Page - 123 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

123 from grand Hotels to tiny treasures ments that allow for a “juxtaposition [of singular referents] and fetishistic almost collector-orientated accumulation of signs and objects,” resulting in a narrative world, “which becomes in some sense ‘timeless’” (Gorfinkel, quoted in Wilkins 2018, 153). These “collection” worlds have often been dismissed as affect- edly quaint or twee; however, as Tom Hertweck explicitly and other contributors implicitly argue in the Summer 2018 special issue on Anderson of Texas Studies in Literature and Language, one needs to consider the way “twee aesthetics serve as a kind of protection from the outside world so as to fixate on the passion- ate investment in personal expression” (Hertweck 2018, 130), which takes the form, one should add, of displacing personal trauma onto historical conflict. Anderson’s twee aesthetics serve to protect the troubled char- acters in his films, “who either desire to — or actively — inhabit institutions that are designed as only transient or transitional spaces” (Wilkins 2018, 167). Like the motel, school, mansion, train, and island in Anderson’s other films, the eponymous hotel serves this function well: [U]nlike the “lived in” spaces of the domestic home, ho- tels are constantly in the process of erasing recent histories; they aim to “remove the trace of previous guests. […] The objective of hoteliers [is] to suppress time, to reproduce the comforts of an old family home without the wear and tear of history […]. Whereas homes are created as personal territo- ries through the presence of collected objects that signify the accumulation of past moments within the space, the private spaces of hotels are designed to be anonymous and dupli- cable: constructed for masses of anonymous people, who are “drifting without settling.” (Wilkins 2018, 168) While it is true that hotels may be non-places from the perspec- tive of the guests, what about those who work in them, whose cramped, spartan spaces Anderson makes a point of juxtapos- ing with the grandeur of the lobby? Following Rhodes and Gorfinkel, Wilkins reasons that if “‘identity is constructed in