Asteroid City feels very much of a piece with The French Dispatch, to the extent that the two films often play like different facets of the same shared universe. As with The French Dispatch there’s a new focus on the visual and structural appeal of the written word, which corresponds to a new black-and-white aesthetic that mirrors the contrast between ink and paper. While Wes Anderson has always been hyper-literary in his outlook this latest evolution is more typographical in spirit – a pondering of how the visual experiences of books and films can be fused into a new kind of syncretic text. Asteroid City also signals this fixation through a highly nested structure, a film within a play within a television special, although it condenses much of the typographical apparatus of The French Dispatch to a condensed prologue, in which “our story begins, of course, with an ink ribbon,” and a rapid montage of “writing, editing and doodling” that recurs at regular intervals throughout the film. Anderson also includes regular intertitles to signal the acts and scenes that are about to take place, while relishing the aesthetic possibilities of the intertitle itself as nexus between typography and cinema. Much of Asteroid City feels like a nascent intertitle, even or especially its most mobile moments, which are always on the verge of congealing into still images with artful captions.
Of course, that opening throwback to The French Dispatch makes it even more startling when we segue into one of the most gorgeously lurid palettes of Anderson’s career. He’s often dabbled with pastels in the past but they’ve never glowed with the luminosity that they exude here, as they’re put to use in service of Asteroid City, a 1950s American desert town that is both the site of an ancient meteor crash and a modern youth astronomy conference. In essence, the film is an exploration of this town, with minimal characterisation or narrative, and its western setup is a perfect vehicle for Anderson – a series of discete spaces along a single strip, which we swivel pan to one after another. The heightened calm of the film really suits the mid-century modern architecture, since this is, in effect, the serene world that space age décor envisaged, a utopian calm in which everyone is slightly alien. Apart from the arrival of an alien spacecraft (or perhaps even including it), the most dramatic event in the film is the death of a wife and mother, but even this is subsumed into a placidly surreal ceremony in which her family deposit a Tupperware container full of her ashes into Anderson’s mise-en-scene. The western also suits the typographical turn of French Dispatch, offering Anderson his first sustained and stagebound streetscapes, replete with a litany of extravagant signage.
So flamboyant, indeed, is this backdrop, that it parches Anderson’s character and narrative drives as never before, reducing them to a formalism that seems austere even compared to The French Dispatch, especially because it is cloaked in such a gorgeously lush visual scheme. The most intimate moment occurs between a pair of strangers, actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) and photojournalist Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) and yet it is neutralised from the outset by the many framing devices that Anderson establishes between the two characters. Not only do they mainly converse across the empty space between their hotel rooms, which reduces them to a series of framed faces against the void, but they bond, paradoxically, by relegating each other to a textual distance, Midge by asking Augie to watch her latest monologue, Augie by asking Midge to pose for a photograph. They describe themselves as “two catastrophically wounded people who don’t express the depths of our emotion, that’s our connection” but in reality they are too flattened to even hint at this trauma. Their trauma is a mere formal device much as the other interactions between characters mainly take the form of paratactic recitations that are frequently so hyperactive that they seem designed to render language concrete enough to be a visible part of Anderson’s mise-en-scene, whether “Brainiac” children playing a game in which they sit in a circle and see how many famous names they can recite, or a sequence in the framing devices (or one of the framing devices) in which the narrator (or one of the narrators), played in this instance by Bryan Cranston, lists the future famous figures in a mid-century acting academy.
All of which is to say that Asteroid City is a curiously dissonant film, at least in terms of Anderson’s filmography, since it pairs tableaux that rival those of The Grand Budapest Hotel with a screenplay that utterly repudiates the yearning emotional core of that 2012 masterpiece. As extraordinary as the visuals are here – or precisely because they are so extraordinary – it’s hard not to wish that Anderson had teamed up again with Owen Wilson to craft characters and narrative details that were commensurate with his mise-en-scenes. Instead, it feels like Anderson is immersing himself in a world rather than crafting character or narrative; or rather, that he has moved beyond ensemble casts altogether in favour of a shared universe that subsists on certain formal aesthetic flourishes, begging the question of how interchangeable his films might become in the future, despite, or perhaps precisely because of, their putative differences, which at this stage only seem to be galvanising him to streamline their core inflections. Like The French Dispatch, Asteroid City belongs in a gallery as much as a cinema, and perhaps even more so, gradually dissociating into a series of still photographs, or sculptural dioramas, as Anderson himself seems to acknowledge in the acting academy that we see in the framing device. Here, Saltzburg Keitel, a guru played by Willem Dafoe, advises his proteges to treat sleep as training, reassuring them that “sleep, it’s not death – the body keeps busy,” before instructing them to fall asleep. In a film that itself is frequently quite soporific, this feels like a manifesto for an austere and eerie limbo in which Anderson’s actors and audience alike converge upon a state of supreme sculptural oblivion.
Yet just as the film ends with the post-ensemble cast chanting that “you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep,” Asteroid City, like The French Dispatch, also yearns for something beyond its hermetic vision – a yearning that becomes ever more plangent as this vision approaches its apex and perfection. In The French Dispatch, that yearning, and the reflexive impotence that came with it, unleashed waves of quite startling and lascivious violence across Anderson’s typically calm mise-en-scenes. Here, it takes the form of extra-terrestrial life, signalling, as that does, something that is somehow beyond the film’s tightly controlled world. Our first pan through three-dimensional space takes us towards a set of satellite dishes, tracking out the sightline of a young boy enquiring about unexplained signals that turn out to be extra-terrestrial in origin, while the arrival of an alien, played by Jeff Goldblum, brings Anderson’s animated oeuvre into his regular filmography for the first time. Even these excursions beyond the frame of the film have the potential to congeal back into it, however, much as astronomer Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton) manages to condense the most extravagant cosmic display of the film, the precursor to the arrival of the alien, to a series of light dots across a strip of paper that ripple across the rest of the film in a variety of modes.
These light dots are the logical conclusion of Anderson’s aesthetic, which moves ever further towards abstraction, detachment and discorrelation from human experience. In their perfection, their fusion of audience and actor into automata, and their ultimate indifference to the fact of the audience at all, they also move towards death – or towards a state in which the life or death of any putative audience is no longer an ontological consideration for the film itself. In other words, Anderson’s quest for perfection, or sublimity, is also a form of self-destruction in slow motion, like a thermometer gradually moving towards absolute zero, a state in which its measurements can no longer meaningfully ramify for an observer. Whether Anderson continues in that direction, retreats from it, or remains perched precariously on its event horizon is hard to say at this point in time, but certainly The French Dispatch and Asteroid City have thematised it with a new urgency, and in doing so usher in his late work.