joe m 🐀

i did see this movie (on the day it opened, which happened to be my birthday) and then meant to write a post about it and forgot (because i ended up having to get ready for a big trip i'm on for the next couple weeks) but this ask is a good enough time to write some of the thoughts i had about it. (if you're a person who cares about spoilers, note that i am going to talk about the film in full.)

oh cohost user mutton-bandit, how right you were to come to me for this one. Asteroid City might be my new favorite Wes Anderson movie, beating out Life Aquatic in a way that leads to a contrast that may prove helpful: if Aquatic is mainly about people who lead extraordinary lives being very bored, Asteroid is about people who lead extraordinary lives being very anxious, and often pretending to be bored to hide the anxiety or sometimes realizing boredom and anxiety are the same thing (arguably this is going on in Aquatic too, of course, but it is less submerged [haha] here in ways i'll get to).

Asteroid is also quite formally distinct in ways that delight Me, Personally. it is built on layers of recursion around various absent centers: an unfinished play that is somehow already being performed, a dead mother, a vast pit in the desert, the emptiness of the night sky. a character references Kurt Gödel, of the Gödel incompleteness theorems, referenced by Doug Hofstadter as a model for the sort of hierarchical recursive self-reference he believes underlies human consciousness, and while i may not be fully onboard with that it's still the sort of shit that makes me stand up and holler in the middle of a movie clearly structured along lines of hierarchical recursion.

a rod serling-like narrator informs us we are watching a recording of a theatrical production (the most ephemeral of all arts) that was specifically written for recording/broadcast. therein lies the tension that defines the film and its concerns, where on the one hand art is created as a doubtful means of communication and connection, as an attempt at endurance, and on the other hand, time and the world and its vast inscrutable cosmological processes rend art and all other things into oblivion. the world in its incompleteness is incomplete. the absent center just might overtake us all. in the far distance, our Good Old Government detonates another beautifully puffy Chuck Jones atomic bomb.

shortly after the narrator's intro, the teleplay steps outside its bounds and takes over the movie, folding out the careful blocking of the stage into a fully three-dimensional grid whose artifice risks (the film wants us to know through the above a-bombs and pastel mesas and several roadrunner homages) devolving into pure cartoonishness. and this is wes anderson knowing what people say about him, and him saying "fuck you i like doing this!!!! how on earth some of you motherfuckers don't find this fun is beyond me!!!!!!"

it is intercut occasionally with scenes of how the play almost didn't come to be: the playwright has a prickly first interaction with the male lead, the female lead almost skips town before being lured back by a high-level gofer who ends up being the junior male lead. these scenes both end with implied fucking, too, but between the characters rather than to anderson's detractors, and in the coupling of human bodies we might intuit the emergence of a more centralized sense in Anderson of the actual place of people getting together and making more people. but we don't have to. (the actor and the director are both men; sometimes we just like to fuck.)

but Anderson's movies are always about sad dads and weird moms and confused kids, and this one more than others feels like it was made by a dad. a trio of young sisters, serving as a kind of greek chorus in the film, provide very childlike performances that feel extremely written from the firsthand experience of the odd and unhinged things children like to do or say, like burying their mother's tupperwared ashes in a shallow pit at a roadside motel and screaming at their grandfather when he tries to dig her up--because to do so would void the ritual they've performed. there is something about this very conventional approach to "jesus christ aren't kids weird" sans the twee cleverness that typically defines the andersonian youth that draws into relief, again, the artifice of the world around them: these three girls might be the most naturalistic performances we've gotten out of an anderson movie???

and as you might expect, there's some element of existential quiet there. the world may be aimed toward oblivion but by god if i don't think these kids might be able to make something of it--and hopefully not fall, like so many of the other characters in this film almost do, into the trap of believing that to make something of the world is to exhaust the world.

an accomplished but grieving war photographer, a famous movie star undergoing something of an identity crisis, genius adolescent scientists, weirdly adolescent adult scientists, persnickety government functionaries, a bunch of rowdy children and their softspoken teacher, a cowboy band--all of these and more are present for the ultimate Encounter with the Real, when an alien spacecraft appears over their bonkers science fair reception, and all watch in perfect astonishment as an alien quietly and awkwardly steps out, grabs a meteorite, clears its throat as if to say something, and then instead leaves.

the government quarantines everybody and gradually everyone goes a little nuts, and it's not hard at all to see covid and the lockdown threaded through here. the titular asteroid city's roadside motel consists of tiny houses, all laid out in a grid like a miniature suburbia, and scenes between jason schwartzmann and scarlett johansson have them facing each other from the windows of their opposite lodgings, their bedrooms framed artfully-messily around them; we shot-reverse-shot while they speak as if we are watching a Zoom call. it's great.

and this is where the film really kicks something new into the Anderson ensemble for me, because the muted astonishment of the characters in the aftermath of a baffling First Contact becomes, somehow, one of the realest emotional things Anderson has ever put onscreen (next to, perhaps, the overperformance and class anxieties of Rushmore). "what the fuck just happened? what the fuck is going to happen next?" says everyone in asteroid city, says everyone in early 2020. the answer (perhaps, unfortunately, in both cases) is "nothing much, in terms of resolving any of these problems" -- life just goes on.

of course, Anderson has never had a daring political imagination, and that existential quiet i mentioned is relevant here. the president ends the quarantine; the alien returns with the meteorite, now marked up with indecipherable runes, before vamoosing again, and the quarantine is immediately reinstated; the fed up citizens revolt against the government and everything descends into slapstick chaos before the actor playing the lead realizes he's lost the plot and steps back out into the frame story, wandering backstage until he happens to meet with the actress who played his dead wife as she smokes on the balcony of an adjacent theater, where she is in a different play. as with the tiny houses, characters once again speak across a gap: her sole scene in asteroid city (the play) was cut, and she properly appears only in a polaroid.

things get weirder from here, but the main point is the two of them have a long conversation about their craft, and about the play they were in together, and even discuss extensively a scene we never actually saw. this is par for the course; multiple climactic scenes from the "asteroid city" narrative are never seen (including how everyone manages to get out of a full-on rebellion against the armed forces with nothing more than a general sheepishness from all parties), but others are discussed obliquely by characters in the frame story, sometimes minutes after the in-play characters and their conflict are introduced.

you know how this goes, says the film. of course the government doesn't murder everyone because this isn't that kind of movie. it's no surprise the father and son (apparently) have a heart-to-heart about their dead wife and mother and come to some sort of emotional understanding; that they do so is not terribly important, but a matter of genre, of completion, of closing a loop, that Anderson is perfectly willing to acknowledge can be closed and will not stop us from closing ourselves, but in the meantime, he'll craft a story that makes it hang for a bit, get a little--this is Hofstadter's term--strange. if the play asteroid city is constantly beset by threats that make it almost not be, the movie asteroid city is beset by conclusions that never quite happen--but, as the last glimpse of an atom bomb on the horizon suggests, aren't outside the realm of possibility.

and therein lies the film's unexpected justification of Andersonian artifice: a cartoon allows us to express artfully and with humor the things that render both art and humor irrelevant.