I watched The Grand Budapest Hotel last night. It’s a good movie. I think it’s about the end of Western civilization. The hotel was beautiful and opulent under the ownership of Monsieur Gustave. Now, under Mr. Moustafa, it is empty and decaying. Mr. Moustafa says of M. Gustave: “His world had vanished long before he ever entered it—but, I will say: he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace.” The movie frames this decline as a consequence of European infighting: succession squabbles among the aristocratic Desgoffe und Taxis family and the rise of fascism. The murderous succession squabbles feel especially trivial in retrospect. They center on an apparently priceless painting, Boy with Apple, which hangs askew in the hotel lobby under Moustafa’s tenure. Everything about M. Gustave’s world seems trivial. The hotel is a good symbol for this. Excessive attention to small detail is the nature of hospitality. Although they may seem trivial, those details add together to create something marvelous and fragile. It is easy to look back at, say, the Victorians and see their excessive moralizing as ridiculous. But then you see the beautiful metalwork they applied to street lamps and gutter drains. A culture that creates beautiful things is a culture that cares deeply. It is a culture that believes in itself—in the superiority of its tastes and judgments. I emphasize superiority: creation, like destruction, requires making choices about what ought to exist and what ought not to. In this way, all artists are fascists. They can’t help it. There can be no equality in art. To create is to assert some hierarchy of being. Wes Anderson’s own aesthetic intuition is overwhelming. Like the Victorians, he can’t help but care for the small details. M. Gustave’s world is marvelous. His death and the subsequent retreat of liveliness from the hotel is a tragedy. Maybe I will say more on this someday! But I have to go to lunch now, I've already kept people waiting long enough.