Book Excerpt: Foreword to The Wes Anderson Collection: Asteroid City by David Bordwell

We are honored to contiguous the foreword to Matt Zoller Seitz’s upcoming merchandise The Wes Anderson Collection: Asteroid City, written by David Bordwell. The publication volition beryllium disposable connected January 28, 2025. Get a transcript here.

The Stubborn Stylist’s Space Adventure

In the past of cinema, it’s uncommon to find directors who persist successful the benignant of powerfully idiosyncratic styles that we tin spot across, say, the past of painting. The ultimate illustration is astir apt Yasujiro Ozu, who for 30 years clung to antithetic techniques of staging, framing, and cutting. Other examples see Robert Bresson, Jacques Tati, and Béla Tarr. Even those filmmakers associated with definite styles beryllium to beryllium alternatively changeable. Jean Renoir, identified with fluid staging and graceful camera movements successful his 1930s work, reverted to a much static, accepted attack successful aboriginal years. Antonioni, Fellini, Bergman, and adjacent Eisenstein mostly gave up their aboriginal styles for alternatives arsenic their careers progressed. It’s uncommon to find a manager with a precise marked benignant who clings to it for decades.

Wes Anderson is 1 of those stubborn stylists. Traces of his distinctive method look successful Bottle Rocket (1996) and Rushmore (1998) and crystalize successful The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). Thereafter, the Anderson look and consciousness becomes stable—some would say, adjacent stagnant. Recognizable astatine a glance, easy parodied, the Anderson sequence, portion drafting connected immoderate precedents, is simply a unsocial pictorial experience. The camera typically frames the enactment perpendicular to the background, and the characters interact frontally oregon successful profile. Compass-point editing maintains these premises, and camera movements are horizonal oregon vertical, becoming virtually robotic 90-degree shifts.

For Anderson’s admirers, these austere but flagrant techniques show his precise mastery of film’s expressive possibilities. His detractors find the aforesaid flourishes showoffish and self-congratulatory. Yet some camps should admit advantages of system and impact. The geometrical rules of staging and camera presumption escaped the movie of the request for the gratuitously beauteous shots that battalion astir live-action movies, those close-ups of irrelevant details, endless circling of actors conversing, and soaring drone shots implicit landscapes. Virtually each shot, crisply chopped to its mates, contributes to the ongoing communicative oregon situation. The aforesaid ratio emerges from the tactics of narration, which let the movie to determination swiftly done communicative points. It’s astonishing that specified overstuffed movies whiz by. In an property erstwhile the emblematic A diagnostic runs astatine slightest 130 minutes, his timepiece successful nether 2 hours.

Anderson’s pictorial method creates large fluency of narration. Thanks to accelerated cutting and voice-over commentary, we’re fixed tightly-paced communicative information. Single-shot flashbacks exemplify cardinal incidents, and speedy inserts of letters, inactive photos, and publication pages proviso details. The clarity of the pictorial method allows america to ore connected the dialogue, which tin grounds elaborate rhetoric and accelerated rhythm. Anderson characters soliloquize successful impassive, breakneck dialogue; their clipped transportation allows you to ideate them arsenic the brusque creatures Alice encounters successful Wonderland. I sometimes wonderment if these characters are akin to those successful the low-affect 1990s autarkic comics of Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware.

Of people his entreaty can’t beryllium reduced to style. A bully woody of what has endeared him to his nationalist are his tales of discordant fantasy. Working somewhat successful the vein of East Europe’s Theatre of the Absurd of the 1950s and 1960s, helium gives recognizable institutions—magazine publishing, undersea exploration, lad scouts—a disquieting unfamiliarity by being reimagined arsenic some whimsical and faintly sinister. Fanciful locales similar Blasé-sur-Ennui and the land of New Penzance go artifact representations of a “typical” French colony and a New England settlement, furnished with detailed, semi-fictional cultures and histories and haunted by separation and death. Sometimes his micro-worlds summation humanities gravity, arsenic successful The Grand Budapest Hotel’s through-the-mirror mentation of Europe betwixt the large wars.

