Total(ity) Cinema: Asteroid City's Celestial Flirtation

Watching the solar eclipse in April, I thought repeatedly about 'Asteroid City' and the way Wes Anderson uses its alien encounter to liken one’s encounter with art to an encounter with the cosmic.

Focus Features

By Charline Jao

“I don’t play him as an alien, actually. I play him as a metaphor,” says Jeff Goldblum’s unnamed character in one of the metatextual behind-the-scenes scenes in Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City. The aforementioned alien appears about halfway through the movie (or rather, the theatrical play, if we defer to the behind-the-scenes plot), interrupting an event at the film's youth astronomy convention. Children and parents alike don boxes over their heads in order to observe “astronomical ellipses.” Light streams from a pin-prick and three spots appear in front of them on the inside of the box. Suddenly, a fourth light shines from a UFO hovering over them. A stop-motion alien appears with an unsure expression, grabs the asteroid in the crater that has become a fixture of the site (and the name of the city), and, in a haste, departs.

Despite the alien, Asteroid City is not a science fiction film, but rather a play within a television documentary broadcast within a film. The story of the Junior Stargazers in the titular 1950s town is punctuated by scenes of the story’s playwright and actors preparing for the show, which is then punctuated by the narrations of a television host (Bryan Cranston). The result is a film that contemplates the fluidity between life, fiction, and audience, as each informs and changes the other. These plots orbit (sorry) each other.

Asteroid City (the play, the Anderson movie) protagonist Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) is mourning his dead wife. In another scene, the actor playing him, Jones Hall (also Jason Schwartzman), talks to the woman who would have played his wife before the role was written out of the play. In each scene, the characters and audience alike experience a different kind of felt absence. In the mix of writer, actor, and director characters, we watch how these connections creep into their lives and transform their multi-layered relationships. This overlap is triple-fold for Scarlett Johansson, our actress who plays an actress playing an actress.

In this rumination on the filmmaking/staging process, it is easy to overlook the role the audience plays in this exchange. After all, we are endpoints more than collaborators. But the audience is the key to understanding the weird alien encounter that sits at the center of Asteroid City. The movie consciously withholds the follow-up to Goldblum’s unnamed actor's assertion about the alien: a metaphor for what? “I don’t know yet. We don’t pin it down,” he replies. The implied answer is so grand that it almost feels too silly to say — because what can it be but cinema itself? The dark sky is the dimming of the lights, the light streaming from the back of the cardboard boxes recalls the projector, and the illuminated dots are the screen. The film is filled with these connections between the technology of cosmic observation and the technology of filmmaking. For instance, the Steenbeck family is in the business of making pictures: Junior Stargazer Woodrow’s (Jake Ryan) project is one that allows him to project images onto the moon, while his father Augie is a war photographer.