Programme Notes Asteroid City
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Programme Notes: Asteroid City
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‘Just Keep Telling the Story’
Spoiler warning: these notes are best read after viewing the film. They contain discussion of plot and character details.
There is so much to take in from the very first moment of Asteroid City that one viewing is arguably not enough. Master craftsman Wes Anderson has truly outdone himself with his 11th feature — ably assisted by many of his longtime creative collaborators — creating a film that is intricate and precise, not just in terms of its visual construction (which is breathtaking), or its multiple layers of storytelling (which are deftly controlled) but equally in the way the script weaves together recurring themes and motifs, across a vast ensemble of characters. It’s a film that is deceptively light - funny and entertaining, with clearly painstakingly created surfaces. But under those surfaces is a well of emotion and thoughtful enquiry.
The lead in Asteroid City’s enormous cast is Jason Schwartzmann, playing a recently-widowed, emotionally closed-off veteran war photographer called Augie Steenbeck [aside: the character names in this film are are delightfully evocative of classic literature and films, and all listed in the opening credits; yet another detail to return to and pore over]. In actual fact though, Schwartzman is playing an actor called Jones Hall, who is performing as Augie in a play called ‘Asteroid City’, which we are seeing unfold via a behind-the-scenes TV documentary. Anderson sets up this framing device at the very start of the film, and reminds us of it at various points, pulling us out of the action of the story — often with a visual gag - to remind us that it is just that, a story. Anderson has always been interested in the stories his characters tell themselves in order to understand the world and their place in it — think of Steve Zissou and his selfmythologising documentaries, or the books that Suzy carries around in Moonrise Kingdom - but he has never looked quite so explicitly at the creative process of storytelling as he does here in Asteroid City.
It is telling that the setting for this film is a junior stargazer’s conference; the film has an undercurrent of wonder that bubbles to the surface at the points when the young stargazers’ curiosity reaches the end of their knowledge and they encounter mystery. Just as the quite magical alien encounter at the centre of the film remains mysterious and ultimately unexplained, so, Anderson seems to suggest, there is an inexplicable mystery at the heart of stories, and where their power ultimately comes from.
In a key moment in the midst of the action of the film’s third act (“to be played relentlessly, without a break”, the onscreen stage directions tell us), Schwartzman’s character Jones Hall can no longer contain his frustration at the part he has been given to play, and steps through a door in the scenery to find and confront the director, Schubert Green (Adrien Brody, who proves himself here, again, to be the perfect Anderson actor).
Jones Hall: “I still don’t understand the play!”Schubert Green: “Doesn’t matter, just keep telling the story.”
These two lines sum up a lot of what has been going on in Asteroid City up to this point. They put a question mark over the importance of understanding, or knowing the answers. But more specifically, this moment suggests that telling a story is not primarily about understanding what it means. As Anderson recently told Little White Lies’ Sophie Monks Kaufman: “I am drawn to mystery. You want it to be there and you don’t necessarily want to get too exact about what it all means because it becomes reductive.” Jones’ job in playing Augie, Green seems to be suggesting, is not to understand, it is rather to communicate - to allow the story to keep being told.
I think Anderson is nudging us towards asking if the real power of stories is not about understanding, but connecting. Asteroid City gives us so many moments of connection: Midge and Augie, drawn to the deep sadness they recognise in each other; Woodrow and Dinah, each sparked by the intelligent curiosity of the other; Dr Hickenlooper, thrilled to be included in the kids’ scientific explorations; and of course, the Alien making its own enigmatic connection with the people in Asteroid City. Taking this theme to a deeper level, in the acting class we see being led by the Lee Strasberg-esque Saltzburg Keitel (a brief but beautiful performance by Willem Dafoe) the repeated mantra of the actors is “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep”. Is this another way of saying that a key to creative connection is letting go of understanding - that to make a connection through creative work, you need to, in some respects, switch off your brain and embrace the unknown?This ties in with a theme that runs through the film, which comes up repeatedly through different scenes and characters, that creative artistic works can give us ways to understand or verbalise feelings and experiences we would otherwise not know how to dig out of ourselves. This hits home most powerfully when Augie helps Midge rehearse a scene, and we realise that the dialogue Augie is reading is speaking to an emotion he had previously been unable to uncover deep in himself.
It took me a good few years of watching Wes Anderson films to tune into the particular ways in which his highly stylised film worlds do actually reflect deep and often very moving truths about the decidedly un-stylised reality we inhabit most of the time (when we’re not watching Anderson’s films). In Asteroid City he has found his own, very deliberate, but very sincere way to dramatise the mysterious process that results in those emotions surfacing.
Paul Gallagher, GFT Programme Manager
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