How Wes Anderson’s Nod to Hitchcock Exemplifies What an Homage Should Be

Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching a video about how a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain influenced Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel.

There is a difference between homage and plagiarism, between paying dues to preexisting work and attempting to pass it off as your own. Even when homage is bad, it still isn’t stealing. A cheap visual reference may cash in on an audience’s nostalgia in a lowly and uninspired way, but idea thievery is something else entirely.

That said, the same metric to assess the presence of plagiarism is actually a pretty effective tool for sussing out what makes one homage “artful” and another one “lazy.” Quite simply: does it transform the work? Does it inflect the source material in some new, exciting, or unexpected way? Has it been shifted and made new in a different context?

The video essay below offers a case study in what makes a blatant recreation an inspired homage rather than a rip-off or an instance of theft. The case at hand is a sequence from Wes Anderson‘s The Grand Budapest Hotel, wherein Deputy Kovacs (Jeff Goldblum), the attorney representing the estate of the late Madame D (Tilda Swinton), is stalked and murdered by J.G. Jopling (Willem Dafoe).

The video outlines in detail how the scene emulates and basically re-creates a sequence from 1966 Alfred Hitchcock film Torn Curtain in which Michael Armstrong (Paul Newman) is similarly pursued. However, by imposing his own personal visual style, re-timing the pursuit, and inserting a score, Anderson succeeds in weaving something distinct that still bears recognizable connective threads to its source material. As a result, Anderson is able to play with audience expectations with exciting (if grisly) results.

Watch “How To Steal Like Wes Anderson – The Grand Budapest Hotel“:

Who made this?

This video essay was created by Virginia-based filmmaker and video editor Thomas Flight, who runs a YouTube channel under the same name. You can follow Flight and check out his back catalog of video essays on YouTube here. You can follow him on Twitter here.

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• Another taste of the work of Thomas Flight: “How Chaplin Made Me Less Anxious in 8 Seconds“.
• And other, on how HBO’s Chernobyl is a masterclass in perspective 
• Okay, one more (this is also on Wes Anderson): a look at Anderson’s work before the things that are now stereotypically considered Wes Anderson were present
• Here’s a video essay from The Discarded Image exploring how Wes Anderson’s comedic stylings hone in on the theme of formality
• A behind-the-scenes featurette on The Grand Budapest Hotel (effectively a clip montage of everyone involved having the time of their lives)
• Here’s a video essay that clarifies the importance of a script breakdown with a look at The Grand Budapest Hotel
• From Queue favorite BREADSWORD: a love letter to Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou