Appreciating the Alien: Loss and Uncertainty in “Asteroid City”

Asteroid City arrived exactly at the right time or exactly at the wrong time, however you choose to look at it. I’d broken up with my longterm boyfriend two nights before when I lined up for a Focus Features screening at 10am. It was overcast at the Landmark Sunset 5, nothing like the flat blue sky we’d been seeing in all the trailers and posters for the film.

Lined up with couple upon couple, group upon group, I was there alone, coffee in hand, feeling almost hungover from the dissolution of the relationship that I thought I’d be in for the rest of my life. I’d considered not going. It was a free ticket (well, two really), so I wouldn’t be losing anything. But no, I told myself, you have to keep doing the things you like doing. As mature or emotionally healthy as that sounded, it felt like shit.

As we were ushered into the theatre, everyone fanned out to grab concessions or take photos with the set replicas taking over the lobby. A little dazed, all I could think of was how my ex and I had gone to see The French Dispatch, Anderson’s last film, when we were first dating, maybe only a few weeks in. It was the first movie we saw together in a theatre, and I remember how much he wanted to hear every little thing I thought about it.

The first time I watched Asteroid City, then, felt as if it was obscured by a fog. I thought it was a great film, but in a really removed way, where I could feel that in some other theoretical universe where the seat beside me wasn’t empty, its emotional high points would’ve resonated deeply, but watching it that morning they only slightly registered.

What instead left me really gobsmacked was the film’s alien ‘invasion' scene. Lit in startling green light beaming down from the alien’s ship, in nearly dead quiet, the alien descends, stares at the humans, and picks up the titular asteroid, before returning to his ship. All I could think was, that’s exactly how people would act if they saw an alien, it’s absolutely perfect.

The movie is framed as a play within a teleplay—“Asteroid City” is really the name of a fictional play set in the early 1950s written by the fictional playwright Conrad Earp, in which a group of parents and their highly intelligent kids descend upon a remote American desert town for a “Junior Stargazer” science project contest, hosted by the U.S. military. We bounce between a staging of “Asteroid City” (in bright, flat color) and the process of putting on this play (in black-and-white); the film focuses on the play’s characters but we encounter their actor counterparts as well.

In one of these scenes with the actors, Jones Hall (Jason Schwartzman) takes a break from the play after being overwhelmed by his inability to grasp his character, Augie Steenbeck. On a fire escape backstage, he runs into an actress (Margot Robbie), who coincidentally was supposed to play his wife in “Asteroid City” but whose role was cut. She recounts their cut scene back to him, telling him how his character meets hers in a dream. Her character has died, and the emotional heft of the scene comes from that. But the alien comes up here as well—in the dream, she tells Augie that she met the alien, and he was shy, just like their son.

It’s this linkage of the unknowns, of the very earthly unknowns of death and loss to the extraterrestrial unknown, that forms the core of Asteroid City. The film even harkens back to another unknown I explored earlier this year with Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, the unknowability of one’s partner. That they’re not unknowable, but you have to discard some of the self to do so, which is frightening and painful. It’s funny how these things all circle back to another: I’d written that essay prompted by a fear that I didn’t know enough about my ex to take a long trip three months into our relationship. But what really undid us was the deeper fear that Hamaguchi’s film gets at—that we were too afraid, the both of us, to truly know each other and what the other wanted, so never had those difficult conversations that we needed to have, before there wasn’t any reason to have them.

In Asteroid City, loss is repeatedly framed as this struggle between knowing and not knowing, because loss that shakes the very foundation of who you are only leaves you with the unknown: how do I move forward? Who am I, now? Who were they, are they, to me?

The loss that hangs over Asteroid City, which is introduced early on as photographer Augie Steenbeck pulls into a little desert town with his four children and a broken down car, is the loss of his wife, the children’s mother. When he calls their grandfather Stanley to ask if he can come pick them up, Stanley asks if Augie’s told them of their mother’s death. He hasn’t. “The time is never right,” Augie says. “The time...is always wrong,” Stanley replies. Their conversation, up to that point filmed in split screen with the men facing the audience, now changes so that they face one another, talking to instead of past one another. “Are you OK?” Stanley asks. “No,” Augie says. The time is never right for something like this, to introduce this grief into his kids’ worlds. The words are hard to find, the reactions difficult to anticipate, the locale and the mood and the time of day never going to say, “Now’s the time to tell your kids their mother is gone.”

