit with Suzy's cosmopolitan flair provided by a battery-powered record player and Francoise Hardy's "Le Temps de l'Amour." This place and the single day they spend there becomes the eponymous and ultimately evanescent "Moonrise Kingdom."

While Sam and Suzy first confront then provisionally escape a difficult world, adult existence seems almost totally hopeless, as it is in Salinger. The film makes clear that growing up is not an answer, even as Suzy and Sam perform the fantasies of the professional child's vision complete with the heteronormative couple's promise of domestic futurity. Sam's parents are dead, and the brief flashes we see of his life at the "Billingsley Home for Boys" all derive from prison movie clichés: the older boys dressed in prison blues, fighting, and the typical prison movie screening scene, in this case taken from The Shawshank Redemption (1994), in which Sam again gets into a fight. Throughout, Mr. and Mrs. Billingsley play the role of cruel and indifferent wardens. Sam retaliates while sleepwalking by setting fire to the doghouse, signifying his wish to burn down the home, and by extension society's supposed management of "undesireables," recalling Holden's often stated desires to either commit suicide or see the whole world destroyed.53 Later in the film, we glimpse the logical conclusion of such violence in the place where Sam will be sent after his latest outburst: "juvenile refuge," an over-crowded warehouse of kids undergoing shock therapy, also recalling Holden's fate in his gentler but still medicalized California sanitarium. In contrast to Sam's life of material and familial deprivation, Suzy's family epitomizes white upper-middle class alienation. Suzy's parents are lawyers so estranged from one another they rarely appear in the same room of the house. They often yell to one another from room to room; the cutting interrupts Anderson's signature long takes, capturing their stressful efforts to communicate, exemplified by the necessary aid of a megaphone for Laura Bishop (Francis McDormand), and signifying the domestic failure of normativity despite their professional success as adults.

Anderson dramatizes adult efforts to negotiate the painful realities of both publicly legible class stratification and the private experience of professional alienation. In one of the most telling moments in Moonrise Kingdom, Scout Master Ward is asked by one of his young charges, "What is your real job?" (MK 11:58). He tells his scouts that he is an eighth-grade math teacher. However, a few moments later, Ward decides to revise his response: "I'm going to change my answer, in fact. This is my real job, Scout Master, Troop 55" (MK 12:05). Ward disavows his actual profession, and like Zissou, he affirms his life of playing at a profession. In Anderson, characters craft identities derived from childhood passions that promise unalienated labor — not unlike becoming the only adult who can see and catch would-be fallen kids in the rye. Unlike the nostalgia for a different time that compensates for the disappointments of adult life in Salinger or earlier Anderson films like Tenenbaums, Rushmore and Bottle Rocket, in his later films, Anderson's sustaining images of the professional child merge with a "second calling." The tensions of this balancing act and the relief of a kind of pure and simple affirmation that restores childhood wonder echo through The Life Aquatic and Moonrise Kingdom, even as the films are often shot through with the ambivalence of both acknowledging the failures of our sustaining fictions as well as of the difficult, meticulous labor of knitting together the constantly fraying edges of their supposed continuity.

Unlike Salinger's Glasses, Sam's alienation as a child-professional is constantly emphasized. While he identifies with his training and abilities, he also constantly suggests that they are not his emotional center. Dressed in his uniform and expertly pan-flipping a fish he has gutted and cooked for Suzy, she remarks "you're very good at camping." Sam replies by both affirming and distancing himself from this identity: "I'm a Khaki Scout. It's what I'm trained for" (MK 25:03). Here, Sam distinguishes the professional skills he has acquired from the imaginative world he shares with Suzy. He emphasizes the kind of distance that he already feels from both his peers in the scouts and the core of his emotional life with Suzy. While his professionalism partially enables his escape with Suzy, it is not who he is. And yet, throughout the film, playing at adult professions remains mostly enabling. In a key scene, the young scout Skotak (Gabriel Rush) scolds the troop for acting poorly towards Sam, again following the cavalry clichés: "This troop has been very shabby to Field Mate Sam Shakusky. In fact, we've been a bunch of mean jerks. Why's he so unpopular? I admit, supposedly, he's emotionally disturbed — but he's also a disadvantaged orphan . . . He's a fellow Khaki Scout, and he needs our help. Are we man enough to give that?" (MK 57:30). Skotak appeals to the professional esprit de corps of the troop, calling them out of their personal prejudice and into their recognition that they must help another bound to them by their shared profession as scouts. Even more, that professional identity is tied to their imagination of themselves as adult "men." The troop then devises a complex plan to reunite Sam and Suzy using all of their scouting skills and culminating in their attendance at Sam and Suzy's wedding.

