“Asteroid City” is written in inverted commas. It’s a cheap shot but it’s true. It’s on all the promotional material, and it’s double-edged in the film. It’s there both as the in-the-play explanation, the fictional settlement has it’s population tenfold as thousands flock to visit the rebranded “Asteroid City” and, it’s not real! It’s the title of a play, it’s an artifice. Ain’t that cute?

Wes loves a good artifice. A hallmark of his filmography is reminding you that you aren’t engaging with something real. You’re engaging with a story. Be that with more Brechtian examples, such as his frequent use of intertitles (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums) and his use of narrators (Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel) or with his more playful attempts: The French Dispatch was a massive ensemble piece that was also an oddly structured anthology, which drew some criticism for how alienating that was. It’s not exactly common for films to construct themselves to mirror the inner workings of a fake newspaper. How many films have a window-dressing four-minute short of Owen Wilson showing you around a fictional town? In Asteroid City, I would argue it’s the closest the artifice, that sense of a false reality, has been to the surface. Sure, in Grand Budapest, the framing device is us checking in with the protagonist at an older age, or in The French Dispatch, the journalists carry over as characters into their own writing, but in Asteroid City, we hear about the world outside The Play a lot. We constantly come out of the main narrative of the film, which is The Play: “Asteroid City”, in order to examine the inner workings of the writing and performances that went into producing it. In fact, I would even say that key points in The Play’s narrative are when it seems most eager to interrupt. It’s fascinating to watch a film that seems so interested in reminding you of its fictional nature at its emotional peaks. I almost described that as undercutting, or as highlighting. I’ve read reviews that say it took them out of the story and others that say it only drew them in more. I suppose this is why the film has been hailed as ‘the most Wes Anderson film’: his worlds and characters are as exact and precisely constructed as ever, whether it’s to your taste or not.

Something I find strange however is how few people seem to acknowledge the connection between the structure and the format. People seem surprised that Wes Anderson would make a film with such overt meta-commentary. Anderson makes these perfect pristine little diorama films, where everybody talks funny and runs in straight lines. Of course they’re going to frequently acknowledge their fourth wall- they look like that!

When it comes to Wes Anderson the auteur, and how people deconstruct his work, it’s clear that he thinks about himself and his craft in a very different way to how people seem to approach it.

Wes Anderson is one of the most easily recognisable auteurs. His hallmarks are so clear and visual that it would be more challenging to not observe them. Other directors have hallmarks, often visual ones, but Anderson is set apart on two grounds that share a connection:

1. His films always look like that.

2. His writing is often neglected.

I can think of directors that have maintained aesthetic choices they’re fond of throughout their careers- Joanna Hogg prefers to keep the camera still and Brian De Palma likes his split diopters- but none employ them as consistently as Anderson. It’s not simply that he has these hallmarks, but that he so rarely strays from his most prominent. If you watch his films in order, he just gets more and more like him until he is him and then he runs with it. Maybe he was always him but he just didn’t have enough money. Post-Tenenbaum for sure, he’s him.

Even among directors understood by their hallmarks (Edgar Wrights whip-pans or Wong Kar-Wai’s step-printing, for a couple more, the kind of directors where you see their associated tricks happen in other people’s films and go, ‘Oh, I’m getting Edgar Wright vibes from this) No director has the kind of capital on image he does; where framing centrally, parallel on a dolly track or pastel colours or hyper-composed theatrical sets, will point like a compass back to him- and it’s interesting because he didn’t even intend on this. Anderson’s visual motifs are as natural to him as his music choices. For him, it’s as simple as he likes it.

I don’t say that to be dismissive. In every case I can think of a director having a hallmark it will be because they like it. They like it, and it works. It’ll be the right decision for the project, the right place to use that thing. No director is coming to a production and saying, “I’m going to invent a hallmark for myself, because I love myself soooo much.” They’re approaching a project, likely thinking that they have something in mind for this scene, that they’re excited by it and they like it. Hell, maybe they’re even proud of it.

At Cannes, Anderson was asked about his use of slow-motion. I’ll summarise the conversation roughly here:

Q: “You used to be quite fond of slow motion. You don’t seem to use it anymore. How come?”

A: “I am still quite fond of slow motion, I’ve just not found the right place recently. This conversation has reminded me I like slow motion. I must try to use it again soon.”

Anderson offers something I quite like in this interaction. When he begins to answer the question, he elaborates on having a directing style:

“I have a series of ways I like to stage things and do things […] I don’t know if I am in command of them. It’s part of my personality as doing this sort of thing, I would liken it to handwriting.”

‘Like handwriting.’ Maybe you use a certain flair here or there, it might change as you get old, as the weight and feel of the pen shifts in your hand. I like this because it made me understand Anderson doesn’t view his hallmarks in the same light as the public does. The degree of association between symmetry and him might exist to him, but I don’t believe for a moment he feels he owns that. When he says “I don’t know if I am in command of them”, I think he’s perhaps humbling himself by suggesting it’s entirely unconscious, but I deeply understand what he means by it. For all the questions people ask about his form, it is, at the end of the day, just the way he likes to hold the pen.

And it has changed. If you look closely, it’s changed a lot: Asteroid City has an early shot that spins 360 on a single axis, he seems to like black and white for emphasis now, there’s an unsettling canted angle montage in there (When was the last time you thought Wes Anderson was unsettling?) There are missing motifs too: his character introductions aren’t as elaborate and montage-focused and we don’t see nearly as many varying location set-ups as something like Tenenbaums.

I think the reason people don’t talk about Anderson’s writing is because it’s less obvious. Sure, people have spoofed his longstanding quirks: the deadpan delivery, his quaint settings and even quainter characters, but his overall narratives are perhaps a tad more elusive. He loves loosely adapting the work of his heroes, be that the New Yorker alumni that formed the basis of The French Dispatch or the work of Stefan Zweig for The Grand Budapest Hotel. But that makes him hard to pin down to a specific theme or idea because he doesn’t directly adapt, he comments and builds upon. Even his straightest adaptation, Fantastic Mr Fox, differs widely from the source material. He often works with accompanying screen and story writers (Roman Coppola, Noah Baumbach) though it’s unclear for each script how much is his and how much is theirs. A Wes Anderson protagonist is a changeable thing. They may be vaguely lonely and troubled, but it’s a lot easier to notice their beautiful symmetrical hotel and their blood-red trawler beanie.

Wes Anderson has plenty of hallmarks that go un-referenced. This isn’t a criticism, I’m not asking the TikTok trend to do their research and to better update their library of Wes Anderson’s visual cues (I have no grievances with a brief stereotype of symmetry and geometry for a 30-second social media spot). Before I started this piece, I was surprised that his stories aren’t often parodied but, really if you think about it, why would you? It’s a trendy filter for your company to market something or to show off your day- in-the-life. Do you need to pretend to be Max Fischer whilst you do that? There is something noticeably-off about those AI recreations though, aside from the obvious.

There is an intrinsic connection between Wes Anderson’s visual style and his writing, and at the heart of it, it is as simple as, only he can make them both look and feel like that. The reason you will never get your perfectly centred Wes Anderson Star Wars film is because that’s not how Wes Anderson thinks about Aliens. Asteroid City is how Wes Anderson thinks about Aliens.