There is an old Saturday Night Live skit that imagines what a horror movie done by Wes Anderson would look like. To some, his works might already work as a horror of sorts; just an existential one.
Hollywood, and perhaps the world of art as a whole, advertises to us a fiction. “Here is a world with no bounds. Let nothing constrain your imagination.” In truth, Hollywood as an industry works under its own form of creative gentrification. Not everyone gets to be an ‘auteur’, fetishised as the ultimate position one can aspire to in the industry. Those Hollywood does anoint as auteurs – heirs to the likes of Kubrick, Scorcese and Coppola, your Nolans and Tarantinos, and Wes Anderson himself – are spared the blockbuster fare the industry sustains itself on. In theory, they get the freedom (and money) to realise their ‘vision’. Lately, though, I can’t help but wonder if that comes with an unwritten or unspoken caveat: for someone like Wes Anderson, “don’t stray too far from Wes Anderson.”
On face value at least, it does feel like the acclaimed and beloved director is skirting very close to being a parody of himself. Asteroid City bears all the hallmarks you would expect from a Wes Anderson film: an ensemble cast, almost caricature-ish characters, deadpan dialogue, vibrant colours and the trademark planimetric composition. It also has a story that like much of his other work can be very hard to pin down.
Anderson himself described Asteroid City vaguely, as a “poetic meditation on the meaning of life”. And sure, the film is that, but then really, so are hundreds of others out there. Not to mention countless books and art, as well.
What can throw the audience off even more is the way the film has been framed in three different layers. It opens as an episode of a television programme – fictional to the audience, but whether it is in the reality of the film, I cannot say –that presents the creation and production of a play. The play, which shares its name with the movie and the fictional town it is set in, does not exist and has only been created for the programme. The third layer, of course, are the events of the play itself, which occupy much of the movie’s running time and to further confuse the audience, are filmed in a three-dimensional reality, rather than the two-dimensional staging of the play about the making of a play.
There is some logic to this seeming madness, even if it is unsaid. We can take our guesses and perhaps, that is partly the point – moreso here, but in all of Wes Anderson’s movies. Like the works of legendary German playwright Bertolt Brecht, Anderson likes to call the audience’s attention to fictional nature of his films. For Brecht, the intention was to force the audience into contending with the political dialectic underlying the stories he presented. For Anderson, it is perhaps to create a sense of alienation that can allow viewers of his films to meditate on the existential themes he likes to explore.
Asteroid City, in particular, alludes to existential plays like Waiting for Godot and Six Characters in Search of an Author. The closest character(s) it has to a protagonist – Augie Steenbeck and the fictional actor playing him, Jones Hall – are both in search of an elusive purpose. Steenbeck, grieving from the death of his wife, is trying to figure out ‘how to go on’. Hall, who we are told, was the singular inspiration that prompted Asteroid City’s fictional writer to write the play, is struggling with his character’s motivation.
“I still don’t understand the play,” Hall tells the play’s director. “Doesn’t matter. Just keep telling the story,” is the response he gets – an advice one may as well apply to life.
Steenbeck isn’t the only character struggling with purpose and meaning. “What’s the cause? What’s the meaning? Why do you always have to dare something?” asks the father of one of the precocious teens attending a stargazing convention in Asteroid City. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’m afraid otherwise nobody’ll notice my existence in the universe,” the son replies.
However, there’s more to the film than navel-gazing existential quandaries. Asteroid City, may not be Anderson’s best or worst work, but it might be the first time the auteur has made a film with political undertones.
The inciting incident in Asteroid City the play is a visit by an extra-terrestrial humanoid at the end of Act 1 that everyone in the town witnesses. Act 2 begins with the entire town under lockdown while the government, ostensibly, cooks up a cover-up.
The occurrence ought to have been life-changing – “Nothing will ever be the same,” Augie’s teenage son exclaims in an outburst. “How can you just go on?” he wonders, in frustration. But Augie and most others in Asteroid City do go on in the trademark blasé manner of Anderson’s characters. One could see a parallel with the ongoing UFO hysteria in the US – there are signs that suggest the American government may know more than it is ready to share, if some reports are believed. While questions ought to be asked, it is interesting how little much of the public seems to care.
More important, to me at least, were the nuclear explosions that took place close to Asteroid City every now and then. The residents of the town react to them the same way you would to any regular inconvenience. Soon enough, the visitors do the same. The response seems to reflect the indifference most of us seem to have developed to the ever-intensifying conflict round the world, not to mention climate change in the face of year-on-year catastrophes.
And then there is the criticism of the authority in Asteroid City – the army that imposes a ‘quarantine’ following the alien’s visit. The teenagers succeed in leaking information to the outside world, subverting the army’s lockdown. But the overlying message, however, seems to be to retain a healthy scepticism towards the powers that be. That they, like us, might be fumbling their way through life as well.
Conrad Earp, the fictional writer of the Asteroid City the play, the ultimate authority in the film’s second narrative layer, seems to have little clue about what he’s actually writing about. Even the host of the TV programme seems to forget where he ought to be and what he should be doing at one point.