Dear Alien, Who Art in Heaven
"Asteroid City" is a stirring meta-drama about the role art plays in human sensemaking and how children are often closer to the truth than adults.
I WAS LATE to the Wes Anderson punch buggy. With Wes Anderson, it is positively a buggy—1973, mint green—instead of a train. And when I say late, I mean way late. Like 2019 late.
The venue was a Japan Airlines flight enroute to the carrier’s namesake via Honolulu. We’d passed the International Dateline—that dubious latitudinal dash just west of Midway Atoll where, once breached, you suddenly advance twenty hours in time—like one airplane movie back. My eyes were heavy because it was a quarter after eleven according to the island time to which I was accustomed. Outside my window shade, however, the sun was about to set.
It was incumbent that I enjoyed this sunset fully conscious. In half a days’ time, I’d be attending a spook conference at a joint U.S.-Japan military base on the outskirts of Tokyo. A fatigued spook is a bad spook, so it was essential that I adjust to the local reality enroute rather than on-location. If I could remain awake for the rest of the flight, and for the long subway ride I’d have to take when I landed, then the not-insignificant walk from Akishima Station to my hotel, my prize would be a rock hard ‘mattress’ to lay my head on and a talking TOTO toilet that could lull me to sleep with a bedtime story (not that I’d need it). Then I’d awake to a Japanese dawn, fresh, alert, and ready to get my spook on.
I considered listening to some EDM tunes—a genre my ears were very much unaccustomed to—thinking the elevated beats per minute might elevate my beats per minute. But I lost interest two base-drops into my first play. What was I doing? Airline movie offerings paired with watery coffee that I was convinced the stewardess had triple-brewed with the same soggy grounds had kept my attention up until that point. Why switch up the strategy? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?
A white paper cup brandishing the airline’s red crane mascot in hand, now it was just a matter of finding a movie that could hold my interest well enough that I didn’t doze off. I’d already watched the big-name titles on the “recently-added” offerings—The Goldfinch (eh), Molly’s Game (eh+), Vice (A+)—so it was time to dive further into the touchscreen’s archive.
Hacksaw Ridge? Already seen it. Manchester By the Sea? Looked depressing. The Place Beyond the Pines? Too adored by hipsters, which made it sus. Dirty Grandpa? Not the time or place as I’d heard a large prosthetic penis gets major play. The Grand Budapest Hotel? Hold on a second.
Maybe now was the golden opportunity to sink my teeth in this movie that I’d been meaning to watch for years. It had come out in 2014—a lifetime ago in our age of social media-driven news cycles—the same year that the Malaysian airliner went missing, Putin annexed Crimea, and Obama wore that ghastly tan suit that generated a perfectly symmetrical backlash. The movie, shorthanded by fans to “Budapest” in the years since, had earned rave reviews and a host of awards. But something about the trailer had turned me off. The film struck me as too, how you say, dry. By no means a cinematic savant, and so lacking a more accurate comparison, its slapstick feel reminded me of Charlie Chaplain’s black and white silents, just with bright hues, audio, a more robust plotline, and a cast made up of heavy hitters. The frames, while visually pleasing in their spatial composition, were all too consistent in their color scheme. It felt mocked-up, tinkered with, as if you were watching a carefully crafted play directed by an obsessive-compulsive set and costume designer rather than a movie that you could get lost in.
Of course, the more honest take was that I felt like I didn’t have the refined eye that I thought was required to appreciate the film. This here, the critics suggested, was a work of High Art, something my buttoned-up “good government employee” persona could never understand.
But that night—that day? —was different. Suspended 35,000 feet over the Pacific and feeling that I’d already entered a new plane of existence of the sort that travel, especially to a faraway place, brings, I felt up to the challenge. I was eager for it, even. I was curious, ready to try something out of my comfort zone. Still, a small part of me worried that this indie-meets-commercial-big-league flick would be a snooze fest à la Birdman, Roma, Drive – films I’d brought myself to watch hoping they’d expand my artistic palate, but which I came away from thinking I was better off sticking to Homeland and Ozark.
