Not long into the start of Wes Anderson’s latest opus is a short scene between two characters that will linger over the entire proceedings, done as a phone call but with split screen. War photographer Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) and his father-in-law, retired lawyer Stanley Zak (Tom Hanks) discuss the former’s car breaking down (quite dramatically) in the tiny desert town of Asteroid City, requesting the latter come to pick up his granddaughters while the grandson and Augie stay for a Junior Stargazer competition. But Stanley, obviously not going to abandon his family, is more concerned with whether or not Augie has told his kids the reason their mother isn’t on the trip, which Augie has not.
“The time was never right,” Augie says, honestly.
“The time is always wrong,” Stanley says, truthfully.
But before that scene we get a moving tableau of the entire location where the film takes place, starting with the train tracks, over to the diner, then the motel, the forever unfinished overpass, and the gas station where the aforementioned car will meet its demise. And before that we will see those same locations, in a slightly different order, shown to us on a proscenium stage as narrated by a deadpan Bryan Cranston introducing not just the play of “Asteroid City”, but the telling of the creation of the play of “Asteroid City”. And after that (but before the phone call) he will also introduce the players, this time in the exact sequence they will appear on screen during the production. It’s a whirlwind pace within the span of five minutes (plus a beautiful opening credits sequence aboard a moving train), setting up the story to come.
It will be obvious to anyone watching that Wes Anderson has not even remotely tempered his diorama tendencies, but continued to dive deeper and deeper into the techniques he has become famous (infamous?) for. The blocking looks at first glance to be symmetrical (although I would argue it’s anything but). The characters speak in clipped, short sentences with seemingly zero subtext (at least if you don’t want to think about the lines for too long). The colors are bright and in your face. There’s stop motion, lateral dolly shots, a twee score, title cards, it’s all there. It would be easy for anyone to dismiss this as just another Wes Anderson style catalogue rather than a film.
But that would ignore what Wes has been doing his entire career—exercising precise control over his productions while the story unfolds in ways that consistently undermine it.
I was first introduced to Wes Anderson’s work not from a movie, but an American Express commercial1. I had no clue who he was, but it was clear that this strange man with shoulder length hair was quirky and offbeat (and made movies). When a few years later I watched Rushmore for the first time, followed immediately by The Royal Tenenbaums I knew I was hooked on a new director. The Darjeeling Limited had just been released, so I ran to a theater. I loved it. I checked out The Life Aquatic and Bottle Rocket on illegal online streams. I thought they were alright.
And yet, just as quickly as I fell in love I fell out. As people I knew and respected complained about the overbearing and cutesy style others created endless parodies to show how “easy” the aesthetic is to create (which still continues to this day, and I will not be discussing the AI or TikTok trends). His next film wasn’t another R-rated picture, but an animated adaptation of a children’s book. If everyone else was going to dismiss him I could and would as well. His movies were not just surface-level fluff with unrealistic settings (ew) and insufferable characters (ugh). When he returned to adult-oriented fare with Moonrise Kingdom I just skipped it altogether. Who needed Wes Anderson? Not me.
What converted me back was, ultimately going to see The Grand Budapest Hotel in a theater because there was nothing else interesting playing. I tried, desperately, to be snarky and dismissive but it was no use—the beautiful tableaus, the bittersweet (and ultimately heartbreaking) narrative, the subtext of the tragic and unforgiving march of progress. This wasn’t some shallow arts and crafts piece, it was a deep and affecting drama that hasn’t once left me since that day. I wondered aloud to anyone who would listen if the movie would still work as well without the style I was still pretending to loathe, and realized, ultimately, that it wouldn’t/ Why not? Because the style, the aesthetic, does not exist to please the director. It is there to comment and enhance the real stories being told, stories about the limits of control.
Bottle Rocket, if I can simplify a few complex ideas, is a story all about a young man, so out of control that he commits himself to a mental institution, trying to grab the reins and be the driver of his life. The larger question is, of course, can a person ever control their own life? From there, Wes’ movies begin break down the answer into sections, occasionally exploring the same themes and overlapping. Rushmore shows that you cannot control your future or your success, no matter how hard you try. Tenebaums, Life Aquatic, and Darjeeling all explore the futility of trying to control your family, both real and found. Moonrise Kingdom reminds us all that we cannot control children and we cannot control hormones. We’ve already covered the progression of time we cannot control from Budapest, but it also explores how we cannot control the culture we live in regardless of our love, money, or power. Even further, The French Dispatch is an examination of our inability to control real-life narratives. Even the two animated movies explore these themes in combination. In Wes’ eyes, control in real life is futile.
