This article contains spoilers for Asteroid City.
In🍌 Asteroid City, out on Peacock now after a theatrical release earlier this summer, grief is a crater. It’s also a broken-down car, the liminal space of sleep, and a military quarantine following a close encounter with the third kind. Wes Anderson’s 11th feature is as rich in metaphor as it is complexly layered in its structure, and Anderson aims each, like a prodigiously talented child scientist wielding an experimental laser gun of their own design, at this theme.
That complex structure — the story of a group of people at a youth scientist convention in the American southwest, which is actually a play invented for an episode of a TV show telling an entirely fictional story — may be part of the reason it stalled out a little at the box office after a career-best opening weekend for Anderson. But the slightly confusing aspects of the movie are what has made it grow in my estimation each of thಞe three times I’ve watched it. Every time, I see more of the ways that each aspect of its nested story brings the theme of processing grief to life.
As the movie begins, Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) and his four children arrive at Asteroid City, a small desert settlement near a military base where his oldest child, Woodrow (Jake Ryan), is participating in a Junior Star♊gazer convention with several other teens. Woodrow and his young triplet sisters don’t know that their mother died three weeks ago because Augie hasn’t been able to find a way to tell them. Eventually he manages, and Augie, Woodrow, and the girls spend their time in Asteroid City coming to terms with the death in their own ways.
The town of Asteroid City is one big metaphor for grief. Anderson’s movies have always focused on, as Scarlett Johansson’s Midge Campbell puts it here, “catastrophically wounded people who don't express the depths of [their] pain because [they] don't want to.” And the crater where a meteor once hit is as grand a metaphor as the filmmaker has ever used for the aftermath of a death. What is a crater if not a geological record of a traumatic event?
Right as the Steenbecks arrive in Asteroid City, their car breaks down. They go to the mechanic. He tells them that he’s seen this issue before and th🅰at it’s either an easy fix or — he gestures to a rusted wreck in front of his shop — the end of the car’s life. The mechanic tries the repair, but the car rejects it completely,🎶 sending the part sizzling into an oil pan below, as all four tires pop. “I think you’ve got a third problem we’ve never seen before,” the mechanic tells him.
The movie strikes a similar note in the climax of its black-and-white section, which shows a group of actors chanting, “You can’t wake up i🃏f you don’t fall asleep.” It’s the movie at its most thematically confrontational. It is clearly saying something — they’re chanting! — but unless you’re digging beneath the gorgeous surface, it isn’t immediately clear what it is. The car scene can provide a way in — sleep isn’t being awake, and it isn’t death. It’s a third thing. One you wake up from, eventually.
And all of this has to be considered in the context of the film’s second and third act. After the alien retrieves the meteorite in full v꧋iew of everyone gathered for the convention, the military places them under quarantine — a liminal space between freedom and imprisonment. Like sleep, it’s a third thing. A week later, the government is prepared to let everyone go when the alien returns and drops the meteorite, newly inventoried, into its original spot. All hell breaks loose when General Gibson (Jeffrey Wright) says that the quarantine is be𝕴ing reinstated. In the end, it isn’t, and they’re free to leave the next day. Augie wakes up after everyone has already left, free from his quarantine and awakened from his sleep. He retrieves his newly repaired car, and drives out of Asteroid City. It wasn’t a quick fix, and it wasn’t the car’s death. It was something in between — a third problem.
The meteorite’s return sets all these conclusions into motion, and helps us understand them. It represents coming to terms with grief. The crater isn’t gone, but the meteorite that caused it has been inventoried. The trauma that created it has been studied and, to some degree, understood. Augie and his children aren’t healed.The state of grief they experience isn't permanent, but it isn't inconsequential either. Like sleep, it is all-consuming — but only for a brief period of time. As the movie ends, they’re on their way out of the worst of it. They’ve woken up. Their car is fixed. The quarantine has been lifted. They're moving away from the crater.