Asteroid city is a damn fine film, if not particularly original territory for director Wes Anderson for the most part. (and “most” is definitely the keyword here, as we’ll soon discuss). It has all the same bells and whistles – the pastel color palette, unnaturally smooth camera movements, obsesssion with visual symmetry and this distinctly Wes Anderson tone that mixes quiet, emotional gut punches with absurdist humor. But none of that is why Asteroid City is a great film – those are just the features that get a pre-existing fanbase into the movie theatre.
What makes the film special is it feels like easily his most personal film. (of the ones i’ve seen, which is a good chunk of them) What makes it special to me (which is what matters here) is that it feels extremely personal to me specifically – as one likely surmised from the title alone.
In terms of inspiration, this movie is not subtle in the slightest nor does it have any pretentions of being anything else. Wes’ extremely formalist style combined with its heavy emphasis on characters and the actors who perform those characters has always lended itself to having an almost stage play quality – and this movie takes that to the logical extreme by having it’s classic Wes Anderson framing device be a master playwright (clearly coded as himself) spending some indeterminate amount of time that is clearly over a decade going to more and more extreme lengths to write the “perfect play.” Thus, a solid 90 percent of the movie is explicitly unreal even within the framing of the movie itself.
That’s not to say that the “play” portion of the movie is uninteresting or unimportant, just that it’s not really pertinent to my writing or lack thereof. For the most part, the narrative of the movie is classic wes anderson with a little bit of stank on it. One of the main plotlines involves war photographer Auguie Steenbeck (played by Jason Schwartzman) trying to work up the courage to tell his four children their mother is dead and then three of those aformentioend children stubbornly insisting their mother’s ashes are buried in a tupperware container in an unmarked Nevada desert grave. If this particular plotline seems eerily similar to the plot of Wes’s earlier film The Darjeeling Limited, it’s because in a lot of ways, it’s basically a heightened, slightly comedic version of his earlier movie compressed as one of many storylines within the extremely dense, yet efficient 105 minute run time of Asteroid City.
Yet, inspite of the 105 being extremely brisk by any modern movie standards, it feels overwhelmingly full, to the point that the movie is daring you to call it self-congragulatory or masturbatory. The poster alone proves the point, loudly tucking a whopping 21 names of BigDeal™ actors into the top right corner of the movie. It’s telling you this is the biggest, gaudiest movie you’ve ever seen, only to spend two minutes slowly revealing the alien that has suddenly chose to reveal itself to earthlings is just a tall guy in a rubber suit. (And not even Andre the Giant tall at that, we’re talking like an NBA small forward sized human).
But it’s finally time to talk about why we are here.(“we” meaning at least two of us if someone else inhabiting this earth is reading this.)
Near the end of the movie, our main character Augie literlaly walks out of the movie and straight into the framing device. The “director” of the play tells him he’s about to miss his mark, but he doesn’t care – he needs to get some fresh air. He walks all the way to some unreal black and white balcony universe to talk to Margot Robbie, the fictional character who was originally meant to perform a single scene performance in the fictional “play” of the movie as a flashback to Augie’s dead wife. (To fully dedicate Augie the person/actor to Augie the character’s performance, the dead wife has been effectively quarantined all on her lonesome on this balcony. Yeah, this movie is insane)
They talk for a bit out of character before half-performing the original “scene” as it was written, a tearful goodbye to this fictional dead wife that feels like both a “real” goodbye to the fictional director’s now ex-wife and Wes Anderson’s personal goodbye to us as the movie is about to end. Then it’s revealed the “playwright” of this entire thing died six months before production. He will never see an audience embrace, reject, or ignore his work. By virtue of the one fundamental truth, death itself, he is now permanently incapable of making additional revisions to the movie. It is both extremely literally the death of the author as well as pretty obviously metaphorically Death of the Author in the sense that Wes Anderson is boldly challenging us to interpret the movie in whatever way we think is right.
Well Wes, i’m a bit of an overanalyzing psycho so let me hit you with my interpretation.
Act 2 and Act 3 of the film take place during a quarantine, in this case, one caused by an alien but to an audience of film goers who were all subjected to life style changes caused by Covid-19, it’s pretty obvious what the similarities are there. The central romance between Schwartzman and Scarlett Johansson’s characters takes place almost exclusively between the open windows of two adjacent houses that appear more like idealized replicas of a small 1955 home than the actual thing. Consumation insofar as it exists is heavily implied to be merely a single night of love making, casual sex, or whatever you choose to interpret that final consumation as. Throughout the film, loud bangs are heard during the “play” section which is explained as being near a nuclear weapon testing site, and the explanation of all of this I believe is pretty striaght forward:
Fuck it, we’re all gonna die someday – do what you love and so long as you don’t harm others, worry as little about the consequences as possible.
For me, that’s writing – and as an obese individual with a horrid immune system, there was a very real chance prior to vaccination the COVID-19 virus would have killed me had I contracted it. Yet, in spite of this, I did the opposite. I stopped writing all together, and for the stupid fucking reason that I didn’t think I was talented enough or a hard enough worker to do what I need to do to chase my life’s dreams with the almost reckless passion that Asteroid City chases its creative vision.
So that’s what I’m doing. I’m writing again. I might change when and where on a whim, but I’m no longer going to let myself get obsessively worried over tiny little details like that.
After all, sweating the details is the director’s job.
Mason's thoughts 