So when that scene in the phone booth moved immediately into another where Augie complies and tells his kids their mom’s reason for not being there (she died three weeks prior), it was clear to me that the themes of control were no longer subtext, but the entire point. As more characters arrive their grasp on control fades rapidly, until the end of their first day when the universe itself throws a meteor-sized curveball that upends existence as we know it. If Bottle Rocket asked “can a person control their life?” then Asteroid City, nearly three decades later, answers, definitively, no they cannot. There are too many factors, too many possibilities, too many inexplicable actions.
There is also the matter of the framing device, in academy ratio, in black and white, that showcase a few scenes of the making of the play we are now viewing in cinescope. A writer who does not wish to be disturbed is forced to see a monologue from a prospective actor, and he opens his doors (and more). A spurned actress is unexpectedly convinced to return by a series of messages from the director, of which the sender only intended her to hear one of them depending on her mood. An acting coach, in order to help the writer break through a block in his narrative, tells his students to improvise (a word likely never once uttered on a Wes Anderson set before) what it might be like to be asleep, or to dream since that is where the scene will take place.
In these short scenes, we can see that the lives of the real people playing the characters in Asteroid City are just as out of control, and the way they make sense of it is not by trying to put on a façade but instead to put on a play. They all come together to perform, to make art, to tell a story. What we see in the movie is not a movie, but the imagination of all the actors and the writer and the director and the audience filling in the blanks of the narrative. According to Wes, that is how we make sense of the world. It is why, I think, he is so methodical and exacting in his style. He knows the world is out of control, his own life is out of control, but in his art he can pretend he has some.
Throughout the film, as the events of the first day ripple out, the characters all find their own ways of processing through art. Some make drawings, some write songs, some take photographs of the place and its people. Others just drink martinis from a vending machine. But through it all they strive to gain control despite the impossibility of it. It’s beautiful, really, the way people all do this in their own way. It just takes a craftsman like Wes to portray it so exactly.
Epilogue, spoilers.
There are three scenes near the end that have stuck with me since my first viewing and may never leave me. The first is quick. While Augie and Midge (Scarlett Johanssen) discuss the future of their relationship, Augie inexplicably places his hand (seemingly intentionally) on a quickie griddle, burning himself instantly. Midge asks why he did this, he cannot say. The actor playing Augie asked about the moment earlier when he first met the writer, neither could answer. We’ll never know why he did it, and maybe that’s the point.
Next is something I can’t remember ever seeing before—a dialogue done in monologue. Still unable to understand his character’s motivation to burn his hand, Augie leaves the set to question the director (still, no answer). He then goes outside to get some air before the play’s finale and sees on the other side an actress he knows, played by Margot Robbie. She is his deceased wife, or at least she was in a scene that was ultimately cut from the production. But she still remembers every line and recites it. It’s a message to Augie and her children about letting go, about grief. It’s a scene from an entirely different and more intimate play (likely why it was cut for time), but it’s also too poignant and beautiful to cut from the film. And so, Wes shows it to us, entirely recite by Robbie, and it reminds us of how the time is always wrong. Robbie mourns the loss of the scene just as Augie mourns his wife (and the cast will soon be mourning the play’s writer when he dies suddenly in six weeks).
Lastly, the most enigmatic line in any Wes Anderson film: “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep”. Returning to the sleep improvisation, the main characters begin shouting this at the screen one after the other after the other until the television production fades to black before the epilogue of its own. I couldn’t understand what it meant, but I knew it couldn’t be meaningless. Wes, as discussed, is exacting. Nothing is by accident. But I hope he never answers because as I’ve formed my own interpretation I want to hold onto it. Whatever it means to you is valid, but I want to share my reading now that I’ve seen the film again.
Art and storytelling has been discussed by many as like coming from a dream. We can’t say where our ideas come from but they have to come from somewhere. We make them up in our heads, recite them to the world, change them, edit them, make them make sense. We control the stories we create, and we create the worlds we want to inhabit (even the depressing ones). But we’re also trying to wake up from the nightmare that is real life, the uncontrollable hell that Wes reminds us we live in and seems endlessly fascinated by. In the end, we tell these stories, we make this art, and we have our hobbies as a way to control something. We do it all to wake up. But you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.
During the improve session it is mentioned that going to sleep is giving up control completely. We don’t die, but we aren’t there anymore. Our bodies remain but we are gone until we are done, letting whatever happens around us happen indiscriminately. If we are going to control what we can, make more art, tell more stories, we need to give ourselves over. You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep. Stop trying to control everything and just control what you can. The rest will happen as it does, and that’s more than ok.
I also work in marketing and have always been fascinated by advertising, so this isn’t too much of a surprise. The ad in question can still be found on YouTube here: