little rowling — The Open Letter Series is a collection of open...

The Open Letter Series is a collection of open letters written to other people, ideas or activities that have taken place over the course of the last few days of uploading in both the public realm and in my personal life. What exactly is an open letter? An open letter is a letter which is often critical in nature that is addressed to a particular person or group of people but intended for publication or to be read by a large group of people. In this case, that is you, the reader.

Each open letter will discuss a different topic, in varying degrees of depth. From politics to personal issues, the Open Letter series aims to provide clarity on issues, create ideas or inspiration, or, in my case, to become a place of stress and thought relief. Nothing is safe from receiving an open letter, not shows or book characters, a class lesson or a provoking idea.

Narration is something that English teachers get hung up on for classes upon classes in high school, talking about how there’s narration types that deal with knowing everything or where everyone knows nothing or when the narrator thinks they know everything when that really isn’t the case and so every English teacher in the history of the universe decided to call this person an “unreliable narrator”.

The Grand Budapest Hotel has one of these types of narrators, but at the same time, doesn’t. Hotel offers many questions and many ideas that you have to draw to as the watcher of the film. It’s up to you to decide who’s good and who’s bad (with a little bit of help from the music), but you are free to hate whomever you please in the movie, whether that’s Mr. Gustave or Zero or Madam D or whomever. But the story is perspective into perspective into perspective: it’s frame narration at its most successful (unlike Wuthering Heights in which Emily Bronte was clearly not told that nothing in literature is obvious, especially not when you’re switching from POV to POV, thinking your reader is going to catch on [they’re not]).

Hotel talks about the life of Mr. Zero Moustafa, through his eyes as he describes it to The Author in the Past (here called Past Author), and then we see that through the Present (well, 1985 version of The Author) Author (here called Present Author). The film’s narration begins with a girl who walks into a cemetery holding a book that was written by The Author. Present Author is then showed through a cool transition that brings us into 1985 in which Present Author explains that writing is hard and sometimes stories come to you, as opposed to you coming to stories, once the public knows that you’re an author (the opening introduction/ monologue that Present Author does is often overlooked by reviewers of the movie) and explains that he was told this story that you (the viewer/reader) are about to hear. Then, we transition into the 1960s and we see Past Narrator and he begins to talk to an old guy who we begin to know is Mr. Zero, and he (as Old Zero [hereby called Old Zero]) tells the story of his past (past zero is going to be called Young Zero), with particular emphasis on the story of Young Zero’s hero and idol, as well as Old Zero’s benefactor, Mr. Gustave. Frame narration after frame narration, it’s frame narration-ception.

Which is why I find this movie so fascinating. You have to dig level after level into this movie and figure out for yourself what the truth is. Do you trust all the words of Mr. Gustave? Is Zero as funny as he is made out to be? These are questions that literature-centred people (and those who watch this movie too many times) ask themselves. What is the film really trying to say? What is it trying to tell us? This is what narration does, and after watching the movie for the twenty-second whole time yesterday, I can come up with the following answer:

The Grand Budapest Hotel is Zero Moustafa’s life as seen through the eyes of so many different people. It deals with the idea that everything will come to an end: you, me, everything we have, the movie, all of it. This life, Zero’s life, is a life of pain, but for just a fleeting moment of time, he was happy. Our lives are a story. When it comes to particular story, like all stories, it’s not about the ending. In a lot of ways, it’s about reliving the middle as often as you can.This is what Grand Budapest wants you to learn, in the most Wes Anderson way possible.