We are honored to present the foreword to Matt Zoller Seitz’s upcoming release The Wes Anderson Collection: Asteroid City, written by David Bordwell. The book will be available on January 28, 2025. Get a copy here.
The Stubborn Stylist’s Space Adventure
In the history of cinema, it’s rare to find directors who persist in the sort of strongly individual styles that we can spot across, say, the history of painting. The supreme example is probably Yasujiro Ozu, who for thirty years clung to unusual techniques of staging, framing, and cutting. Other examples include Robert Bresson, Jacques Tati, and Béla Tarr. Even those filmmakers associated with certain styles prove to be rather changeable. Jean Renoir, identified with fluid staging and graceful camera movements in his 1930s work, reverted to a more static, conventional approach in later years. Antonioni, Fellini, Bergman, and even Eisenstein largely gave up their early styles for alternatives as their careers progressed. It’s rare to find a director with a very marked style who clings to it for decades.
Wes Anderson is one of those stubborn stylists. Traces of his distinctive technique emerge in Bottle Rocket (1996) and Rushmore (1998) and crystalize in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). Thereafter, the Anderson look and feel becomes stable—some would say, even stagnant. Recognizable at a glance, easily parodied, the Anderson sequence, while drawing on some precedents, is a unique pictorial experience. The camera typically frames the action perpendicular to the background, and the characters interact frontally or in profile. Compass-point editing maintains these premises, and camera movements are horizonal or vertical, becoming virtually robotic 90-degree shifts.
For Anderson’s admirers, these austere but flagrant techniques demonstrate his precise mastery of film’s expressive possibilities. His detractors find the same flourishes showoffish and self-congratulatory. Yet both camps should acknowledge advantages of economy and impact. The geometrical rules of staging and camera position free the film of the need for the gratuitously pretty shots that pack most live-action movies, those close-ups of irrelevant details, endless circling of actors conversing, and soaring drone shots over landscapes. Virtually every shot, crisply cut to its mates, contributes to the ongoing story or situation. The same efficiency emerges from the tactics of narration, which allow the film to move swiftly through story points. It’s surprising that such overstuffed movies whiz by. In an age when the typical A feature runs at least 130 minutes, his clock in under two hours.
Anderson’s pictorial method creates great fluency of narration. Thanks to rapid cutting and voice-over commentary, we’re given tightly-paced story information. Single-shot flashbacks illustrate key incidents, and quick inserts of letters, still photos, and book pages supply details. The clarity of the pictorial technique allows us to concentrate on the dialogue, which can exhibit elaborate rhetoric and rapid rhythm. Anderson characters soliloquize in impassive, breakneck dialogue; their clipped delivery allows you to imagine them as the brusque creatures Alice encounters in Wonderland. I sometimes wonder if these characters are akin to those in the low-affect 1990s independent comics of Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware.
Of course his appeal can’t be reduced to style. A good deal of what has endeared him to his public are his tales of discordant fantasy. Working somewhat in the vein of East Europe’s Theatre of the Absurd of the 1950s and 1960s, he gives recognizable institutions—magazine publishing, undersea exploration, boy scouts—a disquieting unfamiliarity by being reimagined as both whimsical and faintly sinister. Fanciful locales like Blasé-sur-Ennui and the island of New Penzance become toy representations of a “typical” French village and a New England settlement, furnished with detailed, semi-fictional cultures and histories and haunted by separation and death. Sometimes his micro-worlds gain historical gravity, as in The Grand Budapest Hotel’s through-the-mirror version of Europe between the great wars.
The risk of such a flagrantly formal cinema is that our awareness of virtuosity will muffle emotional expression. Anderson inoculates his work against this by choice of subject and story. He relies on well-tested dramatic appeals: childhood, young love, parent-child conflict, youthful idealism confronting ossifying tradition. These he embodies through protagonists who are annoying but admirable nerds, geeks, dweebs, and wonks. He will introduce chases, gunplay, even a police siege and a prison escape—all plotted within the rectilinear coordinates of his camera. He’s not above physical comedy; nearly every film has passages of slapstick, even cartoonish violence. More and more he has incorporated ingratiating stop-motion animation that has its own charm. (In Asteroid City, a roadrunner becomes a road dancer.) And he’s not above the occasional shock, as if gratuitously asking for an R-rating with touches of gore and full-frontal female nudity. Above all, his films radiate a sober wistfulness, often most explicit in their endings. Matt Zoller Seitz has written eloquently about the melancholy and pathos that haunt these comedies of off-center manners.
