PicoBlog

If there’s one theme that stretches across Wes Anderson’s films, then it is that of the miniature. Whether it’s the lavish ballroom of The Grand Budapest Hotel, the hand painted carriages in The Darjeeling Limited, or now the quarantine zone in Asteroid City, Wes Anderson has grown into cinema’s greatest miniaturist. As Toy Story director John Lasseter once observed, people are drawn to miniature worlds, they want to inhabit them.

Asteroid City innovates in several ways, adding new camera-movements, multilayered dialogue, and some A-list additions to Wes Anderson’s familiar cast of actors — most notably Steve Carell, Tom Hanks, and Margot Robbie. But this is still very much a Wes Anderson film. Supporters will admire the richly-layered, hyper-stylized aesthetic, whilst detractors will find plenty of evidence to support the claim that he remains an unrepentant formalist.

And yet arguably this is his most restrained and concise film to date. In one of the most memorable sequences of the film, the actors momentarily stop what they’re doing to chant what might well be considered the central thesis of the film, perhaps even his artistic principle: “you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep!”

This is what Wes Anderson’s movies are all about. They lull us into a dream-scape in order to speak to the things that really matter. Life, love, loss, death, the futility of it all, and the urgent need to keep on dreaming.

Freud has a well-known analysis of a father who has recently lost a son. Standing watch over the boy’s deathbed, the father falls asleep and is visited by the deceased child in his dreams: “Father, can’t you see that I am burning!” The father wakes up, and discovers that during his sleep, a candle has fallen over and begun to burn the room in which the boy’s corpse lay.

Here one should immediately resist the temptation to interpret the story as a paranormal “message.” Instead, the true import of the story is that the father felt guilty about his son’s death and about falling asleep. Hence why when he “wakes up” to rescue the child, this very act of waking allows him to repress his original guilt. In other words, the sleeping and the waking are one and the same. The father wakes up in order to stay asleep (to the underlying guilt).

Yet doesn’t Art accomplish the exact opposite? Isn’t the fundamental premise of all (serious) art that it puts us to sleep in order to properly wake us up to the reality of our existence? Recall the well-known maxim (variously attributed to Oscar Wilde, Albert Camus, and Neil Gaiman) that “fiction is the lie which tells the truth.” Without a minimal sense of distortion we cannot see reality for what it is.

Vice versa, any claim to present the truth in its objective “common sense” form often masks the exact opposite, namely ideological obfuscation. For Theodor Adorno “common sense” was essentially an oxymoron. Reason stands against common wisdom, as art stands against cultural reification. Moreover, all creativity is precisely that which radically favors one particular vision, that of the artist, thereby refracting the universal dimension into a singular claim. Or, as Adorno put it, art respects the masses by confronting them rather than catering to their perceived needs, what he called “their degraded state”.

But Wes Anderson is neither a radical theorist nor an avant-garde revolutionary. His films make the case that the artifice of cinema is true to the distorting lens of experience as such. That unless we learn to see things “the wrong way,” as Kafka once wrote, we cannot see things the right way. Or, to quote the movie, “the time is never right. The time is always wrong.”

And if artifice is the antithesis of affect (the scourge of all serious art) then in his determination to wring every last drop of the former from his film-making, Wes Anderson presents a consistently clear vision of cinema as an art form that illuminates and enriches. Or, as he has the photographer (played by Jason Schwartzman) put it in Asteroid City, his pictures “always turn out.”

Asteroid City is no different. Look past the bright and creamy color palette, and you’ll find an extensive meditation on the artifice of time, self-hood, perception, and story-telling. In fact, the film essentially advocates that the telling of the story is more important than the message (“I still don’t understand the play/doesn’t matter, just keep telling the story.”) And of course the same might be said of life.

To view the Asteroid City trailer, click below:

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