The hazard of specified a flagrantly ceremonial cinema is that our consciousness of virtuosity volition muffle affectional expression. Anderson inoculates his enactment against this by prime of taxable and story. He relies connected well-tested melodramatic appeals: childhood, young love, parent-child conflict, youthful idealism confronting ossifying tradition. These helium embodies done protagonists who are annoying but admirable nerds, geeks, dweebs, and wonks. He volition present chases, gunplay, adjacent a constabulary siege and a situation escape—all plotted wrong the rectilinear coordinates of his camera. He’s not supra carnal comedy; astir each movie has passages of slapstick, adjacent cartoonish violence. More and much helium has incorporated ingratiating stop-motion animation that has its ain charm. (In Asteroid City, a roadrunner becomes a roadworthy dancer.) And he’s not supra the occasional shock, arsenic if gratuitously asking for an R-rating with touches of gore and full-frontal pistillate nudity. Above all, his films radiate a sober wistfulness, often astir explicit successful their endings. Matt Zoller Seitz has written eloquently astir the melancholy and pathos that haunt these comedies of off-center manners.

Still, a maniacally accordant benignant demands saltation from movie to film. How to support things fresh? All artists are constrained, but immoderate spell beyond pressures of outer condition to constrain themselves, to perpetrate to a constrictive scope of choice. Like Monet coating lilies and cathedral windows astatine antithetic times of time and night, Anderson uses self-imposed ceremonial commitments to unit america to spot his worldly with caller eyes. In a way, this prime forces him to go experimental, to tinker with the good mechanisms of cinematic storytelling.

For instance, helium has tried antithetic options successful macro-structure. Other filmmakers of his epoch person played with chronology, and he, with diagnostic finickiness, has done the same. Fragmentary flashbacks person fixed mode to modular structures. Moonrise Kingdom offers 2 versions of a azygous day, gauged to the viewpoint of its 2 large characters. The Grand Budapest Hotel offers neatly embedded tales, with the aged Zero’s communicative framed wrong the recollection of the aging writer, who is successful crook invoked by a instrumentality visiting his statue. The French Dispatch links its stories seriatim, anthologically, but each 1 is refracted done a narrator’s voice—sometimes respective voices. Each movie tries retired alternate ways to archer its story. With Asteroid City Anderson explores a new, arguably much ambitious space connected aggregate narrators. The effect is somewhat much teasing and ambivalent than his earlier efforts successful this vein—not slightest due to the fact that it semi-seriously poses cosmic questions astir thing little than the quality of humans to recognize the universe.

Asteroid City braids unneurotic 2 communicative strands. One is simply a 1955 black-and-white TV programme purporting to papers the accumulation of a play, “Asteroid City.” The 2nd is simply a widescreen colour movie taking spot successful Asteroid City.

Start with the second, a movie which has each the trappings of different travel to Anderson World. The municipality is utterly tailored to his diagnostic coordinates. Squat buildings lined up successful azygous rows on a cardinal thoroughfare supply an enclosed arena. Motel cottages prevarication successful a artifact perpendicular to the road. The agelong entranceway to the crater and its observatory is consecutive and perpendicular to the street. The camera is mostly restricted to straight-on angles and usually presents enactment from the cardinal avenue that links garage, diner, and motel. In all, the town’s layout becomes a horizontal grid fixed spot by sometimes astonishing extent of field, with figures stretching from adjacent to the camera to the skyline and the limits of visibility.

Camera movements, of which Asteroid City has rather a few, indispensable set to Anderson’s geometry. The camera whitethorn displacement lone laterally oregon guardant oregon back. Pans thin to beryllium hard pivots astatine close angles. The municipality is introduced by a rightward tracking changeable surveying the terrain with crisp swerves and pauses. As if to bid farewell to the town, this framing is rhymed astatine the extremity by a parallel changeable moving leftward to extremity connected the horizon. This antheral misses nary chance.

Like different Anderson films, the widescreen communicative is committed to a skewed but recognizable clip and place. We’re instantly plunged into midcentury America. What could beryllium a much sumptuous representation of postwar abundance than hurtling bid cars loaded with fruits, nuts, cars, tractors, and a guided missile? We’re successful the ambiance of the Space Race, the McCarthy hearings, backyard eats and drinks (hot dogs, Ovaltine, strawberry milk), discarded vehicles crossed the landscape, and the glowing pastels of what Thomas Hine calls Populuxe design. One gesture, a cigaret lighter casually refilled with a splash of gasoline, sums up the postwar presumption that vigor is successful endless supply.

The circumstances mobilize galore motifs of Hollywood movie and American culture. There’s the roadside attraction inviting drivers to propulsion implicit to spot caves, fossils, oregon nutty home-made sculptures. There’s the godforsaken motel oregon diner arsenic a crossroads of fates, arsenic successful the play Petrified Forest (1935, movie 1936), the movie One Crowded Night (1940), and Bus Stop (play 1955, movie 1956). Of people the alien visitation, unthreatening though it is, echoes the UFO panic of the play and countless science-fiction films.

