‘The Play’s the Thing’, or, Wes Anderson and a Breath of Fresh Air
About Asteroid City, theatricality, and fate
This essay mostly continues a thought from a previous essay; only this time, it looks at them through film rather than through literature. Heidegger said that ‘every thinker thinks only one thought’ (What is Called Thinking?, p. 50); if this is true at all, it might be because everything I say—at least when I’m trying to say something philosophical, and insofar as I’m being honest—is said by me, and is therefore an expression of whatever it is that I consider to be important. Sometimes I have the sense or the fantasy that, if I had enough time and attention, I would be able to write one long book that would express everything that is important to me—and to write it so faithfully and honestly that there wouldn’t really be much difference between my essay and my self, such that—if they had enough time and attention—a stranger would be able to read it and know me intimately. I guess I mean that the ‘one thought’ every thinker has might be the thought, the ‘conception’, that they have of themselves. And so each essay is an attempt to make oneself known. This time, my attempt is about some films.
Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City was one of my favourite films of last year, and one of my favourite of his more maximalist films. Some people, sometimes including me, find his more recent films less effective than his earlier ones, because what they gain with their meticulous and stylised set design (like the hotel in the Grand Budapest Hotel or like everything in Isle of Dogs) and editing (the creative subtitles in The French Dispatch, the non-linearity and plots-within-plots of Grand Budapest and Asteroid City and the more recent Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar) seems to come at the cost of something human—emotional depth, or warmth, or realism.
I basically accept this criticism, at least insofar as my favourite Wes Anderson film is The Royal Tenenbaums, only his third of (so far) eleven feature length films, and his last to be cowritten with Owen Wilson. But watching Asteroid City gave me a new way to look at his later films which sees them as more continuous with his earlier ones—as more difficult, maybe, but still coming from the same emotional-existential place.
The typical Wes Anderson protagonist is precocious, depressed, hubristic, lost, or lonely, stuck in a situation or place where they feel no sense of belonging. In the earlier films, this is played out quite clearly: the characters have fallen from their more adventurous lives—crime for Mr Fox, filmmaking and oceanography for Steve Zissou, renown in school for Max Fischer (in Rushmore), and tennis, theatre, business, and love for the Tenenbaum siblings and their father. All of them long to revive their lives (by refinding love, redefining themselves, getting some kind of vengeance, and so on): to become a someone. (In The Darjeeling Limited, this longing is satirised—the brothers’ haphazard attempt at refinding life and to ‘become brothers again’ becomes an orientalist quest to ‘find themselves’ in India.) At the beginning of Fantastic Mr Fox, Mr Fox says: ‘I don’t want to live in a hole anymore.’ This is the plight of Wes Anderson’s characters: the buried life.
We can call this type of character one half of what defines Wes Anderson’s films; the other half is his increasingly conspicuous visual style: the strict colour palettes, ninety-degree whip pans, symmetrical blocking, and so on. This stylistic element has become so famous that (especially in the conversations surrounding the last two or three films) it makes up the vast majority of what anyone ever says about his filmmaking: little room is given in these conversations to the emotional lives of his characters.
Maybe Wes Anderson is aware of this. After watching Asteroid City a couple of times I had the idea that his later films, and this one most of all, represent something new for him insofar as they take what I have called the two halves of his filmmaking as inseparable: I mean that the formal stylisation of these films is in constant interplay with the narratives of alienation or life-longing that they depict. I’ll try my best to explain what I mean by this.
There’s a scene in the first act of Asteroid City where Augie (Jason Schwartzman) is speaking to Stanley (his father-in law, Tom Hanks) on the phone, and they mention Augie’s children: ‘Tell the kids: I’ll be there when I get there’, Stanley says. After the phone call, Augie steps outside the phone box and raises his camera: we might assume, then, that he is going to take a photo of his daughters (his son is standing next to him)—until the camera pans over a few feet and we see that his daughters are out of the way behind him. He is taking a photograph of his car. I take a moment like this to stand for how the style of Wes Anderson’s films—the camera, the editing and so on—is always a few steps ahead of his characters in telling the story. The actors can tell us one thing, but it is the film itself that decides if they’re right or not.
There are other moments, such as a fight scene in The French Dispatch between Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio del Toro) and Julien Cadazio (Adrien Brody), which are shot with a handheld camera, and in which all of the strictness of the style goes away. (It is hard for me to show this with a screenshot.) This method of the camerawork suddenly losing its consistency has been in Wes Anderson’s films from the beginning (maybe most famously at the climax of The Royal Tenenbaums). If the first kind of moment I described above stands for the failure of the characters to tell their own story, this kind of moment stands for their success: in these shots it is a character’s anger or passion that manages to break the cinematic framing that had been boxing them in. (I think this can be compared to what is called tempo rubato—‘stolen time’—in classical music, where in order to be more expressive the performer will break with the specified tempo and play a particular phrase a little slower or a little faster than what is written. If rules have one benefit it is that they make meaningful exceptions possible.)
