Asteroid City (2023) & Wes Anderson

Callings and fantasy in Anderson’s movies

In Wes Anderson’s world, the child sitting at a typewriter to punch out a play will grow up to be a famous playwright. Working in hospitality in young adulthood will result in a lifetime of devotion to it. The loyal young Khaki Scout will someday be a leader of scouts. These people rarely have simple jobs or even “careers,” they have callings, and they often find them in youth. This is sometimes to their benefit, but it can also be catastrophically detrimental.

In reality, finding the perfect activity worthy of our time and energy that also pays a living wage is pretty difficult, but Wes Anderson’s characters seem to do it all the time. It’s one of the most particularly artificial details of his particularly artificial movies. Of course people really do have their callings and personal missions, but he heightens the idea so extremely that the audience’s attention is drawn to just how imaginary the characters are, and how odd their single-minded, art-designed pursuits can be. One of the great successes of this year’s Asteroid City is that even with a cast of dozens of characters, they all feel so lovingly imagined, and their many callings – photography, science, inventing, military, teaching, and especially directing and acting – all feel important to how the story functions.

You’d have to go back to 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited to find main characters who aren’t identified by a calling they are preternaturally obsessed with, though all three brothers seem well-off, and one is a self-obsessed author. To find a character whose job seems to cause them active distress, I think you’d have to look even further back to Bill Murray as Herman Blume in 1998’s Rushmore. Blume is a disillusioned local factory-owner who doesn’t seem especially devoted to his life as an industrialist, and allows himself to be goaded into a bizarre conflict with a sociopathic teenage boy. From The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) on, characters’ professions have largely served as metaphors: the three brilliant and cute Tenenbaum children of the prologue who found their respective callings in art, sport, and business grow into dour, depressed adults who, in spite of their vast range of successes and failures and experiences, still mostly dress and act like they did as children.

The live-action Anderson movies of the last decade – The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch, and Asteroid City – continue to foreground their leads’ specific occupations and callings, but in one of the smartest moves of his career, these three Anderson-written screenplays establish layers of distance between the viewer and the bulk of the action. The films no longer focus only on eccentric people and their particular, highly composed lives. They’re presented as theater about the people who create stories about people like that—creators that view creation as the ultimate occupation. And they’re about the viewer, too. The fantasy that any one person might find, occupy, and dominate their ideal role – the kooky yet powerful hotel concierge; the essential, insightful journalist-at-large; the lonesome, esteemed war photographer – becomes a critical texture of the full image, and one we’re meant to connect with.

That might also be seen as one of the coldest and most calculating moves Anderson has made. His structures have become comically dense, each level with its unique ornamentation, and all of it flagrantly unreal. But Anderson’s work has never truly made a claim on realism. They look like us and (sort of) talk like us but they’re not us. They don’t live where we live. Bottle Rocket and Rushmore take place in suburban Texas (a prime producer of young psychos, according to him and co-writer Owen Wilson), but his movies have only returned to a real setting once, in The Darjeeling Limited. The combination of the wealthy white Whitman brothers, Anderson’s rigorously controlled aesthetic, and the actual lively, living streets and villages of India creates too much friction. It also feels oddly general—the brothers are just in “India,” not a specific location on the massive subcontinent, and their troubles and how “India” may resolve them are equally vague.

Absurd specificity, however, is part of what makes Anderson’s movies so fun and special. Committing to comically dense structures and imaginary settings with imaginary histories has given him infinite space to explore. It reminds me of old novels that open with a disclaimer: I relay to you, dear reader, an epic tale, relayed to me by the traveler who lived it! We allow ourselves to expect that anything can happen when we understand we are hearing a story.

There is clear delight in the way expectations are toyed with in Asteroid City. Film audiences probably don’t expect to see an entire purpose-built desert town anymore. And they almost certainly aren’t looking for back-to-back references to Looney Tunes and the early years of The Actors Studio. It’s got an alien in it, but is it even a science-fiction movie? It’s philosophical at its core and – like The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch, and Isle of Dogs – edged with concerns about war and surrealism, but it’s also quite silly.

If it was a regular movie, we might assume Asteroid City’s brainiac teens could grow up to be the great brainiac scientists and scholars of the Cold War era. But since Asteroid City is a movie about a television adaptation of a stage play, and also about the original production of that play, and the audience meets the characters as well as the “actors” who play them, we can’t pretend that our five Junior Stargazers might be found again beyond the boundaries of the film. We’re left to appreciate them for exactly who they are in this moment, not for who they might become. They are the brilliant youths meant to signify the power of curiosity and ingenuity and scientific discovery, with an ample helping of raging hormones.

This feels like it may be the definitive realization of Anderson’s approach to characterization, which in some films can seem like a conglomeration of particularities rather than the depiction of a full-fledged human. Now, only the partial representation is necessary. The representation is itself a production, a performance. It’s Wes Anderson with the old-time director’s bullhorn standing high on a ladder announcing, THIS IS COMPLETE FICTION, and in his fiction, every player has their dream role. And it is a dream. It only exists inside this room.

Asteroid City could also be seen as Anderson doubling down to present a complicated defense of his style, which extends to his visuals, characters, dialogue, plotting, structure, the whole deal. I often think the detractors knock it just because it is a style, and mainstream and independent cinema feel like they’re both in a weird anti-style moment, so it was exciting and intriguing to watch Anderson and his team dig deeper and show what can be done with people and places that feel as constructed as they are. Ours is a disordered, chaotic world. To depict it as one of supreme order, precision, and belonging, a place where somebody gets to make a living the way they feel called to, is an attempt to wrest control from the universe. It is an expression of supreme optimism.

—June 28, 2023