Asteroid City (2023)

directed by Wes Anderson

James Brubaker

“You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.”

For the last few years, I haven’t been able to write. I know that writing isn’t easy, and many who want to write struggle. I hadn’t been in that position for over a decade before I stumbled into my current funk. Starting around 2009, I wrote a lot, churning out stories and books and record reviews and following pretty much any whim I could. After finishing my last novel in 2021, a process which took about four years, not counting the home stretch leading up to publication, I haven’t managed to write more than a couple of essays, a story or two, and a quarter of a novel that I think I might actually hate. The question I’ve been grappling with during this dry spell, of course, is why?

So what has been the cause of my struggle to write? Was it that the last finished novel, a complicated and deeply personal rumination on grief, was so emotionally exhausting that I’m not ready to write again? Or could it be something else, something external, maybe, like never fully having dealt with the stress of Covid’s initial impact on everything everywhere, the deeply polarized and ugly political/cultural/social landscape we’re mired in, and/or the drastically changing circumstances at the university where I work, which has resulted in service work expanding to fill so much of the time I used to fill with writing. The cause is probably a little bit of all of that, but the result is the same—on the rare occasions I have time to put words on the page, they all feel somehow small and unimportant.

*

“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—but together they present an authentic account of the inner-workings of a modern theatrical production.”

Unlike some film enthusiasts, my relationship with the work of Wes Anderson is and has always been unambiguously enthusiastic. Since renting Rushmore sometime in 1999, and subsequently backtracking to Bottle Rocket, I’ve seen all of his films in the theater except for The Grand Budapest Hotel—I was in grad school at the time, living in Stillwater, Oklahoma, so of course the town’s one movie theater didn’t screen Anderson’s films, and unlike when Moonrise Kingdom was released, I couldn’t find the time to drive to Oklahoma City to catch a screening. That said, I understand why Anderson’s films don’t land for some, I mean, I get where criticisms of his work come from. Some of those more visceral reactions seem to key in on the oh-so-picturesque elephant in Anderson’s meticulously symmetrical room—artifice. Call it twee, or airless, or too-cute-by-half, Anderson’s films don’t look like real life. They are curated, arranged, ordered—they are so concerned with their aesthetic, from sets to music to affectation in the performances, that it’s not hard to understand why they feel lifeless or false. But then, feeling lifeless and false seems to be the point—to a point.

This artifice is everywhere in Asteroid City. In the film’s opening, Bryan Cranston, playing the black and white broadcast’s unnamed host, tells us that we’re not watching a film, or a play adapted to film, but a television broadcast created for the barely scrutable purpose of educating its audience about “the inner workings of a modern theatrical production.”  Almost as soon as this idea is established, it’s abandoned, adding another layer of artifice—once we settle in on recent widower Auggie, played by Jason Schwartzman, and his four kids on the outskirts of Asteroid City, the film is in full color, looking nothing like a 1950s television special about theatrical productions. Moments into joining Auggie and co, the artifice ratchets up with a blasé presentation of a distant mushroom cloud (“Another atom bomb test,” a cashier says, not at all alarmed), and the cartoonish safety of an old-timey cops-and-robbers car chase zipping down the desert road while Auggie makes a call in a phone booth. Like most of Anderson’s work, Asteroid City quickly and clearly asserts that it intends to push against the real, to become a dream-like, safer version of the shitty world we all actually inhabit. That sanitization of our world, that’s not what draws me to Anderson’s films. It’s how he works the artifice that makes it sing. 

*

“Why does Auggie burn his hand on the Quicky-Griddle?”

“Well, I don’t even know, myself, to tell you the truth. I hadn’t planned it that way—he just sort of did it while I was typing. Is it too extraordinary?”

This winter I read Jon Fosse’s stunning and very long novel Septology. It’s about a painter named Asle and another very similar looking painter also named Asle, both of whom are seemingly at the end of their lives, and that’s as far as we need to get into the novel’s premise for our purposes, here. I’m bringing Fosse’s Asle into this essay only because, over the course of the novel, he decides that he will not paint anymore. He is nearing the end of his life, and has decided he no longer has anything left to say, and no desire to keep painting for the sake of painting. There’s something beautiful in that idea—someone dedicating their life to art then just walking away.

A few months back, before I read Fosse’s novel, I was close to deciding I wasn’t going to write anymore. Even as I was finishing my last novel, I was already starting to feel like maybe I’d run out of things to say, like maybe I’d been wrong all my life and fiction wasn’t going to save me, or anyone from anything. I never talked with friends or family about my impulse to stop writing, but I slowly started to stop thinking of myself as a writer. I continued reading, kept watching films and television shows, and I appreciated how the good ones made me think and feel, but all of it had started to feel somewhat hollow, trivial. I was seeing all narrative art the way Anderson’s critics see his films—everything felt false, all of it, even in more realistic forms. All I could see were the machinations of artists and manipulations of their craft. And then I saw Asteroid City. 