Budapest was no snooze fest. It was utterly captivating, funny: visual opium that’s prevented from getting too high a head by an irony and wit that’s accessible to the simpleton. The writing was impeccable. The frames were symmetrical. It was anti-naturalism, meaning you never forgot that what you were watching wasn’t real. The narrator(s), visible intermittingly, told you this. The flat backgrounds and whip pan shots told you this. The folksy score told you this. The anti-CGI, pro-wide shot of a kitschy yet opulent doll house meant to be the grand hotel which the story centers around told you this.
But in looking and feeling artificial and story bookish, Budapest was, in fact, escapism. It was escapism from the escapism that realism, the predominant filmmaking approach of our era, provided to audiences. Wes Anderson, the film’s impish director and brainchild, was the counter to someone like Christopher Nolan, who, even when he was directing mind-bending blockbusters like Inception or Interstellar, made viewers feel like they were in the room with his characters in worlds that, minus all the spacetime experimenting, could very well be their own. Anderson’s whole shtick, it seemed to me, was “My film is a heavily doctored and choreographed tableau, but you’ll be awestruck because it’s so different from anything you’re getting in the mainstream.” I was mesmerized, mouth almost certainly open, as I stared at the small screen attached to the seat in front of me, nodding my head to this hypothetical quote I made up in the same head.
Fortunately, Anderson’s hyper-attention to aesthetic didn’t come at the cost of rich character development. Ralph Fiennes, the actor who played Voldemort in the Harry Potter series, is the face of the film’s captivating protagonist, Monsieur Gustav H, a savant concierge for the hotel bearing the name of the film who is layered and enigmatic. Gustav H’s dedication to the hotel guests, namely for those matching the description “rich” and “elderly” and “woman,” extends to the bedroom, and you get the sense that his rendezvous’ are motivated not by a naked self-interest (though he loves being showered with compliments and gifts), but a deeper desire to experience more intimate human connection. Temperamentally, Gustav H is like a writer – someone who can be crabby and difficult when at a loss for inspiration, who could soonest flip on a dime and write you the most affecting poem on mankind’s centrality in the cosmos.
His sidekick apprentice, Zero (played by Tony Revolori), whom he both condescendingly and affectionately calls “his lobby boy,” is on the receiving end of this bipolarity. Zero is a refugee orphan hailing from a fictional Middle Eastern state whose been displaced by some unclarified war. The two are an odd pairing who nevertheless have sidesplitting chemistry in the mold of what I will come to discover is Anderson’s trademark deadpan.
Gustav H: “She was dynamite in the sack, by the way.”
Zero: “She was eighty-four, Mr. Gustav.”
Gustav H: “I’ve had older.”
For most of the film, Gustav H and Zero are on the run from both a brutish henchman, hired by the son of one of Gustav H’s late customers and played impeccably by William Dafoe, and a dimwitted police chief, played hilariously by Edward Norton, whose costume bears a striking resemblance to that worn by the Nazi SS. There’s a fine art heist, a prison break, a gun fight, and a Tom & Jerry-like chase down a ski slope – all of which are as comical as they are riveting.
But at a higher altitude, the film is a lament for what was, and what could have been. It takes place in the early 1930s in a fictional Central European metropolis that could be Prague, or Vienna, or, of course, Budapest. These cities were all part of the multiethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire, which, before its dissolution after the First World War, then its cooption into Hitler’s Reich, was a cradle of European cosmopolitanism. It was this bastion of dynamism, free(er) thought, and innovation that bred the likes of legendary writer Franz Kafka and the “Godfather of Psychology,” Sigmund Freud. It was here too where a malleable and jaded young Austrian who failed to break into the Viennese art scene was first exposed to antisemitism.
The fascist movement that was downstream of this hate and scapegoating hangs over the film like a creeping fog. By the film’s conclusion, it’s encased everything. The Grand Budapest Hotel, once a symbol of promise and human vibrance, soon bears the scars of this new reality. Through two narrative flash forwards—Budapest is technically a story within a story—we see that it also will bear the scars of what came after: totalitarian communism.
This historical tie-in, which Anderson makes subtlety, gives my geopolitics-obsessed mind all it needs. But it’s Gustave H’s optimism in the face of terror that touches me on a deeper level, giving me something more that I hadn’t expected, or even knew I needed.
