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Wes Anderson has been breaking the fourth wall from very early on in his career. I mean, very literally, there are many moments where he just takes the fourth wall out of the set. So it's no surprise to find him doing it again in Asteroid City.
Here there are three walls, and there's a character standing on this side of where the fourth wall should be looking straight at the audience. But Asteroid City doesn't just break the fourth wall, it kind of shatters it entirely. It makes it difficult to understand where the fourth wall in the story even is, or if there even is one.
It doesn't start inside the narrative and then break out of the fourth wall, it starts outside of the fourth wall and then kind of moves into the narrative and back out and all over the place. Am I not in this? Asteroid City is Wes Anderson at his most narratively and structurally abstract so far.
I hadn't planned it that way. He just sort of did it while I was typing. Is it too extraordinary for you?
Ironically, it seems like it's within this surreal poetic narrative limbo that he finds the freedom to be the most direct he's ever been about his own personal approach to life and art. All that matters is every second of life on stage and our friendship. I want to talk about why I love this movie so much and why I think its surreal, chaotic maze of meta-structure actually serves a purpose. I still don't understand the play. What is Asteroid City about?
73 minutes into the movie, the play's writer gives us an answer. Infinity and I don't know what else. But that's what Asteroid City, the fictional play within the movie, within the TV show, the one written by Conrad Erp and directed by Schubert Green, is about. What is the one written and directed by Wes Anderson that we see when we go to the theater about?
The list of themes and ideas that Asteroid City is exploring is almost as long as the list of names on the movie's poster. If we look very literally at what's on the surface, we can see that Asteroid City touches on loss, grief, America, storytelling, the entertainment industry, stardom, quarantine, aliens, and infinity and I don't know what else. But I think the biggest thematic question the movie explores, the one that underscores everything, is what's the cause of this?
What's the meaning? I don't know where. What do those pulses indicate? What's that? Was I ever there?
Meaning in both life and the creation of art. Why does Zoggy Bird has hand on the quickie griddle? I think if I had to say what I think Asteroid City is about, I'd say I think it's about what it feels like to feel uncertain about everything. To be surrounded by a chaotic world that doesn't offer a break from that uncertainty and most relevant to our current time what it feels like to suddenly be cast into that uncertainty by an outside event outside of your control like a quarantine but maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves where are we coming and when talk to us okay so in the movie there's the black and white portion about the making of the play and there's the play itself which we see in color here we are inside the play War photographer Augie Steenbeck and movie star Mitch Campbell sit in their separate houses under government-mandated quarantine chatting about life and parenthood and how it relates to their work when suddenly the conversation takes a turn.
I think I see how I see us. Hmm? I mean, I think I know now what I realize we are. Okay.
She starts analyzing the relationship from a very meta perspective. Two catastrophically wounded people who don't express the depths of their pain because we don't want to. This line does pretty accurately describe what's going on with their characters, and this is maybe something an actor would say to somebody else as they were getting to know them, but it mostly sounds like something you would say if you were analyzing the subtext or motivation of this relationship and these characters.
It kind of sounds like something a writer or actor would say during the pre-production of a film or a play. That's a little weird, but it doesn't end there. Also notice how Midge mentions that her black eye isn't real because her character doesn't get a black eye in the story. Technically she's talking about the character she's preparing to play in the script she's working on, but this statement also explicitly applies to the character of Midge Campbell in Asteroid City.
These little moments are ways that Anderson is breaking and removing the fourth wall not visually but in the writing. It brings our attention back to the fact that when we're watching a play or a movie, we're not just watching the characters, we're actually simultaneously watching the characters and the actors playing the characters. In fact, in my opinion, you didn't just become Augie, he became you.
I think it's kind of tempting to think about the black and white portions of this film as kind of decorative framing for the real story, which happens during the play in the color portions. But if we remove the fourth wall between these two fictional layers, it collapses into one singular story with the same characters the entire way through. We have to remember, as the host of the TV show tells us, that both the real world portion of the story and the play are fictional as a part of a television program about the creative process. In talking about the creative process, Wes Anderson is showing us how the writer, director, and actor's lives influence their work subtextually.
Even if it's not a direct connection, there's an emotional or personal one that is connected because the actor and the character are literally the same person. That's kind of what our attention is being drawn to here. This sameness between the actor and the character is highlighted with certain lines.
Take for example when Jeff Goldblum, who is playing the alien, is asked what the alien is a metaphor for, he says this. I don't know yet. We don't pin it down.
