Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City is a film about people’s own personal planets and how they can sometimes collide, or simply pass, ever briefly.
The story (spoilers), of an alien visiting a desert town, is never experienced directly. It is tangled and distorted by being viewed through layers of lenses (showing how reality is built by interpretation; a technique and idea Anderson returns to again and again). The ‘actual’ story is a play, itself about the writing of the alien story, also a play.
The world of the film is therefore trapped and enclosed: in the quarantined desert town, in the theatre set, in the set of a set. Scenes repeat themselves in a concertina of art imitating life imitating art (the joke of course being all of it is art; and if it is also life, then life is wrapped up irrevocably in art).
Ideas are circled around again and again, framed and reframed (a photo of an alien matches one of an actress; both hang in the window through which the actress is seen).
The estranged wife of Adrien Brody’s play director advises him that a character should say her final line after leaving and shutting the door. Then she does the same. Is she merely making a reference, or is this what life is? Can we act in a way towards other people and ourselves that isn’t taken from the archetypes drawn for us? Can we build a self seperate from what we’ve seen on screens and read on pages?
The repetition and the framing of the fictional stage and the ‘real’ stage has another purpose, revealing routine as more than the mundane. Here, routine is the excruciating, never-ending experience of experience. Every time a character — or the character of that character’s actor — repeats an idea, a line or a day, they are not just on a loop. Each time they enter that experience, live it, and come out of the other side different.
The film’s refrain of ‘you can’t wake up if you don’t go to sleep’ appeals to this. It is in part a call to keep going, to go into each act in your life and come out of it changed. But it’s also something more surprising: an underlining of the futility of it all, a resigned sentiment for a cruel world.
The cruelty creeps up and takes the viewer by surprise, hidden under surface warmth, like night in the desert. Anderson’s films sometimes suggest a truth can be found in our imagined pasts, in the stories we tell ourselves, in our search for connections and small kindnesses to one another. But here the characters accept that no truth is to be found. The desert story ends with a burial, a loss of faith, a leaving, and, finally, a repetition of the police chase that opened the story.
The people in Asteroid City are confused and lonely. The alien visit gives them something they hold on to and take with them. It’s not as much as a connection, merely a recognition. They note the alien looks at them like they’re ‘doomed’. The film agrees. The world the characters inhabit — the self-consciously false, theatre-framed Americana desert nowhere of the 1950s — is hurtling towards an end without ever really beginning.
Much of Anderson’s work is infused with, sometimes consumed by, a curious pathos so powerful and elusive it seems to come from some formative, forgotten place within us. But there’s something harsher than the usual nostalgia and the wistful sadness here. Hopelessness, ennui. Something harsh and bitter.
Jason Schwartzman’s actor, playing the desert protagonist, rushes off stage in one scene to talk to the director. Confessing there are parts of his role that he doesn’t understand, he asks, desperate and emotionally nude, am I doing it right? It’s the anxiety that drives everyone in Asteroid City. Even within the ‘reality’ of the desert town, everyone is an actor; everyone is trying to act the role their life has given them and do it right.
It’s a relentless job. Each character is trapped in their own head, like the cardboard boxes they all put on to watch an astronomic event. But while isolated, they are marked by their experiences. Tilda Swinton’s scientist has a line of dots, a record of the glimpse she once had of the planetary bodies lining up perfectly, burned on to her pupils.
And it is when the characters watch this same phenomenon, silent and awed in their boxes, that the alien comes to visit. Looks at them, sees them, and expresses sorrow that they’re doomed. That’s all that these damaged people can hope for.
