Note to readers and spoiler alert: this is not a review, it’s an essay about my interpretation of Wes Anderson’s enigmatic film Asteroid City. I’m writing this because this surreal, oddly moving and disturbing film doesn’t give up its secrets easily, and everyone is scrambling to explain their own way of making sense of it, so I thought I’d offer my own version, in case it is helpful or interesting to anyone who has already seen the film. If you haven’t seen it, this article won’t describe it in detail, and therefore it will be hard to follow, and also it will ruin the surprises of the story, so I recommend you try to see the film, rather than reading any further.
It was interesting for me to note that the film has such mixed responses: some loved it and some hated it. The person I watched the film with was one of the latter. Anderson purposefully directs the actors to speak in an inexpressive tone and rapid-fire speed, and it’s almost impossible to connect to the emotional undercurrents of the film from watching the actors’ body language, or listening to their impersonal tone of voice. The whole emotional life of the film is embedded in the language, the actual spoken words. You will only connect to the emotional world of the story if you are the type of viewer who is able to mentally zoom in on the actual dialog, almost as if you are reading a script, because while the characters are verbalizing very rich, deeply emotional states, their bodies and voices maintain a calm, cerebral sang froid at all times. I had to make a strong mental effort to process everything that was being said, and this allowed me to enter into the emotional tapestry of the story. Some viewers (like my companion) don’t watch films in that way, and rather than focusing on the words spoken, they prefer to soak up images, sounds, music, and the actors’ tone of voice and body language. If you watch Asteroid City in this way, it will seem like a sterile intellectual game, and not a very interesting one, and this is exactly how it seemed to my companion.
Asteroid City is set in the 1950s, well-known as the most repressed period of American culture. The setting is perfect for the film’s subjects: repression, especially of grief, and of having been touched by love. The characters speak in an oddly affectless rapid-fire banter, like a film noir gone off the rails. As in noir, they try to impress one another with their external cool: able to fire off brilliant one-liners or extended monologs (even the auto mechanic does this while trying to fix the car), without showing the slightest emotion (except in the words themselves). The film’s central image is the alien, the one who has become so estranged from his own feelings that he no longer feels like a part of the human race. It is quite literally about feeling alienated.
The film represents a dream. This is the film’s baroque, complex structure: we begin with a 1950s era black and white teleplay about “the workings of the American theater,” something like Kraft Television Theatre, centering on a playwright named Conrad Earp (Ed Norton) who’s creating a kind of Western Our Town poetic drama. Soon we’re also watching the play he’s writing about (in full color), centered on a war photographer dad who brings his genius scientist kid to receive an award in a desert town, a kind of movie-set town built up around a meteor crater as a tourist attraction. All of it, both the teleplay and the play-within-the-play, represents the dream of the central character, whom we never meet (because this is his dream), but who is probably most represented in the dream by the playwright Earp. It is important to remember that, as is often remarked, all of the people in a dream represent aspects of the dreamer (since they all come from his mind), but in dreams there is often a particular figure who stands-in for the dreamer, a protagonist, and Earp seems to be it in this case.
So what is being repressed here? In Earp’s play, the main character Steenbeck is a recent widower, and is too deeply hurt by the loss of his wife to allow himself to feel anything at all. He’s repressing both the love he felt for his wife, and the pain he feels because of her death. The dreamer himself may not be in precisely this situation, but he is surely looking, inside of his dream, for a lost love which his conscious mind is too traumatized to allow him to feel. In the play-within-the-play, when Steenbeck and his family arrive at Asteroid City, their car breaks down; they can’t move any further until they deal with whatever it is that’s been buried in the crater, which recalls the enormous hole inside Steenbeck’s heart.
Like Ishiguro’s novel The Unconsoled, the entire work takes place inside the dream universe, revealing the mind of the dreamer to us by showing us the landscape of his unconscious. And as in The Unconsoled, the dreamer is a man of the theater, who’s dreams are filled with anxiety about performance and representation, as well as the need of children to please their parents, and for parents to figure out how to care for their children.
Among other things, this dream structure explains the film’s bizarre anomalies, events which don’t seem to make literal sense. For example, why would a 1950s era TV drama openly present a gay romance? Or why does the TV host, from the teleplay documentary about Conrad Earp and his new play, wander onto the set of the play which Earp is writing? He does so, in fact, to remind Jones Hall, the actor playing Steenbeck (the hero of the play-within-the play) that he “doesn’t understand the play,” and that he needs to exit, temporarily, in order to find what is missing. These occurrences wouldn’t happen in a real TV show or a real play, but they follow dream logic perfectly.
