How to Blow Up an Asteroid City, Weekly Reel #54
Two great new films that explore issues greater than the individual; the necessity to work together, close ranks, and achieve some naughty resistance against authorities.
News of the Week: I’ve had an unbroken streak of near masterpieces in theaters for the month of June so far, which will surely dissipate next week at the Munich Film Festival. I had the privilege of watching two of my favorite four films, Aftersun and Contempt, at the same theater, on back-to-back days. Part of that streak included Beau is Afraid, a second viewing, and All the Beauty and Bloodshed, both of which I’ve already published reviews. In a rare WR post, I have two Watch Nows this week, even though the second one might be easier to literally Save for Later, but, considering the urgent subject matter, and from my own instincts, I think it sits better as a Watch Now.
Watch Now
Asteroid City (2023, Wes Anderson, USA)
Wes Anderson’s characters have had enough. Like present fears of AI, they’ve become sentient, self-aware, ready to crack the frame Anderson likes to keep them in. His characters in The French Dispatch remained firmly in each act’s time and place—even with Jeffrey Wright’s career-high moments. Asteroid City’s characters are existentially contemplative but retain Anderson’s stochastic dialogue and rhythm. And true to form, Anderson commits the aesthetic plotting to theatrical acts, scenes, and frames-within-frames in his best film since The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Anderson may have the most reboant aesthetics in film history. You can recognize his films in the flash of a moment, which has given way to unfortunately dull ripoffs that he will, if one is sent, “immediately erase it and say, ‘Please, sorry, do not send me things of people doing me.’” In this period piece—a term that strangely sells his style short—the main setting is a 1955 SW American desert town called Asteroid City. In this sub-hundred population there’s a diner, motel ran by an awkward manager (Steve Carell), garage ran by a greaser (Matt Dillon), observatory ran by a mumbler (Tilda Swinton), an unfinished freeway onramp, and a giant crater created by a lightly protected meteorite, all of which, of course, we see in a single shot on a tracking and panning dolly, symmetrically framed in widescreen color. This town’s superficies are blasted with pastel radiation thanks to Robert Yeoman’s cinematography, Adam Stockhausen’s production design, and a cadre of Spaniards handling the art direction. Like the Spaghetti Westerns, Asteroid City was shot in the Spanish desert with a Spanish crew to resemble the American terrain, which nicely matches the play’s inauthenticity.
Anderson’s play within a movie play is one of the most fluid frame stories in his oeuvre, even in cinema itself, which never leaves one confused or Kaufmand. The Asteroid City we’re watching is a play that Asteroid City’s actors are playing in. This higher-dimension plot is black&white with a square frame, and we’re guided gently by a fourth-wall TV presenter (everyone’s favorite dad, Bryan Cranston) describing the production of Asteroid City (the play). The actors of the play are presented (too many actors to list here, most being Anderson regulars), but we mostly watch a dramatization of the playwright (Edward Norton) writing the play. These slimmer sections are highly stylized depictions of a TV play within a movie and has a Chayefskyan rub; no moment moreso than act three’s subtle “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep” Network satire.
In every Anderson film, one or two characters peak so hard that they slow down the freneticism of Anderson’s filmaction. The two in this film, Jason Schwartzman—an actor playing an actor—and Scarlett Johansson—an actor playing an actor playing an actor—deliver the pathos and connection needed to break free from the frame’s confines. When a quarantine forces all Asteroid City visitors to stay inside, Schwartzman, who’s accompanying his genius son to the astronomy convention, and Johansson, who’s accompanying her genius daughter to the same convention, talk to each through adjacent motel windows. These scenes are the apotheosis of frame-storytelling in filmmaking history. Any deeper-level frames would require a powerful sedative and an even stronger kick. While the relationship between these two characters is electric and transcendent in their frame-flouting, Jeff Goldblum, who is replaced via stop-motion animation, is their proportional inverse.
So what’s Asteroid City about? The contrast between UFOs and aliens (infinite space, mystery and exclusion) with quarantines and scripts (restrictive, human, escapist). The desire to break free is powerful, artistically and metaphysically. One can’t help but draw the comparisons to our recent quarantine as well as, but much less so, the sloppy psyops of UFO news. But now, especially, with the ‘film as content’ debates, our relationship to stories on screen is changing and Anderson is coming in like Giovanni Boccaccio or Hieronymus Bosch with his representations of unabashed, post-cataclysmic, filmic decadence perfectly marrying aesthetics and drama. It’s the first film he consciously/artistically—for Anderson the same thing—takes one step back and glances, comments, shrugs and shifts and tears and laughs. One can feel his thrum at every turn; an artistic conscience that doesn’t slide into ostentatiousness.