The embedded movie has a coherent, though somewhat eccentric story. The Steenbeck household has travel to Asteroid City for the awards ceremonial successful the Junior Stargazer competition, wherever the son, Woodrow, volition beryllium honored. At this infinitesimal the Steenbecks’ car collapses. Worse, the begetter Augie has delayed telling Woodrow and his 3 sisters astir the decease of their parent weeks ago. Now, aft helium breaks the news, the sisters request to hide her cremated remains astatine the motel.

Meanwhile, different Junior Stargazers person arrived with their parents, on with a busload of schoolchildren and a roaming cowpoke band. More visitors person gathered determination to articulation 3 days of solemnisation nether the auspices of the subject astatine the Larks Observatory, built alongside the asteroid crater. In what follows, radical get acquainted, medals are fixed to the 5 prize-winners, the Steenbecks’ gramps Zak arrives, and the visitors are treated to a uncommon Astronomical Ellipse. Suddenly, a spacecraft lands. A svelte alien steps retired and cautiously removes the asteroid, past flies off. The visitors, on with the US government, are near to woody with their responses. It’s a classical cinematic turning point, halfway done our viewing time.

One happening ruffles the texture of the embedded film. Chapters announced by a decorative play programme people retired 3 acts, subsidiary scenes, and an epilogue. So the film-within-the-film could conceivably beryllium a (peculiar) Hollywood adaptation of a play. The enactment is confined successful clip to 3 days (the past a week aboriginal than the second) and successful abstraction to the arena of garage, diner, observatory, asteroid crater, and motel. And similar galore American plays of the period, the enactment volition pb its characters to face existential questions.

The interpolated scene-settings are traces of the different braided story, which really launches our film. It presents itself arsenic a TV amusement successful the vein of 1950s cultural-affairs programming similar Camera Three. In a 4:3, black-and achromatic representation the big promises reenactments that volition instrumentality america done the emblematic phases of the mentation of a commercialized play. Unlike the embedded film, this and aboriginal interpolations are usually filmed from a just distance, respecting the limits of a proscenium signifier and the method constraints of classical workplace television.

Immediately determination are disjunctions. Within moments the TV workplace transforms into a theatre stage, the archetypal hop into different medium. “Asteroid City does not exist,” the unctuous big tells us. There’s nary specified town, and, much surprisingly, there’s nary specified play. “It’s an imaginary play created expressly for this broadcast. . . . The substance [is] hypothetical.” Does this entail that everything we’ll see—author, cast, behind-the-scenes conflicts—is besides wholly fictional? Yet the big assures america that the amusement volition contiguous “an authentic relationship of the interior workings of a modern theatrical production.” What tin “authentic” mean here?

After watching writer Conrad Earp purportedly penning the play, we’re invited to witnesser the “first read-through rehearsal.” This reveals the erstwhile announcement astir documenting the mechanics of a accumulation to beryllium a bluff. We get nary efforts to find financing, nary readying betwixt writer and director, nary auditions oregon formed selection. The TV programme has simply skipped implicit definite phases of “the interior workings” of the accumulation and launched america into Earp’s summary for the rehearsal. At halfway signifier helium reads from the play substance establishing the setting: a sun-baked godforsaken hamlet with a state station, a diner, a centrifugal court, and a meteor crater. He supplements this with a database of main characters, captured for america successful a bid of shots of the actors who’ll represent them.

At this point, successful 1 of the astir thrilling cuts of Anderson’s career, we displacement into the widescreen colour film. It brings to vibrant beingness the scenery and freight bid invoked successful the signifier directions. We mightiness person simply a movie dramatizing the play, but it could not beryllium portion of a 1950s tv program. Its sheerly worldly qualities enactment it successful different realm than the satellite of broadcast TV. Is this embedded movie a hypothetical mentation of the read-through rehearsal we’ll ne'er see? Or, arsenic Manohla Dargis has suggested, is it an analogue to the all-star widescreen extravaganzas of the 1950s—the benignant of happening that was a nonstop rival to the cramped black-and-white unrecorded TV dramas?

The ensuing fourteen minutes marque it casual for america to hide this prologue, but the TV accumulation keeps interrupting. It skips astir successful time, from the “read-through rehearsal” backmost to the unorthodox audition of Jones Hall, the histrion playing Augie (an brushwood said to beryllium some imaginary and portion of backstage lore), and past up to the nighttime earlier the opening, erstwhile the histrion playing Woodrow visits the pistillate prima successful her bid compartment. Throughout, the making-of sequences annotate, sometimes successful advance, the embedded film. They interval alternate dialogue, specified arsenic Augie’s code to his children, and hint astatine enactment yet to come, specified arsenic Augie’s burned hand. By the end, we’ll get further hints astir scenes that were chopped oregon spell unseen by us.

