I walked away from Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City wondering whether it was bad at clearly making a meaningful point, or whether I just wasn’t smart enough to understand it.
After reading some reviews and discussing it ad nauseum with my girlfriend, I now feel confident in saying that both of those things are true, and that’s not only okay, but seemingly intentional. Its disorienting and chaotic narrative of recursively nested vignettes, individually delightful but seemingly disconnected from any larger immediately cohesive point, begin to come together as a whole only upon further reflection.
This is a film that doesn’t want you to get it immediately. It invites you to reflect and simmer on the individual significance of each interaction in the aftermath of the overall experience and appreciate the hidden meaning which becomes apparent only with time to process (just as the photographer’s photos can’t be evaluated by the subjects until they’ve had time to develop).
The major themes here are death, meaning, and different ways of dealing with discomfort in the face of questions which, while they may ultimately have answers, are beyond our immediate ability to understand.
These themes are addressed with subtlety in some scenes, such as the young children’s inability to comprehend the significance of their mother’s death and their initial lack of reaction to it (as well as their subsequent ineffectual attempts to change it with insistence on a ritual meaningful only to them), and blatantly in others. At one point an actor breaks the fourth wall of the play within a play to ask the playwright about the meaning inherent to his seemingly self-destructive act and is told that “it just happens” and that he should keep moving anyway. In case you missed the significance of this, as I did at first, he’s breaking character to ask his creator questions about his motivation and meaning and discovering that he won’t be getting any satisfying answers and has to keep going anyway.
When you consider the film from this lens, holding these themes in mind and reflecting on every individual scene you just watched, you begin to appreciate the hidden meaning dripping out of every moment that was right in front of you even though you couldn’t see it at the time (as when the older child points out that the blinking lights a scientist has always dismissed as repetitive noise are actually an intentionally broadcast date). More cohesive thematic threads begin to emerge, and you start to form a fuzzy outline of some of the existential commentary Wes is trying to communicate throughout the film—not by simply stating it directly, of course, but by drawing it out of your personal post hoc attempts to make sense of a bewildering, though not unenjoyable, experience.
This, I think, is one of the most important experientially instructive lessons of the film: that personal meaning is there to be found even amidst confusion and apparent absurdity, even if not all questions are answered to your satisfaction, assuming that you’re curious and thoughtful enough to go looking for it.
Whether you allow each of these fragmentary vignettes to fully develop in your mind and continue to mine them in retrospect for additional glimpses of insight, or whether you simply accept the moments of absurdity with a lack of comprehension and move on with your life (as happens for the characters at so many different moments in the film), it is undeniably an interesting piece of art.
I have no doubt that I’ll be reflecting on it for quite some time, and for this reason alone I have to recommend it… even if, like me, you walk out of it feeling like you didn’t quite understand it as a whole.
And that’s okay. We move on anyway.