Humor and humility can also help us cope with the type of puzzling universe that “Asteroid City” places before our eyes.
Like many of Wes Anderson’s films “Asteroid City” (2023), now streaming on Peacock, gets you thinking about what the director is attempting to convey. At least that was my reaction. I’ve mentioned before that responses to films, TV series, or books are often highly personal. And this is especially true when a creation is complex, as “Asteroid City” is.
As mentions of some of the names below (in parenthesis) indicate, the film features a large ensemble cast of distinguished actors, all of whom perform in a first-rate manner. But the main character is war photographer Augie Steenback (Jason Schwartzman). He’s a widower, as am I. Although compared to me, he’s decades younger, his kids are much younger than my adult children, and his loss more recent than mine, we share a similar grief and some experiences—like where to place our departed wife’s ashes. Nevertheless, unlike one reviewer who wrote “the remarkable power of Asteroid City is the intimidating weight of its grief,” I will refrain from saying much more about my own personal experiences.
Yet, grief and dealing with it pervades this latest Anderson film. One of the cast members commented, “The film is about...existential angst...What are we doing here?...Does anyone know what they’re doing?” The director himself said, “We went into it with a sense of it being about how you face things beyond your control, and how you respond to a world that is so much bigger than you and is a mystery. And grief was at the centre of it. Always. Death was at the centre of it.”
Following his lead, let’s then explore, within this film’s context, death, grief, and “how you respond to a world that is so much bigger than you and is a mystery.” Regarding death, besides that of Augie’s wife, who is also the mother of his teenage son Woodrow and younger triplet girls, there are other deaths with which to contend.
Augie’s father-in-law, Stanley (Tom Hanks), tells his son-in-law that he himself has been a widower for 12 years, and that his wife “drank herself to death.” Before the film ends Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), the author of a play named “Asteroid City” (the film is about this play being put on), dies in an automobile accident. The play is set in a western desert area in 1955 near where nuclear tests were carried out—in fact, there were 14 such tests at a Nevada Test Site in the first half of 1955—and fear of wartime A-Bomb deaths (the USSR also had the bomb) was widespread.
In addition, from time to time in “Asteroid City” we hear portions of the haunting song "Streets of Laredo." (Here’s one stanza: “Oh, beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly / Play the dead march as you carry me along / Take me to the green valley, throw the sod o'er me / For I'm a young cowboy and I know I've done wrong.”)
The one who voices his grief the most is widower Augie. Near the end of the film, though his wife is now dead, he has an imaginary dialogue with her (Margot Robbie in her only scene). Although what she says as they stand on balconies across from each other relates to a scene that was cut in the play, her words are still relevant. (Anderson thought that “the scene she plays...is one of the most important scenes in the whole movie.”) She tells Augie, “Maybe I think you’ll need to replace me.” His response: “What? Why? How? I can’t.” To which, she answers, “Maybe I think you’ll need to try. I’m not coming back, Augie.”
Since he’s only in early middle age and still has young children, his former wife has a legitimate point. And he does become attracted to the actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson). Becoming drawn to another woman after being widowed is certainly not unusual either in real life or in fictional portrayals, whether in books or on screen. Midge, however, has problems of her own and at one point says, “We’re just two catastrophically wounded people who don’t express the depths of our pain because...we don’t want to.”
Not only is she a wounded human being without answers to many of life’s questions, but so too are Anderson’s other characters. Economist/environmentalist E. F. Schumacher wrote in his last book, A Guide for the Perplexed (1977), “Not only are they [people] utterly helpless when they are born and remain so for a long time; even when fully grown, they do not move and act with the sure-footedness of animals. They hesitate, doubt, change their minds, run hither and thither, uncertain not simply of how to get what they want but above all of what they want.” He attributed this intellectual/moral deficiency to educational systems that poorly prepared people to figure out how they should live.
At one point Augie asks, “Isn’t there supposed to be some kind of an answer out there in the cosmic wilderness?” But no one in the film has an answer for him what it might be. In 1875 Leo Tolstoy, the famous Russian author of War and Peace, wrote to a friend that he was suffering an “inner spiritual condition in which nothing from the outer world has any interest,” and that he, still only 47, saw nothing but death ahead of him.
Unless one is a strong religious believer—Tolstoy would become one only later in life—such a fear is all too common. One way of combating it is through some form of transcendence. Many wise people have noted this and proposed different means—e.g., love, identifying with nature, turning to the arts, etc.—of achieving such a state. Anderson himself seems to suggest that his films can offer a doorway to at least partial transcendence.
Psychologist Robert C. Peck sums up one way of achieving it when he writes, “To live so generously and unselfishly that the prospect of personal death—the night of the ego, it might be called—looks and feels less important than the secure knowledge that one has built for a broader, longer future than any one ego ever could encompass. Through children, through contributions to the culture, through friendships—these are ways in which human beings can achieve enduring significance for their actions which goes beyond the limit of their own skins and their own lives.”
A window to such transcendence is also hinted at in “Asteroid City” by an alien (Jeff Goldblum) who comes down to the city in a spaceship. If we are familiar with cosmologist Carl Sagan, we might be aware of some of his statements that provide proper perspective on our place in the universe. For example, “We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star that is one of 400 billion other stars that make up the Milky Way Galaxy, which is one of billions of other galaxies which make up a universe which may be one of a very large number, perhaps an infinite number, of other universes.” And, “For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.”
In addition to Sagan’s cosmological perspective, humor and humility can also help us cope with the type of puzzling universe that “Asteroid City” places before our eyes. Consider the following quote from Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), perhaps the twentieth-century’s most influential U. S. theologian (and a favorite thinker of former President Obama).
Humor is a proof of the capacity of the self to gain a vantage point from which it is able to look at itself. The sense of humor is thus a by-product of self-transcendence. People with a sense of humor do not take themselves too seriously. They are able to “stand off” from themselves, see themselves in perspective, and recognize the ludicrous and absurd aspects of their pretensions. All of us ought to be ready to laugh at ourselves because all of us are a little funny in our foibles, conceits and pretensions. What is funny about us is precisely that we take ourselves too seriously. We are rather insignificant little bundles of energy and vitality in a vast organization of life. But we pretend that we are the very center of this organization. This pretension is ludicrous; and its absurdity increases with our lack of awareness of it.
Such a more Sagan/Niebuhr-like perspective, one where we admit—in this dogmatic, know-it-all, polarized Internet world of ours—that there is much we don’t understand, rather than depressing us, could actually be liberating and refreshing.
