16. The meta-levels of Wes Anderson

2 July 2023

I.

The new Wes Anderson film is a play within a play, and simultaneously a television series. You’re watching actors, played by actors, played by actors. It sounds complicated, but in the end it’s not that difficult. Yet Asteroid City is an immensely rich film, in which both very little and a great deal happens.

Most of the time you follow the play itself as it is performed somewhere in a hall in New York. In the play, people meet each other in Asteroid City, a Looney Tunes-like town (there’s even a Roadrunner figurine). The group gets temporarily stuck due to a visit from an alien, and you follow how the various storylines play out until the lockdown is lifted.

Despite the many characters (in double roles), Wes Anderson manages the juggling act. The film works on multiple meta-levels. It is, in fact, also a film about the pandemic and what happens when your entire world is turned upside down. But the most fascinating layer concerns filmmaking and acting itself. What expectations does the viewer bring, and what meaning does the filmmaker embed in the work? Do the actors always understand that? And should they?

I think Asteroid City says a lot about Wes Anderson himself, whose style is frequently imitated. And usually that stays superficial, because it doesn’t touch the content. Asteroid City is bursting with details, references, and ideas. Cinematically it’s a feast and Anderson’s script is razor-sharp. All those elements together make for a densely packed film — if you feel like diving into it at that level. I want to watch it again.

II.

Anderson often works with the same actors, and in Asteroid City too many familiar faces from his earlier films showed up. But one person was absent: Bill Murray.

He had been cast, but contracted COVID just before filming began. Anderson sought a replacement, and that turned out to be Steve Carrell, the hotel manager in the film.

But when Murray recovered, he came to the shoot in Spain anyway. Without a role. Anderson hoped to come up with something for him, but couldn’t manage it: “You can’t just introduce a new character.” Meanwhile Murray hung around on set and gave pep talks to actors. “He was good for morale,” says Anderson.

In the end Anderson found a way to involve Murray tangentially in the project. In a promotional video for the film, Murray plays an actor who has been cut from the film. It doesn’t get more meta than that.

III.

After fifteen years there’s a new Indiana Jones film, probably the last one. And I enjoyed the adventure.

Online I read in reviews that the film is unnecessary. A strange reason not to enjoy something. And yes, it leans on nostalgia. But I actually love the fact that Indiana Jones is still fundamentally an ’80s film at heart. They don’t make them like that anymore, to use a cliché.

On the other hand, the film itself also plays with Indy’s expiration date (still played with full conviction by Harrison Ford, now 80 years old). In The Dial of Destiny it is 1969. People are going to the moon. Sexy science news is hip. Archaeology is just a dusty concept. Jones seems put out to pasture.

I wouldn’t call this film dusty. It’s a roller-coaster ride, it’s Tintin, it goes off the rails. But in my view this film redeems The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (widely considered a disappointment, though I didn’t mind it that much). So why unnecessary?

Over the years many Indiana Jones games have been released. Quite a lot of bad ones, too. YouTube has an extensive retrospective.

IV.

And now chapter 45 in The Dismantling of Twitter. From now on you need an account to read tweets. But even with an account you can temporarily see a maximum of six hundred posts per day. Unless you pay for Twitter Blue, in which case the limit is six thousand.

According to Elon Musk, the restrictions are necessary because AI companies are copying enormous amounts of data from the platform. That influx would be too much for Twitter to handle. Users are running into limits in the Twitter app. New posts fail to load and a message appears saying the “rate limit has been exceeded.”

More chaos, in other words. You can feel it immediately in the surge of activity on Twitter alternatives. Bluesky (from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey) saw a large influx of users, causing the platform to become unstable. Mastodon also had problems. “I would appreciate it if Elon Musk would destroy his website on weekdays,” wrote Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko, who had to get to work on his free Saturday evening, with some sense of humor.

Speaking of humor. It might be that AI companies are scraping Twitter data. But web developer Sheldon Chang found another cause of the high traffic on Twitter. Namely Twitter itself. A bug in the platform’s web app keeps sending out infinite page requests. “Unbelievable. It’s amateur hour.”

PS.

We now know Siri and Alexa, but virtual assistants existed as far back as the ’90s. The most famous is Clippy, who helped (or got in the way on) Windows systems. Great Big Story interviewed designer Kevan Atteberry.

I’ve spent more hours than I care to admit watching YouTubers play the game Only Up. In the game you make a character go only upward. The controls are clunky and the jumps are tricky, and if you fall you have to redo a long stretch. Typically the kind of game that’s more fun to watch than to play yourself (less than ten euros on Steam).

Fontaines DC singer Grian Chatten has released his debut album as a solo artist. It’s called Chaos For The Fly, and I’m an instant fan. A video has been made for the track All Of The People.

Brilliant director Joanna Hogg has a new film. After the beautiful The Souvenir I & II there is now The Eternal Daughter. A ghost story set in an old hotel, but really a quiet drama. I could write something about it, but instead read the review by (the Netherlands’ best film critic) Elise van Dam in the Filmkrant. She describes it beautifully.

Really enjoyed this video. About the search for the story behind Michaelsoft Binbows.

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