This "Tom Thumb" wedding is one of the most comedic and moving scenes in the film.54 The troop takes Sam and Suzy to meet Skotak's cousin, the "Legionnaire Scout" Ben (Jason Schwartzman). Learning that Sam and Suzy wish to marry, Ben declares that he is a "civil law scrivener, . . . authorized to declare births, deaths, and marriages," although how the presumably teen or twenty-something scout acquired such credentials is unclear (MK 1:07:00). He tells them, "I can't offer you a legally binding union. It won't hold up in the state, the county, or frankly any courtroom in the world due to your age, lack of a license, and failure to get parental consent, but, the ritual does carry a very important moral weight within yourselves. You can't enter into this lightly. . . . spit out your gum, sister" (MK 1:07:20). Ben marries them in a "short form" ceremony in a "chapel" tent while wearing a priest's stole, and the troop act as witnesses. Sam and Suzy affirm their marriage without a single adult present — Cousin Ben seeming like a teenager himself, or perhaps the one adult who sees children as they see themselves. Like Max Fisher or another Zissou, Ben himself plays at life as children do, despite his age. In a slow-motion shot, the wedding party exits the "chapel" (see fig. 11). Given how awful marriage and domesticity look in the adult world of the film, their affirmation can only be sustained by the distance of the childhood miniature, in dreamlike slow motion. Marriage and intimacy are hopeful only insofar as they are make-believe, that is, playing at life. However, the ceremony only happens after they have left their "Moonrise Kingdom," and marriage separates Suzy from her "magic power," the binoculars she always carries and then forgets in the chapel. This loss — as well as a heroic attempt to restore her magic — sets in motion a series of events that will keep Suzy and Sam from any opportunity to run away and live out their fantasy marriage, resulting in the restoration of their roles as children, which is the ultimate and most sincere redemption of childhood in Anderson.

Magic is at the heart of Moonrise Kingdom's third act. In it, the characters are twice struck by lightning, emphasizing that as it moves towards its conclusion, the film becomes less and less interested in maintaining even a pretense of verisimilitude. Unlike "Hapworth's" realism in which the narration attempts to present the self-assured incarnations of fully lived adult lives embodied by a seven-year-old child's perspective, Moonrise Kingdom abandons any attempt to suture together the fantasy of unalienated adult experience with that of the child's. The pacing of the film signifies the break from the pretense of either aspiring toward or even accommodating professional life. After the slow-motion dreamstate of the wedding recessional, the pacing shifts to that of the animated cartoon. In the first scene of the act, Sam runs into "Lightning Field," pursued by scouts from other troops.55 As dozens of scouts run after Sam, their movements make little sense. They stay almost single-file, drawing snaking figures across the screen, though they could easily capture him with a more direct approach. Sam climbs onto a small hill and declares, "on this spot I will fight no more forever," but just as his pursuers are about to grasp him, he is struck by a bolt of lightning (MK 01:12:30). Rather than being killed, he lands flat on his back and kicks off his burning shoes like a cartoon character, and the camera cuts to his face merely blackened with soot. Suzy and the rest of his troop appear, and Sam leads them to safety. The scene is so inexplicable that it marks a break in the film where Anderson reveals that we are completely within the magical world of Sam and Suzy, the daydreaming twelve-year-olds, as if they are in one of the books Suzy carries and "she could open the suitcase and take out Moonrise Kingdom, stolen from the library."56

As a hurricane sweeps towards the island, the children take refuge in the church where Sam and Suzy first met during the Noye's Fludde production. As the adults fight amongst themselves, flinging their professional credentials at one another — Social Services and Captain Sharp begin writing citations of their respective offices' failures to cope with the troubled children — the intensity of the storm increases, the waters rise, and Sam and Suzy (wearing fox costumes from Noye's Fludde) scamper up the bell tower to escape the rising tumult. They grasp hands and vow to jump, hoping that the storm waters will break their fall, rather than climbing back down into the hands of the bickering professionals. In the face of their probable suicide, the adults relent. After the Bishops threaten to litigate, Social Services capitulates, extending an olive branch by agreeing that Captain Sharp may adopt Sam. However, just as they give their assent to the plan, lightning strikes again. The bell tower falls. Captain Sharp, though not in the rye, becomes the most literal and successful "catcher" of the film. As the bell tower falls away, Sam dangles from Sharp's precarious grasp, and Sam in turn holds onto Suzy's hand. The shot is flat, more a climactic storybook illustration than a cinematic image — the three silhouettes have the appearance of paper dolls (see fig. 12). Sharp, the idealized working man who lives almost wholly outside the marital domesticity of the island, heroically transforms the children's lives — and redeems the full symphony of Bishops' household. Like another Holden Caulfield, he too identifies his future in the fantasy of saving lost children. While Sharp offers Sam a new life, saving him from "shock therapy," adult life is restored through a failed man dangling from the destroyed architecture of a church above a torrential flood, holding a string of falling children: "Don't let go" (MK 01:23:56).