*

“Isn’t there supposed to be some kind of answer? Out there in the cosmic wilderness. Woodrow’s line about the meaning of life?”

“Maybe there is one!”

“Right. Well, that’s my question. I still don’t understand the play.” 

“It doesn’t matter. Just keep telling the story. You’re doing him right.

Asteroid City is a film about artifice. That is to say, it’s a film about Anderson’s own body of work. That is to say, it’s a film about how Anderson uses artifice to bring order to the chaos around him, and maybe the rest of us, everywhere. Asteroid City is primarily Auggie’s story, and by extension, the story of the actor playing Auggie. In the play that is the subject of the “broadcast,” Auggie’s wife has died, and he’s struggling to tell his kids. Auggie’s arc in the film concerns his difficulty working through, even understanding his own grief. He does his best to comfort his children (who don’t seem to need all that much comfort). He forms an odd but endearing relationship with Scarlett Johansson’s Midge. In a moment of emotional turmoil, he intentionally touches a Quicky-Griddle, burning his hand. As established earlier in the film, in a scene between the actor playing Auggie and the Playwright of Asteroid City, played by Edward Norton, we learn that even the actor playing Auggie doesn’t understand the Quicky-Griddle scene. In that earlier scene, we also learn that the Actor and the Playwright had been in a romantic relationship. Eventually, in the film’s final act, through Auggie and the Actor’s story, Anderson’s film complicates and expands its own artifice when, during a chaotic melee scene, Auggie walks off the set of the play, becoming the Actor. A few moments later, we learn that the Playwright passed away during the mounting of the production. Worried that his performance isn’t right, isn’t authentic, the Actor speaks to the Director, who tells him, “Just keep telling the story. You’re doing him right.” Then, before returning to the play, Auggie steps out onto a balcony where he sees, across the alley, on an opposite balcony, the actress—played by Margot Robbie, in a brief appearance—who was going to play his deceased wife in a flashback scene that was ultimately cut from the final version of the play. And this is where Anderson’s artifice wholly and wildly pays off—the scene’s dialogue isn’t all that important, the Actress merely describes the scene she would have shared with the Actor—no, it's the way the scene feels, with longing and sadness (but for what?), that gives it first weight, and then the dawning realization that it isn’t grief for Auggie’s deceased wife that we’re feeling—she isn’t even close to real in the world of the film—or the Actor’s disappointment at having a moving scene cut from the play, but a layered system of sadness containing both of those not-quite realities as well as the closer-to-the surface grief of the Actor having lost his lover, the Playwright, to a car accident—even this, though, isn’t necessarily “real” in the world of the film, remember, this is a television broadcast about the production of a fictional play! Still, somehow, and perhaps against all odds, the layers of feeling fold in on one another and in doing so expand into infinity. Asteroid City, it would seem, is built on a core of endless and rich emotional depth manifesting as artifice. 

*

“I’d like to make a scene where all my characters are each gently/privately seduced into the deepest, dreamiest slumber of their lives as a result of their shared experience of a bewildering and bedazzling celestial mystery...”

So what does all of this have to do with my writing? Before the film ends, we learn that the Playwright, before his death, wanted to write a scene in which his characters all fall asleep and share a dream. To aid in the writing, the Playwright asks the actors to pretend to sleep and wake up. As the scene unfolds, characters “wake up,” snapping from black and white to color, repeating the line “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep,” having imagined themselves sinking into some shared dream, and waking up to—something. I don’t know what they learn or gain by pretending to sleep then waking up. The scene is truly puzzling but still somehow works to viscerally demonstrate the power of shared experiences, shared dreams, shared stories, shared artifice. The moment is followed by one last scene with Auggie and his family, something like an epilogue—a return to the dream perhaps? Or maybe we were dreaming all along? By this point, the line between what’s real and what isn’t has all but dissolved in a mess of longing, grief, and cosmic mystery, leaving only a sensation of quiet sadness and big-hearted wonder in its wake. It’s a beautiful film, artifice and all. And if a film so steeped in falseness can arrive at something that feels so true, there’s plenty of room for us other writers to keep doing what we do, finding a way through our own artifice.

James Brubaker is the author of five books, most recently We Are Ghost Lit and The Taxidermist's Catalog. His work has appeared in Puerto Del Sol, Diagram, Laurel Review, and Booth, among other venues. He lives in Missouri with his wife and cats.