Still, a maniacally consistent style demands variation from film to film. How to keep things fresh? All artists are constrained, but some go beyond pressures of external circumstance to constrain themselves, to commit to a narrow range of choice. Like Monet painting lilies and cathedral windows at different times of day and night, Anderson uses self-imposed formal commitments to force us to see his material with new eyes. In a way, this choice forces him to become experimental, to tinker with the fine mechanisms of cinematic storytelling.
For instance, he has tried different options in macro-structure. Other filmmakers of his era have played with chronology, and he, with characteristic finickiness, has done the same. Fragmentary flashbacks have given way to modular structures. Moonrise Kingdom offers two versions of a single day, gauged to the viewpoint of its two major characters. The Grand Budapest Hotel offers neatly embedded tales, with the aged Zero’s story framed within the recollection of the aging writer, who is in turn invoked by a fan visiting his statue. The French Dispatch links its stories seriatim, anthologically, but each one is refracted through a narrator’s voice—sometimes several voices. Each film tries out alternative ways to tell its story. With Asteroid City Anderson explores a new, arguably more ambitious angle on multiple narrators. The result is somewhat more teasing and ambivalent than his earlier efforts in this vein—not least because it semi-seriously poses cosmic questions about nothing less than the ability of humans to understand the universe.
Asteroid City braids together two story strands. One is a 1955 black-and-white TV program purporting to document the production of a play, “Asteroid City.” The second is a widescreen color film taking place in Asteroid City.
Start with the second, a film which has all the trappings of another trip to Anderson World. The town is utterly tailored to his characteristic coordinates. Squat buildings lined up in single rows along a central street provide an enclosed arena. Motel cottages lie in a block perpendicular to the road. The long entrance to the crater and its observatory is straight and perpendicular to the street. The camera is largely restricted to straight-on angles and usually presents action from the central avenue that links garage, diner, and motel. In all, the town’s layout becomes a horizontal grid given strength by sometimes astonishing depth of field, with figures stretching from close to the camera to the horizon and the limits of visibility.
Camera movements, of which Asteroid City has quite a few, must adjust to Anderson’s geometry. The camera may shift only laterally or forward or back. Pans tend to be hard pivots at right angles. The town is introduced by a rightward tracking shot surveying the terrain with sharp swerves and pauses. As if to bid farewell to the town, this framing is rhymed at the end by a parallel shot moving leftward to end on the horizon. This man misses no chance.
Like other Anderson films, the widescreen story is committed to a skewed but recognizable time and place. We’re immediately plunged into midcentury America. What could be a more sumptuous image of postwar abundance than hurtling train cars loaded with fruits, nuts, cars, tractors, and a guided missile? We’re in the atmosphere of the Space Race, the McCarthy hearings, backyard eats and drinks (hot dogs, Ovaltine, strawberry milk), discarded vehicles across the landscape, and the glowing pastels of what Thomas Hine calls Populuxe design. One gesture, a cigarette lighter casually refilled with a splash of gasoline, sums up the postwar assumption that energy is in endless supply.
The circumstances mobilize many motifs of Hollywood film and American culture. There’s the roadside attraction inviting drivers to pull over to see caves, fossils, or nutty home-made sculptures. There’s the desert motel or diner as a crossroads of fates, as in the play Petrified Forest (1935, film 1936), the film One Crowded Night (1940), and Bus Stop (play 1955, film 1956). Of course the alien visitation, unthreatening though it is, echoes the UFO panic of the period and countless science-fiction films.
