In Defense of Wes Anderson
“Asteroid City,” AI, TikTok, and the vanishing promise of artistic integrity
“I still don’t understand the play.”
“It doesn’t matter. Just keep telling the story.”
Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City could not have come at a better time. After nearly three decades of feature filmmaking, the indie-darling-turned-A-lister has spent the past few months relegated to the cultural context of imitation. First came an onslaught of AI parodies, attempting to reimagine popular film and television through auto-generating digital versions in Anderson’s signature style. Then came a widespread TikTok trend, in which people documented moments of their life by filming their days with bright color palettes and static, symmetrical shots.
Both trends faced relentless backlash online for justified and unjustified reasons. On one hand, the AI fad was a lifeless and upsetting misunderstanding of Anderson’s work and aesthetics. Anderson does not (and should not) have a monopoly on warm color palettes, symmetry, and planographic compositions, and so identifying something as “Wes Anderson-esque” by simply possessing these traits shows a lack of artistic literacy.
However, I have no qualms with people on TikTok viewing their own lives through the lens of a particular filmmaker and exploring their own artistry in the process. The quality of the content may not be up to the standard set by Anderson, but critique along those lines is in entirely bad faith — it is no surprise that a teenager’s 30-second iPhone video is not of the same caliber as a filmmaking veteran’s tenth feature with a 25 million dollar budget. Ultimately, some (as illustrated by the following video) seemed to come away from these trends with the wrong idea — that Anderson’s style was a duplicable series of visual shticks that can be imitated with ease, and nothing more.
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Asteroid City is a possibly unintentional, but nonetheless violent rebuttal of the growing understanding that Wes Anderson’s style is simply composed of robotic characters and symmetrical compositions. The film not only serves as a clarification of the fact that Anderson’s work is far superior to that of his imitators, but Asteroid City also reinvigorates the themes at the core of his work, which as of late seemed to be fading into the background.
I’ve been drawn to Wes Anderson since I started watching films; Moonrise Kingdom, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and Fantastic Mr. Fox were essential elements of my childhood film experience. The films that are most appealing to me are those that employ a unique perspective through which the viewer can interpret the world — personally, objectively, or dialectically. Wes Anderson provided me with a magical lens through which to see the world as I grew up.
When a filmmaker removes their story from reality altogether, narratively or aesthetically, there is no appeal beyond novelty, and over the past decade, Anderson’s films have entered this realm. Recent efforts such as The Grand Budapest Hotel and The French Dispatch reside within an artistic purgatory, visually extraordinary but ultimately just empty tableaus detached from human experience. Wes Anderson has always been awkward and anti-naturalist, but his style had never diverged from raw emotion, and his instantly recognizable filmmaking seamlessly and simultaneously incorporated both surreal and sobering affectations. But over the past decade, paralleling increases in budget, Anderson’s once endearing and ennui-afflicted protagonists became little more than two-dimensional gestures towards vague ideas, indicative of a general sense of abstract melancholy that never ties itself to genuine themes. Substance is not entirely missing from Anderson’s newer style, but the simplicity of tangible human emotion is lost in the increasing complexity of his mise-en-scene.
Asteroid City marks an abrupt new era in Anderson’s storytelling. He does not back down from his increasing artificiality of his environments, but he purposefully leans into his overbearing aesthetic convolution, contorting the film as it grows in strained and chaotic tension. After a failed attempt with The French Dispatch, Anderson’s stylistic self-awareness finally succeeds, using a framing device of complex narrative overlap to unpack solitude and the search for meaning within his own work. Asteroid City opens on a television program documenting the creation of a play in which the play being created is told as reality and reality is told through the structure of a play. The eponymous play follows the events of a town no bigger than a roadside attraction, and the arrival of a group of young scientific innovators accompanied by their aging artist parents searching for meaning, along with representatives of the burgeoning military/industrial/scientific complex.
While the arriving parties gather for the awarding of a prestigious scientific prize, the events of the town become increasingly bizarre and the connection between the text and the metatext becomes increasingly labyrinthine. The dystopian doom of nuclear annihilation contrasted with the utopian promise of retrofuturism sends each character spiraling down their respective rabbit holes of ennui. Further exemplifying this disillusionment is the dichotomy between art and science — the artistic generation mourns and dreads reality, while their scientific children push its boundaries. Grieving war photographer Augie Steenfeld (Jason Schwartzman) copes with the reality of loss in his work, and directionless actor Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) worries that her character’s reality will become her own, while their children use their scientific prowess to solidify the future of weapons manufacturing and advertising, among other things.
And so, for the first time in his career (with the exception of the talking animals in his animated films), Wes Anderson employs the involvement of the supernatural. The supernatural serves as the culmination of both the artistic and the scientific, and does not serve as a solution nor an explanation, but rather as the representation of an ongoing search. Despite the inherent and eternal mystery of the supernatural, the characters desperately search for a solution. Asteroid City devolves into increasing layers of chaos as the characters search for a logical solution, but as the tension builds, the story collapses in on itself. The approaching apex suddenly folds under the weight of layers of artifice, and for the first time in years, Wes Anderson lets his narrative breathe a breath of fresh air, culminating in his most human moment in over a decade.
This confusing, out-of-character, and inexplicable denouement completely redirects the entire narrative of the film. It is possible to see Asteroid City as Wes Anderson’s most artificial film — it is soaked in a nauseating color grade and its waves of American nostalgia are rife with metaphors that are either overwhelmingly pronounced or intentionally lack clarity. The film’s environment is depressingly constructed as a fertile ground for tourism and consumption in which land can be bought from a vending machine, and is so depressingly empty that Anderson’s pastiche mannequins of characters finally feel justified. But what makes Asteroid City touching is that the questioning of this artifice is not the conceit of the narrative. Instead, Anderson presupposes the notion of artifice, allowing him to instead explore emotion through the cracks of this collapsing aesthetic and narrative rigidity, which devolves into chaos and then peace by the end of the film.
Asteroid City succeeds because Wes Anderson’s signature traits are heightened to such an extreme that the narrative collapses completely, allowing him to explore a more existential vein of his style. Wes Anderson tears down the growing misunderstanding that his work is entirely aesthetic, and that he is unique because he strips away naturalism from the world, working with only robotic characters and diorama-like environments. But what makes Wes Anderson’s work special is not a quirky lack of human emotion in a dollhouse world. Asteroid City celebrates that Anderson is special because he uses anti-naturalist aesthetics to presuppose beautiful surroundings of artifice and solitude, and then tries to find emotion in an empty world. Anderson has never celebrated a lack of emotion, but always focused on the search for it (see finding the jaguar shark (The Life Aquatic), Richie in the bathroom (The Royal Tenenbaums), or meeting the wolf (Fantastic Mr. Fox)). Asteroid City uses a metanarrative to critique Anderson’s search for meaning, but concludes with the notion that accepting a lack of clarity can be the most gratifying action in the face of chaos. Its emotional reckoning posits that the search itself is just as compelling as any answers we may comfort ourselves with along the way.
OVERALL SCORE: 9/10
Asteroid City was released on June 23 and is currently in US theaters.
See, it's OK. He saw it on the television.