Impressions of Loneliness in Asteroid City
Promotional poster of Asteroid City (2023), dir. Wes Anderson. Written by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola.
“Asteroid City does not exist. It is an imaginary drama created expressly for this broadcast. The characters are fictional, the text hypothetical, the events an apocryphal fabrication.”
– Host, Asteroid City
A lot of the criticism about Wes Anderson’s newest movie, Asteroid City, pokes at the film’s fractured plot, the “cuteness” of the nested stories, and the marked structuralism that many dismiss as the director going “too Anderson” — or, in other words, focusing more on style than substance.
I couldn’t disagree more.
While it is true that Asteroid City is constantly drawing the audience’s attention to its own artificiality, that artificiality plays a central role. From the switch between the black-and-white televised play of the documentary to the bright, saturated lighting of the more “realistic” play, each break from the narrative line creates a moment for the audience to draw a connection between realities.
Asteroid City’s structuralism doesn’t get in the way of the story so much as it creates a theoretical narrative for the audience to derive between scenes. The film contains two frames: a documentary about an imaginary play and the play itself. In the play (unsurprisingly titled Asteroid City), we follow Jason Schwartzman’s Augie Steenbeck, a war photographer who hasn’t yet told his children that their mother is dead. He is taking his son Woodrow to the desert for a space camp for brilliant genius and waiting for his father-in-law to pick up the children so he can “temporarily” abandon them.
In the documentary, we see reproduced scenes of the playwright, the director, and the actors as they piece together the play that we’re watching. The framing device allows for moments from the different storylines to be juxtaposed against each other (loss doesn’t only exist at the heart of the play – in the documentary, we see the director reeling from his wife leaving him and the actor who plays Augie struggling with the death of the playwright, his lover), but it also allows for multiple imagined versions of the final play, which increases our understanding of the actors in the documentary and their corresponding characters.
Scenes in Asteroid City carry multiple meanings for each layer of the narrative, and the themes reverberate back and forth. This is most apparent in the documentary framework, where there is constant talk about the play as well as cut scenes from the play. As the director’s wife visits him on the set where he’s living, she gives him a note to have a character say a line after closing the door. After the conversation, she walks through a door on the set, closes it, and says “goodbye.” We don’t know where the scene they’re discussing might land in the play, but we know that the staging (and likely other aspects of the play) is charged by and mirrors the director’s own loss, and this collaboration that he and his wife shared.
In an inverse of this pattern, we see a lost moment of the play when actor Jones Hall first auditions for the role of Augie for playwright Conrad Earp. In the monologue, Augie talks to Woodrow about how his mother would have reacted to the alien that appears in Asteroid City. “Obviously she would have said something to him. I’m certain of it.” The scene never shows up in the “play” portion of the film. In fact, Augie and Woodrow never really talk about Woodrow’s mother directly after their conversation about her death. This monologue speaks to a different relationship between father and son, and it also speaks of an Augie who is able to talk about his wife, process this experience, and grapple with the appearance of an alien alongside his son, though we never see it.
In the documentary, when Jones Hall is performing this monologue, he has obviously not yet lost Conrad Earp. In fact, this is the beginning of their relationship. Later, we see this throughline about the mother talking to the alien picked up again, which takes place after Earp has died, though the audience doesn’t learn about the death until the scene after. The material is handled in a more distant way, allowing for a more emotional read driven by imagination as opposed to what we see on screen.
The leadup into the cut scene features Jones Hall leaving the stage in the middle of the show, muttering, “I still don’t understand the play.” He rushes backstage to wake the director (who has been sleeping on set since his wife left him) to demand if he is doing the character “right.” The director, after complaining about too much quirky “business,” continues, “You’re doing him just right. In fact, in my opinion, you didn’t just become Augie. He became you.”
The language the director uses highlights the way meaning in the play and documentary cross over. Augie and Hall have become one, both through Hall’s performance and through his new personal connection to grief. It doesn’t matter that Augie is a false construct (Hall even says about his performance, “I feel like my heart is getting broken. My own, personal heart. Every night”); the lines have blurred.
Hall is not satisfied by the director’s confidence in his performance, continuing, “Do I just keep doing it? Without knowing anything? Isn’t there supposed to be some kind of answer? Out there in the cosmic wilderness.” Hall is looking for an answer, a solid answer, the kind of answer that Augie, Woodrow, and maybe everyone else in the play might be looking for too, but the director simply says, “It doesn’t matter. Just keep telling the story. You’re doing him right.”
After this interaction with the director, Hall excuses himself to take a break on the fire escape, and he spots, across the way, the actress who had previously played Augie’s wife before the scene was cut for time. In a quiet moment, the actress talks through their dialogue from a scene where their characters meet in a dream on the moon of an alien’s planet. In the scene, the wife speaks about how Augie should replace her and how she isn’t coming back. There’s a weight to this language, especially where we imagine Augie (and Hall) forced to hear the words “I’m not coming back.”
It is hard to picture that alien moon dream scene appearing in the version of the play that we see. When you do imagine it, it seems painfully clunky and twee. Yet its presence in the film, outside of the play, with the lines spoken by the actress who never appears in the play, brings a depth and tenderness to Augie that would be hard to express without otherwise shattering the shell of the character that we see after his loss.
While the imagined scene provides a narrative arc that explains Augie’s decision to stay with his family — on the documentary level, this scene directly responds to Hall’s search for meaning in the play (and life). Augie’s wife isn’t coming back. Conrad Earp isn’t coming back. The only thing Augie Steenbeck and Jones Hall can do is to move forward. As the director says, “Just keep telling the story.” The audience will figure it out on their own.
In my opinion, Asteroid City is the most deeply emotional of Anderson’s films because it presents a layered approach to a theme, letting the audience take a more active role in the reading and understanding of the film. Instead of letting the audience settle into a straightforward storyline about loss, this fracturing creates a puzzle or a mosaic of loneliness, with the audience struggling (not unlike the characters) to find answers and meaning in the cosmic wilderness.
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