In the Flesh: Asteroid City

Wes Anderson was my very first Favorite Director. Watching The Royal Tenenbaums at the age of thirteen did as much to kindle my love of film as any other single event in my life, and for the next decade I watched and re-watched it along with The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited, Bottle Rocket, and The Grand Budapest Hotel. In my twenties I began to tire of his work, put off by the increasingly self-conscious preciousness of his compositions, the twee tone of his actors’ deadpan performances, his thematic fixations on absentee fatherhood and dead women. It seemed like he was sanding all the edges off his work. To fall in love with a formative artist all over again is an incredible feeling, and Asteroid City, which takes the director’s signature dollhouse aesthetic and layers it over with specters, artifacts, and apparitions, gave that to me.

There are two alien visitations in Asteroid City. The first is a dazzling claymation sequence in which an interstellar visitor (Jeff Goldblum) descends to earth before a stunned audience of junior astronomers to collect a meteorite before returning to his ship. The second occurs when actor Jones Hall (Jason Schwartzman), unable to puzzle out his character Augie Steenbeck’s motivation for purposely touching a hot plate during an emotionally tense moment with fellow actor Mercedes Ford (Scarlett Johansson), walks out onto the balcony of the theater. The actress playing his deceased wife (Margot Robbie) comes out to meet him on a neighboring balcony, a Brooklynite angel in luminous black and white, a visitation from beyond the veils of life and fiction. “Is she a ghost?” Hall/Steenbeck asks Ford/Midge Campbell in an earlier scene. “It’s not clear,” Campbell responds.

Hall, former lover and discovery of the playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), is shattered by Earp’s sudden death. “Use your grief,” Campbell tells him as they act out a scene from a film together within the play. What grief? The character’s grief over the death of his fictional wife? Hall’s over the death of his real lover? It’s the first time that Anderson’s longtime utilization of nested metafictional conceits has felt like a real meditation on something besides metafiction itself. Who are we, and in what context? Are we, like Bryan Cranston’s Rod Serling-esque narrator, a part of the world, or are we only watching it unfold somewhere far below us? Can we touch wonder, or only be touched by it? This woman telling us we’ll be alright; is she a ghost? It’s not clear.