Even as he sees the tide of oppression quickly overtaking his “civilized world,” Gustav H holds out hope that he might be able to stave it off by steadfastly personifying the higher virtues of his era: inclusivity, nonjudgment, emphasis on the arts. For him, the romantic concierge at a five-star hotel, this is accomplished through fastidious service, decorum, and a tireless grace. The fascist death squads—misguided, yes, inherently evil, no—aren’t, in his eyes, unlike his crabby guests. If he could just dignify their existence through his decency, and impress them with his attention to detail, he could rejigger their outlook. As he proclaimed early in the film to the hotel staff:
“Rudeness is merely the expression of fear. People fear they won’t get what they want. [But] the most dreadful and unattractive person only needs to be loved, and they will open up like a flower.”
Ultimately, however, Gustav H’s Old World mentality was no match for this New World darkness. His last act is not in the service of a customer, but to Zero – perhaps the only true friend he ever had. It’s both a throughline and a revolution in his character.
At root, Budapest is tender story about this friendship, and about love and acceptance of outward difference, under the logic that this difference exists in only that: the outward.
I was so affected by my airplane movie, and so impressed by its visual direction, that I spent hours reading criticism and learning more about its singular filmmaker when I finally made it to my hotel. It was there, stretched out on that lightly padded granite masquerading as a mattress, where I learned what that stuffy term “auteur” meant. And what it meant was Wes Anderson: a filmmaker whose vision, style, and worldmaking was so distinct, and whose fingerprints were on every fiber of his films, that if he were suddenly incapacitated mid-shoot, a stand-in director would fail utterly in their attempt to take up his mantle.
Anderson’s catalogue of work, I discovered over the course of my exhaustive hand-held sleuthing, was as vast as it was noteworthy. So too were his ensemble of recurring actors—Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Owen Wilson, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe—whose off-screen temperaments jived so well with the on-screen persona he had them inhabit.
I had a lot of viewing ahead of me when I made it back to my Honolulu apartment in a few days’ time. But I had to gain my composure and find a way to get to sleep.
If I could get through the next couple of days of boring spook dramas, I, like Bill Murray’s character in Lost in Translation, would have some time to immerse myself in the beautiful unfamiliar: the neon-lit alleyways of Shinjuku, the hustle and bustle of Shibuya, the eerie quiet of the Imperial Palace.
Thanks to my decision to watch just one more airplane movie, I’d acquired a fresh zest for adventure.
THE VENUE THIS go-around is the Tampa Theatre. It’s the premier of Asteroid City, Anderson’s latest feature that takes place in a fictional desert town of the same name in 1955 America. Next to me sits Derrick, who comes off as less hipster and more software developer. He’s a self-described “Wes-Head,” and I compliment him on the red beanie atop that head of the same style and color of those worn by the characters in The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou – Anderson’s 2004 film that received mixed reviews upon its release, but which has taken on a vibe of its own in the two decades since. Derrick spent the last week and some change rewatching Anderson’s films in this same theatre, part of a so-called “Wes-Rospective” series intended to grease the tracks for this latest incarnation.
Giddy to be in conversation with another Anderson enthusiast, I do that thing where I ask someone a question then provide my own answer before they can respond. The question was a simple one: “What’s your favorite Wes film?” My frenzied self-answer was “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” Anderson’s 2009 stop motion animated film based on Roald Dahl’s 1970 children’s book. To my excitement (and his, thankfully) Derrick shout-replied that it was his favorite Wes film too.
“Just the fact that the characters say ‘what the cuss’ instead of ‘what the fuck!’” I geek.
“And how they pronounce ‘opossum’ how it’s spelled,” he quips.
Before we can nerd out some more, the organist who’s curiously playing “Take Me Out to The Ball Game”-like tunes walks off the stage. A stagehand rolls the wooden contraption into the curtained unknown. The lights dim to pitch dark, and the crowd promptly silences, save the ravenous popcorn eaters and the excessive straw-suckers.
There’s a warm electricity in the air—as if a battalion of fireflies have assembled—that you just want bottle up in a large Mason jar.
TO WATCH A Wes Anderson film in a room full of Wes-Heads, Wes-Head-Adjacents, and Wes-Head-Curious, which is how I’d characterize my wife, who is seated to the left of me, is to be immersed in a sea of laughter. The chorus radiates almost immediately, brought on by the train steaming into the desert that’s transporting perfectly innocuous cargo, including gravel, pecans, avocados, and a 10-megaton nuclear-tipped missile; the stop-motion roadrunner that BEEP BEEPS across the foreground (a nod to the Looney Tunes); the freeway onramp that’s “closed indefinitely” because it’s just that: an onramp suspended in midair unattached to any real highway; and the mechanic whose fix to a complex car problem is to unscrew a single bolt with an exceedingly small tool.