In the final shots of Moonrise Kingdom, we see Sam and Suzy together in the Bishop home, but they do not seem to be living as a couple. The tone suggests they have returned to the scene of social and domestic childhood, and they are more than happy to answer to the adults who call them to dinner. Sam, still acting the child-professional, now wears the exact copy of the Island Police uniform, and he disappears out the window to meet his adoptive father.57 Suzy goes to join her family. Though she blows Sam a kiss, their relationship now seems strikingly more like that of childhood playmates than pretend newlyweds. The camera dollies back to reveal a painting Sam has just finished, an aerial view of the empty campsite he shared with Suzy, the most idealized moment of their imaginative intimacy. This is the moment in the film when Sam and Suzy's name for this special place is disclosed, "Moonrise Kingdom," but we have also learned from the narrator that this physical location, "Mile 2.5 Tidal Inlet" on the map, has been obliterated by the storm (see fig. 13). They no longer have this set to enact their romance, and, moreover, it is literally a place that they cannot return to, something that they can only nostalgically long for, as Sam's painting makes clear. The painting relegates their fantasy space into a miniature, holding onto the illusion of the full presence of their space of intimacy. Without any acknowledgment of their anti-social and dangerous behavior as runaways, and while repressing the domestic violence that precipitated the now fully romanticized episode, the painting holds the scene in place through its storybook, primary colors. That Sam paints it while wearing his new Island Police uniform suggests that he has now secured a place within the social as Captain Sharp's obedient son. His imaginative relation to a private and lost intimacy creates what Stewart calls the "future-past," a point of desire that, while always inaccessible and safely out of reach, nonetheless enables a sustaining relation to the future. Though Anderson keeps Salinger's figure of the child-professional, he pushes the figure much further in Moonrise Kingdom, imagining that the child-professional is also alienated and needs a yet more private, compensatory fantasy of wholeness to bear the antagonisms and incoherence of the world. Anderson then articulates this figure in a series of miniatures, storybook images, silhouettes, and dollhouse sets to provide a fantasy of wholeness onto which his adult, largely white professional audience might take hold to sustain their present.

Conclusion: Professionalization and Its Discontents

The image of the child-professional at the heart of Salinger's Glass family stories and repeated in various guises in many of Anderson's films is not really about childhood at all. Children are not professionals, and their imaginative worlds are both a great deal less coherent and far more surreal than what we see in the works of these two artists. While children play at professions, they do not fully practice or master them. The figure of the child-professional in Salinger and Anderson speaks rather to their adult audiences. Why is this desire for a "future-past" in the memory of Seymour or the Tenenbaum Children, or in the attempt to live again as children by Scoutmaster Ward and Steve Zissou so resonant? This is, as we have shown, a white-upper-middle-class fantasy that recuperates the dream of a professional life without alienation.

Salinger presents the professional child as a solution that his characters and narrators wholeheartedly embrace and believe in. Throughout his work, it is offered as the only possible solution to the problems of upper-middle-class life in late capitalism. Anderson takes a different approach. He adapts Salinger's fantasy of childhood, but his films show it to be just that — an illusory fantasy — and yet insists on it as a necessary and sustaining fantasy for our present. The difference between Salinger and Anderson thus precisely marks the difference between old and new sincerity. Anderson offers a much more ambivalent vision of childhood than Salinger, but he neither rejects the professional child nor liquidates the fantasy. Instead, he affirms the desire for an unalienated existence filled with potentiality by reveling in our compensatory fantasies.

The childhood invented by Salinger and taken up in the films of Anderson makes painfully clear the role of fantasy in and as desire while dramatizing the ungraspable "future-pasts" of adult life. Moreover, the lost status of childhood puts the audience into the position of the melancholic who takes pleasure in an inability to mourn the loss of childhood and instead remains attached to a fantasy of a childhood that never could have been. As Slavoj Žižek writes, "Therein resides the melancholic's stratagem: the only way to possess an object that we never had, which was from the very outset lost, is to treat an object that we still fully possess as if this object is already lost" (23). This is the paradox at the heart of Salinger's and Anderson's evocation of childhood as their characters and very real audiences navigate the irresolvable contradictions of the postwar American upper-middle-class professional life. The attachment to childhood is a way of possessing the object we never had: both an unalienated version of professional life — with all of its potentialities, capacities, skills, and pleasures — and a childhood replete with a sense of unimpeded autonomy and clarity (a childhood which was "from the very outset lost"). At the same time, the attachment to this figure of the child-professional and its potentiality that somehow both defies and affirms normative domesticity and adult expectations is that object of our attachment, that is to say, our fantasy of that childhood that we could never catch.

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David Banash is a Professor of English at Western Illinois University, where he teaches courses in contemporary American literature, film, and popular culture. He is the author of Collage Culture: Readymades, Meaning, the Age of Consumption (Rodopi 2013), co-editor of Contemporary Collecting: Objects, Practices, and the Fate of Things (Scarecrow 2013), and editor of Steve Tomasula: The Art and Science of New Media Fiction (Bloomsbury 2015).

Andrea Spain received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University at Buffalo and is currently Associate Professor of English and Director of the Minor in Film Studies at Mississippi State University. She teaches courses on postcolonial and contemporary literature, gender studies, critical theory, and film. Her essays can be found in Modern Fiction Studies, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, edited collections, and Trickhouse. Her book manuscript, Postcoloniality and Event, explores the role of time, memory and perception in the postcolonial present.

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