Oppenheimer's all the rage right now. I don't know why. All the bim-bam-boom. And I expect to soon follow the flocks shepherded to the cinemas by the not-so-hidden persuaders to see it (and Klaws Barbie) by week's end. Before it's too late. And I miss the ripple effect. Hell, I may even do a review. If they'll let me. Sometimes they just want you to stick with color-ins at rec therapy.
But I wanted to offer up an alternative to the Oppenheimer splashdown, which promises to lead to a weighing-in festival, pundits and bloggers and old hipsters, analyzing the tea leaves of the fargone retrospectively, and maybe doing something tardo like pronouncing Oppie 'the Last Good Lefty,' or wringing rosaried hands like old ladies at a Shroud of Turin convention, or even pointing, however lucidly, to the Smoking Gun moment we pulled the trigger on civilization and maybe even double-tapped God when we double-tapped the Japs. (See Fromm.) Muscle cars. Teens driving hummers to high school. Feelin' all We're an Empire now. Strutting like Obama to the podium to lie about what happened in Abbottabad. Remember how Trump made fun of the tale by having his own Baghdadi compound moment, the perp clutching kids as a shield. I can do stuff, too, Trump seemed to say.
And who knows, maybe even Ed Snowden will weigh in on this one. Frankly, some of us are getting cranky to be coughing up $5 a month for his Substack feed, only to have nothing to show for it in two years, but some take-down of the Agency, "The CIA is Not Your Friend." Tell me something I didn't know, Ed. And, be safe. How're the pixilated tykes doing? It's a jungle out there. Be careful Putin doesn't have your ass drafted in time for the Kiev march.
No, for now, a better bet, I reckon, and, perhaps, a better entertainment value would be Wes Anderson's latest oeuvre, Asteroid City. What a hoot! Lots of colorful landscapes, colorful people, colorful dialogue, and even a token person of color is thrown in to gain the verisimilitude we need for that precious time.
Asteroid City takes place in September 1955. A little taffy-toned town (population 98) set up in the New Mexico (?) desert, washed out pastels. Attraction: A meteorite fell some 5000 years ago, a sign claims, and made a huge crater, around which now a fence guards the precious astro stone; the kind of stone that some scientists say may have carried the virus known as human consciousness to Earth, the town's main attraction, and center of this story. Kinda. We're told in a voice over:
Main scenography includes a 12 stool luncheonette, a one-pump filling station, and a ten-cabin motor court hotel. Upstage left, the Tomahawk Mountains. Highest peak, 11,000 feet.
That sets a scene. Then, Quirky comes along, like Gumby riding Pokey, and we're looking at a stem-cell highway overpass, -- "which vaults up 20 feet, then chops off midair" -- like something out of Frank Kunert's art, but there's no highway to overpass. Progress got ahead of itself. Kapeesh?
Back then, Americans were nothing if not optimists mooning over opportunity. Hell, Hank Williams in nearby 1950 wanted to jump into a doggone river that was dry and that couldn't drown him even if it wanted to: Can't get much more optimistic than that brief cry-in-the-beer. Nobody suffers like the poor, said Mickey Rourke, in Barfly. Speaking of beer. And the fascist Frank Stallone barkeep who liked to beat the sh*t out of poets, as long as they were shitfaced, All my friends. Yeah, right.
The Plot of Asteroid City can seem perplexing if you've backslid into the literal. (Spank on you.) I asked my son, who I watched the film with what he thought afterward and he said he thought Anderson had lost the plot in the end. In fact, Anderson is all self-consciousnessnessness about this at the end and has a character say, "I would question whether it even is a plot," which I took to mean: Don't read into it too much. Sure, read the tea leaves, but, for chrissakes, enjoy the tea first.
What's it all about, Alfie Neuman? The very colorful movie is a black and white play. Walter Heisenberg from Breaking Bad explains what we're about to see, in an Edward Morrow style delivery (think: Goodnight, and Good Luck). It's a writer at work, reminiscing, confabulating, lying for the sake of Truth. Heisenberg describes:
There is little amusement to be had, however, in watching a man type. Skip ahead, then, past the lonely, agonized months of composing, revising, polishing, editing, rewriting, cutting, pasting, pacing, doodling, and solitary drinking, and join our company as they take the stage for their first readthrough rehearsal.
