Buddy Holly Glasses, Tube Socks, and Angst: Hipster Boyhoods in Moonrise Kingdom
"Who's missing?" asks Scoutmaster Ward played by 40 something, yet boyish, Edward Norton when he realizes that Sam Shakusky, a boy from Khaki Scout Troop 55, the gaggle of nerdy boys in Ward's charge, is missing from breakfast. The troop treks over to Sam's drab tent. The scoutmaster knocks on the frame and asks, "Shakusky, you in there?" before entering the tent and finding a hole that Sam has cut into its canvas side: an escape route. "Jiminy Cricket,"Ward proclaims melancholically, "he's flown the coop." Thus begins the quest for what has flown the coop in Wes Anderson's 2012 film Moonrise Kingdom a quest to recover Sam, yes but also a quest to recover that which hipster aesthetics generally mourns: the perceived loss of white masculine power in the post industrial United States. In this article I closely read the hipster aesthetics of Moonrise Kingdom, questioning what happens when the politics of a hipster aestheticism developed by, for, and about white men are received through a cast of misfit preadolescent boys, such as those who make up the Khaki Scout troop at the center of the film, and the lone heroine, Suzy. Mark Greif explains, "The hipster is the subcultural type generated by neoliberalism, that infamous tendency of our time to privatize public goods and make an upward redistribution of wealth." Building upon Lisa Duggan's notion that neoliberalism is "the creation of a new vision of national and world order, a vision of competition, inequality, market 'discipline, public austerity, and 'law and order'" here I seek to problematize the acceptance of the film as an instance of stylized universality, noting that the film centralizes white, male, upwardly mobile bodies marked for success in a capitalist context in which human struggles are optimistically seen as temporary, something from which we all "grow up." To understand hipsterism's attempt at universality, it is important to consider the "everyday authenticity" at stake in the aesthetic writ large. At "What Was the Hipster," a symposium at the New School on April 11, 2009, object oriented ontology scholar Manoah Finston posited that perhaps: