Happy Birthday Me! It's Asteroid City!
It's my Birthday Week, and around my birthday I like to take some time to surround myself with my favorite things. So, I'm going to talk to you about some of the reasons why Asteroid City (2023) is one of my favorite movies.
TLDR: I like aliens, I like surrealism, and I like thinking about (thinking about) art.
It has aliens! In a desert!
It was inevitable that I would like this movie. The second I saw the trailer, I thought it looked like the closest I would get to a movie about Strangetown, which is not only my favorite town in Sims 2, but my favorite town in the entire Sims franchise.1
Both Strangetown and Asteroid City are super small towns in the American southwest that are visited by aliens (another of my perennial interests). Asteroid City even has some military and mad scientist elements thrown in there, though not in quite the same way as Strangetown.
The question of whether or not aliens exist or are actively visiting Earth is less interesting to me than the fact that they are firmly lodged in American culture at this point in time. I both love kitschy/touristy alien aesthetics and the history of flying saucers and abduction stories.
It's a weird ass movie
The trailer for Asteroid City didn't prepare me for how strange the movie really was. It's certainly not for everyone. All three of the people I've shown it to basically just nodded and said "Yeah, that's a you movie," after I made them watch it. This doesn't offend me because they're right. I think you either like it or you don't.
Asteroid City is a fictional city within the movie's own universe, and the movie's story jumps back and forth between a play (Asteroid City) and the story behind the play (the drama among the actors, the director, and the writer). These two plots progress linearly, in parallel, but that somehow doesn't make it less confusing.
Sometimes the actors behind the scenes will reference scenes from the play that you see acted out, and sometimes they reference scenes that you don't see, leaving you guessing whether those scenes were deleted or just not shown. Should those "deleted" scenes be considered part of the story or not? How much would knowing this matter to the story--and why? This is only one of the ways that the movie shows that it's much more interested in raising questions than providing answers.
I am someone who enjoys imagination and playfulness in my fiction. I don't usually like being spoon-fed explanations for characters' actions or the way their world works. If the characters believe their world and their actions are natural, then I will, too, even if I'm confused.2
Asteroid City is admittedly toward the extreme end of denying explanations to its viewers, but I like that. It's almost like a Rorschach test or a tarot reading, where you are forced to bring yourself into the media in order to understand it. Which, in my opinion, helps you understand how all art interpretation works.
This could be another post in itself, so I'll keep it sorta short here, but I find confusing movies that don't make efforts to explain themselves to be more realistic. Maybe "realistic" is the wrong word. True to life? I find our world to be confusing and lacking explanation most of the time. Realism isn't a metric for how good a movie is, though (movie quality is subjective). Stories are usually told to inject more sense into the world.↩