A Third Problem I Haven't Seen: Asteroid City Explained
“You can't wake up if you don't fall asleep.
You can't wake up if you don't fall asleep.
You can't wake up if you don't fall asleep.”
Augie Steenbeck’s (Jason Schwartzman) wife is dead. It took the death of his car to admit what had come to pass three weeks earlier. His son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) and his three daughters take the news with some confusion but not much surprise – it certainly explains why their father’s been carrying around a bowl of ashes in tupperware. Besides, it doesn’t change the fact that they’re now stranded in Asteroid City, a sleepy desert town known for its large crater and not much else. The good news is at least they arrived to the correct destination; they’re here so Woodrow can receive an award from the Junior Stargazer/Space Cadet convention.
There’s all sorts of people in town for the event, ranging from the famous actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) and her brainy daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards), to fellow-brainiacs Clifford (Aristou Meehan) and Ricky (Ethan Josh Lee) and their parents, to the decorated General Gibson (Jeffrey Wright) and the esteemed Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton). Not to mention Augie’s father-in-law Stanley (Tom Hanks) and a whole host of school children and cowboys who just arrived by bus. The stargazing festivities continue into the night when suddenly a bright green light shines down upon everybody. They watch in shock as a leggy black alien emerges from its spacecraft, grabs what’s left of the meteor that created said crater, and then quickly zips back up into his ship.
What this brief alien encounter awakens in each character, not to mention its impact on the world at large, is stuff of myth and legend.
Mainly because Asteroid City is not real – it’s a play written by a fake playwright who’s being profiled, along with the play’s stars and film director, in a black and white television program. A show which itself is also fictitious, existing only within the movie Asteroid City written by the very real Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola.
If you aren’t feeling dizzy yet I’d guess it’s because you’ve seen the film a few times already. Asteroid City is so laden with digression and detail that it can start to feel unwieldy to even hold in your thoughts. That such a densely packed film is set in an open, empty desert is by design. The more tightly Anderson crafts these characters’ looks on this hyper art-directed set, the more they seemingly melt into their compositions; disappear under dappled light and blend perfectly into color coordinated backgrounds. The further the narrative pulls back towards what is meant to be ‘real life,’ the more manufactured the character and camera movements on screen. From spotlight cues, spoken stage direction and fourth-wall breaking narration, there’s nothing about these segments that feel more real than the central ‘Asteroid City’ narrative that we’re repeatedly told is pure fiction.
This paradox is paralleled on all levels of the film. It’s the same reason the Asteroid City scientists can build a dozen highly complex machines to receive signals from space but can't comprehend the data they're receiving. Or how the military can't keep a lid on an alien landing news story during a mandatory quarantine – let alone get through one commencement speech without interruption. The more they attempt to control the circumstances around them, the more they try and anticipate their futures, the less they truly know. The town on whole feels like it’s barely holding on; the teacher can't control her class and the cowboys can't get cigarettes out of the vending machine, never mind the fact that the hotel recently caught fire and a straight up space alien stole the town’s namesake symbol. Even the local mechanic's never seen anything like this – who even know there was such thing a “third problem” with this make and model of car?
One could argue Asteroid City is as much about grief as it’s about aliens; people left changed by an experience, forced to wrestle with a void they cannot comprehend but still feel overwhelmingly. Like Midge, an already depressive actor who’s rehearsing her next role’s suicide scene, or widowed Augie who moves around in a daze – speaking practically about his deceased wife and yet still putting his hand on a hot plate in an attempt to feel something. It’s an anxiety paralleled in the documentary of the writing of the play as well. Jones Hall, the actor who plays Augie, frets over whether or not he even understands the play he’s been cast lead in. He wrings his hands and presses the director, Schubert Green (Adrien Brody), on whether or not he’s doing a good job but all Green can say to him is: “Doesn't matter – just keep telling the story.”
Conversely, where all of the adults in the film seem unable to move forward, all of the children are looking towards the future. This alien encounter has changed them too, but for the better; the Stargazers are eager to continue building new space-age inventions, military intervention be damned, while the group of school children are excited to talk and sing about the prospect of their newly expanded, alien-inclusive universe. Meanwhile Woodrow gets a needed kick to act on his crush on Dinah, while his three sisters seem more invigorated by the idea of performing rituals with their dead mother’s ashes than they are saddened by the loss. They possess an adaptability that the adults of this world can only pine for – including the their playwright, Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), whose untimely death by automobile, six months after the play opens, may not have been an accident.
And yet another story: past the living tableaus, meticulous art direction, dollhouse-like sets, and rigid camera movements, the layers upon layers, we see a level of introspection in Wes Anderson that we have not seen before. Because the ‘third problem’ Asteroid City itself is dealing with is the paradox of the director – specifically, how one can truthfully portray the chaos of the world while still working within film, a medium that itself calls for tight control and planning at every step.
Anderson has a reputation as a “controlled” filmmaker, detailed and meticulous in how he represents his worlds – over the years his style has shifted from merely art directed to completely custom built, even his camera movements have become increasingly rigid. But rarely do his characters have control in their situations or lives. Where his previous films tend to deal with people wrestling with their own imperfections and contradictions, Asteroid City deals in pure existential chaos. It’s a story within a story within a story, a film designed to whiz past you so fast you can barely keep up. It’s rigidly structured and meticulously laid out, and yet somehow difficult to grasp. A choice that feels almost antagonistic towards his audience, specifically towards the critics and fans alike that tend to mistake style for impetus – those who lob accusations of “twee” and “preciousness” at films that aren’t even pretending to portray shallow or feel-good stories.
All of this to say, it’s all an acknowledgment that the closer any of us tries to get to the truth, the more out of focus our comprehension becomes.
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In one particularly enigmatic scene, the playwright Earp asks his acting class to perform a dream sequence that never actually makes it into the final play. Each student slumps over in a performance of deep sleep, only to shoot awake as a spotlight lingers on their faces. One by one, they snap their eyes open and begin to chant in unison: “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.”
In an already dense and abstract film, this scene can come across as positively impenetrable – borderline arbitrary. But what it represents is a delicate key, not to any one door, but to the cosmos on whole. Earp’s desire to write the perfect dream sequence that can reveal the innerworkings of his characters to his audience, is in turn Wes Anderson’s own zen koan for how to make a film about chaos: to find order, you first must let go.
It says let go of control, let go of expectations. Allow your mind to rest, to search, to reassess, to be fully unconscious of your surroundings. To dream is to digest everything in your life and map it out in a new way – free of the boundaries of reality, free of judgment and self criticism. Perhaps it’s a sentiment that’s easier said than done – advice to himself as much as to the audience, a statement he aspires to whether or not he achieves it – but it’s an important key to the town of ‘Asteroid City’ in the documentary of the making of ‘Asteroid City’ in the film Asteroid City. A paradox, in a paradox in a paradox.
