"The Darjeeling Limited": In search of what's missing

On Wes Anderson's 2007 film, The Darjeeling Limited, and how absence is at the heart of its story – and often at the core of how we understand ourselves.

Nietzsche announced that God is dead; Freud told us that God is dad; in Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, both are the case. Francis, Peter, and Jack Whitman have not spoken in the year since their father died. God is gone, and it is the task of the three brothers to fill the empty space this absence has left in their lives.

We meet Peter first, a man on the cusp of parenthood, racing an older man – standing in, perhaps,for an older version of Peter – to board a departing train, the Darjeeling Limited. Peter outruns the old man and, leaping on board, allows himself a self-satisfied smirk. By boarding the train and setting off across India with his brothers, Peter has avoided something he doesn’t want to look at. This is why he also doesn’t tell his brothers right away that his wife, back home, is weeks away from giving birth to his son.

What is it about fatherhood that scares him so much he goes halfway around the world to avoid thinking about it? We never find out directly, though…