Steenbeck awkwardly yanks himself out of the action of the play-within-the-play in mid-scene, walking off the (full color) set of the play and into the (black and white) set of “backstage” within the teleplay, demanding answers from the director Schubert, who merely tries to assure him that he doesn’t need to understand anything, merely to “tell the story.” Still, the actor persists, exiting the theater to the liminal space of the fire escape where, in the film’s central scene, he confronts the actress who was to have played his dead wife in a dream sequence, only the sequence has been cut from the script. (That is, repressed.) The only way for Steenbeck (or Hall or Earp) to regain his humanity is to connect to his buried grief and love for his dead wife. Only this will give Hall an understanding of his “role” in the “play.” In the fire escape scene, Death of a Narcissist is the name of the play on the marquee across the street. The endlessly self-absorbed Steenbeck (and the dreamer) has to die, in order for him to be reborn, able to make a human connection with his own grief, or with his son.
If one represses these feelings in waking life, one has to enter a dream state in order to find them. Dreams attempt to give vent to conflicts and feelings which our conscious mind refuses to acknowledge. Hence the film’s closing motto: “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.” That penultimate scene in the film, where the entire cast repeats this line as a louder and louder refrain, is the clearest clue in Asteroid City that the film has a dream structure. Like the final scene of The Unconsoled, where breakfast is served on a trolly car, the scene resembles a typical moment experienced at the end of dream, when light is beginning to stream through the bedroom window and the dreamer knows he must wake up soon. The loud, clamorous chanting of the whole cast serves the function of an internal alarm clock.
Among the things that make the fire escape scene remarkable is the physical depiction of the steps the character must take to pull himself out of the film’s many layers of performance and representation, in order to locate his emotional truth: pulling himself offstage from the play, then outside of the theater, onto the fire escape, for a scene where these two professional Broadway actors are chatting while taking a cigarette break. Under the pretext of “re-enacting the scene” which she had done for her audition, the scene where he meets his dead wife in a dream, she is (in a magically dream-like transformation) turned into that wife, and in this moment of high artifice, the emotional truth peeps through, in disguised form, as is the way with dreams. (She’s supposed to be acting in the adjacent theater in an Elizabethan drama, and her hairstyle frames her head like a heart.) Note that, just before leaving the set of the play-within-the-play, Steenbeck deliberately burns his own hand. He knows that he has to force himself to feel something, and the something is his pain. He has to go to the fire escape, just to escape that particular fire.
It’s interesting to note that the scene which the two actors recite in the fire escape scene, the “dream scene” which has been cut from the script, takes place “on the alien’s planet.” Like the fire escape, or indeed like a man falling asleep and dreaming, Steenbeck imagines he can only connect to his wife on a remote plane, the “alien” world of the dead.
Steenbeck’s three little girls, like the three witches in Macbeth whom they are made to quote and mimic, represent the pure, vengeful spirit of the dead wife, who doesn’t appreciate being forgotten and suppressed. Their focus is to honor and guard her memory. When the father finally admits to them that their mother is dead, they ask him “are we orphans now?” Taken aback, Steenbeck replies “no, I’m still alive.” But he’s so distant, so un-loving, it’s as if he is dead.
As in any dream, all the characters are versions of the central persona, the dreamer. They each embody different aspects of his psyche. Whereas Steenbeck is the steely war photographer, hardening himself to all emotion to survive in a dangerous world by selling images, the theater director Schubert is the one whose “rabbit-like” sexual drive is aimed primarily at his obsession with success (as the narrator inform us). Steenbeck’s genius son Woodrow represents the curious, brilliant dreamer and inventor, who has inherited his father’s drive for excellence. Schubert, whose wife is merely estranged, not dead, is pleased to discover that his son has made the honor roll, once again. He represents the aspect of the dreamer that values worldly success over everything. But of all the characters, the one who represents the heart of the dreamer most poignantly is the alien. The scientist whiz kids admit to one another that they feel more at home “outside the earth’s atmosphere,” one way of expressing the alienation that the dreamer feels from his own humanity. But the lonely alien, who tentatively approaches a completely strange world, is the loneliest figure of all. He has come for one purpose: to retrieve the asteroid, the evidence that something from outside the world of the narcissist once came into his world and made a lasting impact, an impact that has been buried for thousands of years. This can be seen as a metaphor for the love Steenbeck had felt for his wife, when she “crashed” through his self-absorption, and opened up his life. (No wonder the girl-witches don’t want to let their mother’s ashes be moved from the spot where the asteroid hit.) Later, the alien returns the asteroid, which has now been “inventoried.” Like Steenbeck, he can’t make a life for himself wallowing in grief full time, but it has to be acknowledged, registered emotionally, for him to move on. In a later scene, a boy from the “space cadet” summer camp group sings about the alien, in the film’s surreal and fantastic music and dance number: “Are you friend or foe? Or other?” With Steenbeck burying his feelings of love for his wife, he doesn’t even seem human.
