You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep

A puzzled, adoring, spoiler-free take on Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City

I’m not entirely sure how to write about Wes Anderson’s latest movie. It will surprise no one that he’s at the top of my personal canon. In my write-up of Ken Russell’s 1971 musical The Boy Friend I touched upon my love of hyperstylized cinema that dares you to experience film narrative through a non-literal lens, and Anderson is certainly today’s most popular and acclaimed exemplar of that approach. He’s only a few years older than me, so his frame of reference isn’t terribly different from mine. And his eye for visual storytelling is just so all-consuming, it’s impossible for me not to burn with admiration. As someone who has little use for sports metaphors, Wes Anderson is the closest thing I have to a home run. 

So there’s a sense in which, three days after watching Asteroid City, I’m still too close to it to say anything coherent - and that may always be the case. I’ll put my toe in the water with a few words of description. On the surface, it’s a romantic pastiche of the 1950s as envisioned by white middlebrow America - a time period of limitless optimism undergirded by technological advances and overwhelming economic prosperity. Sure, there’s the ever-present spectacle of nuclear annihilation, but that’s (literally) relegated to the background, where bomb tests occur with comfortable reliability on the margins of everyday experience. This is also a version of the fantasy where people of color are welcome, provided they don’t stick out as poor or disruptive - problems of injustice don’t exist, because they’re simply not depicted. 

Which brings me to the second layer of the film, which is a wide-ranging meditation on storytelling. Another major innovation of the ‘50s was the rise of a singular mass culture through the pervasive media of television - a situation that, as we’ve discovered over the past decade or so, was far more fleeting than many of us could have imagined. For a few moments there, an intimidating majority of people tuned into the same programs, discussed the same topics, and siphoned off fumes from the same collective dream. Outright rebellion against this monoculture could doom you to a small (if ultimately influential) audience of beatniks and outcasts - but what if you could take more of a maverick approach, wending your own trail within the dominant paradigm? What could you get away with if, for instance, your story was a movie of a televised production of a staged play? Does the press of all these layers squeeze out any traces of spontaneity or emotion? Or does your story somehow accrue strangeness as it jumps through each successive hoop? If you choose to present something so peculiar to a wide, popular audience, it’s curious to see what they’ll accept and what they’ll ignore.

Serving as a foundation to all of this - as in all Anderson films - is a story of generations. Parents and children, teachers and students, directors and actors - who learns from whom? Which lessons are intended, and which are accidental? Swimming in all of this influence, what does it mean to be who you are? 

I’m intentionally not giving any examples of how all of this plays out, because the moment-to-moment details, more than the overarching frameworks, are what make the film a joy to watch. If you know Wes Anderson, you know you’ll be well-served on that front. It’s a tightly packed movie, but unlike The French Dispatch (which I adored, for the record), it doesn’t feel frenetic. There’s a langour to it, as if its cast of characters can’t be bothered to exert themselves in the dry desert heat - or conversely, under the glare of the stage lighting - despite whatever chaos might befall them. When an ad-hoc community builds up during an isolated emergency - or the mounting of a production - the resulting bunker solidarity can encourage a proud defiance against the wider world beyond. The moment is now, and we’re all stuck here, so let’s make the best of it. 

After we watched it, Hope suggested that this is Anderson’s midlife crisis movie. I think she’s right, though I feel something similar can be said about all of them, even the ones with teenage protagonists. It might be more accurate to call it a piece of mid-career introspection. As a director who has always made very bold choices, he’s poking at himself a bit, asking himself why. 

One of those reasons is clearly the company. It seems like Anderson is entering a kind of Altman stage - he wants to invite the widest possible array of people to come and play in his sandbox. These performers clearly don’t have the same freedoms that Altman’s actors had - instead of inviting everyone to come and build a 19th-century frontier town from scratch (a la McCabe and Mrs. Miller), it’s more like they’ve been recruited as comical cogs in Jacques Tati’s Playtime. Yet the influence of both of these idiosyncratic masterpieces is on display here, filtered through Anderson’s own peculiar sensibility. 

This is also, in a sense, Anderson’s attempt at a summer blockbuster. It has big names, Hollywood glamor, special effects, and explosions, followed by a firm return to the status quo. The entertainment value is high, and you leave feeling lighter than when you came in. But I can’t imagine any other summer blockbuster performing a beautifully art-directed alien autopsy on itself, right there in every scene. 

And that’s what movies were back in the ‘50s, right? Popcorn fodder. Not all of them, to be sure - plenty of arty currents were starting to roil around on the edges - but even prestige flicks of that dawdling decade presented a front of Entertainment. Then that manufactured innocence filtered down through the counterculture, through the crack-ups of the ‘70s, through the enforced nostalgia of the Reagan years, until it had morphed into a cheesy diorama of a certain kind of paradise, before we got kicked out by the very socioeconomic trends that made it possible in the first place. 

I have to believe most of the thoughtful misfits of my generation have spent at least a little time basking in a ‘50s daydream not too dissimilar from Anderson’s. It’s impossible not to wonder how it would feel to drift through the comfort of that fabricated certainty: This is how the world works, this is good, this is bad, this is my role. Could even the documented appearance of an interplanetary spacecraft do much to shake that assurance? 

We went to see Asteroid City as our Father’s Day outing, and, just like when we went to see Across the Spider-Verse two weeks earlier, it made for a remarkable dad experience.

I was really hoping my son would like it. We’d shown him The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs years earlier, but I don’t think he was quite ready. When he was 10 we dragged him to see The French Dispatch, and he found it a bit much - which, okay, fine, but it was our first pandemic-era movie outing, and he was still too young to leave home alone. This time, though, he was excited going in - we’d watched the trailer, and he loved the “saturated look,” as he put it, and the fact that the whole thing looked “goofy ahh.” 

When it was finished, he stood up and said, “That was a great movie.” We watched it at the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn, where I sprung for the exclusive limited-edition lunchbox and thermos - an appropriately contrived souvenir. He desperately wants to bring it to school, and I’m on the fence - I’d like to keep hold of it as a nice collectible, but at the same time, I love the idea of letting him make it a part of his life, like all the inexplicable old-school culture that I absorbed myself as a kid. I think no one knows better than Wes Anderson that the stories, images, and myths we love aren’t meant to sit alone on dusty shelves - we need to take them down and play with them. Reimagine them. Make something new out of them. 

I really do wonder if this is a crossroads for Anderson. As I hinted earlier on, I long for him to engage more directly with some of the problems of our world - to venture a few steps further from the fantasy and grapple with the inequities faced by less privileged characters. Part of the magic, of course, is the way that he creates a space where, for a couple of hours, we can all be that privileged. By letting us play-act as Max Fischer or a Tenenbaum, he provides us with a special kind of comfort we can’t find anywhere else. But at the same time, this movie is full of wonder at the power of creative people to change the world, even if it’s only the world at our feet. This movie, like all of his movies - like every great movie - is about transformation. Maybe Anderson is encouraging us to transform too, as he scans the flat horizon for new events. We’re always on the verge, teetering over that crater into something new. As one of the movie’s cryptic refrains has it, “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.”