"Fascist Aesthetics in the Films of Wes Anderson"

A friend of mine called me a relativist, among other names, because I didn't think Darjeeling Limited was as he put it "a piece of shit". So I went back to read more about it. At the House Next Door I stumbled upon this essay by David Nordstrom, "The Life Fascistic" (ha ha) a quest to uncover Anderson’s dark side (“within these lyrical motifs lurk elements of an ethos far more bitter than sweet”).
True, nothing is innocuous (not even, especially not Amelie which carries a more rancid ideology than Wes Anderson in my opinion) and many would agree that the "lifeless" Life Aquatic is Anderson's worst movie.
Nordstrom goes on to argue, quoting Sontag, that Wes Anderson's work shares the qualities of fascist aesthetics. [I wonder what Sontag herself would have thought about this.] "Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums offset or subvert their fascist aesthetic through irony. The lack of ironic counterbalance in The Life Aquatic allows Anderson’s fascist aesthetics to mutiny, to take over the film and run it aground".
"The elements of fascist aesthetics more or less latent in the first three films become patent in the fourth. Among them is a preoccupation with martial order, a system of rank and classification, expressed through themise en scéne , particularly through the uniforms and tokens that litter every frame. Sontag speaks directly to this characteristic: “There is a general fantasy about uniforms." Could the same thing be said of Darjeeling Limited's tyranical main character? Or does Sontag's argument resist displacement?
"Central to each of Anderson’s films is a self-elected, charismatic leader. This leader controls his followers by virtue of their blind devotion to his cult of personality." There is something totalizing about Anderson's fluffy world but the “leader” roles in his films mainly embody a simulacrum of power (contrary to Riefenstahl) -not actual power.
Nordstrom's semiology is a bit simplistic (what is the meaning behind those signs?). This is more convincing : "objects are exalted into fascinating characters and characters are reduced to boring objects. Again we encounter a propensity of fascist aesthetics: “The turning of people into things.” "Idealized eroticism, or sexual denial, is plain in at least two of the earlier films, Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums".

And going back to quirk: "Sontag warns that the fascist aesthetic cannot be fully divorced from its ideological content, its anti-humanist implications. The danger lies in the fact that for some audiences the fascist aesthetic is “no more than a variant of camp.”