The embedded film has a coherent, though somewhat eccentric story. The Steenbeck family has come to Asteroid City for the awards ceremony in the Junior Stargazer competition, where the son, Woodrow, will be honored. At this moment the Steenbecks’ car collapses. Worse, the father Augie has delayed telling Woodrow and his three sisters about the death of their mother weeks ago. Now, after he breaks the news, the sisters demand to bury her cremated remains at the motel.
Meanwhile, other Junior Stargazers have arrived with their parents, along with a busload of schoolchildren and a roaming cowpoke band. More visitors have gathered there to join three days of celebration under the auspices of the military at the Larks Observatory, built alongside the asteroid crater. In what follows, people get acquainted, medals are given to the five prize-winners, the Steenbecks’ grandfather Zak arrives, and the visitors are treated to a rare Astronomical Ellipse. Suddenly, a spacecraft lands. A svelte alien steps out and cautiously removes the asteroid, then flies off. The visitors, along with the US government, are left to deal with their responses. It’s a classic cinematic turning point, halfway through our viewing time.
One thing ruffles the texture of the embedded film. Chapters announced by a decorative play program mark out three acts, subsidiary scenes, and an epilogue. So the film-within-the-film could conceivably be a (peculiar) Hollywood adaptation of a play. The action is confined in time to three days (the last a week later than the second) and in space to the arena of garage, diner, observatory, asteroid crater, and motel. And like many American plays of the period, the action will lead its characters to confront existential questions.
The interpolated scene-settings are traces of the other braided story, which actually launches our film. It presents itself as a TV show in the vein of 1950s cultural-affairs programming like Camera Three. In a 4:3, black-and white image the host promises reenactments that will take us through the typical phases of the preparation of a commercial play. Unlike the embedded film, this and later interpolations are usually filmed from a fair distance, respecting the limits of a proscenium stage and the technical constraints of classic studio television.
Immediately there are disjunctions. Within moments the TV studio transforms into a theatre stage, the first hop into another medium. “Asteroid City does not exist,” the unctuous host tells us. There’s no such town, and, more surprisingly, there’s no such play. “It’s an imaginary drama created expressly for this broadcast. . . . The text [is] hypothetical.” Does this entail that everything we’ll see—author, cast, behind-the-scenes conflicts—is also wholly fictional? Yet the host assures us that the show will present “an authentic account of the inner workings of a modern theatrical production.” What can “authentic” mean here?
After watching author Conrad Earp purportedly writing the play, we’re invited to witness the “first read-through rehearsal.” This reveals the previous announcement about documenting the mechanics of a production to be a bluff. We get no efforts to find financing, no planning between author and director, no auditions or cast selection. The TV program has simply skipped over certain phases of “the inner workings” of the production and launched us into Earp’s summary for the rehearsal. At center stage he reads from the play text establishing the setting: a sun-baked desert hamlet with a gas station, a diner, a motor court, and a meteor crater. He supplements this with a list of principal characters, captured for us in a series of shots of the actors who’ll portray them.
At this point, in one of the most thrilling cuts of Anderson’s career, we shift into the widescreen color film. It brings to vibrant life the landscape and freight train invoked in the stage directions. We might have simply a film dramatizing the play, but it could not be part of a 1950s television program. Its sheerly material qualities put it in another realm than the world of broadcast TV. Is this embedded film a hypothetical version of the read-through rehearsal we’ll never see? Or, as Manohla Dargis has suggested, is it an analogue to the all-star widescreen extravaganzas of the 1950s—the sort of thing that was a direct competitor to the cramped black-and-white live TV dramas?
The ensuing fourteen minutes make it easy for us to forget this prologue, but the TV production keeps interrupting. It skips around in time, from the “read-through rehearsal” back to the unorthodox audition of Jones Hall, the actor playing Augie (an encounter said to be both imaginary and part of backstage lore), and then ahead to the night before the opening, when the actor playing Woodrow visits the female star in her train compartment. Throughout, the making-of sequences annotate, sometimes in advance, the embedded film. They float alternative dialogue, such as Augie’s speech to his children, and hint at action yet to come, such as Augie’s burned hand. By the end, we’ll get further hints about scenes that were cut or go unseen by us.