Who are we talking here? Hemingway? John Cheever? Robinson Crusoe?
So, Asteroid City is a "rehearsal" that we, the viewers, are made privy to. We are the living color that the scenes (explicitly announced in the film) of the play are acted out on -- with, maybe, some kind of flip Wes Anderson humor. The play (and the film), as we said, are set in the fall of 1955.
In 1955, Oppenheimer, by that time, was on the career decline after his security clearance had been taken away because of his supposed sympathy for the Devil: Communism. In 1955, Oppie published, The Open Mind, which pleaded for a global, rather unilateral, negotiation of nuclear arms controls, and urged a move away from political coercion and toward reasoned persuasion and openness. Dr Death spoke (the book came out of a speech, the way the mushroom cloud came out of the atom) of this new found Reason and what it should include:
The essential elements of these proposals were: (1) the internationalization of the key activities in the field of atomic energy; (2) the complete abolition of secrecy; (8) the prohibition of national or private activities in fields menacing to the common security; (4) the intensification of cooperation between nations in research, development, and exploitation; and (6) the abrogation of the right of veto, both in the management of the affairs of the international development authority and in the determination of transgression against the covenant.
Wo! F*cker had to go. Take his Hindu bag of guitars and string theory with him In fact, as one pundit put it, if Oppie represented anything it was the last time Lefty scientists were allowed to have any real sway in the political debate -- pretty much about anything (see cigarettes, air pollution, Covid-19's origins).
On November 22, 1955, just a month after the events unfolding on stage and screen are said to be happening, the Soviets tested their very first hydrogen bomb, turning nuclear bomb designer, and "the Father of the Soviet H-Bomb" Andrei Sakharov into a political dissident, like Oppie. You could even argue that the Bomb that closes the film is the Soviet hydrogen Bomb that follows the US Bomb that explodes at the beginning of the film; the race was on; the human race was gone. McCarthyism is rife.
It doesn't help that the last Bomb shapes up, on the horizon, like a candy-colored ice cream cone with a generous scoop of, I'm thinking, vanilla. Folks in the film, certainly, this convergence arriving at Asteroid City, largely nerds and their enablers, come to stargaze and exhibit inventions, seem to have Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. There wasn't as much dismay as you'd like to see. I recall recently reading what Senator Frank Church, in the Army at the time of Hiroshima, observed of his compatriots: "I am fearful that the United States is about to launch itself into a program of unprecedented imperialism," [he wrote to his girlfriend] Bethine after the Japanese surrendered"With few exceptions indeed, people I meet over here speak elatedly of the atomic bomb." [from The Last Honest Man by James Risen. See my review]
Asteroid City is another Wes Anderson film that features a stellar cast. Dig it: Bryan Cranston (as the play's host); Edward Norton (Conrad Earp, the writer); Jason Schwartzman (a War Photographer); Scarlett Johansson (Midge Campbell); Jeffrey Wright (General Gibson); Liev Schreiber (J.J.Kellogg); Tom Hanks (Stanley Zak); Matt Dillon (Mechanic); Steve Carrell (Motel Manager); Tilda Swinton (Dr. Hickenlooper); Jeff Goldblum (The Alien); Adrian Brody (Schubert Green); Willem Dafoe (Salberg Keitel); and Margot Robbie (Actress/Wife). What a repertoire! Everybody wants to be in a spillover Wes Anderson production.
The test nukes that go off in the film remind one that the depicted environment could be one of the Atomic Cities that rose up in the heartland in the 40 and 50s, like Los Alamos, constructed for secrecy and work on WMD. I could imagine the Atomic City of Frank Church's Idaho being the model for Asteroid City. There was a commercial boom in Nuclear Reactors for energy production soon after the double-tapping of the Japs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Atomic City, Idaho, was home to the world's first electricity-generating nuclear power plant, Experimental Breeder Reactor-1. Then, in 1955, the breeder suffered a partial meltdown and the boomtown went ghost town. You could almost imagine that the crater featured in Asteroid City was the site of the meltdown rather than a stone from outer space. That would make the film depiction a kind of metaphorical return to the short-lived feel-good moment in the sun of the desert town, population 89. Nuke towns sprouted in the US and in the USSR. Incidentally, a good read on this phenomenon is provided by Kate Brown in her book, Plutopia. She writes of such communities:
These special communities proliferated as ably as the nuclear technologies that spawned them. Communities like Richland were reproduced in California, Texas, Georgia, Idaho, and New Mexico. Communities like Ozersk repeated across the Urals, Kazakhstan, Siberia, and parts of European Russia. It was a compelling model with global prospects"As the arms race fed nuclear communities, the culture and way of life they produced nurtured the arms race. The highly subsidized nuclear communities built up a "universe of contentment" that was very hard, politically, to dismantle. [p. 335]
Had things worked out, that highway overpass in Asteroid City could have led to a cheery mall full of capitalism's overflowing cornucopia. Featuring brainiacs. But now it was all Dawn of the Dead.
