Imagine a 1950s TV show.
Well, no need to imagine it, I suppose. Just flip on that massive 16-inch black-and-white television set and tune in.
Now imagine a TV play about the famous playwright Conrad Earp—a show that gives viewers a behind-the-scenes look at his creation process …
Well, watching a man type with two fingers and drink heavily while working through multiple rewrites late into the night really isn’t that interesting. So, let’s instead imagine his stage creation. A play filled with sets, flats and talented actors.
Or better yet, let’s just plop those actors down into the colorful story at the play’s core. No sets, no flats—just technicolor reality. What perhaps Conrad Earp imagines as he types with his two fingers and drinks away the night.
So … imagine Earp’s story of Asteroid City, a quaint little stop-off somewhere in the sun-bleached cross-section of highways between California, Arizona and Nevada. Imagine its bright blue skies, startling yellow sands and crisp orange-tan rock formations.
Imagine an atomic bomb detonating in the distance, and a huge crater at the center of town that was created by a falling asteroid. (Well, OK, it was a meteorite, but you get the gist.)
Now imagine the parents of young, brilliant, Junior Stargazers bringing their kids to Asteroid City, so the kids can demonstrate their amazing inventions and compete for a scholarship.
There’s the grieving father. Well, OK, he’s not grieving so much as fretting that he hasn’t yet told his children that their mother died three weeks ago. I mean, when is the best time to tell them that sort of thing?
Then there’s the pretty actress. She’d rather be rehearsing for her next role, but hey, you’ve got to be the mother you were born to be sometime. Thankfully, her second ex is dealing with her other brats someplace else. L.A., maybe. But who cares?
Oh, and other interesting people are gathered for the Junior Stargazer event. A teacher and her gaggle of churchgoing school children. Some happy cowboys who missed their bus ride. A female astronomist—a rarity in the 1950s.
Oh, and aliens. Space aliens show up, too.
Yes, there’s a story to be told here. There are questions to be asked.
But first … imagine a word from our sponsors.
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Augie Steenbeck is a photographer and dad who doesn’t appear to be very good at that second role. When we first meet him, he isn’t connecting very well with his kids about their mother’s illness and death. And he’s planning on abandoning them at their grandfather’s—which, obviously, isn’t a positive thing. But by the story’s end, he has at least decided against the abandonment.
On that same front, Stanley, the kids’ grandfather, doesn’t really want responsibility for them either. But he does show up to take them home with him. In fact, Stanley notes that he gives complete and unquestioning support to the people he loves. And that includes his daughter, and by extension, her kids.
When the space aliens arrive, a cowboy helps reassure a group of worried kids, broadly giving them his own brand of comfort.
When a bus full of school kids rolls into town, the kids get out and pray for their journey. Later, one of the kids writes a song/prayer to the space aliens.
A number of statements suggest that faith and prayer are perfunctory and pointless. For instance, when Augie tells his kids about their mother’s death, he says: “Let’s say she’s in heaven. Which doesn’t exist for me, of course, but you’re all Episcopalians.” That joke is revisited later when someone asks if life has any meaning.
Augie’s three young daughters are called “little princesses” by a waitress, and they reply that they’re not princesses but rather a vampire and two witches. Later the girls bury a Tupperware container holding their mother’s ashes in a spell-like ceremony that they hope will raise her from the dead. Later still, the girls convince Stanley to leave the Tupperware buried, and Stanley says a prayer over the final burying spot.
The girls’ older brother, Woodrow, wrestles openly with the idea of belief in God and by the film’s end declares that he does not believe. Augie makes mention of the fact that his mother told him that his father was “with the stars” after he passed away.
Most people staying in Asteroid City rent small cabins for their lodgings. Augie and the actress Midge Campbell have cabins next to each other, and they talk through windows that face one another. Augie watches Midge practice her lines, and she asks him if he’d like to see her nude scene. She proceeds to play it while wrapped in a towel and then drops it at the end. We see a quick glimpse of her fully naked body reflected from a mirrored surface.
Later the two draw closer and Midge’s daughter, Dinah, spies them having a sexual tryst. We see Augie, clothed, and Midge’s bare leg and foot.
