Asteroid City Is Peak Wes Anderson

Asteroid City Is 'Peak Wes Anderson' In The Best Way

Asteroid City works as a master key that decodes all Anderson's pop-up book fantasies, writes Prahlad Srihari.

Dir: Wes Anderson

Cast: Tom Hanks; see all

Playing in: Theatres

OF all the trends to come out of the generative AI craze, one of the worst has to be the Wes Anderson mash-ups. Social media is flooded with all sorts of ghastly miscreations passed off as grand feats of “prompt engineering.” What if Star Wars, Avatar, Harry Potter and The Shining (the list goes on) were directed by a filmmaker with the most unmistakable style? Except, each mash-up mistakes aesthetics for cosmetics. Each cheapens the precise symmetry, the kitsch cool, the pastel colours and all the mannered extremes to algorithmic feed. To bored TikTokers, Anderson represents aesthetic-core: a glorified filter for their morning commutes, lunch breaks and pandemic quarantines.

For the very same reasons TikTokers and AI apostles can’t get enough of Anderson, the naysayers refuse to give him due consideration. Every new film is like a stick being handed on a silver platter to those who see his formal affectations as frivolous adornments — a knee-jerk reaction from the kind of viewers who have grown too suspicious of pretty surfaces to see the terrible depths of sadness underneath. Anderson’s stories are inextricable from his sense of style, from the alternate worlds in which the repressed emotions of his characters inexorably burst through the pretty surface.

Foregrounding the artifice doesn’t prevent the artifice from assuming its own truth. Recognising art by definition as artifice, Anderson has doubled down on the heightened realism with each successive film, readily branded by the press as “peak Wes Anderson” and called out by the detractors as “self-indulgent”, as if that’s a bad thing. Truth be told, who deserves to be indulged more than an artist at his most creatively and emotionally naked, throwing all caution to the wind?

Asteroid City, his latest, is indeed “peak Wes Anderson” and “self-indulgent” in the best sense of the word. Because it works as a master key that decodes all his pop-up book fantasies, opening the door to the creative process of an artist seeking answers to the unknown and the unknowable through the artifice of unreality. Anderson doesn’t yield his secrets readily however. He embeds them between layers upon layers of metatextual playfulness.

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