By Matthew Dodd
Wes Anderson’s 2023 feature Asteroid City begins with a stark clarification: ‘Asteroid City does not exist’. A television presenter, played by Bryan Cranston, explains to us that, within the context of the film, ‘Asteroid City’ is a fictional play, the production of which has been dramatised for the purpose of a television programme on contemporary American theatre. Its characters are fictional, as are its actors, its writer and its director. As the audience, we fill in the implicit additional reminder: we are watching a film, this is not real. Wes Anderson has always toyed with the conscious artificiality of his films – The Royal Tenenbaums presenting itself as a novel, Rushmore as a play – but Asteroid City sees the director take this notion to its logical extreme. It is a film which plays on at least three narrative levels at any given time, revelling in the complexity of its construction. It’s easy to get lost along the way: we follow Augie Steenbeck, a recently widowed photographer who suddenly meets an alien at a junior stargazing event, as well as Jones Hall, the actor playing the part of Augie Steenbeck. At one point, Bryan Cranston’s television host erroneously appears within the play and questions ‘am I not in this?’ On a first watch, Asteroid City may appear a disorienting and ultimately pointless venture, wherein emotional truth is submerged in a mess of muddled narratives and overly quirky stylisation. Yet, it is precisely because of its deliberate artificiality that the film works so well and, in truth, bears such a sincere emotional heart.
Throughout the film, characters hold the reality of their feelings at a strange, syntactical remove. Tilda Swinton’s Professor Hickenlooper remarks that ‘I never had children. Sometimes I wonder if I wish I should’ve.’ This kind of overwrought dialogue is typical for Asteroid City. In classically Anderson-ian style, lines of this sort are delivered in a macabre monotone, as though these Oscar-winning actors were amateurs in a small-town production. It is this register of unreality which imbues Asteroid City with its special strength. What could be read as overt quirkiness – something Anderson is regularly accused of – is in fact representative of something deeper, an emotional detachment which dogs the film as a whole. Characters hold their emotions at arm’s length, plays exist within films, nothing is quite what it seems and nobody quite says what they mean.
Things happen in Asteroid City for no apparent reason. First, it’s a car exploding, then it’s an alien coming to steal an asteroid, and then that same alien coming back to return said asteroid. When faced with the unexplainable, humans are troubled. We like to rationalise and we like to understand. The other major event to take place in Asteroid City without a reason, prior to the events of the film itself, is the death of Augie Steenbeck’s wife, the mother of his four children. The alien’s pointless invasion becomes a symbol of her death, a moment in time with no motivation or purpose but which fundamentally alters life as we know it. Photographing it, Augie hopes to have some kind of closure, some elucidation of this bafflingly pointless event, but he doesn’t find it.
Grief can be a destabilising force, rendering the world a soundstage and the rest of humanity actors. And so, when Augie Steenbeck, in the midst of the heady commotion on screen, turns to the camera and says ‘I still don’t understand the play’ before, quite literally, walking off the set, the layers of over-drawn hyperreality are levelled, and this moment of meta-theatricality becomes, instead, an intensely human moment of derealisation. In the face of grief, he becomes an actor in the play that is his life and, noticing this, decides to leave the stage. The audience’s confusion over what is actually happening – where in the film/play/television programme are we? – is mirrored by Augie’s confusion over what the play is actually about which, in turn, mirrors that deeper, nagging confusion that we all feel throughout our lives: why do things happen the way they do? The exchange between Augie/Jones and his director is, understandably, read as the central illuminating moment of the film. After 90 minutes of confused, deliberately ambiguous drama, our protagonist sits down with the director of his own story and asks the question that we, as audience, feel equally drawn to, what is actually going on? Except, this isn’t quite the question Augie ends up asking. Though he dwells on his confusion – ‘I still don’t understand the play’ – his real question is a much more direct one: ‘am I doing him right?’
By now the walls of meta-theatricality have collapsed into a central emotional truth. Jason Schwartzman’s role is, at this point, not quite Augie Steenbeck the character, or Jones Hall the actor, but rather a strange amalgam of the two. He asks his question, ostensibly, as an actor, but on a truer emotional level as a widower, a lost and frustrated man left to care for his children, alone. It is the genius of Asteroid City that these disparate roles are pressed together as one, setting the performance of an actor trying to convincingly play a role alongside the performance of a single father trying to behave as though everything is alright. We search for meaning in life how we search for meaning in a play; we want the alien to mean something just how we want death to mean something. As he walks through the backstage, Augie runs into the actor playing the alien – a magnificent cameo from Jeff Goldblum – explaining how he plays the alien as a metaphor. ‘Metaphor for what?’ Augie asks; ‘I don’t know yet’, the actor responds. Asteroid City very deliberately plays with its own apparent meaninglessness, a parody of a Wes Anderson film, dollhouses within dollhouses. Yet, it is precisely because Wes Anderson constructs Asteroid City so artificially that it is able to be so sincere. Raw human emotion is buried under an endless veneer of obfuscation and detachment. Asteroid City is confusing because the world is confusing. We are all actors in plays with no obvious themes. The question, therefore, isn’t what the play is about, but rather how good our performances are. The simple, revelatory answer that Asteroid City provides, through the animus of Adrien Brody’s role as director, is that it doesn’t matter, as long as you ‘keep telling the story’.
