What if Wes Anderson came to Melbourne? He’s already here, on TikTok

You’ll never see a smartphone in Wes Anderson’s lovingly crafted analogue world, but the director of films such as Moonrise Kingdom, The French Dispatch and now Asteroid City has unwittingly fuelled a viral social media trend that captures our world through a copycat mobile lens.

The hashtag #wesanderson currently sits atop 2.2 billion views on TikTok, as content creators film their everyday lives in a style that mimics Anderson’s colour-drenched, symmetrical aesthetic. It is the first time a filmmaker has inspired a recognisable social media style, along the likes of “Cottagecore” and Y2K. And parts of Melbourne are providing the ideal backdrop.

Local TikTokker Beatrice Caro (@beatrice.caro) was 17 when a screening of The Grand Budapest Hotel at Moonlight Cinema 10 years ago kick-started her relationship with Anderson’s work. The director’s visual idiosyncrasies offered her an alluring escape from real life, in “fantastical, nostalgia-tinted worlds where the usual codes and expectations don’t seem to apply”. From Moonrise Kingdom’s runaway teens, to Rushmore’s chronic underachiever Max Fischer, Anderson provides space for his wayward protagonists to embrace their otherness.

“Something which I identified with as a young person,” says Caro, “is Wes Anderson’s recurring fascination with the theme of trying to carve out one’s place in the world.”

In her own Anderson-inspired TikTok, Caro glides through a familiar afternoon in Melbourne: a cafe meal, a detour through the Block Arcade and a shopping expedition to a city bookshop. True to the director’s form, there’s an appreciation of fine details, from the arrangement of a glistening omurice dish to the soft, forest-green velvet of Caro’s coat.

Inspired by what she calls Anderson’s “different and very beautiful way of seeing”, Caro chose Carlton’s Instagram-friendly Budapest Cafe as one of her TikTok settings. Inside its intricate architecture and pastel decor, she had found herself looking at the world through the eyes of Wes Anderson, and began filming two years before the current craze took hold.

“My video started there, [with me] carefully positioning my scrambled eggs and panning my phone camera across the salmon-coloured walls,” she says.

The experience kick-started her commitment to finding beauty in the everyday. “That video started me on the longer process of becoming more intentional about the objects to which my camera is drawn, how long the camera lingers there and how it moves,” she says.

TikTokkers Emily Jackson, left, and Beatrice Caro in Wes Anderson mode at Parliament House.Credit: Simon Schluter

There’s something endearing about seeing Melbourne reframed as the location of a Wes Anderson film, or at least an evocation of one through an iPhone camera. TikToks within this trend tend to gravitate towards the same hotspots: Flinders Street Station, shopping arcades, City Circle trams and the State Library are virtually mandatory.

The commitment to rigid symmetrical compositions, wide-angle distortion and warm colour filters lend these familiar landmarks the uncanny feel of Anderson’s dollhouse settings, rearranging metropolitan chaos into an overstuffed semblance of order. It’s an affectionate mode of pastiche that’s channelled into something more personal and grounded, with ordinary people at the centre of a cinematic, Anderson-inspired world.

Beneath the rich surface of Anderson’s aesthetic, content creator and marketing creative Emily Jackson (@emily.beatrice) points to an “undercurrent of ennui” that’s core to his appeal. After watching Moonrise Kingdom – “I was 16 years old and saw perhaps a little too much of myself in Suzy Bishop,” she admits – she became enamoured with Anderson’s films and the inherent tension expressed through their tightly constructed worlds and the hapless characters losing their grip on it.

“No matter how perfectly one plans, curates or cultivates their lives, people are always going to be who they are,” she says.

The excesses of Anderson’s style are always matched by a keen sense of loss and a desire to hold on to the past; the Melbourne-based TikToks present a fanciful version of the city lost in time, with contemporary details pushed out of frame. Jackson’s TikToks already embraced a retro look, so she had “a variety of filming locations” up her sleeve when it came time to create her tribute to the filmmaker. Chief among them was Parliament House – “one of the last remaining pillars of the 19th century after the mass demolition in the ’60s,” she says.

Among the local places that evoke the Wes Anderson style are, clockwise from top left, the Kelvin Club (also bottom left), the Majorca Building, Melbourne Town Hall, the Nicholas Building and the Melbourne City Baths. Credit: Simon Schluter

Filipino-Australian director Matthew Victor Pastor (@retiredfilmdirector) says that while not all the Anderson-inspired TikToks quite hit the mark, “what’s cool ... is that they give you a glimpse into the creativity of others, and how they pay homage to Wes Anderson’s world with their DIY limited resources”.

“Some don’t quite hit the right visual symmetry, but you sense it’s all in the spirit of fun and enjoying a great artist’s work,” he says.

Pastor first encountered Anderson’s work when he saw 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums on DVD. In his own TikTok, he pays tribute specifically to the character of Chas Tenenbaum (memorably played by an Adidas-clad Ben Stiller). Rather than romanticising the everyday, Pastor strips back the “day in the life” format seen in the other TikToks to something more firmly rooted in his own experience, acknowledging the delicate humanity underlying Anderson’s films and how it reflects his own daily routine.

“There’s a lot to say about his visuals and aesthetic, but it all stems from the core story and emotion of his films,” he says.

While the Wes Anderson TikTok trend typically presents a confected recreation of our world, it also feeds into the broader anemoia that sustains the popular video platform, as well as the broader Gen Z online landscape. From Stranger Things to Regencycore, many of the most popular trends trade on an inherited nostalgia for a time its followers never actually experienced. This perpetual recycling of media can be in part explained by the paucity of modern culture and anxieties about the present, but it is not a phenomenon entirely unique to this generation.

Like many a young auteur, Anderson started out telling stories derived from his own experiences of coming-of-age dysfunction, but recently the 54-year-old has spun fantasies out of 1960s France, and now the American Space Age. In disappearing into an imagined past, it’s easy to rearrange the world into something that, however briefly, makes emotional sense.

Asteroid City is in cinemas from August 10.