The Alien

No one I love has ever died. Not yet, anyway. Pets, but those are pets.

I often try to think about what I’d do in that situation. At times it’s become an obsessive preoccupation. It’s not that I think I’d be emotionless, but I’m not sure if I’d react the way you’re supposed to. I know there’s no way to do it right… but maybe you can still do it wrong. My writing at university was inundated with stories about grief, but the wrong sorts of grief. Short stories about stone-faced funerals and broken rites, plays about predestination, wild speculation about my own potential incorrect reactions to various miseries, attempts to rehearse what might happen, one day, in case I might need a reference. Workshop feedback frequently came back in the form of prescriptions and diagnoses. What’s wrong with the protagonist? I don’t understand why she’d do that. Is the story about mental illness? Which one? Could you make that more clear?

When I was around eight or nine, we got a tank of goldfish. Mysteriously, one by one, they all sickened and got tumours and died. Probably we didn’t have the filtration system right. Every day we’d have to tip another one into the sea. Goodbye Goldie, goodbye Sunspot, goodbye Shadow. Look, they were fish, so maybe it’s fine, but I didn’t really feel anything. It seemed sort of natural, like they were only going home again.

Maybe they were.

ACT ONE — THE CRATER

Asteroid City is a play written in the 1950’s, set in a desert town during a Junior Stargazer convention. It follows Augie Steenbeck, a war photographer, and his children, as he breaks the news of their mother’s death. The story is eventually interrupted by the unexplained visitation of an alien.

Asteroid City is a film written in the 2020’s. It is presented in the form of a TV special dramatizing the process of creating a hypothetical, imaginary play, also called Asteroid City. The characters in the special include the playwright, Conrad Earp, the director, Schubert Green, and the actors, including Jones Hall, who plays Augie Steenbeck.

The film cuts between the candy-coloured play unfolding as hypothetically-written, and the black-and-white TV special that recounts the behind-the-scenes drama of creating it. Characters actively wonder and ask each other what the play’s really about, the true motivations of the characters, the meaning of each metaphor.

But the play’s own writer, Conrad Earp, claims to have not quite figured out what Asteroid City is ‘really’ about. “Mm… Infinity, and I don’t know what else.” Endlessness, eternity, existence or the meaninglessness of it. The metaphors are up in the air, according to him — it’s all yet to have surfaced, unconscious, ephemeral. And he’s still open to suggestions.

Then again, nothing about Asteroid City feels like it’s about infinity. Not in its set design, nor in the preoccupations of its characters, nor in its symbols. It seems saturated with emptiness. Everything is cut off, stoppered, halved, left all alone. Something has been carved out, not expanded — there’s a crater in the show’s heart. The set appears unfinished. The highway, half built, leads to nowhere and nothing. The fence around the impact zone is only waist high. Attempts to make sense of things fail; the math is all wrong, the car is uniquely broken. Offscreen, the school bus ran over a coyote a few miles back, and now a roadrunner flits from scene to scene, meandering, unchased.

The play appears less concerned with what is eternal but rather what has been cut short. What cannot be made whole. The death of his wife hangs over Augie for the entire runtime. There’s someone, something, missing. She’ll never come back. There’s an empty space here, an impact crater that was supposed to be filled. Asteroid City is an unfinished play with an optional intermission and a litany of discarded scenes, now only half-remembered, recounted and reconstructed after the fact. It is like a dead person in this way.

At the end of Act One, the alien visits Asteroid City. It appears randomly, the signs of its coming unreadable until hours before its arrival, and it takes the titular asteroid without a word, a signal, a message.

Death is sudden. It can happen fast. There are no explanations. One moment, the land is flat. The next, cratered, and now your scene partner is gone without a trace, vanishing into the darkness past stage left.

Anderson’s (and Earp’s) alien is tall, and dark, and skinny. It’s not exactly frightening, but it’s uncanny in its length, like a long shadow. It has no other particular identifying features. Jeff Goldblum, as the actor playing the alien, muses that he isn’t playing it as any specific metaphor — “We don’t pin it down.” But on my first watch I found it pretty simple to parse.