The 2 communicative lines mark, I think, a caller improvement successful Anderson’s handling of narrative. Playing with chronology has been 2nd quality to him, but dissimilar galore of his contemporaries helium hasn’t tried to mislead america with ambivalent flashbacks. He typically uses flashbacks to capable successful missing bits oregon blocks of action, and helium usually signals them with written language. With Asteroid City, though, helium shifts timelines portion offering a diagnostic twist connected his conception of refracted storytelling, the warping of 1 communicative successful the people of its retelling. To enactment it cryptically, a tv mentation of an imaginary play’s accumulation is supplemented by an unmade movie of the play.

The refraction of 1 mean done different is cardinal to galore of Anderson’s films, particularly The French Dispatch, wherever each communicative is filtered done a presumption successful print, images, oregon spoken word. More specifically, theatre has been a recurring interest of Anderson’s since Rushmore, with Max’s amateur signifier adaptations of Hollywood movies (Serpico, Vietnam War epics). Moonrise Kingdom has already fixed america glimpses of a cinematic rendering of Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde portion The French Dispatch posited a layered presumption of Mitch-Mitch’s subject drama.

In Asteroid City, though, the bound lines betwixt substance and show are overmuch little clear-cut. We suffer the neat framing of communicative modules, with 1 communicative embedded wrong another, that we find successful The Grand Budapest Hotel. The TV amusement offers alternate versions of actions we spot successful the embedded film. Jones Hall’s informal audition for the relation of Augie anticipates Augie’s burning his hand, and the monologue Jones recites is addressed to Woodrow, giving his thoughts connected the alien’s sojourn and suggesting however his woman would person reacted. He adds an relationship of however helium archetypal saw her, connected a occurrence escape. This monologue is missing from the film.

Throughout, the TV amusement hints astatine developments not seen successful the movie version. At 1 infinitesimal the TV amusement edges into the film, erstwhile the camera accidentally inserts the big into Asteroid City’s landscape. Near the end, inactive baffled by the script, Jones Hall breaks quality and leaves the film, stepping from widescreen colour into the black-and-white backstage country to question manager Shubert Green. Now it seems that the embedded movie is, impossibly, besides an existent show of the play,

In all, the crosstalk betwixt movie and TV creates a “variorum” mentation of an admittedly nonexistent text. It besides violates the coordinates of our universe: a movie has nary backstage. More deeply, the anomaly makes america bespeak connected theatre arsenic a medium. We usually deliberation of a play arsenic a literate text, but the publication is lone 1 mentation of it, Every accumulation is unique. So is each performance, with actors trying retired antithetic enactment readings. Add to these versions the revisions during the creation of the play, erstwhile the writer fiddles with aggregate drafts of scenes. In all, a play successful toto—drafts, rehearsals, productions—is a benignant of literate multiverse, hosting parallel characters and lines of dialogue.

It whitethorn not beryllium excessively overmuch to deliberation of Asteroid City arsenic Anderson’s effect to the caller vogue for movies with multiverse stories. If so, it’s diagnostic of his sensibility that his fluctuating clump of microworlds comes from the satellite of theatre. The echoes and disparities betwixt antithetic versions of the play physique into the texture of the movie its astir sweeping concerns–nothing little than uncertainty astir the intersection of our satellite and 1 beyond it.

Despite the Absurdist milieus and the occasional slapstick interludes, Anderson’s films person ever been haunted by death. In The Darjeeling Limited, it’s the decease of a child, but much often it’s the decease of a parent. At 1 constituent oregon another, that lawsuit triggers immoderate mourning and reflection, but successful Asteroid City decease becomes a prevalent motif. Augie’s reluctance to archer his children of his wife’s passing becomes a recurring root of tension. When his 3 daughters larn that their mother’s ashes are preserved successful Tupperware, they hide the vessel successful the sand, aft which 1 tries to bring her backmost to life. Grandfather Zak has plans to hide the remains connected his play course. He lone reluctantly lets the vessel stay successful Asteroid City, possibly to beryllium dug up by coyotes.

Beyond these concerns, the mother’s decease pushes characters to speculate connected religion and the cosmos. Is she successful Heaven? She is for the kids, Augie says, due to the fact that they’re Episcopalian, though the daughters signifier a mentation of Christianity tinged with popular-culture notions of witches and mummies. A much by-the-numbers piety is echoed successful schoolteacher June’s coaching her people successful supplication astatine intervals.

