"Asteroid City"

Whose story is this?

That is a difficult question to answer about ”Asteroid City,” Wes Anderson’s latest film. This is a film about a TV program (about a play?) about the production of a play about an extraterrestrial encounter in the desert somewhere west of the Rockies in the 1950s. We watch the play, but its narrative is interrupted by the TV program commenting on the production of the play, which we also watch as if it is a play, which is also interrupted by the TV program. And all of this is a movie we’re watching called “Asteroid City” with the title in quotation marks as you would correctly write the title if it is part of a larger work, which “Asteroid City” definitely is, since it is a play within a play (about a play?) in a TV show in a film about all of the above.

Some of you have already checked out and want nothing to do with these kinds of meta-narrative shenanigans, but you’ve likely checked out on Wes Anderson long ago anyway. If you enjoy his movies, you’ll likely enjoy this new one. If you’ve been tepid at best, this might be the one that breaks you. I love his films. I love formal experiementation and narrative leaps. I generally vibe with Anderson’s sense of melancholy humor. ”Asteroid City,” was difficult for me in a way that his other films have not been.

That gets back to the question I posed in the lede – whose story is this? It’s a question I like to be able to answer about any story because determining perspective helps me connect emotionally to a story more than anything else.

Is this Augie’s story? Or maybe his son Woodrow’s? They are the father/son pair at the center of the play about the extraterrestrial encounter. Augie has the heavier emotional beats, but it also feels like that story is something remembered by Woodrow and pieced back together from the perspective of adulthood. It’s a grace-filled and forgiving perspective, and Woodrow is the hero of the story, if there is one.

The actor playing Augie is more central to the play about the making of the play, though that story belongs equally to the play’s director and a couple of its other stars. By taking this step out of the extraterrestrial narrative, “Asteroid City” draws attention to the way the lives of the actors and director influence how they play their characters and direct the show. This layer makes the film about the ways the things going on in our lives impact the way we construct reality and the difficulties we face in trying to construct reality in a certain way. We only know ourselves so much. There is much about us that is a mystery to us.

The mystery of ourselves and of the stories we tell and of the universe comes on strong in the sections devoted to the playwright’s writing process. As I write that, I’m convinced we really are watching a film about a TV program about a play about the production of a play about an extraterrestrial encounter. Why do we tell the stories we tell? Why do they include the strange things they include? What happens when the story leaves our desk and is interpreted by other storytellers? What’s the meaning of any of it? The further out we get from the extraterrestrial encounter layer, the more metaphysical the questions become. Maybe it’s the playwright’s story.

But then there’s that TV show layer which puts the emphasis back on the audience, as if all of this exists for the audience. Once the story is out—and the “pictures always come out”—everyone is part of the audience, especially the writer who ceded control of the story once he let it be produced. So it belongs to everyone, and if ”Asteroid City” didn’t include the TV program layer, we would have lost that wrinkle. The story is something we share. It exists only communally as we mull it over together, like grief, like love, like an encounter with something beyond our comprehension. A good story is difficult to grasp. It consumes us, not us, it.

Ah! But this is a film about a TV program about a yada yada yada. Maybe it’s not for you. Maybe it’s not for me. Maybe ”Asteroid City” is Wes Anderson’s after all.