Diorama. I think that’s a great word. The definition of it can vary according to what dictionary definition you take, but in general a model representing a scene (either real or fictional), scaled down from the confines of reality but doing its’ best to replicate it. This can be for educational purposes, or any other means that one might believe a model or diorama should exist for. Perhaps war, perhaps peace; perhaps reflection. Before the camera was invented, these painstakingly assembled fascimilies (also a great word) of reality might be the next best thing you’d have to viewing or reviewing something or somewhere in the existence of our cosmos. So here’s another one, pastel coloured and spoken with dry wit.

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Shortly and succinctly, it’s been over a year since I wrote my last entry for this site. Chalk it up to time, fractured bones, and the heavy weight of creation. I am making my own film, and honestly I don’t want to write about it these days. Rather than ruminate (another fantastic piece of vernacular) on the possible causes and effects of that choice, I’d just like to write again. I could have picked any film, but I chose this one, in part because of another exhibition of props/minatures/set design pieces which I had the pleasure of visiting first, for this film Asteroid City (2023, Dir. Wes Anderson). Unlike The French Dispatch (2021, Dir. Same), I did not see the exhibition before the film, an enhancement and expansion of the celluloid portal I’d stepped through. This time, due to closing times, I saw the exhibition first. Almost like a 3-dimensional preview/trailer of the film; it’s assorted jumble of intricately designed mementos and keepsakes. Vestiges of costumes and uniquely shaped objects (see pictures below), designed for those who don’t really exist. Or perhaps they do, behind the artifice of our eyes and our imaginations.

Anderson’s films have often embraced the artifice of constructed creation, not just to expose the scaffolding which strings stories together, but to celebrate the loose and disparate threads which sinew their way between those who take it upon themselves to construct new realities. Asteroid City is in keeping with that method; it follows a playwright and director making Asteroid City, the cast of struggling actors who populate that stage, and the events of the play itself (shot somewhere in Spain). It is a torn apart Rubik’s cube, even more complicated in appearance than a sealed unit. But by doing so, it becomes an expression of structure, not just style (consistent with mimicking reality). Meta-textuality, where an author comments on the process of creation, always has a danger to disappear down a rabbit hole of ego and navel gazing.

But then what about disappearing down an asteroid-sized one?

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I took a road trip a long time ago, through America. In Arizona, we almost stopped at a place called ‘Meteor Crater’, subtitled as ‘Arizona’s Second Biggest Hole in the Ground’ (just behind the Grand Canyon. I encourage you to go someday, I didn’t. Two of the company of our road trip were not in the mood to drive an extra mile and a half to see it (on an already long journey). So we missed it. Or rather, it left an impact crater in my psyche. Maybe the parallel I find in this story (if there is one), was in a film that spins around the nostalgia for a world so vividly remembered that it seems to be both more real and less at the same time. That crater, laying somewhere out in that desert heat, makes me wonder about life’s possibilities; whether I’ll see it again, who I’ll be if that time comes, it has me musing on my connections to life, nature, my orbit in a series of constellational occurences.

Anderson’s films always make me feel like I’m writing in an overly-literary, self-reflexive kind of way. Maybe that’s one of his biggest gifts, that no matter where you fall on the spectrum of enjoyment regarding his sometimes twee, sometimes confusing parades of life pastiched into pastels; he often reaches for an understanding beyond our more conventional perspectives. After 27 years of life, I have an inkling that’s what artists seem to be asked of by the world, although that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll like them or what they have to say. Asteroid City swirls with characters who are colliding with each other in space, motivations and means and goals and somewhere rising inbetween it, a concern about why life happens.

There’s lots of revelry in this one, I actually think it’s one of my favourites of his. You need heat to rise for entropy to increase, and the chaos and disorder which begins to populate the lives of these adults is naturally tempered by the cool breeze of childlike wonder. Their discoveries, their questions, their desires are folded continuously into a universe of adult worries and woes; by then often planet-sized in their complexities. His continuous revolving cast of players (quite literally featured as a cast here also) shine in so many different ways here, that it’s exhausting to try to give voice to them. Let their expressions speak for them, every creative thread woven around the beating heart of the film.

That’s not to say I like all of it, or perhaps am thrown off by a few choices; it’s just to say that I feel and felt good watching it, a kind of reverie that one needs to fall into sometimes so they can re-awaken with some more clarity. More than anyone at points, Anderson constructs dioramas to show you a perspective, an opportunity to see from a vantage point previously unseen before. I really admire him from that, even after all these films and all these years later. One day we’ll look back at the impact craters of the choices we’ve made, and someone else might pick them up and reflect on them too.

-Alex

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P.S Oh and as for the exhibition notes? Well upon my reading of an interview with him in film magazine Little White Lies, he doesn’t have that much to do with them. How humourous that was to read, to think these windows into worlds that we might project so much onto might contain secrets previously unknown! Not to say I didn’t enjoy it, just was glad to have my bubble burst in realising that an exhibit is merely one shade of colour to a film’s song, not the secret to its’ creation. See for yourself some of the highlights below. As always thanks for reading.