This month I have been to the cinemas twice1. Which is already 200% more cinema trips than the last two years combined. The first was a spontaneous trip — an invitation late on a Sunday to go see Wes Anderson’s latest Asteroid City with a friend. The second was meticulously planned: ‘dinner and a show’ with a group of friends, dressed up to see the summer blockbuster that is Barbie. Both films left me with the same feeling as the credits rolled: I had just experienced a movie movie. By which I mean that for the two hours or so I had sat in the dark I had been transported into another world, a specific story in space and time created by someone else within which to lose myself. A spectacle of sight and sound that held my attention and convinced me totally of the reality it created. Movies are back.
What connects Asteroid City, perhaps the most Wes Anderson-y film yet with Greta Gerwig’s feminism-lite comedy Barbie? Well, they both are unafraid to live in their own worlds with their own logic far away from ours. In doing so they disregard any notions of the ‘real’ world. Even Barbie’s ‘real world’ within the film is heightened and cartoonish (the board members no different to the hapless Kens). Likewise, Wes Anderson has always created an environment entirely his own where characters act in ways eccentric to many but somehow entirely fitting. Every person is performing a certain version of the self of the character all the time in Anderson’s films. Every person is a Character, capital C. Just as stereotypical Barbie must live up to a version of herself that fits into her world, until suddenly it doesn’t. Asteroid City rifts on this further with its play-within-a-play framing narrative. The artifice is always sitting at the top. It’s fun. It works. It’s why a stop-motion alien can appear in the middle of the film and everyone just rolls with it. Even the road-runner (the star of the movie) is in on the act — a carefully crafted puppet whose jerky movements both recall the real-life bird and reveal its man-made nature. Back in Barbie-land everything is made with Barbie in mind, down to her Dreamhouse, clothes and not-boyfriend boyfriend. It’s why Ken’s only job is beach. Their worlds make sense to the characters who populate them whether that’s a pink feminist land or a heavily stylised vision of the American west.
Both films contain a world within a world: Barbie-land sits in opposition to the real world and Asteroid City is a play within the fiction of the film with the real-life actors playing both their character in the play and an actor in the ‘real world’. Both films intentionally signal their unreal, over-produced worlds and ask us to believe in them anyway. They craft a world from the details: the perfect replicas of clothing and accessories in Barbie, and the impeccable models and graphic design in Asteroid City. Each have a distinctive saturated colour palette. The hyperreality of both is what makes them that much more real. I recently went to see an exhibition of props from Asteroid City and what struck me most was how many details were perfectly rendered that were never shown in the film or seen only for a split second. There was graffiti in the phone booth and stories and drawings written into the children’s exercise books. Reality created in the thousand cuts of tiny details.
Perhaps they are also both so successful at creating a believable world because they feel so original (even when based on a bestselling toy that may hark the beginning of the Mattel Cinematic Universe). And while Anderson draws on familiar tropes and framing devices the story he is telling still feels fresh and moves in unpredictable ways. Certainly, it is a story only he is equipped to tell. Just as Gerwig’s Barbie is her own.2
You could if you wished pull out from Asteroid City and Barbie plenty of real-world emotions and analogies. Much of Barbie is asking you to do just that, full of knowing asides about equality and the patriarchy. Asteroid City contains Wes Anderson’s often-revisited themes of grief, father/son relationships, young love and the pursuit of one’s passions. But actually, that’s not what I’m interested in. I don’t want to think about how the worlds they made are fallible, or unengaged in real-world politics. I don’t care for the disc-horse. I’m sure people smarter than me could write plenty about all of that.3 But right now what I care about is not so much the specifics of their stories but that feeling both these films instilled in me in the cinemas. And that is their ability to transport us into their world so fully that we may forget our own stories we are in the midst of living.
It’s so simple and so obvious but I haven’t felt this way in a long time. I had stopped going to the cinemas because why would I shell out the expense of a ticket to risk strangers ruining the film and the inconvenience of travel when I could just wait for it to hit one of the streaming platforms and watch it in the comfort of my own home? Except I hardly did watch those films even when they were so easily available to me, or if I did I spent half the time scrolling my phone which is even worse than not watching them.
There is still magic in the cinema then. In sitting in the dark with strangers, an act of collective belief that the story in front of us is as real and true as anything, at least until the credits roll and we wearily push our bodies up and out into the light. If there is one story from the cinemas that feels universal it is this: that moment of waking as if from a dream, our senses settling back into ourselves and the lethargic return from the movie world into the real world. If the film has been particularly good this feeling is close to heartbreak.
Yes I say cinemas —I’m not sure if it’s a Leicester thing or a family thing but I think it makes sense since there are multiple screens at the cinemas. You can fight me on it later.
Or as much as any film can be said to be the product of one person, even if as writer and director. I understand these things take a village.
They definitely can. For Barbie check out verilybitchie’s video essay ‘The Plastic Feminism of Barbie’ or this article in The New Yorker by Leslie Jamison. On Asteroid City I recommend this interview on building the town of Asteroid City and this article on its use of framing devices.