“Here I go.”

In the year 2017, I used to carry this little over-the-shoulder satchel around with me. It contained two underutilized cameras stuffed with slowly dying 35mm film stock. There were also back up rolls with ISOs for varied situations of lighting, a notebook specifically formatted for logging framerates, ISO, and focal length, two black Pilot G2-07s, and an eighth. “But why was the film stock slowly dying,” you might ask. Well it’s because I fucking hated taking photographs.

I hated taking them for two reasons:

Everytime I tried to take a photo of my friends they would turn to me and smile, thereby ruining the candid and totally authentic moment which I was about to chemically immortalize.
I love street photography but I lacked the temerity to take photos of strangers without permission.

There’s a scene early on in Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City where our protagonist, war-photojournalist Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) spots the famous actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) and snaps a candid photo. She notices and seems to take offense.

“You didn’t ask permission.”

“I never ask permission.”

And so immediately a major theme of the film, which I will call “the intentional creation of frames,” becomes text. It’s not just photographic frames either—narrative framing devices, window frames, oratory table setting, aspect ratios, quarantines…. A strategically deployed frame is a means by which to define and present a subject. But it can also result in distance and containment. In certain contexts, this might sound dispassionate or sinister—and maybe that’s what Anderson was struggling with during the creation of Asteroid City.

If you Google the plot of Asteroid City, here’s what you’ll see first: “World-changing events spectacularly disrupt the itinerary of a Junior Stargazer/Space Cadet convention in an American desert town circa 1955.” This synopsis is true but grossly incomplete. It’s sort of like describing the plot to Inception as “a man and woman are waiting for a train.”

Asteroid City oscillates between two dreamy narrative levels. We see the production of a play told through the lens of a 1950s TV special, narrated by Bryan Cranston doing his best Rod Serling. When filming the play—despite its heightened themes of nuclear anxiety and alien contact—director of photography and Anderson’s long-time collaborator Robert Yeoman, moves his camera in the precise and comedic deadpan way one would expect from an Anderson joint. The scenes are shown with a full and deeply stylized color pallete and a wide 2.39:1 aspect ratio. The soundtrack is stuffed with oldfangled tunes that sound like they were recorded into an empty can of beans.

The televised special, however, is in black and white and a cubic 1.37:1 aspect ratio. Though the staging is practiced, and the frames are decisive, our line of sight is more aerial and dynamic. The action presses with urgency. To open the film, Alexandre Desplat’s score, unclouded and unbridled, anxiously tugs and tinkles with nervous ideation.

The televised special about the production of a play is staged, acted, and designed more like a play than the play it is supposedly about. On the surface, these formal choices could be seen as a bit overwrought or persnickety. But they begin to make more sense when one understands them less as aesthetics and more as emotional choices in conversation with Anderson’s inspirations, his previous work, and the critiques he has received as a filmmaker.

Not to be reductive, but Anderson jacked some of his signature style directly from Jean Luc-Godard’s film La Chinoise. It’s all there: precocious youngsters, finely orchestrated (yet decidedly candid) side-panning dolly shots, tongue-in-cheek needle drops, sick fonts, little doodads, and—perhaps most importantly—characters looking straight into the lens as establishing shots. But throughout his career, the Texan has deployed these tricks in ways that feel warmer and less acerbic than his French predecessor. His youngsters are more docile, his dolly shots more dollhouse, his needle drops less ironic, and his portraits more lovingly ornamented.

Ah… a center framed character staring blankly into the camera. Has anyone noticed this yet? Has anyone seen that Wes Anderson movies have a certain motif of positioning his characters just so? I’m kidding, of course. In recent times, the cultural aggregators have even begun to enlist the help of AI to replicate the Anderson-Godard pastiche. I still wince at the comedic disappointment I experienced when I first encountered “Lord of the Rings by Wes Anderson.” There was just so much left on the table. It’s the difference between memeification and satirization. These slapstick sideshow suckfests don’t even scratch the surface of what separates Anderson’s sincerity from Godard’s cynicism.

It must be a strange arena to operate in for an artist. A gilded cage for sure, but still a bit of a cage to have one’s schtick so defined and presented back to you. The perpetual peanut gallery of the internet prefers a well-thrown rotten tomato to a round of applause. Whether Wes reads snarky Letterboxd reviews or not, you KNOW he has seen one of those AI renderings of him doing The Matrix or whatever. I wonder if, like myself, he was annoyed with the idea that he would cast Bill Murray as Gandalf.

