Asteroid City

Wes Anderson, 2023

Check it out on Letterboxd

The following is a love letter to Asteroid City:

If you've ever been to the desert, you know this feeling. Where the rocks are big, the buildings are so small, there is a layer of dust covering every surface, your skin warms in the sun, the water tastes sweeter because it is so rare, the spirits in the sky are spread out wide and you think if you looked deep enough into the stars you could see something extraterrestrial, and all is vibrant in the way only desolate wastelands can be because that is where humanity is truly laid bare and anything is perceivably and unsurprisingly possible.

That was just a paraphrase of my Letterboxd review, written in a fervor in the late hours of last night while the credits rolled on Asteroid City and I finally felt like Wes Anderson and I had understood each other. Anderson has long been an elusive filmmaker for me, and for those unfamiliar has been responsible for widely celebrated and innovative films such as The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), and many more, each special in their own way. If you have not come across the coffee table book "Accidentally Wes Anderson" (Wally Koval, 2020) either, then allow me to share a few photos that embody Wes Anderson's distinct visual style that permeates all of his films. Enjoy! Each of these frames is like a little piece of candy.

Isle of Dogs (2018)

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

The Darjeeling Limited (2007)

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

The French Dispatch (2021)

You get the gist. Deliciously colorful, symmetrical, and unmistakably Wes Anderson. While I admit I struggled to connect with Anderson's stories for a while and ultimately felt they were style over substance (hence the term "candy," these films felt like a sweet treat with no real nutritional value), I have come around on the artist thanks to the very depths of the soul on display in Asteroid City.

I won't get too much into the story as I highly recommend you watch it as soon as you've finished this glowing review, but Asteroid City is, I believe, Anderson's most existential, grief-stricken, flawed, and inexperienced collection of characters yet, each of them grieving their own losses in their own way, reacting selfishly or rashly toward the universe-altering event they all experience, and ultimately helping and hurting each other in the most human of ways. While Anderson's stories are typically overtly constructed (or completely detached from each other, such is the case of The French Dispatch, which I found surprisingly charming) and move along in an almost slapstick nature, Asteroid City simply plops all of its characters into the desert town and forces them to interact.

Here is a crucial piece of information for understanding Cheyenne on a plate: I love stories about bad people doing bad things to each other. If you've ever wandered over to my Letterboxd, you will see films like Closer (Mike Nichols, 2004), The Ice Storm (Ang Lee, 1997), and even May December (Todd Haynes, 2023) lurking on my list of Favorites. These films are all part of this sub-genre for which I am the biggest fan: selfish, ignorant, meandering people hurting others, infecting their lives with one another, and going after what they want with little regard for those around them. It's sickening, but like watching reality television, it's so addicting to watch. Stories and characters like these reveal the ugliest and deepest-buried parts of ourselves and brings them into the harsh light of cinema. The giddiness I felt when the players in Asteroid City talked to each other about their problems, manipulated each other, and ultimately imprinted themselves onto the lives of everyone else there, all on Wes Anderson's cotton candy-colored sets had me smiling from start to finish.

I also love the desert, for reasons I mentioned in my overly poetic Letterboxd review; it's the place where humanity is laid bare. The most desolate slices of land where humans (and very few plants or animals) are the least able to survive, and it is in those places that I feel the most at home. Deserts are vast and existential, oases from constant noise yet suffocatingly silent, and internally stimulating despite the constant external threats to our comfort. If you have the resources, I implore you to go to the desert sometime. Go for a walk, look at the nothingness for miles around, and allow yourself to feel the dry ground beneath your feet. If you can't get to the desert, watch Asteroid City instead.

-Cheyenne