All this is to say that I take the strict style of Wes Anderson’s films to be what limits the characters of these films in their expression and autonomy—except in those rare moments where it is caused to break. The criticism that has become common is that is ‘inhuman’; to this I would say: that is the point. So what do I mean by that?
When I saw Robert Eggers’ film The Northman (2022), I kept thinking about its differences to Hamlet, since both of them are based on the same legend. The most noticeable difference to me surrounded the idea of fate. In The Northman, Amleth seeks to avenge his father, and most of his decisions in the story are made on the basis of him acknowledging that this vengeance is his fate, his destiny. This was quite strange for me to get my head around: there are points in the story where Amleth both recognises something as his destiny, and yet also vows to do it. Wouldn’t his destiny be indifferent to his will? All this makes Hamlet easier to understand for a modern audience (or at least for me) to whom the idea of fate is quite foreign: part of what defines Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a character is his inability to follow through on what is destined to him. (I take the fact that Hamlet is commanded by a ghost and not a living person, just as Eggers’ Amleth is instructed by spiritual visions, to be a sign that his vengeance is more like fate or destiny than something merely suggested.) So when Shakespeare tells Hamlet’s story by presenting us with five hours of prevarication (or five hours of attempts to steal time), I take him to be showing us something about what it is to be a modern person, to live without fate.
Under this interpretation, it is no coincidence that Hamlet himself should employ theatre as one of his techniques: in Shakespeare’s plays, characters often realise the looseness of fate precisely by realising (or nearly realising, anyway) the theatricality of their existence—that is, that they are characters. So, famously, Macbeth sees life as a ‘tale told by an idiot’, and King Lear in his madness says to Gloucester that ‘when we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.’
My point is that, in his later films, Wes Anderson really recognises the meaning of his strict style by acknowledging it as the kind of theatricality that Shakespeare’s characters came to recognise. The protagonists of these films are existentially alienated, searching desperately for what they are supposed to do with their lives—and the films themselves undermine and challenge this search by constraining the characters within the frames and angles of theatricality.
Like Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, I guess I wish I could walk off stage when my life is difficult and get a moment to figure out if I’m doing it right. Obviously I can’t: there is no backstage to life. In Asteroid City, things are a little more complicated: the main story we follow (in the desert, in colour) is actually a production of play (in the city, in black and white), and both of them are chronologically preceded by the story of the playwright. When, at the emotional climax of the film, Jones Hall (playing Augie, played by Jason Schwartzman) walks off stage in a crisis over how to play his part, this is his moment of pause: it is the suspension of his script, his fate. “Am I doing it right?” he asks Schubert Green, his director. “I still don’t understand the play.”
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Certain lines in this scene (“In my opinion, you didn’t just become Augie: he became you.” — “He’s such a wounded guy. I feel like my heart is being broken—my own, personal heart.”) suggest to me that we shouldn’t take Jones and Augie as genuinely separate people. They are, after all, both still characters: neither of them is Jason Schwartzman. This separation between actor and character (perhaps the same separation between Mr Fox and “the quote-unquote Fantastic Mr Fox”, or, in Grand Budapest, between Zero Moustafa the grown man and Zero Moustafa the storywritten boy)—all the separations Wes Anderson introduces by framing his stories in broader stories—might be understood psychologically, or I guess existentially, as reflective of the distance a person can take from themselves in moments of alienation. To be alienated is to feel that you are living theatrically: when you are alienated you become aware of—perhaps you invent—the difference between really living and just acting. (When Jones meets Margot Robbie’s character, who plays Augie’s wife, he says: “Oh, it’s you. You’re the wife who played my actress.”)
“I need a breath of fresh air,” Jones tells Schubert. “Okay,” says Schubert, “but you won’t find one.” Jones is not only struggling with the play, but struggling with the fact that its writer Conrad Earp—who Jones was seemingly in love with—has died. I think what makes so many of Wes Anderson’s characters tragic is their desperation, in moments of grief and suffering, to put a hold on life and get everything in order before they go on living. You can see this in Chas Tenenbaum and his refusal to properly grieve the death of his wife. But there is no backstage to life. The cathartic moments in Wes Anderson’s films are when these characters realise that it is impossible to steal time, that there is no breath of fresh air. For a minute or two all the style and the order breaks, and you recognise you just have to keep going.
This year I lost my grandparents. Because he was so passionate about films, whenever I would watch a film that really stuck with me—especially if it was an older one—I would think: “I should talk to my Grandad about this.” And even though I can’t do that anymore, I still have that same thought all the time. The thoughts I’ve tried to put into writing here are dedicated to him.