Side note: If you want to experience some more spiritually attuned imitation, I would direct you to the work of Jared Hess. Particularly a little film called Nacho Libre. Like Anderson, Hess enjoys using the boundaries of his frames (let’s call them punch lines) as a way of creating comedic zones. Characters move in and out of frame to punctuate humor. They find themselves staged as a way of marking them vulnerable and less self-aware. And they always hit their marks (sometimes knowingly so). Wow! A throughline from Godard to Jack Black! Nacho Liberte.

Speaking broadly, Anderson’s character portraits throughout his filmography are just that: portraits. By that I mean they are not exactly diegetic, if we can borrow the term. These moments exist in the world of the film but not the world of the story. That’s not a distinction so cleanly delineated in most “prestige” experiences these days. There are plenty of contemporary examples of vibey surrealism in our modern storytelling landscape; but, there are less so of Anderson’s overtly arranged dioramas committed to tape. They aren’t posing. They are positioned.

Asteroid City shies away from these scene-transition tableaus and opts instead for constant austere staging. Not only is the style STILL there, it’s MORE there. Anderson is throwing his cake in the compost and eating it too. The subjects are still arranged figurines for our ogling. The difference is this time they know it and they seem to feel a type of way about it.

Anderson detractors will tell you this fussy finagling, this doll-housification, leaves them with the feeling that the artist has gotten so lost in his own sauce that he forgets to imbue his stories with feeling. I would counter that an artist makes themselves known through their choices and this dude makes more choices per frame than perhaps any director in the brief history of film.

All this stylistic context and expectations are what made the best joke in Asteroid City hit so fucking hard. The crowd is all gathered, a spaceship arrives, a sticky little alien guy descends looking close to a literal marionette, J-Shwartz grabs the Pentax and… this friggin alien holds up the asteroid as if to pose for a celebratory pic for mom, y’all. Click. As clever as it is cute.

“You can’t wake up if you don’t go to sleep.”

Here’s the part of this article where I tell you that I’ve only seen this movie once and I don’t yet feel like I’ve got my paws around the third act. Is it messy? Is it overwrought? Is it a perfectly orchestrated convergence of the film’s plot threads, metatextual themes, and character arcs? Perhaps time will tell. What I can tell you now is it made me curious about what Wes would say about season 6 of Community.

The artist’s calvinist journey takes them into their dreamlike work so they may return to the waking world having experienced some needed growth. Perhaps the journey readies them to face the True Challenge, which normally has something to do with mom and dad. To take this journey, many storytellers will use a surrogate—a character who functions as a stand-in for the artist and allows them to traverse these murky waters with lowered stakes. Directors do this all the time. If you want to find the surrogate in a Christopher Nolan film, just look for the guy who wears grey suits and has Christopher Nolan’s haircut. If you want to find the surrogate in a Wes Anderson film, just look for the guy who wears tan suits and has Wes Anderson’s haircut.

In Asteroid City, Jason Schwartzman doesn’t technically play Augie Steenbeck. He plays an actor named Jones Hall, who, while playing Augie, becomes increasingly frustrated with the constraints of the play. He becomes so frustrated that he abandons the set of the play and confronts the play’s director Schubert Green (Adrien Brody, who played his brother in Darjeeling Limited) saying that he doesn’t understand his character’s motivation. Schubert straight up tells him he doesn’t need to.

Remembering the exact order of events in the third act of this film is difficult but here’s a few final nuggets to chew on:

There’s a scene involving Schubert that utilizes over-the-shoulder photography for what I believe is the first time in Anderson’s filmography.
The film gets so confusing that Cranston’s narrator (wearing a great blue suit) accidentally finds himself in the wrong narrative level.
Schubert communicates with Mercedes Ford (Johansson) by having an actor who looks like a younger version of himself read his words.
The funniest Letterboxd review of this movie that I read just listed off the literary references the film made as a flex. That would be bad enough but this is a movie that features a little nerd—in a shirt that says “brainiac” on it—sitting in a circle with a group of other little nerds and playing a game where they just memorize an ever growing list of smart people.

Whether you get down on literary references, nice suits, world class production design and cinematography, or you just like Jeff Goldblum, I think there’s something for you here. Asteroid City is both a return to form and a major work of Anderson’s because it feels like he finally had something to clean out of the ol’ dream hole. The fact that he’s one of the most successful, distinct, imitable, and sincere auteurs of the 21st century—and that this fact obliged him to get all meta on our asses—isn’t something I begrudge. I applaud it and I applaud him for getting all the way in his satchel for it.

In Asteroid City, Wes Anderson Finally Goes To Sleep