Asteroid City & Grief
Something a little different this week.
Last night I watched Asteroid City and changed my mind about what we were going to talk about this week.
Not really because of the movie, but because tomorrow I’m flying to Texas again to see my mom and dad before Mom goes into her stem cell transplant — an all-in eight-week process with both outpatient and inpatient stages in Dallas. It’s been hard to rack any thoughts of culture out of my brain as the anvil that is the Stem Cell Transplant inexorably lowers into my psyche and squeezes out space for anything else.
Not that it’s been easy to access my emotions about it. There’s this scene in Grace and Frankie [one of the best shows ever] where Jane Fonda’s character Grace says, “Anger solves everything. You just crush your emotions into a diamond and hurl them at the person you're mad at. Then you move on."
That’s usually my approach to pain, even though I know it’s completely wrong-headed. [I didn’t ask for this personality, it chose me!]
I bring up Asteroid City because it’s a movie about the ways we deal with grief, and that’s what I want to talk about. Thoughts on how it’s helping me process my anxiety and sadness below.
But first, I wanted to invite you, Dear Reader, to share some advice:
Mom needs some things to while away the hours, days, and weeks in her hospital room in September. Books, podcasts, shows, YouTube videos, movies, or even things you can bring into a hospital room to make it feel a little less “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” if you know what I mean. [No offense to hospitals!]
What shows/movies/books/podcasts have you found in your life to be a wonderful distraction, comfort, or encouragement? Some things my family loves, to give you a direction: Parks and Rec, Ted Lasso, Madam Secretary. Things they tried and didn’t like all that much: New Girl, Shrinking, Parenthood.
I’d love to hear your recommendations, either in the comments or in email if you don’t want to comment publicly or can’t figure out how to set up a Substack account. 😎
A Little Housekeeping
Over the next two months, I’ll probably post on odd schedules since I’ll be in and out of traveling to see Mom and adjusting my work calendar, etc. This is my Happy Place, so I hope to keep writing and interacting! But I can’t promise I’ll be on a military schedule. [“LOL,” you say, “as if you ever *have* been, Hannah!”]
Anyhoo….
Asteroid City: A(n overly precious) Reflection on Grief
Remember that scene in Parks & Rec when Ben Wyatt is between jobs and falls into a depression but doesn’t know he’s depressed yet and gets really into building claymation? [“claymash”] “You think a depressed person could make this!?” he asks indignantly, holding a gruesome clay replica of himself up to the camera.
Wes Anderson in a nutshell!
Asteroid City is ostensibly about a weird little play with aliens, but it’s really about grief and all the ways in which we approach or avoid it. [Though it took me several hours and several Reddit threads to fully come to this conclusion.] With Asteroid City, Wes Anderson is making a plea that our deepest selves might be best understood via the external art we create. It’s saying: “This art, this artifice even, is an outworking of the inexpressible.”
Asteroid City is NOT a movie to watch if you don’t already like Wes Anderson. It’s confusing and slow and a bit too clever by half. It requires a LOT of patience. [Something I do not have in abundant supply!] I’m not sure if I can fully say my patience was rewarded; my experience was not devoid of confusion, annoyance, and, I admit, two dozings-off(!). But I can say that, with work, it led me to some profound reflection.
Wes Anderson is often criticized for his movies feeling like picture-perfect—but impersonal—dioramas. An aesthetic that is so precise that it becomes emotionally distant. I don’t feel that way because I [a white, female, middle-class, liberal arts graduate] am predictably a Wes Anderson fan. But I get it. Some of his movies really do it for me [e.g., the widely beloved Royal Tennenbaums, the widely panned Darjeeling Limited] while others don’t [The Isle of Dogs, Rushmore].
But Asteroid City uses a super arms-length framing [a play within a show within a movie!?] to say that even art that seems emotionally distant can also be incredibly personal. When our grief is too deep to put into words, we create. We express the inexpressible with sound and color and stories.
Near the end of the movie, Jason Schwartzman, who is playing an actor playing a character [I told you this movie is too clever by half!], and both the actor and his character have lost someone they love, asks, “Am I doing it right?” [My eyes are swimming as I type because that question is so deeply part of my life right now. In this horrible time of unknowing, I just want to know, “Am I doing it right?”]
Actor-playing-actor-playing-character Schwartzman goes to his director and says, “I don’t understand the play. I feel lost. Do I just keep doing it without knowing anything?”
His director [played by Adrien Brody] simply says: “Yes.”
Schwartzman: “Isn’t there supposed to be some kind of an answer out there in the cosmic wilderness?”
Brody: “Maybe there is one.”
Schwartzman: “Right, well, that’s my question. I still don’t understand the play.”
Brody: “Doesn’t matter, just keep telling the story.”
To me, it says: A good way to understand your own life is to get lost in a story. “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep,” the characters chant.
Granted, the movie is annoyingly meta and complicated. It’s chockfull of metaphors [an alien, a broken car, a televised play], but as one character says, no one knows what they’re metaphors FOR. We may be confused as an audience, but so, intentionally, are the characters themselves. After all, such is grief and the human experience.
In the end, I didn’t enjoy watching the movie all that much. I have no idea what the troop of kids was about or why there was an alien or why Tilda Swinton was here. But now, as I process it, I’m overwhelmed with emotion and finally thinking about how I feel.
Ultimately, it’s a rich text with a lot of fluff that will likely reward true Wes Anderson fans and frustrate nearly everyone else.
And maybe it came at just the right time for me.
So much love to you all as you continue to navigate the physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of this journey with your dear mother (who I so love!).
Ideas for her:
Shows:
The Good Place
Abbott Elementary
Schitt's Creek
Podcasts:
Disappearing Spoon
Kind World
The History Chicks (I feel like your mom would really enjoy Susan and Beckett)
Thank you for being open with your grief and how you process. It's so beneficial to see that not everyone processes everything the same way and we're all just trying our best.
Beautiful. 🥹❤️