Nathaniel Carper-Young, Sophomore
Wes Anderson, singular aesthete and auteur darling of the 21st century (The Grand Budapest Hotel, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom), has dreamed up a new spectacle: Asteroid City. It is perhaps his most accomplished work to date.
The film is, even by Wes Anderson’s standards, a gonzo and labyrinthine production. It is fluid in every sense of the word, operating on countless different planes at once. It is a damning condemnation of consumer culture at one moment, a deeply moving portrait of fractured familial relationships the next. This speaks to an extraordinary development in the director’s prowess. Just five years ago, Anderson threw together the twee and unseemly Isle of Dogs, a directorially unrecognizable film entirely subsumed by its cutesy inclinations. Here, though, his characterizations are truer and more human than ever before, and his decadently artificial formalism reaches its pinnacle.
Asteroid City is a film of many facets—it is rather literary in its usage of motifs and wry relation of information; it is literally and aesthetically theatrical in its presentation; it is a film about belonging, artistic ambition, interpersonal conflicts; it is whatever you wish it to be. However, the most pertinent of the film’s throughlines is its varied critique of the obsession with commodity culture that belies America’s nascent moment—the contemporary history of then (the film is set in 1955), now, and everything in-between.
The film, after Bryan Cranston’s tongue-in-cheek televisual introduction, opens on a shot of a freight train carrying various consumer goods—grapefruits, John Deere tractors, new Pontiac models (not to mention a nuclear warhead). We follow this freight train for a while, and then we see it cross through an invitingly-hued podunk wasteland; none other than the eponymous Asteroid City. With it arrives the nuclear family, disembodied—a father, three daughters, one son, no spouse. The film presents a (rather crude) contrast between people and product, and there are many such juxtapositions peppered throughout the film. There is a singular instance of this—the film’s narrative and thematic centerpiece: the alien.
Upon the arrival of the nameless alien (only characterized as “six-foot-seven” and a possible worker for “…the Russians or the red Chinese”), everything is set in motion. Photographs are taken; observations are made; drastic actions are carried out (the immediate lockdown of the city at the will of the federal government). Most notably, the alien loses its status as a being and is transformed into a talk-of-the-town abstraction. The alien becomes a commodity, and the film’s characters cannot get enough of this commodity—they talk about it until they lose interest. They exhaust themselves of intellectual curiosity: when the commodity is extinguished, they are left empty, looking only for the next object of consumption. Such is our modern tragedy.