Once upon a time, death symbols came in the form of beasts of the woods. Banshees, bats, black dogs, vampires. A reaper, a Horseman, a psychopomp. But we live in a new, shinier century. We’ve charted all the dark forests. We’ve made machines that can crack the planet in half. We’ve categorized every beast by genus, family, order, phylum, kingdom and domain. We’ve catalogued every skeleton, and made more than a few ourselves. There are so few true unknowns left. Nothingness can’t be simple darkness any longer, it must be something genuinely unknowable, something more frightening, vast and eternal. The afterlife can no longer be imagined as a place of torture or reward — now it must be a blank, endless space, utterly unexplorable, expanding towards entropy. Space, the Final Frontier.

Augie recounts his mother telling him about his own dad’s death by saying he’s in the stars, now. He didn’t believe her. You can’t be in the stars, it’s too hot, and anyway in the vacuum of space you’d get crushed into oblivion. In space you can’t exist, you can only not-be.

Debbie Millman, in her piece The Saddest Poem I Have Ever Written: “And I cried to myself it was too fast too soon too too — I tried to hold on as I felt the dogs slip away from my side. I have travelled a long way since then — way past Saturn and Pluto. I like that I can see them up close, but I hate that they wave as I pass.”

These days, Anderson (or Earp) poses, death can only be conceptualized as the truest unknown, the literally inconceivable. The Alien.

Many of the central characters in Asteroid City are preoccupied with death and grief. The alien is that struggle embodied, turned literal. It is not a figure of danger but of absurdity. It appears, it takes something, it leaves, like the Grim Reaper. It turns your whole world upside down, and you don’t know what to do or who to call and you want to fight it or stop it from happening again or find out what it means at least, but it doesn’t mean anything, it’s not moral, it’s completely at random, you can’t guess at the date until it’s right in front of you, it’s not a punishment or a threat or a sign, it happens and then it’s done, and now your world is different forever, it’s just different, because that dark spectre visited you, and now something in your life is gone, and you can never get it back. Everything’s connected, but nothing’s working. And for days or weeks the world is on fire, topsy-turvy, and you lock yourself inside and you cry and scream and dance and want to kill everybody, and then…

And then life proceeds on like normal. Like it never happened. And you get back in the car, and you drive away.

(At least, I think that’s how it happens. Again, it hasn’t happened to me yet, and when it does, who can say if I’ll do it the same way?)

Crucially, vitally, the point here is that the alien isn’t scary. It’s not angry, it’s not doing anything out of wickedness or even fear. It does. It occurs. Death is scary, but only in the sense of our own reactions to it, our own fears. Death itself isn’t spiteful, or cruel. It isn’t moral. It’s not doing anything on purpose. It’s just a thing that happens, and you never find an explanation, not in science or theatre or star charts, because there isn’t one, there just isn’t. It wasn’t personal. It didn’t mean anything, anyway.

ACT TWO — THE ALIEN

1955. The American Southwest. A freight train carries Pontiacs and nuclear warheads side by side across arid plains.

Asteroid City orients itself in a historical reality saturated with uncertainty and doom. It lives in the shadow of the Cold War and the adrenaline of the space age. If the alien is death, it must be feared, it must be dissected, studied, and prevented from spreading further. It is something unknown in a world that seeks to know everything, including how to blow up continents and create poison gas and build laser guns. It must be taken under control, kept quiet, its existence publicly denied for a period of a hundred years. It should be forgotten— by force, if necessary.

But the play is also filled with children. They are incessantly curious, deeply accepting, and clear-eyed. Augie’s little girls struggle a little to understand their mother’s death, but ultimately, they bear it with ease. They treat it with no special sacrality. Why wait to bury the ashes on a verdant golf course? What’s the difference? It’s all just earth. The schoolchildren make art about the alien, sing songs, dance with joy and hope and a spirit of gentle inquiry. They want to know more, even as their teacher tries her best to talk around it. The junior stargazer crew takes a more proactive approach, conspiring to leak the news of the alien despite threats of prosecution. They have no sense that this should be kept under wraps, repressed or suppressed or otherwise hidden.

The adults are the ones who fear death, whose lives are truly upturned by the alien’s visit — they are the ones consumed by the need to “do it right”, to find the right time to say it, but of course there’s never a right time. They have to follow the script, but when they reach for one, it isn’t there.