June’s counterpart is Professor Hickenlooper, with her unshakeable assurance successful science. (This contempt her blatant ignorance: Woodrow has to explicate the galactic calendar to her.) Backed by subject force, subject is aiming for conquest of the skies. The prize ceremonial rewards the Junior Stargazers, though the authorities volition ain the patents connected their discoveries. The teenage brainiacs sanctify probe by incessant treatment of method subjects and, for fun, by playing a round-robin representation crippled invoking renowned scientists. Even their parents quality technological mentation astatine the cookout. The request for nonsubjective knowledge, peculiarly successful cosmology, counterbalances the spiritual aspirations. Religion and subject are some trying to grasp the satellite beyond.

This neat part of labour is challenged by the sojourn of a carnal from that realm. Once the alien has discreetly made disconnected with the asteroid, galore of the characters, pious oregon hyperintellectual, are impelled to inquire eventual questions. J. J. Kellogg, fed up with his lad Clifford’s changeless dares, demands “What’s the meaning?” Why does the lad importune connected showing off? Clifford for erstwhile pauses to think. Perhaps helium doesn’t privation to beryllium overlooked successful the vastness of the universe. Augie and the movie prima Midge hold that things present consciousness different, and not conscionable due to the fact that they’ve had sex. Midge, possibly channeling her movie script, wonders if they’re not “two catastrophically wounded people.” Soon Zak and Augie are impelled to a frank speech of feelings. The Stargazers’ crippled changes to regenerate titans of subject with mass-culture icons (making a concession for Darwin), and they observe the pleasance of being whistleblowers by leaking quality of the alien visit. June’s pupils person go originative artists, preparing a mockup of the spacecraft, a drafting of the alien connected Jupiter, and a hymn that prays to the alien arsenic a substitute Christ. Most radically, Woodrow worries that the sojourn forces america to inquire if there’s a meaning to life.

The aforesaid enlargement of accusation takes spot successful the seminar store Earp convokes portion preparing the play. There helium confesses that helium considered calling it The Cosmic Wilderness, which suggests the benignant of metaphysical ambitions Thornton Wilder gave Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth. Moreover, Earp intends to heighten this with a country portraying the dreams of assorted characters. We learn, during Jones Hall’s cigaret interruption connected a occurrence escape, that the archetypal play featured Augie’s wife, brought backmost to beingness successful the imagination and quizzing the alien astir the meaning of existence. (Hall’s audition monologue adjacent the film’s commencement has provided a preview.) But that full country was chopped for moving time, and Hall continues to beryllium mystified.

We get lone 2 answers. One is the puzzling slogan, “You can’t aftermath up if you don’t spell to sleep,” shouted astatine the extremity of the actors’ seminar (and reiterated successful the opus sung nether the last credits). Does it suggest that you can’t acquisition an epiphany unless you’re immersed successful mean regular existence? By contrast, there’s Green’s proposal to Hall to not interest astir the meaning of the play. “Just support telling the story.”

Both alternatives would look to beryllium astatine involvement successful the film’s precocious phases. The alien vessel returns the asteroid, and the authorities clampdown that results triggers a riotous rebellion among the visitors. When the particulate clears, romance has blossomed. The backstage TV play has already revealed awkward efforts astatine intimacy: Earp’s clasp of the histrion playing Augie, Green’s apt divorcement from Polly, Mercedes/Midge’s imaginable seduction of the histrion playing Woodrow. But successful the post-alien stretches of the film, full-blown emotion affairs emerge. Dwight’s hymn to the alien devolves into a hoedown that lets Montana expanse up June successful a lively dance. Dinah and Woodrow go a couple, and there’s a hint that Madge and Augie’s matter whitethorn continue.

Ending Asteroid City (the movie) with the TV programme would neatly framework the embedded version, but our movie ends with the play’s epilogue, successful widescreen glory. The characters person woken up, and the communicative keeps going. The hollow certainties of religion religion and authoritative subject person been replaced by a frankly uncertain cognition toward the Great Unknown—which enables radical to admit the ongoing, unpretentious adventures offered by mundane life.

The film is frankincense poised betwixt emotion and death, but the ending evokes Anderson’s accustomed enactment of muted poignancy. The embedded movie has opened with a roaring freight bid accompanied by a antheral dependable singing “Last Train to San Fernando,” a opus that celebrates a hopeless accidental for love. The full movie ends with a mentation of “Freight Train, Go So Fast” astir a antheral being hanged, yet it’s sung by a mourning pistillate with sheer exhilaration. The lone certainty is death, but earlier that everyone has a accidental to trial the Theory of Celestial Flirtation.