Wes Anderson and the Surreal
Augie Steenbeck and his children visit Asteroid City to attend an award ceremony held to recognize young geniuses including Woodrow Steenbeck, Augie’s oldest son, who has won an award. The award ceremony goes as expected until the sky suddenly glows green and a spaceship descends from the sky. An alien climbs down from a spaceship and finds himself in the middle of a crowd of people, who stand frozen in shock. The alien grabs the asteroid in the middle of the crater and tries to quietly leave. Augie Steenbeck, a former war photographer, tries to take a picture of the alien before it departs. The alien, after seeing the camera, pauses and poses for the picture, holding up the meteor as if it is an award.
This scene, by far, earned the most laughter from the audience as I watched Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City. The last thing a viewer expects an alien to do while a photographer is taking his picture is to know what a camera is and how to pose for it. It is moments in Anderson’s films such as this one–unexpected and surreal, humorous and iconic–that are intrinsic to his films.
What makes Wes Anderson movies seem so unreal? The director seems to actively try to make his movies defy standard norms of realism. A perfect example of this defiance is Anderson’s preference to use modeling instead of CGI. In a short documentary about his 2004 film, Life Aquatic, Anderson explains that modeling costs more than CGI. Despite the financial inefficiency, Anderson uses modeling in Asteroid City for most of the town and the environment. The artificial environment combined with ridiculous events such as an alien intrusion elevates the unrealistic, almost whimsical nature of the movie.
In storytelling, realism is a powerful approach to create empathy, an essential emotion to evoke from the audience. Realism is not wholly absent in Wes Anderson’s movies; it can be found in his characters. At a surface level, these characters seem to be an extension of the surreal world they inhabit. Many of them are eccentric, wearing ludicrous outfits and displaying peculiar habits. Asteroid City is no exception; many of the characters possess traits that are hardly relatable. The young geniuses exemplify this when they play their memory game. The game is simple; the players go around in a circle and say the name of someone that is either alive or was once alive. The next player has to repeat the names in order before adding another to the list. The first person to mess up the order or forget a name loses. Days pass and none of the players make a mistake, and they soon realize that the memory game is not for them.
Anderson thus makes decisions that veer close to isolating his characters and his worlds from the empathy of the audience. However, despite some peculiarities, his characters are forced to face some very relatable issues. Woodrow and Augie suffer from the loss of their mother as they question the meaning of family, even as their perception of the world is challenged with the arrival of the alien. The humanity in these characters is juxtaposed with their surreal environments, and the world around them seems to resist their existence, leading to an impending sense of doom throughout the film. This sense is felt even in the metafiction layer, in which the actors take on another role. A director divorces his wife because of his obsession with his work and consistent infidelity. A playwright starts a love affair with an actor and soon dies in a terrible accident. An actress contemplates the purpose of their career, one that fabricates reality, and hence, possesses no intrinsic value. Beneath all the humor of the film lies a nihilistic dread.
The cure for this dread, at least for Anderson, seems to lie in the surreal. The cure is in the beautiful colors of the landscape that contain too many primary colors for it to be natural, or the elaborate speeches that possess too much eloquence for it to be spoken by a real person. The real world is gray and dull, while the fictional world flourishes with color. The characters realize that their struggles to find meaning are useless. There is no way for them to know what the alien wanted, much like there is no way for them to know what the confirmation of extraterrestrial life means for their own lives. Eventually, the characters go back to their lives, leaving their questions behind with Asteroid City. Anderson seems to express a powerful, aestheticist message. Art, or its sublime beauty of it, can hold the existential dread we often face at bay. During the time we consume it, we can laugh and enjoy it while temporarily forgetting our responsibilities, our fears, and our lives.