What matters here is that fear of what is alien and unknown is taught, not innate! A uniquely American violence inundates the framework of the play, inflicting order on the orderless, attempting to enforce normality, to little effect. Its military characters and elements are rendered in a satirical way, the closest the play gets to the truly silly, playing out their own private farce. All towards spotlighting the absurdity of our political structures — how “natural” is the social order if it must be enforced so violently? Nuclear bombs are reduced to background noise, faraway set elements. The junior stargazers are lamented as abnormal by their parents, sometimes with apathy, sometimes accompanied by violence. Montana opines that they should try to be friendly to the alien, but if they can’t take that option, they should fight it, and America hasn’t lost a war yet. The Larkings Foundation’s sign proclaims: “For A Powerful America”. Hidden in the background of a concerning amount of shots lurks a spy in sunglasses and a black hat, just watching, waiting. Jeffrey Wright’s General Gibson, in a fervent speech, recounts getting whipped with a maple switch twice a week with verve and pride and an honest nostalgia. That was life. That is life. That should be life.

“If you wanted to live a nice, quiet, peaceful life,” Gibson declares, “you picked the wrong time to get born.”

Existing in that sort of world is difficult enough. But the two main characters of Asteroid City make their trade in miseries, in capturing violences, in one way or another. Augie is a war photographer, so it makes sense that he would be somewhat desensitized to death, but that doesn’t seem to complete the full picture. Midge acts almost exclusively as depressive alcoholics, and believes she may turn out the same way. She talks about how she’s not sure if she feels guilt, but at least she’s played it onscreen. She speculates with disarming disconnect that it’s due to a childhood spent in fear of male violence, from her father, her brother, her uncles. Family was a system of violence to her, so it tracks that she’d feel disconnected from her own. There’s something acutely tragic about her desire to transform that misery into art, and that art reflecting back onto her. Has the screen only served to illuminate the wound?

Regardless of the cause, central to this film and its characters is an acute sense of wrongness, a deep-rooted feeling of alienation. The experience of not knowing how to perform emotions properly even if you feel them, or perhaps not knowing how to feel them even if you can perform them. Some of this lives in the acting — everyone always looks at least a little confused, like they have no idea why they’re there, waiting around for someone to tell them what to do. Augie wants to grieve right, wants to do right by his wife’s death. Midge wants to parent her child right, love her correctly. But they don’t know how. The cinematography boxes them in; they find it hard to escape cage-like frames. Shots are bordered, like photographs, rendering them frozen in time, unable to move forward, change their natures. There’s something in them, nature or nurture or both, that’s “wrong” in that way. They connect because they are both, in a sense, aliens.

Midge knows her lines, and maybe at one point she really feels them. “Was I ever there? […] Did you ever see me? […] I can’t even see myself anymore.”

“Am I doing it right?” Jones Hall, actor, asks as he flees the part of Augie, and the stage, and the theatre. Asks, or maybe begs. It’s the question on everybody’s minds.

I like Wes Anderson films, but not really in an obsessive way. I like the craft, and the layered stories, and the beautiful interiors, and the clever writing. While I’m watching them, I’m always thrilled and invested, but I usually sort of forget the plots and characters a few days later. I don’t feel distant about them like some do, but I don’t know that any of them have really grabbed me by the throat. Asteroid City was different, though. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I still can’t. I mean, I watched it three times in the space of a week, which has to count for something.

Possibly it owes this to how much it lacks the usual overwhelming Wes Anderson bells and whistles — there are bells, there are whistles, but as you’re watching it your mind isn’t totally occupied by the screaming thought of “how did they MAKE this?” In truth the film feels muted, sleek. The town is the only set, and it’s intentionally bare. The interspersed black and white scenes are dressed to look even more theatrical than the play— all single stagey rooms without a fourth wall, also rather bare. Anderson’s shots are still dazzling, but in a simpler way. This film’s beauty exists more in terms of composition and naturalistic lighting than in any Rube-Goldberg diorama work or barrages of maximalist scenery or screwball action set-pieces (not that I don’t love a good diorama). The scope is small, the ambition kept on a tight chain, and the story and script are what take centre stage.

Maybe it’s also the acting. I haven’t seen anybody really talk about the pitch-perfect performances. Every single performer involved is doing something different, something uniquely beautiful and generous that’s completely their own, without ever stealing the show. Everything has to work on at least three levels. (Jason Schwartzman in particular is doing a billion really heartbreaking things layered on top of each other — I don’t know how else to explain it.)