The convergence of folks is a mysterious major event. "The itinerary of a Junior Stargazer/Space Cadet convention (organized to bring together students and parents from across the country for fellowship and scholarly competition) is spectacularly disrupted by world-changing events," the description tells us. This is funny. Maybe a few dozen people are there for the event.
But the convention is actually a kind of disguised DARPA-like event, presided over by Army General Gibson (Jeffrey Wright), who is terrific in the campy role. It is just a year or so away before the Soviets launch Sputnik and get the Cold War going, the Americans responding with a proto-ARPA (now DARPA) and an early version of the Internet, partially conceived to guarantee America could retaliate in a first strike event by the Russians. The convention, held in the asteroid crater, is called "United States Military-Science Research and Experimentation Division," also has its own junior Ig Nobel prizes, and several of the brainiacs there exhibit their kooky wares, including the eventual winner Woodrow Steenbeck for "his work in the sphere of astronomical imaging advertizing; it may have applications in the development of interstellar advertising."
Asteroid City has many quaint and quirky and funny scenes. A CGI version of the cartoon Roadrunner is seen at the beginning ("beep-beep") and again at the end when he does a little dance on the road as the film closes. If he catches you you're through. There's a kooky-looking alien that makes its appearance during the Stargaze, descending in a hexagonal space ship, who looks scared and tentative, like he's been told to watch out for Will Smith who might come along and b*tch slap him. The Alien steals the meteorite and then comes back with it, General Gibson, who's had his gun cocked, now notes, picking up the rock that "It's been inventoried."
Names are thrown out in odd arrays: Three little girls are named Pandora, Cassiopeia and Andromeda. The brainiacs play a circle memory game where they must say a name, then pass it on to the next who must say that name and make up his own -- Cleopatra, William Bragg, the father, Lord Kelvin, the mathematical physicist, Midge Campbell, your mother, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the rocket scientist -- until one of them says, "I don't know if this game works with us. Uh, brainiacs, I mean. I think it might go on forever." (Shelly quips: "I don't mind.) Near the end there's a massive spillout of names from American culture with no seeming rhyme or reason.
There's a breakout of a mini-musical number. There's a flash of Scarlett Johansson naked (or a gorgeous body double). There's a couple of scenes with cops chasing a baddie through (two different baddies). There's a faux didactic Brecht-like ending with characters falling to asleep -- I don't know: method acting? -- and a mysterious, but corny lesson to us all: "You can't wake up if you don't fall asleep." What the f*ck does that mean? And reinforcing it, back in the theater, is The Alien coming right at the camera, saying, "You can't wake up if you don't fall asleep." Apparently, it's Jeff Goldblum under that makeup. Hey, remember him in The Fly? Now he's a well-spoken alien, coming right at you, looking you in the eye. I can't remember how many eyes flies have, but they have tongues on the bottom of their feet. Remember that the next time your dog shits not far from the picnic spread and little Goldblums show up to tap dance on your corn cobs.
All in all, it was a delightful film; lots of entertainment value, and made me think deeply about the time the MAGAs are always going on about -- that small window when the world was full of pastel colors that wouldn't hurt a fly and there was still a chance that the US and the USSR wouldn't nuke each other. Probably if we push Putin one more step (why not, say, drop sarin gas on Moscow sub-urbs? Who knows maybe we'll get Snowden for finking) we'll have candy-colored mushrooms you want to lick like ice cream blooming everywhere. Anderson is quietly but effectively subversive. And I agree.
Two thumbs up, while I still have them.
