Wes Anderson on Lockdown
Interpreting “Asteroid City” through the filter of the COVID Pandemic
NOTE: This analysis discusses the film in depth, and therefore necessarily contains spoilers. If you haven’t seen the film, you might want to avoid this article. The descriptions will hopefully give my readers a gratifying framework for subsequent viewings of “Asteroid City”.
In Wes Anderson’s newest film, characters from a variety of backgrounds — including, among others, a widower (Jason Schwartzman as Augie Steenbeck, a photographer) and his four children; a teacher (Maya Hawke); a famous actress (Scarlett Johansson); other parents with their science-loving children; students of varying ages; and some cowboys — find themselves stuck together when the appearance of a single, apparently benign alien in a very remote, very small desert town causes the government to quarantine the area in 1955.
As with most of Anderson’s work, his career-defining style elements are all there: strongly contrasting, muted pastel colors; symmetrical or nearly-symmetrical framing; closeups of inscrutable faces, and the wonderful dolly-driven scene transitions that minimize hard cuts. But unlike his work with more traditional, linear storylines, “Asteroid City” views more like a fever dream for which personal analysis, rather than consensus, works.
That’s because this is a film about the Covid-19 pandemic.
It starts with the boom of an atomic bomb test, marking the arrival of something bad. It is met with simple curiosity, and not brought up again until the end of the film.
Asteroid City is a dry southwest town that wouldn’t appear on most maps were it not for the fact it is the location of a 5000 year-old meteorite impact crater. It is also the site of an annual “Junior Stargazer” convention, during which several high school students show off their far-above-average science projects to compete for a $5000 award, as others also gather to watch an event that Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton), sponsor of the award and resident of the local desert observatory, would like to call “Celestial Flirtation”.
When viewed through the filter of the pandemic, this setting becomes both natural and obvious. What better representation of how most of us felt during the lockdown than being stuck, as the town is, between “Arid Plains” and “Parched Gulch”? Like the homes in which many of us were quarantined for months, it is a place where things can live, but not thrive. Often, our only connection to others was through social media and Zoom calls.
To represent those restrictions on community gatherings and the limits imposed on us by internet-only social interactions, Anderson deploys some positively brilliant symbols.
The motel at which all of our characters converge works beautifully as a symbol for both the internet and our limited real-life interactions. Each room at the motel is a separate little cabin (cleverly spaced at least six feet apart), with windows that allow people to talk to each other. The manager, played by Steve Carell, serves as a simple host, asking people about their breakfast needs, explaining their accommodations, and occasionally facilitating a variety of transactions through the hotel’s collection of vending machines. His part is deceptively simple: he gets people what they need (just like the internet), while beginning most of his responses, regardless of the tone of the guest’s query, with a decidedly neutral and A.I.-inspired “I understand”. He presents information with no emotion attached to it, no agenda. He is a search engine personified.
While the standard vending machine staples of food and drink line the hotel lobby’s outside wall, there is also one marked “Real Estate”. For a small fee, the hotel manager explains, you will receive a notarized title to a plot of land roughly the size of half a tennis court, right there in the middle of nowhere. And while the vending machines themselves are a collective representation of the surge in online shopping we did during the pandemic, the real estate vending machine in particular plays a role in showing how truly bizarre we got, and how many of us were financially burned in that period by the clever marketing of useless products intended to ease our discomfort during the lockdown, or those who “invested” in cryptocurrencies. Predictably, the vending machine land purchases end up not being exactly what had been represented to the buyers.
In the mean time, the older kids, with all their scientific brilliance, are trying to make real sense of the world (and universe) they’ve been thrust into, playing games no one else would understand, challenging accepted behavioral norms, and in the case of a teen inventor named Clifford (Aristou Meehan), exhibiting dangerously attention-seeking behavior via a series of questionable and potentially harmful dares, not unlike the various TikTok and Instagram dares and challenges we saw involving Tide Pods, spoonfuls of cinnamon, and holding one’s breath.
Then comes the viewing of the “Celestial Flirtation”. To view it properly, Dr. Hickenlooper recommends that everyone wear a protective box over their heads, strongly reminiscent of the ubiquitous surgical and N95 masks. But during the event, a comically cartoonish alien (perhaps representing the virus itself) briefly appears, looking similar to the animation style in Anderson’s “Isle of Dogs”. Without a sound, it climbs down from its ship and takes the remnant piece of the meteorite that caused the crater 5000 years ago. After briefly posing for a photo for Augie, the alien suddenly and quite affably departs with it.
This causes a swift response from the U.S. military, led by General Grif Gibson (Jeffrey Wright), which cordons off the area and creates a quarantine zone around Asteroid City. For at least seven days, according to an executive order, everyone present in the town will have restricted movements. No one leaves, no one enters.
During this period, the middle school kids and their teacher, Mrs. Douglas (Hawke), are trying their best to hold class in this weird wasteland. Armed only with a blackboard (how did it get there!?), she tries to educate the kids about our solar system. However, their attention span is long gone. Since the appearance of the alien, they can only think about the alien. When asked questions about the planets, one child ignores the question and shows off a surprisingly accurate model of the alien’s spacecraft that he built. Another student draws a picture of the alien. To rest any doubt about the similarities between their situation and the one pupils and educators went through during the pandemic, Anderson includes an exuberant and seemingly disconnected scene in which one of the children performs — with the help of the cowboys — a song he wrote about the alien, and a special dance he made up just for it. Even the teacher — equally concerned and distracted by the pandemic alien, simply gives in to the music and dances around with a strapping young cowboy. Rules and norms are long gone.
