REVIEW: Wes Anderson's compact 'Asteroid City' seemed mostly compelled by the COVID crisis trap.
Late musings from under the waning Buck moon.
Last night I attended a showing of Wes Anderson’s latest film, ‘Asteroid City’. The film’s narrative felt entirely compelled by capture in phasic writing that ran in circles under quarantine capture. The characters gathered in a 1950 desert region to celebrate annual accolades of aerospace science in the fictional town of Asteroid City. Asteroid City was a curious stop over on the border of California, Nevada and Arizona. The draw was an enormous asteroid crater that held the remains of millennia old spherical meteriod on display in a commemorative cage.
The characters were simple, yet had increasingly complicating lives while compelled to quarantine in Asteroid City. Their actions were unfortunately transparent under a sudden unconstitutional martial order. The hapless travelers were coming through for an annual junior science award and celestial event centered on an ‘ellipsis’ or three concurrent dots. The story-tale detoured into subplot cutouts, detailing the life and sudden death of the playwright, in various stages writing the play. It dialed in the increasingly sordid lives of the actors playing stoic single line exchanges that turned to grind them with grief and ambiguity.
The exchanges were also riddled with scientific jargon, deception and inconclusion. The dialogue was often trifling layers, of lists of item contents in introductory and operative exchanges. It was a mirror of the lives and lifestyles of creative people submerged in COVID governance tantrums and its doldrums, driven by a vague and overly broad security authority.
There were layers of subconscious and conscious meaning weaved through the entire film; which felt at times crowded and suffocating. I reassured my mate that it was the effort of Anderson’s screenplay to convey the loss of the normal abilities. This included obstructed travel and the stacking of compulsory living and working in one confined space during COVID.
One such instance, was a cut-away scene of the playwriters class arriving at the same resonant conclusion as developing story. “YOU DON’T HAVE TO WAKE UP IF YOU DON’T GO TO SLEEP!” emerged as a monotonous abusive chant. It was meant to assault the senses with a zealous fervor that likely emulated the irrational and violent political turbulence of the Summer of 2020, aka ‘woke’ political action.
Another was the addendum to the ellipsis in the celestial event - a consecutive three dot emblem recognized in many cultures as, “Life goes on.” When a fourth green dot appeared it hailed an aberrant life-form moving forward into their experience as a “forth kind”.
AUTHOR NOTE: The favored abuse of the ellipsis is one of my personal style in text and conversational chats. It’s also a rendition of a popular 3-dot tattoo found on many people’s hands as an evolved straight line vs. the triangulation of dots in, “mi vida loca”.
The subsequent ambush by martial law quarantine, science testing and truncation of all normal liberty happened in a partitioned mash among genius children. The junior science award winners manufactured means to tell the world of their secreted circumstances and of the ‘why’ of their unconstitutional arrest to the school newspaper. Thus, drastically shortening a 1,065 day sentence, based on 1950 file national security policy.
So we see this as evidence of editorial embedded as possible dissent in Wes Anderson’s screenplay. We once made the comparison of national security invalidation of normalcy of a civilian’s living circumstances to that of US COVID civil policy directed at US populations during the pandemic. We also said most recently, despite the whims and anti-desire of medical autocrats on all things COVID, “Life goes on.”
Perhaps, Wes Anderson layered his experience like a message in a bottled up frenetic conveyance at Asteroid City.
To read into it here, are my own conclusions. He never said anything of the sort.