Or… maybe it’s that I’ve written a bunch of plays, or maybe it’s that I’m scared of space, or maybe it’s because I really like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Probably it’s all of that. Probably it’s something else, too.

My whole life, I’ve been haunted by the feeling that I don’t know how to do anything right. Not like a normal person would, anyway. The feeling of not knowing how to perform normalcy properly, maybe due to isolation or lack of practice or maybe there’s just something in my brain that’s different than other people’s. The feeling that I am an alien, and everyone else is speaking some other language, one they learned so long ago, that after all this time I still cant parse. I can recite the lines to some extent, I can play the part, but I don’t understand it. Is it natural for everyone else? I don’t know what it is in me that marks me with that difference. But the feeling, the one that lives in Augie, in Midge, the one in Jones— I know that.

Enclosed — excerpts from my own journal entries, on various days:

I still don’t know what I’m supposed to do differently.

I don’t understand what anybody means. How can this be easy for people? All the things I haven’t done. Everything I don’t know how to do. What am I supposed to do. Why do I do this. What’s it for.

The dawning realization that it’s not the situation but me that’s the problem. That I fucked up a long time ago and never fixed it and now cannot be fixed. I can’t make it happen. Something went wrong. Nothing changes. I’m still just as stuck. In my cage, which is not really a cage, it’s open, can’t you see how open it is?

Real people want something. I feel like I want stuff, but a child’s version of that stuff, completely unattainable nonsense, so I am unable to do anything.

I don’t know. I feel stupid and bad. Maybe ‘bad’ is a better term than ‘wrong’ but I do feel wrong. I don’t seem to understand anything. The same old questions and concerns rolling around and around. Why can’t something happen?

I can’t imagine a hypothetical future in which I am happy and feel normal. I don’t think it exists for me in that I can’t conceive of it. The way that God can only exist if you can conceive of it. I don’t want to be cruel, but who does?

“Sometimes,” says Dinah, “I think I’d feel more at home outside the Earth’s atmosphere.”

Woodrow concurs.

ACT THREE — THE STAGE

[To be read relentlessly, without a break.]

The play Asteroid City reads as a pastiche of (or love letter to) mid-century modernist plays. The work rejects religion, rejects convention, struggles for self-realization, blindly searches for meaning in the endless desert. God’s dead, death’s meaningless, life is futile and irrational, et cetera. It’s deeply self-conscious and unromanticized and unrelenting and lives in the creeping shadow of the bomb. Conrad Earp appears as something of a Tennessee Williams-type, described as being known more for his “romantic, poetic tapestries”, though he’s touched by a little more of the West.

Williams’ work was darker, more torrid. He was known to inject elements of his personal life into his plays — characters could be read as manifestations of certain family members, his work’s destructive plots based on his childhood memories of a dysfunctional, abusive home life, and his own struggle with his sexuality.

From The World I Live In: Tennessee Williams Interviews Himself:

“Q: But surely you’ll admit that there’s been a disturbing note of harshness and coldness and violence and anger in your more recent works?

A: I think, without planning to do so, I have followed the developing tension and anger and violence of the world and time that I live in through my own steadily increasing tension as a writer and person.

Q: Then you admit that this “developing tension,” as you call it, is a reflection of a condition in yourself?

A: Yes.

Q: A morbid condition?

A: Yes.

Q: Perhaps verging on the psychotic?

A: I guess my work has always been a kind of psycho-therapy for me.

Q: But how can you expect audiences to be impressed by plays and other writings that are created as a release for the tensions of a possible or incipient mad-man?

A: It releases their own.

Q: Their own what?

A: Increasing tensions, verging on the psychotic.”

The lines blur. If the play is modernist, then the film, with its extra layer of metanarrative, is something more akin to true absurdism. Bryan Cranston’s TV special narrator appears errantly in the fictionalized play, then steps out of frame, apologizing, while the characters look at him blankly. We are made to be hyper-aware of the falsity of this narrative, the multiplying framing devices; there is a story beneath the story. We’re watching actors in real life, playing actors in a TV special, playing actors on Broadway, playing characters in a play, some of whom play actors on TV. These are characters who have characters of their own, who are fictional themselves, who may contest their own roles, who may contest their material, who may have lived the material, who may themselves be the material.

