Page - 122 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

122 siting futurity proximate — but do not align with — real-life events” (Wilkins 2018, 166), yet that approximation matters: “1985 maps loosely onto a post-1989, post-Iron Curtain moment; the film’s 1968 ac- tion has no connection to the May events but rather hints at the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that summer; and he sets the central action in 1932, though, in fact, Hitler came to power only in 1933 and began military incursion in 1938” (Brody, cited in Wilkins 2018, 166). Against the claim that the film “does not evoke a period in time; it creates an artificial version of a period in time” (Conklin 2014), it is very clear that not one but three identifiable periods are, in fact, evoked: “the first is the ‘world of yesterday’ which Zweig captures in his literature (pre-World War I), second, a period of indeterminate war and fascism (with the Nazi-like SS insignia changed to ZZ), and third, the period of Communism in Eastern or Central Europe” (Dilley 2017, 184). One understands why the film had to be set in a grand Budapest hotel and not a grand Vienna one. Somewhere associated only with Western Europe would not had have the requisite associa- tions of cultured, old-world grandeur meets the totalitarianism that put an end to that world, and neither would Eastern Euro- pean places such as Marienbad and Karlsbad, which, although in the Czech Republic, are nevertheless firmly rooted in the world of art-house film thanks to Alain Resnais’s 1961 film and the Karlovy Vary international film festival, respectively. Given its status as the capital of the half of the Dual Monarchy that ended up behind the Iron Curtain, Budapest’s connotational coordinates are much more appropriate for the historical imagi- nary Wes Anderson wanted his film to call forth than Vienna’s would have been. While Budapest was appropriately positioned to evoke the imaginative world of Anderson’s film, neither it nor Vienna could do so practicably. While “[a]ll film worlds — both those filmed on location and those filmed on a set” are, by definition, “artificial worlds,” Anderson’s distinguish themselves by signal- ling their own artifice (Wilkins 2018, 152). They are “hermetical- ly sealed fantasias” (Rainer 2014), and to create such a “hermetic and enclosed world” requires that they be made in environ-