The laughs, buoyed by a crowd that appreciates Anderson’s deadpan humor—which he achieves through a mix of dry yet snappy dialogue, quirky set design, and exquisitely-timed camera shots—will echo through the theatre for the whole of the film. Being a part of this “in-the-know” crowd will elevate the experience, not least because their chuckles and subtle “oohs” will snap me out of the dream-like trance that Asteroid City’s sherbet-saturated composition lulls you into if you’re not careful (or kept honest).
The film centers on newly widowed war photographer Augie Steenbeck, played by Jason Schwartzman, and his whiz-kid teenage son Woodrow, played by Jake Ryan. The pair, along with Augie’s hysterically innocent triplet daughters, are visiting Asteroid City, population 87, to attend a U.S.-military-sponsored “Junior Stargazer” convention, where, in addition to looking up at the night sky and learning about the town’s lone tourist attraction (a spent meteorite encased in a crater), Woodrow will receive an award for a futuristic invention he submitted for a contest. The convention’s host, Army General Gibson, played by Jeffrey Wright, will also recognize four other young brainiacs who submitted out-of-this-world contraptions to the contest. Among them is Dinah—played by Grace Edwards—an outsider in a less apparent way who Woodrow will grow cautious love eyes for. Dinah’s mother, Midge Campbell, played by Scarlett Johanson, is a Hollywood actress whose beauty masks a cosmic emotional torment. She and Augie will get sucked into each other’s gravitational pulls over the course of the film as they bond over their tragedies via the windows in their adjacent bungalows.
Joining this hodge podge of characters is yet more hodge podge: a yodeling group of cowboys point-manned by Montana (Rupert Friend); a 3rd grade class under the instruction of June Douglas (Maya Hawke); the guarded parents of the three other nerds (Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Stephen Park); and Augie’s jaundiced, yet superbly dressed father-in-law, Stanley Zak (Tom Hanks), whose purpose in traveling to the Southwest wasteland is to help out with the kids and hold the remains of his late daughter, whom Augie has been ferrying around in ash form in a teal Tupperware.
The point of convergence, Asteroid City, occupies a small couple of blocks in the flat desert. There’s a diner, a fill-up station, and a mechanic who has no idea what he’s doing. It’s like any old pit stop on the drive from California to Vegas, though the billowing nuclear mushroom cloud in the distance suggests it sits somewhere near the Nevada Test Site or it’s folklored subcomponent, Area 51. Lodging is covered by the motor inn, the city’s other structure, which is run by an enterprising manager played by Steve Carrell, who, in addition to wearing a bright green reflective visor comically low on his face, sells cigarettes, robot-arm-shaken martinis, and real estate out of a row of highly advanced vending machines.
The surface-level drama of the film, in line with the whole Area 51 vibe, is an alien encounter that occurs while the entourage is staring up at the night sky as they attempt to view an ellipse. The lanky little guy drops down from a flying saucer, innocently poses as Augie snaps a picture, then absconds with the city’s cherished meteorite and flies back into oblivion. Where other filmmakers might capitalize on our built-in intrigue with extraterrestrials to hold us in suspense, Anderson reveals the alien suddenly and with little fanfare, and he depicts it as cute and quirky rather than grotesque and menacing.
Anderson’s first foray into sci-fi, in other words, is decidedly Andersonian.
The military machine ramps up even though the encounter couldn’t have been more innocuous. General Gibson institutes an airtight quarantine that will turn out to be quite porous. He orders his minions to gin up a cover story. Green-uniformed troops surround the town and wrap it in barbed wire. Federal agents rush in and try to convince everyone that what they saw wasn’t in fact an alien.
It’s in this lockdown where Augie and Midge develop a banter, then an intimacy, that delivers the emotional thrust of the film. But the government’s heavy handedness is a theme unto itself. It’s a bellwether of the times.
