Close Encounters of the Nerd Mind

Wes Anderson explores grief, loneliness, and the mysteries of the universe in Asteroid City

There’s always someone or something missing in a Wes Anderson film — a parent, usually; a hawk, occasionally; responsible adults, often. Asteroid City is no exception. Anderson’s play within a TV show within a movie is all about absence — of meaning, of people, of reason, of explanation. It’s a movie about how we know nothing, really, and so we tell stories to fill the gaps in our knowledge, both to others and to ourselves, and in the end, when there are no answers, the stories have to do. Throughout Asteroid City, characters try to express something they can’t get their hands around; they fumble in the dark in search of it, or stand still and wait for it to run into them. And sometimes they slam their hand directly onto a hot plate and say that they don’t know why they did that, though deep down, they do.

The pain of grief and loss and the loneliness they create is a constant thread through Anderson’s filmography, and Asteroid City is suffused with it — a movie fixated on our attempts to explain emotions that feel inexplicable. Jason Schwartzman’s widowed war photographer Augie can’t even bring himself to let his four children know that their mother died weeks earlier, telling his gruff Californian conservative of a father-in-law that the time was never right. Once he does let them in on the truth, he presents it shorn of emotion; figure it out for yourself, he seems to say, because I sure as hell can’t. Simultaneously, the actor playing Augie — which is to say, Schwartzman again, only without the thick beard used to signal his emotional disconnect, ala Luke Wilson’s Richie in The Royal Tenenbaums — struggles to understand why, in essence, his character is the way he is. What is he mourning? What does his grief mean? Why exactly does he, in as close to a moment of unguarded emotional exchange as his character gets, slam his hand down on a hot plate?

When someone or something important goes missing forever, the resulting cavity can’t be filled. You’ll find yourself searching for it, probing it; I had two wisdom teeth pulled a month or so ago, and I’ve spent every day since with my tongue touching the new gaps in the back of my mouth a thousand times, over and over, aware of the loss but unable to accept it, in a sense. At first it hurt, then it stopped, and soon it became nothing — no pain, no surprise, no twinge of discovery. Just the cold hard reality that there once were teeth there, and now there were not, and there never would be again.

My father died last December, 10 or so months after he was diagnosed with a brain tumor that, my family and I were told in no uncertain terms, would kill him within a year. That it did, and throughout his sickness and decline in health and, ultimately, his death, the reality of what that all meant — that this figure present at the very beginning of my life would leave before mine ended, that one day soon he would simply be gone — ran rampant through my mind, some days stomping the folds of my brain with the vigor and anger of a person crushing a bug, some days hanging briefly in the air like a bird song from a nearby tree. But it never became sensible. I could understand the medical diagnosis, the physical and physiological effects, the inescapable truth that we all reach the end at some point and that none of us can be here forever, but not the idea that a person who existed, right then and now in the same shared reality, would become past tense. In those moments, the searing pain of super-heated metal looks more and more appealing — a jolt out of the fog, a reminder that we’re still here, even if sometimes we’re not sure that we want to be.

It figures, then, that Anderson’s latest meditation on what loss does to us takes place somewhere wholly artificial and limited in every sense: a tiny desert town with five properties (a train station, a diner, a motel, a garage, and an observatory) that is obviously a movie set (or a play set adjusted to look like a movie set, because sometimes I think Wes Anderson is more interested in making seven-layer dip than a movie). There is nothing to do, in a space that small and lacking and unreal and where nearly every character doesn’t want to be, but think on your problems and feel your feelings. That’s the case even before Anderson strands them all there, first robbing Augie and his family of their car, then quarantining them and the rest of the cast for reasons of national security. Amidst that, something entirely unpredictable and mind-altering happens, which I won’t spoil, save to say that it’s essentially a physical manifestation of the inexplicable, a phenomenon that can’t be understood and that Anderson has no interest in exploring in depth. It simply happens, and it changes the world for everyone, and after it happens, everyone is left to figure out just how, exactly, everything is supposed to work now.

Such is grief, and it’s no wonder that the actor playing Augie can’t find the root of Augie’s pain: it has no explanation. It simply is; death happens, and those who survive are left to make sense of a loss that defies sense. What we’re left with are a thousand unanswered questions and a burning desire to rewind time and step in before it happens and ask those questions and get those answers. And while the actor playing Augie does get to do that, in a sense, in a scene where he has a short conversation with the actress who played his dead wife but whose scene was cut from the play, the rest of us don’t. We’re stuck in Asteroid City on lockdown, waiting for someone to explain how and why things became so strange and scary, and getting nothing but silence in response.