But, following that conversation, Augie does sit them down and tell them their mother won’t be joining them on this trip because she died three weeks ago. He tries to ease their grief, that’s not even really apparent yet, by offering an answer of sorts to the biggest unknown, telling them, “Let’s say she’s in heaven,” undercut immediately by the addition that heaven doesn’t exist for him, but it can for them because they’re Episcopalian. For Augie, he knows this is the kind of thing you’re supposed to tell kids, to give them some false hope that their mother is out there somewhere in some form, especially as his mom did the same for him when his dad died: “My mother told me, ‘He’s in the stars.’ I told her, ‘He’s not in the stars, he’s in the ground.’ She thought it would comfort me.” Yet he tries to tell his kids the same thing, then complicates it, probably just confusing them more. Knowing she’s lifeless ashes is one thing, knowing her soul is up in the stars is another – considering them both at once is a Schrodinger’s cat.

This loss is explored in other ways too, not only in the idea of where she is now and the inability to tell the children (and therefore make it real). When we zoom back out to the teleplay that houses this play, we see the meeting of Jones Hall (auditioning to play Augie) and “Asteroid City"’s playwright, Conrad Earp. Earp is won over when the actor recites a monologue, that never actually makes it into the final play, where he imagines to his son Woodrow what Woodrow’s mother would have said to the alien, that she would’ve yelled at him or made him laugh. Augie starts to drift from his imagined scene to his reality: “Sometimes, I think, sometimes I still hear her, here,” his delivery slows as he points to his temple, “her breathing in the dark…who knows, Woodrow, maybe she is in the stars.” There’s this tendency in the aftermath of a loss to imagine how that person would react to something, how they’d take a sip of coffee and say it’s good, or even to speculate how they’d react to something you’d never encountered with them before, whether that’s a movie or an alien invasion. They’ve left you only with this spectral reminder of them, that’s there in your head only. (There’s something of Drive My Car in this as well.)

For Woodrow himself, back in the play, he takes his father’s admission of his mother’s death as well as one could, saying that he was pretty sure he knew already. When his crush at the Junior Stargazer convention asks him what his mother was like, he says, “She was…like this,” pulling out a photo of her from when his father first met her. His eyes close – maybe awkwardness, maybe it upsets him a little. It’s reminiscent of that inability to describe someone so soon after you lose them because they are so much, because once you start talking about them, you feel like you’ll never be able to stop, their memory consuming the oxygen in the room.

Meanwhile, Stanley’s fixation is on his daughter’s burial place. His son-in-law has brought her ashes to this godforsaken desert in a green Tupperware, which his granddaughters have decided to bury in the ground there: “We’re not going to abandon my daughter at a motel in the middle of the desert, buried next to the communal showers.” They yell at him as he takes out the Tupperware. He puts it back, but promises to bring her back to his house the next day, to bury her on the golf course that serves as his backyard—more fitting, he thinks. It’s the last thing you can really control in death, this meaningless, earthbound thing of burial plots.

The girls, for their part, start reciting incantations over their mother’s makeshift grave—they’re witches, they insist. The least aware of what death actually means, the girls resort to the most fantastic of coping mechanisms, trying to bring her back, as opposed to Stanley’s fixation on resting place or Woodrow’s downplaying or Augie’s rationalizations. They call to unearthly forces, which would be a little spooky if they weren’t a trio of little blonde girls no more than 5 or 6 years old. Their process isn’t any less valid than those of their older, male family members. “They do know, by the way, but just barely,” as Augie later describes it.