This is Cold War America, when successive White House administrations will condition the populous into believing that peace can only be achieved if they accept the risk that they could be annihilated at the press of the button. As the ‘good’ victor of WWII, America, and its ballooning military-industrial complex, had anointed itself the guarantor of the free world, and of human civilization writ large. So when an extraterrestrial visits Earth, it’s Uncle Sam’s responsibly to protect not just its own citizenry, but all of humanity. (Well, all of humanity minus the Soviets and the “Red Chinese” – regimes that General Gibson suspects might forge an alliance with the aliens.) This is a massive undertaking, and an epochal shift for a country whose populous was loathe to enter WWII in the first place, wishing instead to continue in their relatively drama-free isolationism.
Asteroid City reminds you again and again of the whole-of-society mobilization against communism that past generations endured. General Gibson, a man who is quick to dole out the term “treason,” is the most apparent incarnation of this postwar anxiety. In his opening remarks to the convention, which he delivers with a hint of innocent nervousness, Gibson speaks whimsically about his childhood in the interwar period, before getting terse and sharing how the second ‘war to end all wars’ hardened his spine.
“If you wanted to live a nice, quiet, peaceful life,” he tells the brainiacs, “you picked the wrong time to get born.”
Augie also bears the scars of this brave new world, both physically—a bald patch has replaced a shrapnel wound to the head—and emotionally. Like many of his contemporaries, he has untreated trauma from the war, the price of which is being borne not just by him, but his family. Augie is wholly unavailable for his children in any emotional sense. He breaks the news of their mother’s death three weeks after the fact and in an entirely matter-of-fact manner, offering little comfort as if to suggest “I’ve learned to just sweep things under the rug, now you should too.”
He’s numb to the Cold War machinations and propaganda, or at least indifferent to them. He may have the look and feel of someone who’s become disillusioned with his government, but at the end of the day, he, like the late “Beat Generation” writer Jack Kerouac, who had a similar glazed air about him, is content merely describing the whacked world around him. Offering remedies isn’t Augie’s M.O., just as it wasn’t Kerouac’s. His photographs are provided without editorial comment just as Kerouac’s notes on America’s downtrodden in his epic On the Road are presented without significant unpacking.
But in Midge, who is carrying trauma of her own (domestic abuse), Augie finds someone who helps him snap out of his indifference. It’s a slow process, which she achieves inadvertently by opening up about her own unhealthy pathologies in a brutally honest way that stands out as a blaring exception to the emotional restraint that Anderson has virtually all of his characters in all of his films personify (Gustave H being another outlier).
She and Augie, Midge claims, are not all that different. She distracts herself from her misery by drowning herself in her work, where she chases role after role in film and television, playing characters who are even more miserable than she is. He does something similar, jumping from conflict zone to conflict zone, snapping photos of human depravity. Both characters acknowledge that their addictions to their distraction mechanisms make them poor parents, but they have little confidence in their ability to do what it takes to shake this. They are, as Midge claims in one of the standout lines of the film, “Two catastrophically wounded people who don’t express the depths of [their] pain because [they] don’t want to.”
However, their back and forth will prove cathartic, at least for Augie. There’s healing in voicing your inner truths, no matter how ugly they are. You only have a chance at stepping into reality when you can acknowledge the mask.
Augie’s awakening occurs deep into their quarantine, after his depression-laced flirting with Midge turned physical. Looking at her through the window with a scorching hot panini sandwiched firmly between tongs, he finally finds the words to articulate something that’s been weighing on him:
Augie: “I don’t like the way that guy looked at us. The alien.”
Midge: “How did he look?"
Augie: “Like we’re doomed.”
It’s his come-to-Jesus moment. The beatnik-looking man is finally acting the part. Augie is jaded by the world around him, which has changed night and day in the span of what feels quite literally like one night and one day. And he’s suddenly calling BS on the postwar narrative. He’s asking questions.
Have we (America, humanity) grown too paranoid? Are they (the aliens, the communists) really the problem? Or is it us?
AUGIE’S SON WOODROW, who has an unadulterated curiosity about the world, also helps wean him off the proverbial Novocain by the end of the film. Woodrow’s not immune to Uncle Sam’s Cold War politicking, especially when it comes to the budding Space Race. Neither are his teenage contemporaries. The inventions they submitted for the contest is all the evidence you need of this: Woodrow’s high-fidelity hologram, which can project an image of the American flag on the moon; Dinah’s “work in the area of ‘botanical acceleration,’” whereby she found a way to grow plants with the radiation from nuclear fallout; the ray gun that Clifford (the son of the character played by Leiv Schreiber) demonstrates to shocking effect in front of drooling black-suited Pentagon officials. But Woodrow, the unassuming leader of this gifted collective, is irked by the government coverup that follows the alien encounter – an intense feeling that leads him to break from the government narrative far sooner than Augie.
