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.
“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.
Like a movie, the ellipses eclipse is an event of both new information and wonder. The phenomenon, which Tilda Swinton’s Dr. Hickenlooper calls a “celestial flirtation,” is an analog for the flirtation of the film, which lures the audience in. She states:
Twice every 57 years, when the earth, the sun, the moon, and the galactic plane of the Milky Way all combobulate along the same angle of orbital interest, the radiant energy of three neighboring stellar systems induces a parallel ecliptic transit, thus all but proving the hypothesis of celestial flirtation.
The hitch, of course, is that the math doesn’t work!
But maybe one of you, one day, will be the genius who solves that problem.
The explanation, at first listen, floats in one ear and out the other — one’s sci-fi-trained brain shifts to a suspension of disbelief that goes: sure, why not? But a careful ear will notice the parallel between the three neighboring systems, the three levels of fictionality (play, TV documentary, film), and their strategic moments of alignment.
To introduce a phenomenon only to emphasize its apparent impossibility or incalculable nature, though, is another matter altogether. If the math to show this parallel did work, perhaps what we would have is something akin to film theorist André Bazin’s “total cinema”: “an integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own image.” In Hickenlooper’s suggestion that someone might “be the genius who solves that problem,” we hear the echoes of Bazin’s famous line: “Cinema has not yet been invented!”
But the operative word in Hickenlooper's explanation, of course, is flirtation.
Flirtation — between Johansson’s Midge and Schwartzman’s Augie, between their children (two young Stargazers), between the play’s writer Conrad Earp and the actor Jones Hall — is what gives Asteroid City (the play, the movie) its thrall and texture. It is no coincidence that the image Woodrow decides to project onto the moon as a message to the alien is “WS+DC,” a love note to his crush (“A universal message, not only to earthlings”). Like flirtation, which ends (for better or worse) when objects become too close, one cannot look too directly at the brilliant phenomenon or they risk a burn in the back of their eye. As Hickenlooper warns the Stargazers:
Remember, if you look directly at the ellipses rather than through your refracting box, not only will you not actually see the effect, but you'll burn the dots straight into your retina, probably permanently.
I know that for a fact, because they’re still burned into mine from when I was 11 going on 12.
That’s when I realized I wanted to be an astronomer, which is another story.
What a world, where the moment something scars you, you become intimately tied with it forever. It’s no surprise that various mythologies made sense of eclipses by personifying the moon and the sun and viewing their overlaps as violent and romantic in equal measure. In the movie theater, we cannot look directly at the light, but instead, at its projection. The burn in the retina is a kind of photo-negative — you do not see the effect, only its aftermath. Cinephilia has its risks! After all, we say that people flirt with danger and disaster, not with stability and safety. Without condoning my own behavior, I will confess that, when I watched the solar eclipse of 2024, I could not resist looking directly once or twice.
Flirtation, like a joke, disappears when one puts it under a microscope. Is it a kind of play or simply a cover for something more serious? Is it a means to an end, or an end in-and-of itself? When scholars and academics write about flirtation, they distinguish it from seduction, erotics, courtship, desire, and romance. It naturally eludes or comes to an end with certainty. All studies, in some way, refer back to German sociologist Georg Simmel’s 1923 essay “Flirtation,” in which he writes:
The essence of flirtation, expressed with paradoxical brevity, is this: where love is present, having and not-having are also present, whether in its fundament or in its external aspect. And thus where having and not-having are present — even if not in reality but only in play — love, or something that fills its place, is also present.
The maneuvers of having and not-having, the laws of attraction and repulsion; the math doesn’t work, but maybe one of you one day will be the genius who solves the problem.
As I watched the solar eclipse in April under full totality in Central New York, I thought repeatedly about Asteroid City and the way Anderson used this alien encounter to liken one’s encounter with art to an encounter with the cosmic. This connection is a familiar one, from the mythologies that people would create from the figures they saw on the moon to the early Georges Méliès film A Trip to the Moon (where the journey is as much about encountering film as it is the extraterrestrial) and the central assertion of Nam June Paik's video art project Moon is the Oldest TV. Artists have long seen a resonance between the night sky and the dark room of the movie theater. Some consider the first-ever film to be the sequence of images that Jules Janssen took to capture the transit of Venus. Even more simply, Anderson’s work with star-studded casts finds another joke in a star named after Midge Campbell (Midge Campbell X-9 Major), which complements an earlier statement in the movie that the dead are “in the stars.” What is the difference between a Stargazer and a film-lover (or, for that matter, a lover)?