Those answers, it seems, have to come from within, or we accept that they’re never coming at all and move on. We confront our grief and bury our dead and do what we have to do to keep going, but if we stop and sit forever with the loss or refuse to process, we never leave. The world gives us no choice but to take steps forward; it’s no accident that so many of Anderson’s films focus on emotionally stunted people hiding or running from their pain, or trying to find some way to fill the holes left by the departures of those they held dear. Often times in Anderson’s work, it’s precocious children who are more responsible and emotionally mature than their parents and the adults around them who do the most digging, their preternatural intelligence running headlong into the messy reality of feelings and the fact that human beings rarely make sound logical choices and decisions. That’s the case for Woodrow, Augie’s son, a gifted yet lonely child whose mother defined him as both a brainiac and a late bloomer, and who tries to intellectualize the chaos around him as best he can. (I love that Schwartzman has gone full circle from being Max Fischer to being the father of Max Fischer.) Woodrow is an outcast until he isn’t; he finds like-minded teen geniuses, all in Asteroid City for a scientific event and contest, and in the process of connection, comes out of his shell and begins to come to terms with his mother’s death. So, too, does Augie, working through the loss of his wife to a certain degree through his conversations and dalliance with Scarlett Johansson’s Midge Campbell, an actress who literally acts out death and departure and forces Augie to take part in it as well. (It also means that Johansson is an actress portraying an actress portraying an actress; I would love to see Wes Anderson’s version of Inception.) As the play’s actors chant toward the film’s end: You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep. You have to embrace the pain, or at least recognize it, before you can move on.

I don’t want to probe too deeply into the many meanings of Asteroid City, in part because I’ve only seen it once but mainly because it’s a jumble of ideas and themes and settings — Anderson not only exploring the emotions at its core but also creating a paean to the revolution in acting and playwriting of the 1950s while sending up the decade’s tension and paranoia in a mock Western at the edge of society where the past and future collide, essentially transporting an Old West town to the Atomic Age. Complicating that is the show-within-a-show construction of the film itself, with the play and TV show bleeding into one another and leaving you occasionally unsure as to what you’re watching, or even when it’s happening. It’s of a piece with his more recent works that leave basic structure behind in exchange for something less formal, e.g. The French Dispatch’s framing device where, as with Asteroid City, the story is divided into individual and unique segments; or his foray into stop-motion animation with Fantastic Mr. Fox; or the impossibly tidy and diorama-esque The Grand Budapest Hotel, a story being told years later by an in-universe character. This isn’t exactly new for Anderson — The Royal Tenenbaums had a narrator and a book-like division into chapters — but he’s leaned into it more and more over time, to the point where a Wes Anderson film feels less like a film and more like an experiment.

Critics and detractors have referred to Anderson’s films as dollhouses, and it’s a fair critique at points; this is a man obsessed with production design after all. But he’s not building a tiny desert town simply because he likes to make fake cacti; there’s a method to all this madness. The same bittersweet longing that makes Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums such deeply human works despite their fastidious cinematography and style is there, too, in The Grand Budapest Hotel, where the fascism and violence of mid-20th century Europe steadily encroaches on the picturesque namesake hotel; in Fantastic Mr. Fox, where the animation hides a down-to-earth story about a father learning how to love his son by accepting his own limitations and embracing his child’s differences; in The French Dispatch, a love letter to a long-gone era of both journalism and story-telling and, by its end, a funeral for both; and in Asteroid City, a movie about a TV show about a play about death as well as a movie about acting and pretending and why people create art. When we write plays and movies and books, what message are we trying to send? What are we trying to express? And how is that story changed in its interpretation by human beings who, as Anderson shows us in the regular glimpses at the play’s creation and staging and performance, aren’t automatons but, well, human beings? We try to say one thing and it comes out another way; we try to make sense of the ineffable and land somewhere else entirely. We try to understand the pain in our hearts, and the only way we know how to express it is by mashing our palms into the red-hot coils of an electric burner.

Something is always lost in translation; what Anderson does is acknowledge that by visually reminding us through his obviously fake sets and fourth wall breaks that all art is translation, and that all art is artifice. Grief is both universal and personal; so are love and hate and anger and joy and all the other feelings that swirl in our hearts and that our minds and mouths can’t fully express. And when we try to say something specific with them, we leave them open for interpretation anyway. The act of creation is personal until the train leaves the station. After that, it’s just a train going fast.