Woodrow is even more put off by his father’s initial nonchalance after the incident. Has his dad become so used to cataclysmic events that he can’t even register the significance of this one? Does he not care to consider how this changes humanity’s understanding of the universe? Is he not peeved that the U.S. government wants to pretend that this never occurred?
“The meaning of life,” he barks at his blank father, “maybe there is one!”
This motif of curious and perceptive children questioning their cynical and burdened old guard is one that Anderson explores in much of his filmography, most previously apparent in Moonrise Kingdom (2012) – a film in which you worry more about the adult characters than the twelve-year-old protagonists who’ve run away into a forest amid a life-threatening storm.
Anderson seems fixated on the process by which innocent and idealistic youth lose their sparkle and zest for life in adulthood – that dreary place where creativity and wonder is replaced with such recitations as “we need be practical” or “it’s important to remain realistic.” Maybe it’s because his greatest fear is that this will happen to him one day; that life, and the inevitable hurdles that accompany it, will fashion him into this boring, romance-less shape. Maybe that’s why he refuses to move away from his whimsical storybook aesthetic.
This regard for youthful inquiry and imagination is far more apparent in Asteroid City than in any of Anderson’s other ten feature films. Whereas in Moonrise Kingdom the adults are slow to acknowledge the surprising wisdom of the child protagonists, in Asteroid City, the adults appear to accept this proposition from the start, albeit begrudgingly. Even if the parents of the wiz-kids are miserable shmucks who are godawful at offering anything in the way of love and reassurance, it’s clear they have at least an unconscious respect for their offspring. They’re keepers of young physicists and chemists and engineers whose minds are already so sharp that Big Brother is scheming to weaponize them against the commies for crying out loud! (There’s a clause in the fine print of the contest rules giving the government ownership of their inventions.)
But it’s not just their intellect that sets these kids apart, it’s their gall. It’s the kids, not the adults, who have the courage to leak news of the alien encounter to the outside world – a development that ends the quarantine that all the old-timers were moaning and groaning about.
In fact, most of the sixteen-and-under characters in this film can be thought of as planets unto themselves. It’s a reversal of the natural order of things, where it’s not the kids who orbit around the adults, but the adults who orbit around the kids. There’s Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton), a buttoned-up astrologer with decades of experience, who hangs on to Woodrow’s every utterance as if he’s twenty years her senior with 5 Nobel Prizes to his name. It’s Dwight, one of the third graders on the field trip who, through an infectious confidence, manages to earn the respect of the pugnacious cowboys, whom he bums cigarettes from then leads in a laugh-out-loud yodel that ranks as one of my favorite moments of the movie. It’s Ricky (Ethan Josh Lee), one of the other adolescent stargazers, who holds a whole room of military and three-letter-agency officers in suspense as he explains why he decided to publish news of the alien event in his high school paper.
In a film where the characters are grappling with a host of existential questions (among them being the meaning of life itself), the magnetism of the younger characters points to a larger idea that I think Anderson has been trying to wrap his hands around over the course of his whole career: that truth is far easier to pinpoint when we’re young.
There’s a certain intuition that accompanies nascent personhood – that beautiful window of time when one is still mostly a blank slate, not yet fully molded by the whims, quirks, expectations or dysfunctions of one’s parents and environment; not yet indoctrinated into political, religious, or cultural paradigms; not yet overwhelmed by the layers and complexities of human behaviors and interactions, which are often so tangled that one is forced to hold up two or more contradictory ‘truths’ at the same time in order to preserve one’s sanity (If that person loves me, then why are they treating me this way?)