The two story lines mark, I think, a new development in Anderson’s handling of narrative. Playing with chronology has been second nature to him, but unlike many of his contemporaries he hasn’t tried to mislead us with ambivalent flashbacks. He typically uses flashbacks to fill in missing bits or blocks of action, and he usually signals them with written language. With Asteroid City, though, he shifts timelines while offering a characteristic twist on his conception of refracted storytelling, the warping of one story in the course of its retelling. To put it cryptically, a television version of an imaginary play’s production is supplemented by an unmade film of the play.
The refraction of one medium through another is central to many of Anderson’s films, especially The French Dispatch, where every tale is filtered through a presentation in print, images, or spoken word. More specifically, theatre has been a recurring concern of Anderson’s since Rushmore, with Max’s amateur stage adaptations of Hollywood movies (Serpico, Vietnam War epics). Moonrise Kingdom has already given us glimpses of a cinematic rendering of Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde while The French Dispatch posited a layered presentation of Mitch-Mitch’s military drama.
In Asteroid City, though, the boundary lines between text and performance are much less clear-cut. We lose the neat framing of narrative modules, with one story embedded within another, that we find in The Grand Budapest Hotel. The TV show offers alternative versions of actions we see in the embedded film. Jones Hall’s informal audition for the role of Augie anticipates Augie’s burning his hand, and the monologue Jones recites is addressed to Woodrow, giving his thoughts on the alien’s visit and suggesting how his wife would have reacted. He adds an account of how he first saw her, on a fire escape. This monologue is missing from the film.
Throughout, the TV show hints at developments not seen in the film version. At one moment the TV show edges into the film, when the camera accidentally inserts the host into Asteroid City’s landscape. Near the end, still baffled by the script, Jones Hall breaks character and leaves the film, stepping from widescreen color into the black-and-white backstage area to question director Shubert Green. Now it seems that the embedded film is, impossibly, also an actual performance of the play,
In all, the crosstalk between film and TV creates a “variorum” version of an admittedly nonexistent text. It also violates the coordinates of our universe: a movie has no backstage. More deeply, the anomaly makes us reflect on theatre as a medium. We normally think of a play as a literary text, but the script is only one version of it, Every production is unique. So is every performance, with actors trying out different line readings. Add to these versions the revisions during the composition of the play, when the author fiddles with multiple drafts of scenes. In all, a play in toto—drafts, rehearsals, productions—is a kind of literary multiverse, hosting parallel characters and lines of dialogue.
It may not be too much to think of Asteroid City as Anderson’s response to the recent vogue for movies with multiverse stories. If so, it’s characteristic of his sensibility that his fluctuating cluster of microworlds comes from the world of theatre. The echoes and disparities between different versions of the play build into the texture of the film its most sweeping concerns–nothing less than uncertainty about the intersection of our world and one beyond it.
Despite the Absurdist milieus and the occasional slapstick interludes, Anderson’s films have always been haunted by death. In The Darjeeling Limited, it’s the death of a child, but more often it’s the death of a parent. At one point or another, that event triggers some mourning and reflection, but in Asteroid City death becomes a prevalent motif. Augie’s reluctance to tell his children of his wife’s passing becomes a recurring source of tension. When his three daughters learn that their mother’s ashes are preserved in Tupperware, they bury the bowl in the sand, after which one tries to bring her back to life. Grandfather Zak has plans to bury the remains on his golf course. He only reluctantly lets the bowl remain in Asteroid City, perhaps to be dug up by coyotes.
Beyond these concerns, the mother’s death pushes characters to speculate on religion and the cosmos. Is she in Heaven? She is for the kids, Augie says, because they’re Episcopalian, though the daughters practice a version of Christianity tinged with popular-culture notions of witches and mummies. A more by-the-numbers piety is echoed in schoolteacher June’s coaching her class in prayer at intervals.
