The Darjeeling Limited, 2007
November 2022 | LOU BELSER
The Darjeeling Limited is a story about three brothers going on a spiritual journey in India a year after their fathers’ death where they have been completely no contact with one another for a year. Peter meets up with his two other brothers: Jack and Francis (Francis being the oldest and Jack being the youngest) on a train called “Darjeeling Limited” to go on this planned day by day spiritual journey that Francis wants them to complete. Each brother has their own journey to go through throughout the movie before they can join in a spiritual understanding of one another; they fight and keep secrets from one another until an act of God, an unavoidable circumstance changes that for them. Jack is still in contact with his ex-girlfriend and takes on
the stewardess, relying on Francis but also being a communicator between the two brothers. Peter has a strong attachment to their deceased father, who after his funeral took his car, suitcases, even his father's glasses that still have the wrong prescription in them. Francis throughout the movie is also wrapped in bandages, we learn by the end of the movie that he had attempted suicide and that is what got him to question why the brothers stopped talking to one another. Because of this he planned a spiritual trip for the three to get together, he takes on his mother’s roll even saying things like “I’ve always mothered us, haven’t I?”; a part of his plan is to find and meet up with their mother who left them at an early age. He did not tell this to Peter because he knew that would make Peter not go to India in the first place. Peter must confront the fact he left his pregnant wife at home, we meet her through the funeral flashbacks, who ends up giving birth to his son during the movie's end. I chose this film for its use of Divine Command Theory because of its spiritual nature and the two climaxes in the film: when the boys get to speak to their mother, and when the Indian boys get trapped in a river and they must try their best to save them.
Divine Command Theory makes it so that your morals are just because they are through and stand in accordance with the person's God or Goddess. We see Divine Command Theory most commonly with western ideology. This movie exemplifies this side through their mother: Patricia. What’s interesting about this movie and its use of flashbacks to the boy's funeral is that it leads up to a funeral they face again a year later, to me showing the universe/their God trying to teach them this lesson again. When we are transported to the past, the three boys and Alice, Peters wife, are in a cab going to the father's funeral. They stop at a car shop that has been holding onto the father’s Porsche for some time, it is still not ready and inside of it they find the luggage that Peter uses in “real time” and Jacks’ first book that he wrote, it is neatly wrapped and unopened. They are about to miss the funeral of their father and at the repair shop they get a call that their mother will not be attending the funeral. When they get to their mother's church over a year later, she talks about how this is where she needs to be. How the people in this tiny village needed her, they asked her why she did not feel the need to take care of them. There is a
beautiful scene between the brothers and mother that night where she apologizes for not being the mother they needed, but that she was living as truthfully as she could for herself, so she did not feel that bad about it. They all held hands and looked each other in the eyes, she had a black mark on her forehead to symbolize Ash Wednesday. The next morning, breakfast was set up for them, but she had left, abandoning the brothers with one another once again. Francis had fought to make it so that they would be reunited for once and her pattern of leaving repeated itself. Something to note about these scenes with the mother and her connection to the Christian God is her ability to get confession from the boys. Francis had told Peter and Jack that he had just gotten into a motorcycle accident, when his mother asked, he told her how he purposefully ran his bike into the side of the mountain. Francis ends up taking most of his bandages off in the airport bathroom at the end of the film, symbolizing the healing he needed to go through emotionally with the ties to his mother as well as the literal healing that needed to be done.
The entire movie was building towards the funerals, their fathers and the one that was held of a little boy who they could not save from a river rapid. This happened after the scene with the mother leaving when morale was low. They were walking down a dirt road with all their luggage hoping to get somewhere to find an airport when they saw three boys crossing a river. The boys fall from the makeshift buoy system they had created and when the brothers see them in danger, they immediately drop everything and try to save them. Francis saves his kid, Jack saves his kid, Peter does not. It is particularly important that Peter is the one to not save his child because he speaks earlier in the movie about worrying, he is not going to be a good father, acting as if he and Alice are already divorced because that is what he anticipates with his belief that he is a creation of his father before him. Because he was not able to save this child, he was the one who had to bring him back to the village to his family. During these scenes he is broken by the fact he was not able to save this child, repeating the phrase “I almost had him. I almost had him.”
When the brothers get to the village, it changes their journey all together. Peter feels responsible and finds himself being present in the entire process of the Hindu culture. He is taken to the hospital where he holds a child and the elders of the town talk to him, a life was taken in his arms, so a new life was placed in his arms as well. When the brothers board a bus to take them back to the main town, Peter asks one of the boys to tell the father that he tried his best to save that child. Because of this act and the show that they all deeply cared, the three are invited to the boy's funeral. This funeral is of course wildly different from the funeral for their father. Instead of dressed in all black they are in all white, Wes Anderson then goes to show the two moments a year apart side by side. Because of this child's death and the three brothers immediate need to address it, it symbolizes their true spiritual transformation. They were searching for Divine Command throughout the entire movie, looking for an answer. They did this in India, one of the most spiritual places in the entire world; they got their answer.
At the beginning of the movie, Francis has an entire itinerary and idea of how this spiritual retreat is supposed to go. They stop at temples, pray, buy incense, climb hills, and perform these acts to call out to some God that they really did not believe in. The biggest event being the ritual around a feather, the feather ritual makes an appearance several times in the movie. The first being when the train is lost, Francis wanted to save it until the end of the trip but handed the feather to each of the brothers at that moment. The train being lost is a symbolism for the brothers being lost and unsure of where they are going spiritually as a group. It starts moving again suddenly, and they must run to catch it, cutting the feather ritual to a short. The second time the feathers come up is when they are kicked off the train. The reason for this being that Peter brought a venomous snake on, also Jack was sleeping with the train Stewardess and sharing cigarettes with her like the romantic writer he was. Francis takes the main responsibility for this as he always does, lashes out at his assistant who then quits, and the brothers for the first time are truly left alone. They all have their own interpretation of what the feather ritual is meant to be, one blowing on the feather and burying it, one letting it go into the wind, and one keeping it with him. Francis says that they did it wrong and does not seem to understand why this ritual he turned to did not work out for him how he wanted it to.
The Darjeeling Limited is an amazing example of Divine Command Theory because it calls into question a balance of internal divine command, and external. The brothers go on this journey and must define what this is for themselves; the child dying was an act of God. In the sense that it was an unavoidable, fixed moment that they could not change the outcome of. Because of these fractions, it causes them to break down their old beliefs and go through a Spiritual Awakening to shift their perception of the world. This movie is dense and takes a couple of watches to notice every detail, Wes Anderson places this divine transformation into a film that also battles coming of age, healing generational trauma, and the ever-present question of finding where you belong.