There’s something wrong with Augie, or is it Jones Hall? (Or is it Jason Schwartzman?) There’s something behind his eyes that doesn’t seem like acting. It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes — most actors can fake tears. But eventually something snaps, the fourth wall collapses into air. He can’t play the role anymore, he has to leave the stage, escape to the real world, while the rest of the characters flail around him, unable to finish their lines.

Are you a character or aren’t you?

Early on in the play, still only a few scenes into Act One, we learn a little more about its author, Conrad Earp, and its lead actor, Jones Hall. By ‘learn more’, I mean they start making out before a tasteful fade-to-black.

Queer characters aren’t exactly new ground for Wes Anderson, who seems to offhandedly include a closet case or a stuffy bisexual in the majority of his films. But something about Jones and Earp’s romance feels different, somehow? Like it’s woven more deeply into these diagetically-hypothetical characters-playing-characters, infusing them with a pathos and reality that, despite the artifice involved, allows them to become somehow true.

There’s definitely something erotic about it, anyway. The characters dance around each other. Tension builds. The audience is still playing catch-up, trying to discern where Jones ends and Augie begins. And then — the performance finishes, the false beard is stripped off. There’s something real under all the pretence.

What becomes abundantly clear is that this romance cannot be separated from Earp’s art or Jones’ performance. Jones becomes Augie, then sheds that skin. Inspires the work and then lives it. That shared art is the foundation on which their relationship is built, and so the play and film are infused by their love in turn. It’s a recontextualization that verges on the masterful. Through the lens of its author, a gay man writing in the 1950’s, the play Asteroid City appears transformed.

It is, after all, at its core, a piece about a man who is incapable of coming to terms with grieving for his lover, due to some distant, immutable part of himself. Why can’t he say it? Why can’t he talk about it? What’s wrong with Augie? In the context of its authorship this could be read as a play about sublimated queer grief. Some great, tragic, unexpressed love that must be kept inside, repressed utterly, that cannot under any circumstances be uttered aloud.

Bombs and missiles populate the background. Americana is no longer a nostalgic primal force like the cowboy days of yore, but has revealed itself instead to have always been a mechanical, violent politic. The play is full of institutions so terrified of what is ‘alien’ that they believe it must be cleansed, it must be suppressed, news of it must be buried and censored. In particular, the children should not be taught about it — should be discouraged from even speaking about it. Should under no circumstances come to love it.

You can’t talk about the alien. You can’t talk publicly about this thing that has happened to you, this thing that has been taken from you, this tragedy. Thus you cannot process it. You cannot understand it or accept it. You are systematically barred from doing so. You face legal and political and physical violence if you speak this truth. You can see something with your own eyes, feel it in your heart, and you still have to keep it secret.

But that secret cannot be borne.

The story breaks. The story beneath the story erupts, casting off its bells and whistles and faux beard and colour and light. Augie disappears, and Jones Hall makes to leave the stage. “Why does Augie burn his hand on the Quik-e Griddle?” he asks, as the characters around him look on, confused. He’s not supposed to say that. This wasn’t supposed to happen. “I still don’t understand the play.”

On first watch it appears he’s genuinely confused about the character’s motivations. He’s concerned about playing the role correctly. We may not notice his voice breaking, or his eyes shining. It’s only after the scene ends that we learn about Earp’s premature death, six months into the production’s run. The black-and-white scenes are nonlinear. It’s not stated where in the production timeline this exists, whether this scene takes place before or after Earp’s death. But it must be the latter, for Jones Hall is clearly, obviously grieving.

Knowing about this on rewatch casts the scene in a much different light. He’s no longer searching for meaning in terms of Augie’s motivations — Earp already told him his interpretation was perfect. I thought he was looking for an excuse as to why his heart was beating so fast. Rather, he’s searching the play for messages from the man he loved. He understands the character too well.

“Am I doing it right?”