Emotions, too, are easier to isolate in youth, which aids in truth-seeking. That’s because kids don’t self-censor, sugarcoat, mince words, bite their tongue. They say what’s on their mind, and they mean what they say. They’re not afraid to share how they feel. They have yet to learn how to be agreeable—synonyms: “acting,” “lying”—for the sake of not “rocking the boat,” or of making someone feel a certain way, as if they are in charge another person’s feelings; as if it is their words, and not the receiver’s lack of emotional control, that are at fault. They have yet to care how they are perceived. They are not yet aware of how what they say and what they believe can be twisted and contorted and used as justification for others to put them in a box. They are incapable of grasping that the box they will soon allow others to put them in—the box that they will one day put themselves in out of fear of speaking honestly—will become their life’s ‘identity.’ They don’t understand that the longer they’re in that box, the stronger its four corners will become; the longer they’re in the box, the more stifling and claustrophobic it will get in there. Only, it won’t register as claustrophobic because, by that point, they’ll be so far gone. By that point, all they can do is confabulate.
A lifetime of calculating and hedging and suppressing and conforming leads, inevitably, to unhappiness, as we see in Augie, who is so dizzy, and so utterly incapable of diagnosing his emotional discontents, that he’s become a glazed donut.
It’s the antithesis of Augie—that not-yet-sullied youthful emotional intelligence—that I see Anderson jumping through hoops to shine a light on. There are many examples in the film, but none quite as stark as an interaction that Clifford (Aristou Meehan) has with his father, J.J. Kellog (Liev Schreiber), during the lockdown. Clifford has this schtick where he dares himself to do outlandish things like jump off roofs, eat bushels of ghost peppers, or hug cacti. His father rolls his eyes every time he pulls one of these stunts. In this scene, however, his father blows a fuse and pops off.
“What’s the cause? What’s the meaning? Why do you always have to dare something?” he shouts.
“I don’t know,” Clifford replies soberly, his wheels turning. “Maybe it’s because I’m afraid [that] otherwise nobody will notice my existence in the universe.”
Clifford’s cutting honesty leaves his father speechless. Here’s a kid that’s not only smart enough to engineer a functioning ray gun, but conscious enough to identify, with striking precision, the root of his reckless defense mechanism.
You could hear a pin drop in the theatre during this scene. But only for a second, because in true Andersonian fashion, the absurd promptly rears its head to clear the air.
The kids in Asteroid City—who, if we are to consider the period which they’re set in, will be in their formidable years during America’s counterculture movement—may be self-aware and teaming with life now. But the implicit question that hangs over the film like the mushroom clouds that were all too common in the 1950s is whether they’ll be able to keep this up in adulthood.
Are they destined to meet the same fate as their life-zapped parents?
HAVE I MENTIONED that Asteroid City isn’t real? It’s a movie set in a fictional place with fictional characters, so of course it’s not real, you retort. What I’m saying, though, is that even in the structure of this non-real entertainment venture, the desert town and all its whacky characters and happenings aren’t real. That’s because Asteroid City is a film about a documentary television program about a play.
Confused yet? I was too at first watch.
Basically, this means that Jason Shwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, et al, aren’t just playing Augie Steenback, Midge Campbell, et al—they’re playing the actors playing Augie Steenback, Midge Campbell, et al. That is to say, every real-world actor that has facetime in Asteroid City is technically playing two characters.
One onion ring out from the Cold War-meets-alien-life shenanigans—i.e. the Broadway play—are the fictional actors, guided by the scribblings of Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), a Tennessee Williams-ish playwright known for his “poetic tapestries of life west of the Rocky Mountains.” And one more onion ring out from there is a documentary television crew – the face of which is Bryan Cranston (yes, that Bryan Cranston) who narrates from behind the scenes of Asteroid City (the 1955 play) in a similar tone to the host of The Twilight Zone. The purpose of the television program, as Cranston’s character announces at the top of the film in a crisp black and white, is to:
“Witness first-hand the creation, start to finish, of a new play mounted on an American stage. Asteroid City does not exist. It is an imaginary drama created expressly for this broadcast. The characters are fictional; the text, hypothetical; the events, an apocryphal fabrication. But together they present an authentic account of the inner workings of a modern theatrical production.”
This blooming onion, as it were, is an intricate framing device that allows Anderson to explore not just the themes of grief, wonder, and dispassion, but another meta-narrative about the central role performance art plays in helping us make sense of our world and our place in it.
By taking us behind the curtain and showing us how the sausage is made, Anderson is trying to drive home the point that people who make a career out of inhabiting other people on stage or behind the screen are performing a vital societal function. The “pull-yourself-up-from-your-bootstraps” ethos that reached escape velocity in America in the 1950s too often fails to appreciate this. Artists are perceived as fanciful or impractical. The art itself is viewed as trivial. For the salary man, a film is intended merely to provide mind-numbing entertainment that he can get lost in when he’s not slaving away for The Man.
