Asteroid City came out in 2023, it's Wes Anderson's 11th film, among many other projects of shorter length, more recently 4 shorts on Netflix based on Roald Dahl short stories. Wesley Wales Anderson was born in 1969 in Houston Texas. He majored in philosophy at University of Texas at Austin.
The first thing is the frame for the movie. To start out saying it's a play on TV, the writer, the actors, the TV screen. The setting of the play is another layer. Then the title credits roll and you get color. A father with 5 children, his car breaks down. It dies in front of them. The movie core is grief. The inability to speak it. The weird sequelae.
The visuals are southwest, 50's. Wes Anderson has a specific look to his movies, it's unique, it's his, among many other aspects of the film. Maybe the deadpan deliveries. The way the whole thing is intricately structured. There's a knowing metafiction approach that turns many people off, usually uneducated people and right wing people who like simplicity and no frills, no complications. They want realism and the artifice of the movie to be hidden. There are too many false notes. They don't like the precocious kids, the artistic affectations. Anderson is an auteur.
Americans are hostile to intellectuals and artists. They think only honest jobs like cattle rustling, auto mechanic, and businessman are legitimate. Logger is a good job, construction. Building the great society to put penises on the Moon and Mars. Not the great society of Lyndon Johnson, who was a commie. The great society of ... the thought trails off, they weren't much into thinking things through, they're more here and now, gritty, not that fancy new age spirituality. You can find a lot of strong reactions to Anderson online. It almost proves his aesthetic is working.
This morning the sweet lady downstairs in my building told my daughter, "good morning princess." My daughter was confused. I told her she's a sweet lady who likes children, and she knows many little girls think about princesses.
There's a great scene where the waitress in the diner asks what the 3 princesses want to drink, and they have complicated comebacks. I thought of my daughter. I can't find a transcription online, I'll have to do it myself. I'm not going to keep checking it and I notoriously can't get it exactly right, but here it is (8:10-8:17)
What do you princess like to drink?
Oh, I'm not a princess, I'm a vampire.
I'm a mummy, buried in Egypt, buried alive, and came back to life, with my head chopped off.
I'm a fairy.
You cou unpack every moment, act and scene in the movie. This movie is jammed packed, and they all interact with each other. The movie is jam packed, and paced.
The date on the galactic calendar can't be right because there is no cosmic now. We see stars light from millennium ago, we can practically see the big bang and the big crunch.
The antidote to grief is the meaninglessness of existence. If we can evoke grief in others, that means we were not nothing.
I can't help but think of Stardust Memories (1980) when I see the Anderson exploration of fame.
I find the end of every movie fairly chaotic and arbitrary.
So my second watch was interesting. I could probably watch the movie every few months for a while.
The Absurdity of Asteroid City Thomas Flight
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