Failure to Launch Syndrome and the Denizens of Asteroid City

A Meditation on Wes Anderson's Latest Film

This morning the short story I am working on, “Pursuit Among the Ruins,” took a surprising turn. The other day, my son Francis and I went to see Wes Anderson’s new film, Asteroid City, and ever since then I have been mulling over the narrative strategy Anderson employs in the film. What should I call it? “The Breaking the Fourth Wall Strategy”? The “Intrusive Narrator Device”? The “Quirked-Out Metafictional Mannerism”?

I think I’ll call it the “Our Town Gambit,” after Thornton Wilder’s eponymous 1938 play.

Anderson begins his movie by showing us scenes from a black-and-white television special, whose host informs us that what we are about to watch the beginning of a new play (called Asteroid City) by the famed playwright Conrad Earp.

Then we shift to the play itself (which is actually a movie--???) and scenes in supersaturated and stylized color evocative of the 1950s. A father named Augie Steenbeck arrives with his four children in Asteroid City—a tiny desert town in the American Southwest where a Junior Stargazers convention is about to take place. At the convention Augie’s brainiac son Woodrow, along with several other children, will be honored for their science projects.

And so it goes. Scenes from the play itself are juxtaposed with scenes from the television special, where we hear more from the host and see the playwright Earp interacting with the director and the actors who we see performing in the play.

This isn’t a review of Anderson’s film, which is a very poor film, a film that was made on Anderson’s reputation and the quality of his ensemble of actors, not on the quality of his script.

What I am interested in is Anderson’s attempt to provide his film with a transcendent vantage point. Which brings us back to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.

Both in his dramatic writing and in his fiction, Wilder was gripped by the problem of how to depict the true experience of a particular individual while at the same time depicting universal truth. He thought the theater was especially well suited to tell both truths:

[Theater] has one foot planted firmly in the particular, since each actor before us (even when he wears a mask!) is indubitably a living, breathing ‘one’; yet it tends and strains to exhibit a general truth since its relation to a specific ‘realistic’ truth is confused and undermined by the fact that it is an accumulation of untruths, pretenses, and fiction. (I’m drawing upon Wilder’s Preface to his book, Three Plays.)  

However, theater’s ability to show the “general truth” is inhibited, Wilder argues, when it allows itself to be boxed in by the proscenium stage and when it goes for realistic staging and acting effects. By both strategies the theater is devitalized. In Our Town, Wilder sought to revitalize the theater by (1) breaking the “fourth wall” (and thus the confines of the “box set”) by having his Stage Manager speak directly to the audience, and (2) by employing a minimalist set design and pantomime by the actors.

For Wilder, realism on stage obstructs the imagination as it attempts to move through the particular to the universal. Realistic staging and acting give us too much particularity, and consequently too much of what soon will be (if not today then tomorrow) thrust back into past time. On stage, we need just enough of a mimetic connection to real life such that we can see how the “general truth” of the play is related to the particularities of personal experience.

Thus Wilder hoped to achieve a transcendent vantage point for his play, “transcendent” both in the sense of “going beyond” the egos, sentiments, dreams and ambitions of the particular characters, and in the sense of invoking the all-seeing eye of God upon human affairs.

In Asteroid City Wes Anderson attempts something like the “Our Town Gambit.” He breaks the “fourth wall” of the story in the desert by depicting the writer and actors behind the play we are seeing. The host of the television special, as well as the director and actors in the play, together play a role akin to Wilder’s Stage Manager, in that they attempt to afford us a transcendent perspective on the story in the play. Realism is also dispatched by the fact that the actors, both in and behind the play, though not engaged in pantomime, are more comic caricatures than real people.

Yet Anderson’s use of the “Our Town Gambit” not only does not, but deliberately refuses to exploit, the potential in the device. He uses the device to raise serious questions about life’s meaning, but then denies to his characters the serious effort of pursuing those questions and achieving “general truth.” Questioning, both inside and behind the play Asteroid City, quickly and not-too comically fizzles into agnosticism regarding life’s meaning.

It is a masterstroke, in a way, for Anderson to set the play Asteroid City in the boomtime of the technological age, with science projects, alien visitations, and Trinity-like tests exploding randomly in the background. (Such tropes have loomed large in modern storytelling since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.) Modern technology provides something like a glass dome around the world, shutting us into a desire to master and control nature. But for Anderson, the technological drive is an attempt to launch into a transcendent world, a world of wonder and awe and beauty. But for Anderson’s characters, this drive does not (cannot?) lead to such a world. At best, it leads to other creatures no more alien and mysterious than we are—but to nothing beyond the creaturely.

Anderson’s raising the specter of, and then ultimately rejecting, a transcendent vantage point is most evident in the great pains the film takes to frustrate our expectations regarding plot. In Asteroid City there is no protagonist in quest of a goal. There are emotionally damaged characters with questions about life’s meaning, and things happen to these characters (in particular, an alien visitation). But there is never a significant dramatic action taken by any character either in the play or in the television special about the play.

A healthy imagination is always grounded in action, which is to say, a character on the hunt, a character taking responsibility for his life. Because there is no significant dramatic action in Anderson’s movie, Anderson is forced to make his passive, irresponsible characters bare their souls in on-the-nose dialogue that is meant to be poignant but which always falls flat.

Psychologists talk about “failure to launch” syndrome, a condition in which young adults fail to make the transition into more mature stages of development. Wes Anderson’s characters in his movie Asteroid City are like such young adults. They aspire to a transcendence that will bring them to a certain maturity, but at launch they sputter off the pad and crash. They do not develop because they do not take responsibility for their lives. They do not sincerely pursue the questions about life that would allow them to transcend the immanent frame of our technological age.

But in thinking about all this I have been inspired to try something of an “Our Town Gambit” with my short story. More on that anon.

Meanwhile, your own comments and reflections most appreciated.

Still looking for a great summer read? My novel, The Good Death of Kate Montclair, is available here on Amazon and from Chrism Press.