test-1

Let’s start by trying to produce a full description – or at least as precise as necessary for the sake of this video – of the narrative structure of the film. Indeed, the narrative structure of Asteroid City takes precedence over the dramatic content of the play itself as it is what determines the way this “Asteroid City” play is to appear on the screen of the viewer. And, depending on the level of the so-called narrative structure we are in, this play will take different values for different characters. Let’s be more schematic: the “Asteroid City” play can be perceived (a) as a pure fiction created for the needs of a TV broadcast and its host; (b) as a work-in-progress or to-be-written play in the scenes with the playmaker; (c) as a real play that will soon be played by tangible actors in the scenes with the fictional actors; (d) as a play to stage in the scenes with the director played by Adrian Brody; (e) as a play effectively played, or at least played as a general rehearsal, in the main scenes of the movie. 
With that in mind, we can then consider, in a schematic manner, that we have three main narrative levels, that could all be respectively complexified. These narrative levels are in order or hierarchized, which means that the lower level is always dependent on the upper level, the ladder being the condition of possibility of the former. Each level of narration can also be understood as a level of reality inside of the world of Asteroid City as a whole, as a movie.
(1) The TV broadcast led by Bryan Cranston’s host, which is the reason why all the rest – the playmaker, the play itself, the actors, and so on and so forth – is invented. Of course, the TV broadcast is itself a fiction inside an external reality that has to be presupposed, but that is never part of the movie. In the absence of this lever of reality in the movie, we have to considered that it doesn’t exist, or that it exists simply as a useless background that has to be there but that is irrelevant to understand the stakes of the story. With that in mind, it means that the TV broadcast is the superior level of narration, in which all the others are grounded.
(2) Everything that concerns what I propose to gather under the idea of the process of the play’s production, with (2a) first the writing & the production of the play, (2b) and on the other hand the staging of the play. The most important part of this level of narration is what I propose to call the “actorialization” (*this word is used in literary semiotics but to refer to something different), that is to say the process in which the actors try to make the roles their own. I might talk about the “performance” of the play in general to refer the activity of the director and the embodiment of the characters of the play by actors in a theatrical performance. At this level of narration we shouldn’t forget that the “actors”, called like that because they have each been chosen to play a specific role in the play called “Asteroid City”, are actors themselves in the presupposed “background reality” of the world we are presented, as they have been chosen by the TV channel, Channel 8, to play these roles.
(3) The play as it is performed or rehearsed, as it is shown to the viewer, and in which all the actors of level (2) play their respective roles. These are, to put it simply, and the scenes in color of the movie. On the contrary, the black & white scenes are either set in the level (1) or in the level (2), because, as we will see, we have to consider that the reality of level (1) will continuously merge with the level (2) reality through the character of the host, who plays the function of a junction point between the two levels of narration. Indeed, it is only when he inadvertently shows up in the level (3) reality that we are told that something is wrong: “I am not supposed to be here, am I?” says the host when he is spotted in a scene of the play. By the way it is through some scenes like that that we envision that we are only in a rehearsal of the play, and not in an official performance of the play in front of an audience. The end of the movie makes
it clear that such a performance before an audience is never to occur since the play was canceled due to the premature death of its playwright, Conrad Earp, in a car accident.
(4) For the purpose of this interpretation we have to add a fourth level of reality, which is originally a subproduct of the events of the play itself, in which Midge Campbell, the star actress, rehearses for a role she got in an incoming movie.
Now that we have in our possession this rather objective description of the narrative structure of the movie, we have to answer this simple question: why did Wes Anderson choose to orchestrate a narration of this sort, which makes every scene of the movie feel like a metatale? One simple way of finding an answer to that question consists in understanding that a structure so rigid can only have an interest in a contemporary film if, at one point, the rigidity and order between the different levels is subverted in any way. Then it’s in the precise way these structures are subverted that we will be able to understand why the director felt the need to tell the story he envisioned in such way from the get-go.
