Asteroid, Artifice, Anderson

This article was originally published in Mars’ Hill, volume 28, issue 5.

Wes Anderson seems to be on a never-ending quest to one-up himself. The American filmmaker’s name is synonymous with his distinctive creative flair. For those familiar with his work, the sound of Anderson’s name conjures images of symmetrical frames, intentionally stilted performances, and dollhouse sets. Almost three decades into his career, Anderson’s style has become increasingly idiosyncratic with each project. He leans more and more into the aesthetics he has become known for. However, if the annoying “Wes Anderson trend” on TikTok this past summer has revealed anything about the filmmaker, it is that these unique visual choices are more than just choices. There is an underlying artistic and thematic motivation for these tricks.

Anderson’s movies are artificial. Are not almost all movies artificial? They are written in advance, recorded with cameras and microphones, lit with electric lights, and performed by actors. The difference here is that Anderson wants you to know you are watching something unreal; the artifice of the craft is part of the experience. Whereas most filmmakers want the viewer to believe in the reality of the film for its runtime, even if we ultimately know that the film itself is not reality, Anderson keeps one foot out of reality at all times.

For the best exploration of Anderson’s style, I turn to Asteroid City (2023), his most recent feature film. In Asteroid City, we see Anderson explicitly trying to explain his peculiar visual choices. The film is one of his most narratively complex. The film is structured through a series of frame narratives, each adding a layer of complexity and artifice to the story being told. To try to summarize its many parts, the film is a television program that dramatizes the life of playwright Conrad Earp and the writing of his play Asteroid City, which is intercut with a group of actors performing the play. Where the frame narratives of The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), for example, are ultimately just to add texture to the execution of the story, the various narratives of Asteroid City begin to blend into each other, creating this weird bowl of metatextual soup.

Asteroid City is Anderson’s most visually ambitious film with its sprawling practical sets, shifting colour palettes and aspect ratios, miniatures and stop-motion, and meticulous blocking. As exemplified in this film, Anderson borrows a lot from theatre with its specific blocking, obvious sets, and frequent breaking of the fourth wall. He’s making the inherent artifice of film more apparent. In a play, the viewer is more aware of the obvious artifice surrounding the story because of the limitations of the stage. The same thing is evident here. Anderson himself has been clear about the influence of American playwright Sam Shepherd and the theatre culture of New York in the 1950s on Asteroid City. These influences are also apparent in many of Anderon’s other projects as well. Rushmore (1998) clearly borrows from theatre in its story: the film is about a high schooler who stages elaborate theatrical productions at his school. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, his 2023 Netflix-released short film, highlights the inherent theatricality of Anderson with sets built for obvious stages and uses of flies and stagehands to shift location.

Anderson’s best films are the ones that pair the humorous with the melancholic and the comedic with the tragic. “Anderson's characters are often figures on the cusp of crisis,” writes film scholar Kim Wilkins. “Many experience existential malaise, trauma, or grief, and some attempt suicide.” These characters go through a lot throughout a given film: divorce, broken relationships, violence, familial deaths, social isolation, the rise of fascism in Eastern Europe circa the early 20th century, and heartbreak. “Yet,” Wilkins continues, “because of Anderson's use of irony and artifice, his characters are often presented as amusing oddballs rather than deeply troubled figures.” Asteroid City is a perfect example of characters on the edge, both in the world of the play-within-the-movie and the story of the actors and crew working on it. These are people who are struggling through life and all its hardship and uncertainty, despite the veneer of humour that the film puts over itself.

Jason Schwartzman and Tom Hanks in Asteroid City. Photo via Focus Features.

Now, through this blend of the humorous and the melancholic, Anderson creates some very potent moments of catharsis throughout his filmography. Despite the tragedy that befalls the characters, they end on moments of satisfying emotional release, where the world has returned to some sense of rightness. But unlike the majority of his films, Asteroid City struggles to tie up its loose ends. There is not a clear sense of catharsis that the film leaves the audience with. It is a puzzling, confusing movie about intense emotions that never really find themselves resolved. The characters themselves are struggling to understand the meaning of the play by the end of the film.

There is a moment towards the end of the film where actor Jones Hall (played by Jason Schwartzman) suddenly has a profound revelation about the work he is performing. “I still don’t understand the play,” he says. He storms off stage to find the play’s director, Schubert Green (played by Adrien Brody). “Am I doing it right?” Hall asks Green in an earnest, pained voice.

Green sits him down, and, after a moment, says, “You’re doing him just right.”

But Hall still doesn’t get it. “I feel lost,” he says. “Do I just keep doing it? Without knowing anything? . . . I still don’t understand the play.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Green. “Just keep telling the story.”

“Fiction often seeks to explain the human condition, to offer answers to questions that elude us in our own lives, but Asteroid City refuses that mandate,” wrote critic Sam Adams in his review of the film for Slate. If you are anything like me, you will find this lack of proper resolution to be utterly compelling, making for one of Anderson’s most enigmatic and complex works yet. But there are many for whom this approach simply does not work, where the lack of any sort of concrete answer will drive you mad. Asteroid City’s fictional author, Conrad Earp, does not really know what it is about either. When asked what his play is about, he, after a pause, replies, “Infinity, and I don’t know what else.”

Anderson’s filmography is not just about distinctive visuals and gentle scores by Alexandre Desplat, as your social media algorithm might suggest, but there is an artistic motivation behind it all. Critics of the director’s work often use his love of stylized visuals as a critique, saying that the artifice of Anderson’s films makes them emotionally hollow. I could not disagree more. There is a purpose to every choice, to all the artifice, and to those iconic symmetrical shots. Perhaps the artifice is an attempt to reconcile with an outside world that seems random and chaotic. The hyper-organization of his style, then, is a way of making sense of it. The worlds Anderson presents are never kind, often pushing characters into extreme, existential circumstances. Maybe, like Green and Hall and Earp, we will never understand the story. Maybe we just have to keep telling it.