The emotional linchpin of Asteroid City lies just beyond this moment, however, in the immediately succeeding scene. The actor Jones Hall, having gone for the fresh air his director assures him he won’t find, runs into the actor cast in the absent role of his deceased wife. ‘It’s you’, he says, ‘the wife who played my actress.’ By this point there is no illusion of specificity in the players at hand – both characters are at once the actors and their roles. Whether this is an actress playing a wife or a wife playing an actress is of little relevance, the lines read the same. The two exchange a few words before the actress/wife, played by Margot Robbie, delivers her lines, cut from the play. Robbie, simultaneously the actress and the wife, announces the central emotional torment at the heart of the film in a strange, surreal soliloquy about alien planets and the secrets of the universe: ‘maybe I think you’ll need to replace me’. We know Asteroid City isn’t real, we know the characters are illusory, we know these are just lines being read by actors, and yet none of this makes any difference. This moment is as emotionally direct as they come, a wife giving her husband permission to move on. ‘I can’t’, Jones/Steenbeck responds, to which the actress/wife replies, ‘maybe I think you’ll need to try.’ The camera, having held both characters in a balanced side-on shot now cuts brusquely to Robbie’s face. ‘I’m not coming back Augie.’ This focal exchange is held at a distance, both by the myriad of meta-narratives and the dialogue’s own modality of detachment: the truth – ‘you’ll need to try’ – is qualified by these separations – ‘maybe I think’. There is a desensitisation, an alienation from reality which pervades all the characters and their interior lives. The painful, shameful, impossible decision to journey through one’s grief, to allow oneself to move on, is hidden beneath this labyrinth of confusion. The exchange is, textually, just a recitation of some lines by two actors, and yet it transcends the layers of meaning becoming, out of something wholly artificial, something wholly earnest. Augie Steenbeck, like so many of us, buries his grief deep within and so it only follows that the truth of his feeling should be buried so similarly in this narrative sprawl. Asteroid City is unreal because grief, pain and life are unreal. The effect of the meeting on Jones Hall, the actor, is unclear, but that doesn’t really matter, its relevance is clear, the heart of Asteroid City unlocked.
Asteroid City – the city itself – takes on allegorical relevance as a kind of purgatory for its residents. Every character, excepting perhaps Steve Carrell’s motel owner, is there visiting, and yet none are able to leave. It is a neutral zone in which to deal with traumas unseen. Midge Campbell bears pretend bruises which become an avatar for the implied abuses suffered at the hands of her second-ex-husband. As she runs lines with Augie, she works through the pains of a failed marriage held at the remove of dramatic artifice. As it does throughout the film, art becomes a useful intermediary between ourselves and our emotions. Both her and Augie are afraid to move on from the events which have scarred them: as long as they are stuck in Asteroid City, they are stuck with them. To move past their unexplainable traumas, they can’t just sit with and try to analyse them, they must acknowledge them and let them go. You can’t expect to overcome your pain if you don’t first accept it. Or, more simply, as Willem Defoe’s drama teacher endlessly chants, you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep. Visually, Anderson employs a register of oversaturated detachment, evoking the paintings of Edward Hopper, the preeminent visual documenter of mid-century American alienation, trapping characters in frames-within-frames, focally positioning the endless flatlands that surround each of these characters. In the end, the characters leave Asteroid City overnight, with little ceremony. Our final image is of that unending desert into which our heroes recede, as an upbeat skiffle cover of Elizabeth Cotten’s Freight Train plays us out. There’s no true conclusion to Asteroid City in the same way there’s no real conclusion to the desert as it drifts on endlessly, in the same way there’s no true conclusion to grief and no true answer to life.
The characters in Asteroid City are lost, bursting out of the seams of their text to find some answers to the grand mysteries of life. We might imagine ourselves as characters in plays: wouldn’t we want to walk offstage and ask our directors what the central theme of our existence is? Asteroid City understands and sympathises with such a desire but knows all too well that these sorts of questions don’t matter. We’re all playing characters just how they were written, and there’s no point trying to fight that. There is no scholarly consensus on the thematic relevance of death and loneliness. For much of his career Wes Anderson has placed real characters inside doll-house existences, drawing out the rich humanity that can only be truly realised in these hyperreal scenarios. In Asteroid City, he takes the characters out, plays with the fakeness of their existences, before returning them to the dollhouse, accepting after all that life is an incomprehensible play, devoid of morals and structure, but that this is no reason to give up on it.