On this matter it is very clear that Wes Anderson’s interest lies in the way some levels of reality contaminate each other: sometimes it’s an upper level of reality that contaminates a lower level of reality, sometimes it’s the other way around, which is always more surprising. There is something postmodern is this way of treating the narrative structure of the film, but also something that one may call “metamodern”. Postmodern because the movie is portrayed in a way that we have the impression of witnessing some sort of arbitrary equalization or levelling out of the different types of discourse, as if lines of a movie rehearsed by a character from a fictional play that was itself invented by a fictional playwright created for the sole purposes of a fictional TV broadcast should have the same impact in our lives (in terms of intensity, of importance, of significance and of affectivity) than the “background” reality that is never shown in the movie. But we’re also on the verge of what some commentators call “metamodernism” or sometimes “post-postmodernism” in the sense that the levelling out of the different types of discourse is not determined by a general negation of their respective capability of saying something of significance, of greater importance for our individual lives. On the contrary, it’s more like the deeper we get inside the narrative structure, the deeper we dive into layers of mediations and discourses, the more we could effectively return to the immediate significance of our existences. Of course one cannot settle on Wes Anderson being more postmodern than metamodern or the other way around, because these types of meta-concepts are always too broad, too general to fully grasp the singularity of a work of art.
To take a significative example of a contamination of the levels of narration in the movie, let’s think about the movies wants us to think, as it is implicitly suggested, that the death of the playwright, Conrad Earp, in a tragic car accident, could have something to do with the events of the play he himself wrote. Do we have to imagine that he died in one of the high-speed car chase that we witness twice in the film, at the beginning and at the end, when the quarantine is not forbidding the passage of cars? Or maybe the movie wants us to think that his car just stopped obeying him because one of the weird car parts thought it was high time to claim its autonomy, just like it happened for the Steenbeck family in one of the first scenes? We are led to think that Conrad Earp died because he sort of dove into his own play, because it has been prepared since we saw him make out with the actor playing Auggie in the play after he saw him embody “perfectly” the character, as if the playwright had had the need to lose himself in his own creation, “he immerses himself in it; he enters that work – as legend tells us happened to a Chinese painter on once catching sight of his finished painting” (Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction). In other words, we are led to think that, in this world exists an interpenetration of the lower levels of the narration into the higher levels, especially between the levels (2) & (4).
It’s what we will see way more clearly with the characters of Auggie & Midge Campbell: the former, as a character in the “Asteroid City” play, ends up being deeply transformed due to his acting contact with the character he briefly embodies every time he helps Midge rehearse for her role in a future film. But the reason it happens is because it is already the case of Midge herself, in a very explicit way: when she talks about herself to Auggie , right after one of their rehearsals, she tells him that she is pretty sure she will someday be found dead in her bathtub due to a pill overdose. But later in the movie we realize that it is in reality the ultimate incident that marks the end ambiguous end of the character she is bound to play in the movie. Moreover, the actor who plays Auggie is the character who, inside the movie as a whole, keeps transgressing the frontiers between the different narrative levels. Even though he has been intimate both emotionally and sexually with the playwright, one may believe that he knows and understands the deepest meanings of the play he is in; but the paradox is that he is the one that will lose touch with the meaning of the play the more. At the beginning we are under the impression that the actor succeeds in his acting so brilliantly that he forgets his own identity as an actor, but this vision is soon to be inverted when we realize that it’s more Auggie as a character in the play that is transformed by the fact that the cognitive confusion of the actor who plays the role regarding the meaning of the play ends up contaminating Auggie himself. For example, the end of the movie makes it very clear that Auggie as a character, in the original play as written by the playwright as we can imagine it, was supposed to know about the quarantine being lifted off. But because the actor, in the meanwhile, was having a conversation with the director, then with the actress who was supposed to play his late wife, he comes back in the play as if he had slept the whole night: an understudy had his hand bandaged instead of him, and learned about the quarantine being lifted off. The character should have known about it, but the play seems to be transformed by the way the actors know or don’t know about what is happening to them and the meaning of it all.
In the end it’s the reality of third degree (3), the one created by the play being performed by actors, that ends up winning over the reality of second degree (2b), because the movie as a whole wants us to consider that what is willingly happening in the “Asteroid City” play is truer, more liberating, and more important for the actors as their “lives” as actors. The intention of all of this is to make us think about the way a completely fictional and, most of all, ludicrous play can say more things about the actor than their own lives outside of the play.