This mixing of tenses in this line is making it sound like his character is saying he doesn't know yet because he's still waiting on an answer, but the actor is saying on another level, maybe accidentally, that we don't pin it down because he's read the script and he knows that they do never come up with an answer in the story that he's a part of. You can kind of get the same thing in this moment where Augie burns his hand on the quickie griddle and Mitch Campbell says, You really did it. That actually happened. It's almost like her character knew it was going to happen but is surprised when it actually does in the story. I don't know how to explain this exactly, but it's just this weird fusion where it feels like the actor is alive in the story and the story is really happening.
It's a bizarre effect, but it feels very intentional to me. Part of the subtext of these scenes is that Midge Campbell and Augie Steenbeck are actually just the actors Mercedes Ford and Jones Hall the entire time, but the subtext of that subtext is that they're both actually just Jason Schwartzman and Scarlett Johansson the entire time. Or just, I didn't think of that. I didn't think of that. I didn't think of that, I should have.
Did you tell her we were rehearsing again? I didn't think of that, I should have. When we're watching Asteroid City, what we're really watching is Jason Schwartzman playing Jones Hall, playing Augie Steenbeck, saying what his character says, which was written by Conrad Earp, which was written by Wes Anderson, and you can start to see how the alternate title of the play will... as the cosmic wilderness.
By erasing these lines between reality and fiction, or maybe fusing them together, the movie explores the question of the meaning of life and meaning in art simultaneously. Are we playing our characters right? Am I performing Thomas Flight correctly?
Is Wes Anderson performing Wes Anderson correctly? If we're in a play, who's directing it, and is the director happy with how it's all going? You meant to be ashamed of yourselves, are you?
You can't wake up if you don't fall asleep. So you're in a play and you're playing a character, but you don't always know why your character does the things that they do. So you want to understand your character's motivation because you want to know what it all means and you want to do it right. This is our chance to be actually worthwhile in our lifetimes. I see what you mean.
And while you're trying to figure all this out, the world around you is kind of bubbling with insanity. Things that are really happening, shootouts, quarantines, children with weapons, bombs dropping, all feel kind of distant and unreal. A suddenly jarring event might make it difficult to just go on with your life as if nothing happened, even while you're maybe feeling like you should maybe be feeling more about these things than you do. do.
Strangely in this movie the behind the scenes portion, the part that in theory should be closer to real life, looks more like a play and is presented in black and white. It's here in the interior of the play Asteroid City itself, even through all the layers of metaframing devices and visual artifice that you might still forget for a moment. that you're watching a play in a movie.
Where you might forget, as we often do watching stories, that you're watching anything at all. Where a character stops being a character and starts to feel like a person with real emotions. Use your grief.
And often the way that writers and actors produce this effect for the... the viewer is by tapping into their own actual life experience and personal emotions. What Anderson is kind of getting at here is that those moments that feel real and true through all the layers of fiction are actually real and true because often as the viewer, what you're connecting with is not the character, but the truth of the actor or writer's emotions or experiences that just happen to be coming through all of those layers.
There's a reality underneath it all that is making it feel real. It's when we let our hyper-rational thinking mind fall asleep and allow ourselves to dream, when we let go of the need for concrete explanations and our need to really understand that we can wake up to something that feels real within the story. Oh wow.
I think this is true within the creation of art, but perhaps it's also true about life. I don't know. To be honest, I'm tired, this has been a long week, I don't know if this video is really making that much sense or conveying what I'm trying to convey about this film, and the reality is this whole movie is a fabrication so there's no concrete objective explanation of the film that I can discover and then give to you here.
But to make the fabrication that is Asteroid City, the artists working on this movie tapped into their own real emotions and life experiences. And sometimes I think I can sometimes feel that coming through the screen and it feels like Augie Steenbeck is really in grief even though I know it's just Jason Schwartzman the whole time. And it feels like the personal life experience that Anderson is trying to convey through this movie is that sometimes when you're trying to do something whether it's a creative project or just life you might not know if you're doing it right.
You might not know why something happened or even why you did something. And when you feel like that, sometimes you have to just keep doing the work because your cue's coming up and you're wanted back on stage. Just keep telling the story.
You're doing them right. Okay, stop. Some people feel like all this meta-framing and Anderson's visual style pushes away the emotion of the film and makes everything feel more distant.
And I discussed kind of the ins and outs of this Tom from the channel Like Stories of Old for our podcast Cinema of Meaning. It comes back to this whole idea of like there's now two explicit actors talking about their fictional characters who could have had this emotional moment but didn't. And yet them talking about the potentiality of that still felt to me like the most relevant or the most emotionally resonant moment of the movie for me.
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