But it’s far more than that. As Ethan Hawke argued in a Ted Talk video that went viral during the COVID pandemic, “Art is not a luxury—it’s sustenance.” It’s a medium that can awaken feelings within us we forgot we had. Why is this scene bringing tears to my eyes? It’s a medium we turn to in times of desperation. Has anyone ever felt what I’m feeling?
“Actors lead unconventional—sometimes dangerous—lives which nourish and elevate their artistic aspirations and illuminate the human condition,” Cranston’s character declares when the camera cuts from the tan desert back to the black and white studio.
But actors aren’t impervious to that same human condition they seek to articulate for the audience. Sometimes their personal trials can inform and elevate a performance. Other times, this straddling of personal and professional torments only serves to suspend the person behind both characters in a state of emotional paralysis.
This is the case for Jones Hall, the fictional actor (Jason Schwartzman) who plays Augie Steenback. Jones, we learn, is not much different than the character he’s been asked to inhabit. Like Augie, he’s recently experienced an emotional trauma that he has yet to process. So, for him, the line between personal and professional is as blurry as a window in a sauna.
The ambiguity surrounding the ending of Asteroid City (the play) eats away at Jones night after night as he personifies Augie in the Broadway theatre. One night, he can’t take it anymore. He storms off the set mid-act and confronts Schubert Green (Adrien Brody), the play’s highly devoted director.
Jones: “Am I doing it right?”
Schubert: “You’re doing him just right. In fact, in my opinion, you didn’t just become Augie. He became you.”
Jones: “He’s such a wounded guy. I feel like my heart is getting broken – my own personal heart, every night.”
Schubert: “Good.”
Jones: “I still don’t understand the play.”
Schubert: “Doesn’t matter. Just keep telling the story.”
I CAN’T HELP BUT think that Asteroid City is partly autobiographical. I feel like there’s a little bit of Wes Anderson in both Augie Steenback and Jones Hall. That may sound odd given how upbeat and innovative Anderson is next to their downbeat dull. But I think the similarities are not so much in the man, but the sentiment.
The fact that Anderson conceived of this project as he was locked away in his home during the height of the COVID pandemic tells us all we need to know. In many ways, the pandemic was just as dizzying as the dawn of the nuclear age was for those living in mid-century America. For better or worse, a collective amnesia about the whole ordeal has replaced that collective angst. But it’s important to remember that there was angst, especially in the early days of this great disrupter. Some became numb to it all. Others, over-catastrophized, then over-reacted. But for many on both sides of this spectrum, the pandemic brought about a force-reset, whether they liked it or not. It demanded that they take stock; that they reappraise; that they recontextualize.
I don’t think Anderson was impervious to this great shake-down. And you hear him asking a lot of existential questions in this film.
What’s it all worth, anyway? What will happen to my body of work if humanity is wiped out? What if I haven’t said all that I need to say? What if I’m more confused than ever? WHAT’S THE POINT?
The answer Anderson arrived at is the same one that Schubert offers. It’s okay if you’re confused. It’s okay if you don’t have it all fleshed out. Just keep telling the story. There’s virtue in that alone. You can find salvation in the journey. And maybe, just maybe, in all your striving, you’ll tap into something greater than yourself: a collective consciousness, a universal truth.
In what I’d argue is the crowning scene of the film, Conrad Earp has Saltzburg Keitel (Willem Dafoe), a famous acting coach, lead the cast in an improvisational exercise. Conrad needs help ironing out a scene in which the characters in Asteroid City are “seduced into the deepest, dreamiest slumber of their lives as a result of their shared experience of a bewildering and bedazzling celestial mystery.” The only direction Saltzburg gives the troupe is to “work from the outside in.” Provided they’re doing that, there are no wrong answers.
Soon, the whole class breaks out in a recitation of a mantra that first revealed itself to Jones Hall:
“You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep. You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep. You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.”
There is perhaps no more fitting an ethic for Wes Anderson, and the type of films he makes, than this.
Find a way to retain that childlike spirit and knowing about the world, and you won’t have to experience that come-to-Jesus moment. You can’t snap back to reality if you’re already in it.