There’s much more to discuss in the impeccable, dream-cast ensemble: Jake Ryan as Schwartzman’s son is one of the great teen-age performances in Anderson’s filmography, which is filled with those; Grace Edwards, Ryan’s counterpart, as Johansson’s daughter is likewise perfect; Tom Hanks, a first for Anderson, naturally fits in playing Schwartzman’s gun-in-waistband father-in-law who has to drive into town to pick up his triplet grandchildren (Ella, Gracie, and Willan Faris); Jeffrey Wright plays a General, host of the Junio Stargazer convention and then quarantine czar; Adrien “brooding” Brody plays the plays director, who sacrifices his personal life to get this nonexistent play to the stage; Liev Schreiber wields a laser gun; Willem Dafoe is the Actors Studio prof who introduces method acting to much of the play’s top-billed cast; Margot Robbie has a small part as Schwartzman’s dead wife…
Asteroid City is available in theaters.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022, Daniel Goldhaber, USA)
Making a film that seriously deals with climate change is near impossible. Even the most earnest and competent filmmakers, like Adam McKay with Don’t Look Up, create a jumbled tax on your didactic and aesthetic sensors. Are we supposed to teach and learn, or fight through collective resistance? Good thing the Swedish-Marxist ecological professor Andreas Malm wrote a lengthy pamphlet to draw inspiration from, which is titled How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Writing the preface in late March 2020, a time when we all connected online and extolled the new utopias that this crisis could afford regarding bringing the world together, Malm wasn’t optimistic about climate action’s prospects: “If a pandemic can induce governments to take emergency actions, why can’t a climate breakdown that threatens to kill off the very life-support systems of the planet do the same? After this, there can be no more excuses for passivity.” (Gather round comrades.)
Malm argues for the literal destruction of private property to disrupt as much of the world polluters as possible, as a defensive action. The climate activism growing in the late 2010s was too passive and nonviolent, and that needed to change. His How to Blow Up a Pipeline was a direct rebuttal of pacifism and encouraged sabotage—as if one couldn’t tell from the title. He develops this argument from past activism at nonviolent climate rallies, which lacked the imagination for “defensive violence.” He finds the answer in pipeline destruction, a relatively simple measure, as opposed to a shift in international consciousness, that will spook companies into investing less money for devices producing CO2 emissions. He argues that the worst part of current climate activism is the despair created from “climate fatalism,” which in the end becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The responses to the book were, of course, not hyperbolic.
Daniel Goldhaber read the book and thought it was appropriate research material for an eco-crime-thriller, which he co-wrote with Jordan Sjol and (star of the film) Ariela Barer. He bookended the film with Tyre Extinguishers, a group inspired by Malm’s Pipeline, who slash SUV tires to make them less desirable. This action of private property destruction is on the least damaging end of the Malm-spectrum while blowing up a pipeline is on the other. Barer, who leaves a passive divestment uni-activist group for being too gradualist and accommodating, forms a small group of those willing to commit acts of climate revenge. It becomes a near-direct heist film genre flick when we watch the creation of the group and handling of the mission, but favors the in medias res quickplot after the short tire slashing amuse-gueule.
The group that’s formed all have a duende towards climate ills: Xochitl’s (Barer) mother dies from a freak heat wave; Theo (Sasha Lane), Xochitl’s best friend, was diagnosed with a rare cancer from living next to a refinery; Dwayne (Jake Weary) lost his house to eminent domain for an oil pipeline; Michael (Forrest Goodluck), a Native American self-taught explosives expert, constantly picks fights with seasonal oil company employees working on his reservation. Then there are the sympathizers (Alisha, Theo’s girlfriend, played by Jayme Lawson and Shawn, a film student who met Xochitl at the divestment group, played by Marcus Scribner) and Rowan (Kristine Froseth) and Logan (Lukas Gage), a couple from Seattle interested in amateur B&E. But the latter couple don’t appear to be wholly part the group, with Logan being a nitwit trust-fund kid and Rowan taking pictures of the group’s desert hideaway in secret.
From beginning to end, the film is structured to keep the thrills high while it crosscuts between the pipeline mission, which involves dangerous amounts of explosives and DIY fuses, with vignettes showing how each of the members joined. The effect is a tight 104 minutes with legitimate moments of panic that never feels gimmicky or unearned. Tehillah De Castro’s 16mm Kodak cinematography went a long way in portraying this dusty haste in the West Texan desert. The grain of the image and unprofessional property destruction gives the film a stronger connection to Malm’s original text, which itself, as seen from the book’s cover, conveys a sense of amateurishness that is necessary for these crimes to occur. There could never be an Extinction Rebellion for blowing up pipelines. It would be too easy for the FBI to Weathermen them.
The (over)reactions to the film gave away the hacks and returned criticism to the nineteen-twenties gangster film debate: does the portrayal, no matter how much the protagonist suffers, lead to admiration and duplication? Goldhaber does away with this formula and directly tells us: this is what needs to be done.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline is available to rent online in the USA and in theaters in Germany.
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