Speaking of the unearthly, it’s only later that night that the Stargazers and their parents alike are visited by an extraterrestrial visitor. They’re expecting to watch something that happens, like clockwork, twice every 57 years—a lunar eclipse, which will appear as three dots of light all in a line through their cardboard box pinhole viewer, as explained to them by Asteroid City’s resident head scientist. She’s flanked by military men: “For a Powerful America,” the atom age banner proclaims behind the stage they stand on. The eclipse begins, but soon, a fourth, green, dot joins the expected three. Woodrow looks up, and soon they’re all bathed in green light. The music stills, but doesn’t stop, its twinkling sounding more like radio feedback. They all stare up in anticipation of their invader. Silently, gently, he descends. The music introduces strings, like some wonder at the skinny black figure that’s appeared, with its deer-in-the-headlight eyes. Only Augie can do anything, the rest are too dumbfounded, even the general who starts to draw his pistol. Augie raises his camera to take a photo. The alien mimics him, raising the asteroid.

An alien invasion, the discovery of aliens, is a loss, too, a loss of the self as it’s been constructed up to that point, as the center of the universe. It’s a disorienting loss, shaking humans free from their imagined place of primacy. When I first broke up with my ex, who never posts on social media, I had no real form of communicating with him. I would only see if and when he liked my Instagram Stories. I took to calling him “my alien” to my friends: this being to whom I had no relation, no way to know how he was doing or what he was thinking or feeling, only able to send out missives of my life back here on earth and see if he sent a coded response back.

In the face of both of these losses, of the loss of the mother/wife/daughter and the appearance of the alien, the characters all react differently, but each one is framed by this decision to present themselves as knowing or not knowing in the face of it, as understanding what this means and where they go from here or not. Everyone deals with this new unknown in their own way. The government responds in their typical way, with intimidation and secrecy, locking the entire town and everyone in it down. A class of elementary school kids visiting Asteroid City on a field trip can only think about the alien, derailing their lesson plan on the planet Neptune with questions because their world has been knocked off its axis: “Maybe the alien went there?” Montana, the cowboy whose band is trapped in Asteroid City along with them, “reckon[s] he came from a tribe we don’t know nothing about, down here in the spirit of exploration.” For Augie, with the loss of his wife, he vacillates: there’s not knowing when to tell the kids, but knowing for certain she’s in the ground and not in heaven, but then not knowing if he should leave the kids with their grandfather (“Are you planning to abandon us?” “Uhhhhhhh…I was.”). His son, on the other hand, had sort of known already his mother was dead, but the alien is a source of excited confusion and why he came here a tantalizing mystery. Is knowing, is certainty, scarier than unknowing? Is deciding on a course of action, discovering something you weren’t anticipating, having a suspicion confirmed…is that all more frightening than living in a state where multiple things could be true, multiple paths lie ahead of you?

I’d say yes. But maybe it’s good for us, better but harder. My ex stopped being my alien when I found out that he had a new girlfriend. I knew, now, how he was doing—he had moved on. I no longer had to wonder, when he liked my Stories, what the impetus behind it was, or where he was, was he at work or at home editing photos or waiting in line at a Ralph’s in Glendale. He was with someone else, feeling the brightness of someone who looked at him with eyes unclouded, and liking my snapshots from my life as a kind of “good for her,” devoid of care or wistfulness or love or anything else I might still hope he held a vestige of.

Not only with unknowing can you create realities for yourself that are kinder to your heart, but once you know, you have to move forward. Shrouded in ambiguity, you can remain still while the smoke clears. Knowing for sure your wife really is dead, there really are aliens, your boyfriend really is out of your life, you have no choice but to reconceptualize yourself and forge ahead. Augie’s actor counterpart Jones Hall summarizes this feeling, this fear, toward the end of the film, as he takes that break and runs backstage because he can’t comprehend his character. The play’s director is backstage, there to give him not so much as a pep talk but affirmations to every question he poses: “Am I doing it right?” “...You’re doing it just right.” “Do I just keep doing it?” “Yes.” “Without knowing anything?” “Yes.” “I still don’t understand the play.” “Doesn’t matter, just keep telling the story.”

Neither the character Augie nor Midge, the depressed actress he strikes up a romance with, say they feel any different after the arrival of the alien. They’re not like their kids, stirred up by the confirmation that we’re not alone in the universe. To them it seems more like another thing in a never ending procession of shit that happens to them, too dulled to consider the possibilities. As Augie hammers out school drop-off routines with his father-in-law, Woodrow can’t believe their nonchalance: “How can you even think about this? The world will never be the same. What happens next, nobody knows! Will he visit us again? Will he speak to us? What will he say?” (Things I’ve asked of my alien.) “Why did he steal our asteroid, was it ours in the first place? Nobody knows! What’s out there? Something…the meaning of life, maybe there is one!”

