Page - 124 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

124 siting futurity and through place,’ then the desire of these characters to inhabit transitional spaces as though they were permanent discloses a perception that they do not belong in more stable settings” (ibid., 167–68), which is the case with the homeless, placeless characters of the concierge and lobby boy, who are associated with a specific hotel in a specific place that is ravaged by a specif- ic history. It is not the case that “their private lived environments bear no traces of them” (ibid., 168). On the contrary, the point of the film is that for the guests M. Gustave the concierge is for all intents and purposes the hotel. His character is as imprinted on it as the hotel character is on his. Moreover, even if both the concierge and the lobby boy use the hotel as “a surrogate for the familial (Mr. Moustafa’s voice-over ‘I never asked who his family had been’ implies that Monsieur Gustave has no fam- ily, while Zero’s were killed in war),” I remain unconvinced by Wilkins’s reading of this “surrogacy” as an inadequate replace- ment that “does ‘not allow for the demarcation of personal ter- ritory through decoration and reordering’” (ibid., 168). On the contrary, given the terrible and unnecessary divisions, hardship, and suffering that precisely this type of demarcating and insist- ence on biological motherhood continues to wreak, to argue for its inadequacy seems irresponsible. The problem Anderson faced in making the film was to find a hotel appropriately grand enough for M. Gustave. Given that the film is set in a fictional republic that Anderson has described as “an invented country that is part Czechoslovakia, part Hun- gary, part Poland” and whose name is an anglicized form of Žubrówka, a Polish brand of vodka (Firebrace 2014, 70), An- derson and his crew sought out locations in that vicinity with appropriate hotels, such as “the Grand Hotel Pupp, founded by Johan Pupp, a confectioner, and the Palace Bristol Hotel, with its bright pink exterior, both in Karlovy Vary (formerly Karlsbad) in the Czech Republic” (ibid., 70). As both proved “so changed that they could no longer produce the atmosphere Anderson was looking for,” he and his team became creative and decid- ed to use the interior space of the Görlitz Kaufhaus, “the only