This is the question. When he confronts Schubert Green with it, he’s not talking about playing the character correctly — at least not entirely. He’s talking about his own grief, his grief for Conrad, a grief he finds himself incapable of processing. Of course he leaves, and of course the narrative revolves for him. He can’t tell the difference between himself and his character anymore. Maybe Augie’s gone, and it’s all just him. The lines have blurred too much, it’s too close to home. He’s surrounded by metaphors for his own suffering, craters, grim reaper aliens, a burned hand, a crashed car. Walls that are paper-thin, or non-existent.

Imagine you’re in love with a playwright, and he writes a play — before he even meets you — about how you’ll be unable to grieve or process his death, which hasn’t happened yet. And he asks you to star in it, and then he dies, and you still have to play that role.

“I feel like my heart is getting broken,” Jones says, “my own personal heart, every night.”

We never get to see the climax of the titular play. It all happens offscreen, and we get sent straight to the epilogue. Because this was the real story all along. This is the climax! Asteroid City — the film– is textually about nested stories of grief. It’s about a gay man who has to perform heterosexual love and grief on stage, while at the same time being unable to publicly or privately process the meaninglessness of his own love and grief. Well, it’s about a TV special that’s about that. In its own prismatic way, this is a film that is very deeply rooted in queerness, in the alienation of it, in the terror and secrecy and grief and love of it.

“You’re doing him right,” Schubert reassures Jones. Him — meaning Earp, not Augie.

Jones encounters a woman outside the theatre, Margot Robbie, playing “the wife who played my actress”. Generously she recounts to him the missing scene she would have done with him. Cut for time, she guesses. “We meet in a dream,” she says, “on the alien’s planet,” — an encounter between Augie and his dead wife, set on a distant moon. She has been spirited away. The alien won’t talk to her. He’s shy. Here the alien is surely cast as a psychopomp figure, herding her soul out into the infinite dark.

We watch Jones watch her. He could be thinking so many things, but to me it’s clear he’s experiencing this as his one last conversation with Earp, who through his art is managing to speak to him from beyond the grave, from out in the distant stars, quite literally in his own words— “I’m not coming back, Augie.”

Often, queer imagining comes through cut scenes and lines, apocryphal statements after the fact, readings that can only ever just be readings. Metaphors, subliminal messages, coding. Things cut for time. The resolution of Jones’ grief and understanding only comes via a scene that, for some reason, could not be shown to an audience. Its intimacy too obvious, too overwhelming, as if it were a personal message.

It’s immediately after this scene that we learn of Earp’s sudden death in a car accident, capping it off with a shot of his empty chair, spotlighted in the dark. He wrote this play, we might realize, about his own death. He predicts it a dozen times over. It begins with car trouble, an automobile accident. To some it might seem like prophecy, maybe even manifestation. One layer deeper, Midge predicts her death through her art, too. She’s convinced she’ll be found dead by suicide or addiction, like so many of her characters. The play is almost too prescient. We want to find the pattern, search for meaning in death— who wouldn’t? Could we have stopped it, seen it earlier, found another way? Did Earp always know it would end this way, run over offscreen? Like the offhandedly-mentioned dead coyote, who leaves his roadrunner without a scene partner?

(I have this gnawing belief that theatre is the only medium that can truly communicate the feeling of having been totally abandoned by God. Because the audience is put in the position of God— present and watching, but unable (or unwilling) to interfere in fate’s unfolding.)

So many questions. No one to answer them. The show goes on. Every night a new performance, a new question, a new dream.

Susan Sontag, from her essay on war photography, The Pain of Others: “After four decades of big-budget Hollywood disaster films, “It felt like a movie” seems to have displaced the way survivors of a catastrophe used to express the short-term unassimilability of what they had gone through: “It felt like a dream.””

You can’t wake up until you fall asleep, the troupe asserts, unconsciously. This erstwhile thesis statement seems to elude meaning. Something about the subconscious bleeding through into our work, maybe. Reaching the divine through the personal. Feelings — love, grief — with nowhere to go, sublimated into art. Or maybe, more cynically, movies (and plays) are the only way we can really process these things anymore, our lives too inundated by global miseries and traumas for any of us to act “right”. Augie is a war photographer, Jones an actor, Earp a playwright. They’re all doing the same thing, really. You can look at a violent world that wants to keep you silent and you can make art that transcends it. Or at least you have to believe you can.

Just keep telling the story.