The youngest children of the group – the three daughters of recent widower Augie Steenbeck (Schwartzman), are seemingly detached from all of it. They go on playing, though they are subconsciously surrounded by death at all times. They run around, throwing stones at the rusted out shell of a car, which was at one time identical to their own family car (a possible symbol of the death of their family). The cremated remains of their mother, sealed in a Tupperware container, were presented to the young girls by their father. Later, pretending to be a trio of witches, they bury that container in a shallow, unmarked area next to a piece of dead cactus, near the communal bathrooms, bringing to mind the countless funerals of people who couldn’t see their loved ones before dying, some buried hastily or in groups. The girls believe their spell will have the possibility of bringing their mother back to life.
Even before these three are told about their mother’s death, they sense it, as is evident in an early diner scene when the waitress asks the “little princesses” what they’d like to drink. The girls, talking over each other, quickly correct her, stating that they are not princesses, but vampires and zombies. Purposefully undead things. People who have come back to life.
This is one way children who lost people close to them during Covid dealt with all the death around them, and though these girls are almost always joyful, they are in many ways the saddest of all the people under quarantine. Their blissful ignorance, we know, will give way to more difficult thoughts to confront as they grow up.
In the movie, the younger children all pray at meals, often about silly things. The older ones, and the adults, do not. Woodrow Steenbeck (Augie’s son, played by Jake Ryan), watching his three little sisters bury their Tupperware mother, is asked if he’s going to pray. He says he doesn’t believe in God any more.
Another subtle but profound way Anderson represents our lockdown period is his treatment of Augie and Midge (the famous actress played by Scarlett Johansson). For every scene in which these two interact, they are in their separate cabins, talking to each other through their windows. This framing is strongly suggestive of seeing people on your computer screen via FaceTime or Zoom. And as Augie, a photographer, develops his photos, he hangs them over his shoulder like so many background images in a presentation.
(Note: A separate entry could be written just about the story between Augie and Midge, and everything it represents, but this strays from the theme of the film as a metaphor for the pandemic.)
After several days in quarantine, it is learned that the news about the alien — like Covid-19 — couldn’t be contained. Consequently, General Gibson lifts the quarantine. As everyone celebrates, the alien returns. While people watch, he puts back the meteorite where he found it, and leaves in his spaceship again. The general begins to say that now the quarantine must be reinstated, but before he can finish, people riot, and chaos breaks out.
Sound familiar?
There is a lot more to this film that would be difficult to discuss here without recounting the entire script. The fact that it is a play contained in a movie, during which actors playing actors move in and out of their parts, adds a layer of complexity that would make it hard to analyze fully in a meaningful way without multiple references. Suffice it to say that our widower, Augie, must step away from all the chaos – literally leaving the play he’s in — to talk to the actress who should have played his wife in the play. It is here that the movie snaps into place. Augie, escaping the chaos, takes some time to deal with his grief — over the death of his wife, the damage to his family, the quarantine.
The film ends with the sound of another atomic bomb test.
Here are a few other points and interpretations to consider:
• Matt Dillon’s character Hank the mechanic, is incapable of fixing things — look at the graveyard of automobiles he has by his shop. He could represent the early failed attempts at a vaccine or cure for Covid-19. He might also represent the difficulty in diagnosing the disease in the first place, given its myriad symptoms. It could be this simple 75-cent piece you need. Or it could be an entire rebuild of the car, and even that might not work. Oh, looks like you have a third thing…
• Tom Hanks as Stanley Zak, Augie’s father in law, and father of the deceased, can easily be interpreted as representing Florida through the pandemic. He has the bright golfer’s outfit, is wealthy and retired, and tries to get the family to go live with him, where he implies things are happier and better.
• I’d love to understand the recurring road runner appearances, variation of “meep meep” included. It’s more than just that they’re in the desert. It’s a statement, but I haven’t figured it out.
• There is clearly a side story about inequality and “wokeness”. For instance, an Asian-American character and his son check into the motel only to be told their cabin had burned down, so they would have to stay in a large tent instead. If we think of the motel as the internet, it’s a clear reference to how minorities were disproportionately affected by the pandemic, not given the same access to things that most others were. Poor children who were supposed to continue their classes online during the lockdown often had to find internet access at public libraries or coffee shops. This scene is just a few lines and a brief visual gag, but it spoke volumes.
• A few times during the movie, there is a chase through town. A police car followed by a motorcycle cop, both chasing another car, with gunfire exchanged intermittently. As with the atomic bomb, no one pays it much attention. Firmly believing that a good writer/director doesn’t put unnecessary things in their scripts, I couldn’t help but wonder if this was a nod to George Floyd and the other people of color who died, often unnecessarily, in police confrontations or police custody — something they had to deal with on top of the stress of the pandemic itself. Perhaps it was just as simple as showing how people pay little attention to anything negative until it affects them directly.
•You can’t wake up if you don’t go to sleep. This line is strongly driven into your brain toward the end of the film. Does it refer to our sleepless nights during the pandemic? Our inability to participate in society while we’re distracted by the internet, the newest opiate of the masses? If someone had paid attention sooner to the atomic bomb, or the virus, or the inequality that our world contains, would things not have been very different? Better?
• Thanks to Kerry Wayne and Allison Wayne for their additional observations and encouragement.