We’re also introduced to playwright Conrad Earp who auditions an actor for the role of Augie. After the actor reads his lines, the writer gives him the role. The actor then removes his pants (we don’t see anything critical), kisses Conrad and kneels in front of him before the camera cuts away.
The cabins have an outdoor communal shower. We see partially clothed people using them. Augie shows someone a picture of his deceased wife lounging in a one-piece bathing suit. A letter references a sexual interlude that two people had in a public bathroom.
Schubert Green, the director of Conrad Earp’s play, is said to have the sexual appetite of a rabbit. Woodrow and Dinah kiss. Midge wears a low-cut robe with apparently nothing underneath on several occasions.
Those in the isolated desert town of Asteroid City will see distant atomic bomb detonations from time to time. After aliens arrive and depart, U.S. soldiers march into town with rifles in hand. We see some shooting at haybales that sport pictures of the space creatures. A train rolls into town carrying a 10-megaton bomb on one of its platforms.
One of the Junior Stargazers presents a “death ray” as his science project invention. He blows up a tossed plate. Every so often, a crook will blaze down Asteroid City’s main street with a gun-firing police car in pursuit.
Woodrow mentions that his photographer father had picked up shrapnel while photographing in a war zone, and Augie displays a small scar on the back of his head. A retired general recounts his life story which includes war and people who lost “arms and legs.”
Stanley always carries a pistol in the waistband of his slacks. While working on her upcoming role, Midge will occasionally wear a greasepaint black eye on one side of her face or the other. At one point, Augie purposely burns his hand on a hot griddle.
Midge plays out a suicide scene while in a bathtub surrounded by spilled pills.
The dialogue includes a use or two of the word “b–ch” And Jesus’ name is crudely misused.
A set of various cantina machines near the motel cabins dispense everything from cigarettes to martinis. The adults drink and smoke constantly. And one kid smokes a cigarette near a campfire with some cowboys who also smoke cigarettes (and a pipe) and toss back beers. In fact, most all of the adults smoke and drink bottles of beer at every public gathering. Augie constantly lights and puffs his pipe.
Stanley notes that his wife drank herself to death. A Stanislavski-like director asks his troupe of actors to recall (among other things) “past experiences with drunkenness to infidelity.”
Characters repeatedly ask about the meaning of things in this film: the meaning of a line, of life, of grief, of guilt, etc. And the film implies through various outcomes and actions that there is no objective meaning or purpose.
The Junior Stargazers break the rules put in place by the government. A wife talks to her husband about getting a divorce. Dinah says of her actress mother, “I’m sick of her face, but I love her voice.”
Our human brains love to find patterns and meaning in the bewildering things around us. And that’s rarely more prevalent in the entertainment world than with a Wes Anderson film.
This odd-duck auteur is so masterful at his eye-candy production design and colorful-but-ludicrous scene work that our brains tell us there must be something deeper in the mix. As we watch his actors talk rapid-fire through the movie’s thickly verbose dialogue with a hunch-shouldered deadpan glaze, we’re convinced that there has to be something brilliant here, some meaning that we’re missing.
That’s definitely the case with Anderson’s latest, Asteroid City. And in a way, you could say the idea of “meaning” is this movie’s point.
Asteroid City’s Russian doll-like movie-within-a-play-within-a-TV-show structure is decidedly creative. Its 1950s styling in monochromatic shadows and bright pastels is visually impressive. And the film’s cavalcade of quirky characters ask one thing over and over: What does it all mean?
Is there meaning in grief? In guilt? In loss? In success? Is there meaning in faith? In art? What about outer space aliens?
And Anderson’s multi-act answer is a stylistic, nihilistic nope.
Now, that doesn’t mean that viewers won’t still walk out of the theater scratching their heads in confusion, like they’ve done with other Wes Anderson pics. They surely will. They’ll also walk out remembering images of boozy interactions; a brief glimpse of full-frontal nudity; a truncated view of a gay sexual tryst; declarations of the fallacy of religion and a general sense that all we hold dear is fairly pointless.
All of those things will be rattling around in moviegoer’s heads. And the meaning behind that isn’t confusing at all.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