While watching the sky turn pitch black and then become bright again, I felt like I could understand how someone could have a sublime revelation in such a moment. You are one person before the experience. Afterward, you’ll find that nothing has changed about you physically, nor is the world radically changed from what it was a few minutes ago — and yet, everything feels different. For a moment, what follows can only be a crisis of faith, an inability to move forward, the shocks of rediscovering a new worldview and placing oneself into it, hostility (encapsulated by the governmental conspiracy that results in statements like Asteroid City's “I don’t think he’s working for the Russians or the Red Chinese, but you never know”), or a sense of profound wonderment. Like Asteroid City's young schoolteacher (Maya Hawke), who struggles to continue teaching her original curriculum on the solar system in the eclipse's aftermath, doubt becomes exceedingly powerful. In Noema Magazine, Laurence Pevsner writes about his love of solar eclipses and his uncertain memories: “For a long time, I thought it was my memories. What did I really see? Is my memory true? Can I trust my own mind?” Like the young Stargazer Shelly (Sophia Lillis), one might build a singular obsession afterward (staring at Rorschach images, she utters, “That’s an alien eating an apple. That’s an alien doing jumping jacks. That’s an alien in a top hat. That’s an alien climbing a ladder. That’s an alien on a racehorse. That’s an alien…”).
Author Annie Dillard describes her experience of viewing an eclipse as like being sucked into a movie. “I was watching a faded color print of a movie filmed in the Middle Ages; I was standing in it, by some mistake. I was standing in a movie of hillside grasses filmed in the Middle Ages. I missed my own century, the people I knew, and the real light of day.” Asteroid City’s visitation from another world, made even more pronounced by Anderson’s choice to switch into stop-motion — a demanding medium that famously requires careful and repeated physical manipulation — is another such kind of transport. It is what happens when the film stumbles upon a truth or experience so compelling that you are forever a different person. It is the moment when the illusory nature of cinema is — for a moment — overcome and becomes real (as Nicole Kidman famously declares in her AMC ad, “Because here, they are.”) Whether you choose to follow that change professionally (as Woodrow does with a new scholarship for studying celestial flirtation) or hold it internally (as Augie does, moving through grief) is your choice.
For Anderson’s characters, this moment is a shock akin to the emotional punch of briefly reviving a deceased loved one (“Who knows, Woodrow, maybe she is in the stars”) or a scalding burn on the hand. The second appearance of the spaceship near the film's conclusion — which results in the return of the asteroid (now “inventoried”) — triggers the next metatextual scene. Augie/Jones asks, “Why does Augie burn his hand on the Quicky-Griddle? I still don’t understand the play,” before walking off the set and past a television camera to speak to the playwright:
“Do I just keep doing it?”
— “Yes!”
“Without knowing anything?”
— “Yes!”
He eventually goes outside the building, where the actress (Margot Robbie) meant to play Augie’s deceased wife talks to him about their scene, which was cut from the play. While this is the final visitation for the characters of Asteroid City, however, it is not the final visitation of the film.
In the alien’s third and final appearance, the costumed figure holds the asteroid and silently stands in the spotlight among the play’s playwright, actor, and directors, with the television host in the foreground. Amidst this promised parallel of three neighboring stellar systems, they exclaim repeatedly, “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep!” Several of the film’s actors have read the line as a meditative one about attention, with Steven Park calling it “a little bit of a zen koan, that’s my interpretation, where you can’t quite understand it intellectually.” But slumber, here, seems more like an immersive hypnosis. This scene, which verges on group hysteria, emerges after the playwright states he’d “like to make a scene where all my characters are each gently/privately seduced into the deepest, dreamiest slumber of their lives as a result of their shared experience of a bewildering and bedazzling celestial mystery.”
When discussing this proposed sleep scene, Asteroid City's acting teacher Saltzburg Keitel (Willem Dafoe) says:
Sleep: is not death. The body keeps busy (breathing air, pumping blood, thinking). Maybe you pay visit to your dead mother. Maybe you go to bed with ex-wife. Or husband! Maybe you climb the Matterhorn. Connie: you wake up with new scene three-quarters written in the head already. Schubert: you wake up with a hangover. Important things happen. Is there something to play? I think so. Let’s work on scene from the outside in: be inert — then dream.
What are we to make of this final alien visitation? Is he there for the actors? Or is this a visitation to us, the inert audience in the theater seat? Goldblum’s actor might not pin down the metaphor, but the alien’s presence is again that of carrier — this time, in a strange realm of dreaming where memories, ideas, and desires come to life.
As the film cuts back to a mostly empty Asteroid City (now renamed Alien Landing, USA), we watch the Steenbeck family getting ready to depart. Our characters have grieved, prizes have been awarded for scientific excellence, and Woodrow has come of age. Have they “woken up?” Or have they simply found new dreams?
Anderson’s alien-as-film-as-dream is less about the navigation between fiction and life and more about the fact that there is always life in fiction (and vice versa). Coincidental events may make the interactions of these spheres of life, dreams, and art more pronounced, creating moments of sublime, observable parallels, but these worlds are ever-present; they never stop moving. The body keeps busy and so does the solar system and so does Wes Anderson.
Eclipses, Pevsner writes, seem so coincidental that they feel “impossible.” They only happen because we are on a “perfect planet at the perfect moment to see a near-perfect alignment, this ultimate trick of the light.” A “trick of the light” — what a perfect phrase! It is deceptive, playful, scientific, and magical all at the same time, and so excellently captures why we return again and again to be tricked, whether by the cosmos or by films.