Bill Murray was supposed to be in Asteroid City, but he got COVID and had to be recast. He flew out anyway, and before they struck the set Wes Anderson wrote a weird little bit for him where he gets to play a studio executive who talks to actor Jones Hall about the film production of the play Asteroid City, shot in the style of an awkward promotional video. They filmed it and, for some reason, released it exclusively on the New Yorker’s website, where I guess it’ll live forever.

Murray’s character asks Jones what the movie’s about, and he says the following. “Asteroid City is a movie for our times: 1955. It’s about people, like you and me. It’s about Love. Death. Hope. War. Peace. Art. Science. Deep Sadness. The Unknown. And America. That’s the subject matter.”

A pause. “Also, Infinity, and I don’t know what else.”

The infinity, the eternity that Earp speaks about, that Jones (or Augie, or Schwartzman, or Anderson) references, is nowhere to be found within the world of Asteroid City… because it is Asteroid City — the play, not the place. Death may be meaningless, but it’s the art itself that lives on, if that isn’t too trite of a thing to say. In connections, in memory. Infinity lives in the secrets Jones will forever be unravelling in the script. In broadcast signals, eternally beaming out into the night. The film replayed on our laptop screens. Immortality? Maybe not quite. But art can be our one fevered rush towards forever. Something sublime, communal, often vague, almost always unfinished, joyful, painful, universal and unspecific and at the same time intrinsically personal.

Tennessee Williams, in his last will and testament, requested to be buried at sea. He wrote: “More specifically, I wish to be buried at sea at as close a possible point as the American poet Hart Crane died by choice in the sea; this would be ascrnatible [sic], this geographic point, by the various books (biographical) upon his life and death. I wish to be sewn up in a canvas sack and dropped overboard, as stated above, as close as possible to where Hart Crane was given by himself to the great mother of life which is the sea: the Caribbean, specifically, if that fits the geography of his death. Otherwise — whereever fits it [sic].”

In the final scene of A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche says, “And I’ll be buried at sea sewn up in a clean white sack and dropped overboard — at noon — in the blaze of summer — and into an ocean as blue as my first lover’s eyes!” Afterwards, she is institutionalized. (It’s generally thought that her character is based on Williams’ sister, Rose, who was lobotomized. He used the play’s success to finance her care.)

(Tennessee Williams’ brother arranged his funeral. Contrary to his wishes, he was laid to rest at Cavalry Cemetery in St. Louis, beside his mother.)

We are not our art, but we can certainly speak through it. Look — I understand the theory behind Death of the Author and all that, and I often find it a useful lens, but the truth is that when I write it can feel impossible not to leave something of myself in my work. These are my questions, after all, my concerns, my musings and miseries. Not always, but not never.

Can you excavate a person from their art? Can you build them back, speak to them from beyond the grave (or the other side of a door)? Can their art address questions they can no longer answer? I don’t know if I could go that far. But it’s probably as close as you’re ever gonna get.

Ultimately, Asteroid City does end up in a hopeful place, more so than the modernist plays it may be referencing. Augie and Stanley work through their grief and seem by the end to have accepted help from one another. Woodrow and Dinah find love. The characters leave the town better than they started, for the most part.

And for Jones, this healing turn comes not just through hearing Earp’s lost words, but in using his own craft, his own grief, to create something transformative.

Jason Schwartzman, in conversation with IndieWire, spoke about his experience playing the role of Augie/Jones: “There’s a moment in “Asteroid City” when my character, Augie, reveals to his children that their mother is dead, that she’s been dead for three weeks, and they’re moving away. That’s almost exactly what happened to my father and my uncle when they were kids. They lost their mother to breast cancer and my grandfather packed them up in Brooklyn and they drove across the country to California and didn’t find out that their mother had died until a few weeks later, after they had settled. It was a sad coincidence. So when I read that part, it was eerie, like my dad was a part of the scene. It was very emotional. When my own father passed away, my mother said, “Remember, there’s no wrong way to feel.” I was 13 at the time and didn’t get it — but “Asteroid City” helped me understand what she meant. […] That was the most personal aspect of all this, but I didn’t even get it until I watched the movie.”

We can see the people we’ve loved and lost, still: in dreams, and in art, and nowhere else. There’s something alive in our art because it was, at one time, created by something living.

A ghost in the pages. Maybe an alien.