June’s counterpart is Professor Hickenlooper, with her unshakeable confidence in science. (This despite her blatant ignorance: Woodrow has to explain the galactic calendar to her.) Backed by military force, science is aiming for conquest of the skies. The prize ceremony rewards the Junior Stargazers, though the government will own the patents on their discoveries. The teenage brainiacs sanctify research by incessant discussion of technical subjects and, for fun, by playing a round-robin memory game invoking renowned scientists. Even their parents dispute scientific theory at the cookout. The demand for objective knowledge, particularly in cosmology, counterbalances the spiritual aspirations. Religion and science are both trying to grasp the world beyond.
This neat division of labor is challenged by the visit of a creature from that realm. Once the alien has discreetly made off with the asteroid, many of the characters, pious or hyperintellectual, are impelled to ask ultimate questions. J. J. Kellogg, fed up with his son Clifford’s constant dares, demands “What’s the meaning?” Why does the boy insist on showing off? Clifford for once pauses to think. Perhaps he doesn’t want to be overlooked in the vastness of the universe. Augie and the movie star Midge agree that things now feel different, and not just because they’ve had sex. Midge, perhaps channeling her movie script, wonders if they’re not “two catastrophically wounded people.” Soon Zak and Augie are impelled to a frank exchange of feelings. The Stargazers’ game changes to replace titans of science with mass-culture icons (making a concession for Darwin), and they discover the pleasure of being whistleblowers by leaking news of the alien visit. June’s pupils have become creative artists, preparing a mockup of the spacecraft, a drawing of the alien on Jupiter, and a hymn that prays to the alien as a substitute Christ. Most radically, Woodrow worries that the visit forces us to ask if there’s a meaning to life.
The same expansion of implication takes place in the seminar workshop Earp convokes while preparing the play. There he confesses that he considered calling it The Cosmic Wilderness, which suggests the sort of metaphysical ambitions Thornton Wilder gave Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth. Moreover, Earp intends to enhance this with a scene portraying the dreams of various characters. We learn, during Jones Hall’s cigarette break on a fire escape, that the original play featured Augie’s wife, brought back to life in the dream and quizzing the alien about the meaning of existence. (Hall’s audition monologue near the film’s start has provided a preview.) But that whole scene was cut for running time, and Hall continues to be mystified.
We get only two answers. One is the puzzling slogan, “You can’t wake up if you don’t go to sleep,” shouted at the end of the actors’ seminar (and reiterated in the song sung under the final credits). Does it suggest that you can’t undergo an epiphany unless you’re immersed in ordinary daily existence? By contrast, there’s Green’s advice to Hall to not worry about the meaning of the play. “Just keep telling the story.”
Both alternatives would seem to be at stake in the film’s late phases. The alien ship returns the asteroid, and the government clampdown that results triggers a riotous rebellion among the visitors. When the dust clears, romance has blossomed. The backstage TV drama has already revealed awkward efforts at intimacy: Earp’s embrace of the actor playing Augie, Green’s likely divorce from Polly, Mercedes/Midge’s possible seduction of the actor playing Woodrow. But in the post-alien stretches of the film, full-blown love affairs emerge. Dwight’s hymn to the alien devolves into a hoedown that lets Montana sweep up June in a lively dance. Dinah and Woodrow become a couple, and there’s a hint that Madge and Augie’s affair may continue.
Ending Asteroid City (the movie) with the TV program would neatly frame the embedded version, but our movie ends with the play’s epilogue, in widescreen glory. The characters have woken up, and the story keeps going. The hollow certainties of church religion and official science have been replaced by a frankly uncertain attitude toward the Great Unknown—which enables people to appreciate the ongoing, unpretentious adventures offered by everyday life.
The film is thus poised between love and death, but the ending evokes Anderson’s usual note of muted poignancy. The embedded film has opened with a roaring freight train accompanied by a male voice singing “Last Train to San Fernando,” a song that celebrates a desperate chance for love. The whole film ends with a version of “Freight Train, Go So Fast” about a man being hanged, yet it’s sung by a mourning woman with sheer exhilaration. The only certainty is death, but before that everyone has a chance to test the Theory of Celestial Flirtation.