But the morning after the alien’s visit, Midge asks Augie to run lines with her for a film she’s about to shoot. In a monotone, he reads the dramatic scene of her character’s suicide back to her. She asks him to do it again and use his grief, and he does, bringing some emotion back to the line: “Such a sickening waste…think of the world you could’ve seen, Dolores.” He sniffles, turning the page, quickly ending the scene. He walks over to the kitchenette to retrieve his sandwich off the tabletop griddle and impulsively sticks his hand on the hot grill, burning it to both the surprise of Midge and himself. Maybe he doesn’t feel it in the way that Woodrow does, but maybe the alien has changed something within him too, loosened some protective mechanism and now all emotion, and grief in particular, is more accessible to him. I’d say Asteroid City did the same for me, not noticeable in the immediate aftermath, but slowly becoming a lens for interpreting my breakup.

The alien, too, is what brings his wife back to Augie, into his dreams. In that cut scene I mentioned at the very beginning, Augie and his wife meet in a dream on the alien’s planet, acted out by Jones Hall and the actress who would’ve played his wife, after Jones talks to the play’s director backstage. In the scene, he asks if she talked to the alien, and she says she thinks the alien is shy, like their son. She details the rest of the scene to Jones, starting with their son’s shyness: “I say, I think he’s a late bloomer but you’ll need to replace me. You say, what, why, how, I can’t. I say, maybe I think you’ll need to try. I’m not coming back, Augie. And then you take a picture of me and start crying. And I say, I hope it comes out.” It’s the emotional high point of the film, taking place in the ephemeral context of a cut scene from a fake play. But it’s the alien who brings Augie to this realization, his subconscious imagining that his wife would tell him to replace her, because their son who’s a late bloomer like the alien will need someone else in his life. His response to her saying that she’s not coming back is to take a photo of her, the one domain where he has control.

When Augie wakes up, Midge is already gone. He meets his children and their grandfather in a diner for breakfast, where the waitress gives Augie Midge’s address. (Just a P.O. box.) Then they go and finally say goodbye to his wife. The girls still won’t let Stanley take out the Tupperware from the patch of dirt. He gives up: “I no longer have the strength to fight for her dignity.” Woodrow chimes in to say he no longer believes in God. “Fair enough.” Stanley quietly cries as he watches the girls say incantations over the Tupperware. Resting place resolved, closure nominally achieved, she’s in the ground, just as Augie said earlier he knew his father to be. But in his dreams, she’s in the stars. He’s begun the process of acknowledging she’s gone, moving himself from the liminal, uncertain space he entered the film in: not knowing when to tell the kids, what to tell them, if he could move on, if he was going to leave them with Stanley.

I’ve been unready to finish this essay, never feeling in the right mood, on the right wavelength, to close this chapter. “Maybe this isn’t the right way to write about this movie,” I’ve told myself. Sometimes I feel nothing about the end of my relationship and looking at Asteroid City through this lens no longer feels right, while sometimes I feel almost too in sync with the characters, some of the dialogue too on the nose for me.

Because, in many ways, this does the same for me as the story of “Asteroid City” does for Augie. The same as journaling, as painting, as talking—it’s confirmation that I know that my relationship is over, that I’ve moved it from uncertain to certain.

It takes a long time to get to knowing. It’s not really “acceptance,” that hoary grief stage we’re all supposed to get to, but rather the mere convincing of oneself that something truly has happened, something is over, someone will never show up at your door again. It’s not accepting that aliens are out there and human existence doesn’t mean the same thing anymore, it’s not fully understanding what your new identity in the face of that is yet. It’s just that relieving yourself of the twisted comfort of the unknown, to know now what is real and do the uncomfortable thing of purely existing with that knowledge.

Appreciating the Alien: Loss and Uncertainty in “Asteroid City”

“How Do You Live?”: Oppenheimer and The Boy and The Heron

Place and Memory in “Suzume”