Note as well the many expressions of emotional repression within the play-within-the-play: the parents of the “space cadet” kids are so alienated from them that they have to watch their own children on a TV monitor. Everything is kept is strict quarantine, no one is allowed to move about or express themselves freely.
The film actress Midge (Scarlett Johansson), who perhaps represent the dreamer’s anima, his female aspect, is clearly his twin spirit, equally a performer, with a cool exterior, and equally capable of making a living by selling images, in her case, images of herself. In a witty send-up of the worst tendencies of 1950s Group Theater era poetic psychodrama, she is made by Earp’s script to speak lines in which she plainly spells out the play’s subtext and symbolism. "two catastrophically wounded people who don't express the depths of our pain because we don't want to." Steenbeck’s affair with her is an evasion, an attempt to escape the necessity of confronting his grief by finding comfort with a kindred soul who, like him, simply wants to repress bad memories. His name refers to a film editing console, and he seems to see his role as one of editing: of cutting out the bits he’s trying to avoid. That’s how (in his persona as the playwright) the crucial “dream sequence” gets left out of the script. (Schubert claims it was to shorten the running time.) Midge’s “black eye” is makeup, a method actor’s trick, to make herself feel a pain she’s probably never allowed herself to feel. Later, she reveals she’s been abused by all the men in her life, starting with her father and brother. Very likely, this includes the ex-husband she alludes to.
Jones Hall (Jason Schwartzman), the teleplay “actor” who is playing Steenbeck, has an affair with playwright Earp. Earp falls in love with him, declaring he is “perfect” (both for the part and for him). In a Pygmalion-like twist, Earp is narcissistically in love with his self-symbol in his own play. At the same time, the actor Jones, like all the characters, is relentless in his pursuit of success. “Sleeping with the writer” might be a punch line to a joke in Hollywood, but in the theater, it’s a reasonable pathway to stardom. Earp is (to his detriment) in love with the image of Steenbeck which Hall brings to life for him: the tough professional image-maker, who doesn’t let anything get to him or make a fool of him. By creating the character Steenbeck, Earp imagines himself as too tough to let love get the better of him, and he loves the way that Jones Hall brings his creation to life.
The actor Jones Hall feels a grief similar to that of his character Steenbeck, because his lover (Earp the playwright) also dies. (We learn that, by the time the play opens, Earp has died in a car accident.) So Steenbeck’s grief is his grief. As is often the case, truth is concealed within the fictional world of the performance. Since repressed love is the subject of the dream (and the film), it is well represented, using dream logic, by a gay romance. What could be more repressed in 1950s America than gay love?
It is true that Anderson has created a narrative structure of mind-boggling complexity: a dream about a TV drama about a playwright, and the world of his play. But this complexity is not there to confuse the viewer, nor is it meant to be an intellectual puzzle. The complexity represents the hall of mirrors of the dream world, the nightly world we visit where everything takes place inside the mind, the realm of pure representation and reflection. The dream world respects the distance we need from our most terrifying fears, our most devastating losses. These traumas appear to us, in our dreams, in an infinite variety of delicate disguises, like an echo or a perfume, which seems to be fading just as we enter a room. It allows us to approach these traumas and to process them, but using an extremely indirect mode of approach and heavily disguised images, so that we are able to respect their power, and avoid being overwhelmed by too much direct pain. Those moments in our dreams that do become overwhelming generally have the effect of causing us to wake up, just in time to save us from our own monsters. Asteroid City beautifully embodies this necessary complexity, full of saving graces.
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