"Am I doing it right?"
"Asteroid City" and the Bisexual Experience
This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter focused on the late blooming queer experience, the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.
It’s easy to miss the queerness of Asteroid City, because it was probably not meant to be there.
There is only one scene toward the beginning where actor Jones Hall, one of Jason Schwartzman’s characters, is revealed as gay along with Conrad Earp, the playwright portrayed by Edward Norton. It is notable for being the first time two queer characters kiss in one of Wes Anderson’s films, although the camera zoomed out so wide as to not be able to really see much beyond their embrace. But it’s clear that is what it is, given that Schwartzman has stripped to his underwear beforehand and narrator Bryan Cranston notes this is when the characters became lovers.
This is the only time either character’s sexual identity is mentioned. The characters appear at intervals in the black and white “documentary” segments of Asteroid City’s play-within-a-play, but not always together and never in a way denoting they have a relationship. Rather, Norton has relatively few scenes at all, dying off camera, and it is the character of widower Augie Steenbeck, the character portrayed by Schwartzman’s Hall in the actual production of Asteroid City, written by Earp, that we see most often.
On it’s surface, it is typical of an Anderson film—the aforementioned play-within-a-play plot structure and plot elements such as dead parents, wealth tangential to the protagonists, trauma and/or loss of innocence and the death of a beloved pet. This is all alongside a signature visual style with largely expressionless and restrained acting.
Schwartzman’s Hall’s Steenbeck is a recently widowed war photographer on a road trip to take his teenage son to a special event with his triplet(?) young daughters. His awkwardness as a father is evident early on, even before we know it’s been three weeks since his wife died and he has her ashes inside a lime green Tupperware bowl he bounces on his knee as he finally tells them. Steenbeck is seemingly puzzled and genuinely fascinated by women, particularly Scarlett Johanneson’s Midge Campbell, but keeps his distance, physically and emotionally. They never kiss or embrace or even say goodbye to each other face-to-face, Campbell instead leaving her post office box address with a diner waitress to pass on to Steenbeck.
As with most Anderson films, I wasn’t sure how I felt about Asteroid City after I first viewed it. There was something familiar and relatable about it to me, but I definitely could see where some of the most severe critics of the film were coming from.
A BBC review stated “...at no point does [Anderson] allow us to settle into any narrative in particular.”
Variety called Asteroid City one of the worst movies of 2023, saying " ...[in this] claustrophobic dud of a movie, Anderson triples down on his fetishistic yet oppressive way of engineering a story, even as his most ardent fans triple down on their devotion to the idea that he’s somehow expressing an arch humanity. This one, we kept hearing, is actually an aria of 'grief,' though the only grief I felt was that of being trapped in a stylized panorama so insistent it’s become a form of OCD.”
A review in Time said "Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City is what happens when a filmmaker’s world of wonder and whimsy becomes a prison."
But the more I thought about the film the more it grew on me. And it’s because I realized: Schwartzman’s roles reminded me of how it felt to be queer and closeted for most of my life. The doubt, the awkwardness, the attempts to “look the part,” the need for assurance. Even the movie’s dual plots add to this, as Schwartzman navigates two very different characters. With the documentary and the production vying for attention, so, too, does it feel like as a bisexual man I was trying to navigate two very different worlds and trying to make sense of them and my place in them.
This is driven home toward the end of Asteroid City, in the middle of the climax. Schwartzman’s Jones feels out of his element, unable to understand Steenbeck. Schwartzman breaks character as Steenbeck to leave the soundstage and to talk to the play’s director, Schubert Green, played by Adrien Brody.
Schwartzman: Am I doing him right?
Brody: Well, I told you before: there’s too much business. With the pipe, with the lighter, with the camera, with the eyebrow; but, aside from that, on the whole, in answer to your question -- you’re doing him just right. In fact, in my opinion, you didn’t just become Augie: he became you.
Schwartzman: I feel lost.
Brody: Good!
Schwartzman: I still don’t understand the play.
Brody: Good!
Schwartzman: He’s such a wounded guy. He had everything he wanted -- then lost it. Before he even noticed! I feel like my heart is getting broken. My own, personal heart. Every night.
Brody: Good!
Schwartzman: Do I just keep doing it?
Brody: Yes!
Schwartzman: Without knowing anything?
Brody: Yes!
And remember: Conrad Earp, the playwright who wrote Asteroid City within the movie’s universe and Jones’ lover, is himself queer. How much of the Steenbeck character’s overwroughtness, awkwardness, brooding are Earp’s interpretation of a straight recently widowed father? How sure is Earp that the character he created is “right?”
Perhaps I am reading too much into it, wanting to see what I want to see. After all, many reviews note that the plot seems to be more about the human tendency to struggle with not understanding or being able to control everything.
And it’s highly unlikely that Anderson was deliberately seeking to portray the struggle of the queer, much less the bisexual, condition. While queer characters are not unheard of in his movies, it’s almost always tertiary at most to the plot. The exception is The Grand Budapest Hotel, where Ralph Fiennes’ Monsieur Gustave H. is a prominent character, if flawed. And even then, as one individual pointed out to me, queerness is treated derisively in the film with the use of the term “faggot” in a dehumanizing way.
Hall’s (and Earp’s) sexuality seems to be an afterthought, or worse, a nod to the stereotype of queer folk figuring heavily in the dramatic arts. Simple tokenism is not outside the realm of possibility.
Perhaps that’s also why Asteroid City feels so familiar—I’m used to treating my queerness as an afterthought. I felt the need to obscure it for most of my life. And even though its our society and its culture that inspired that, I still search for the faintest hint that maybe, just maybe, I can be seen.
In next week’s newsletter…
The beginning of a three-part series looking at body image as it fits within the late-blooming queer experience. I’ll be kicking it off by sharing a few of the things that have helped me to come to a healthier place with my body while I’ve increasingly embraced my queerness.