Asteroid City: delightful, decadent, or despairing?

07/13/23 • 80 min

0:00 The prosecution

39:15 The defense

With the release of his new film Asteroid City and with memes imitating his cinematic style going viral on social media, Wes Anderson is having a real moment in the zeitgeist almost thirty years into his career.

In Asteroid City , Anderson drives further into the immediately identifiable and somewhat polarizing style he has cultivated for the past decade, characterized by meticulous framing, camera moves and blocking, a certain color palette, and deadpan writing and acting. One is always aware of the director's hand tightly controlling a cute, harmonious little world of his own creation.

The Criteria hosts look at Anderson's career and try to figure out what he's trying to achieve by making his movies so aggressively, well, Anderson-y. James Majewski calls it downright decadent and pretentious, style for its own sake to the point of self-parody. Thomas Mirus is concerned that the increasingly airless and emotionally closed-down aesthetic may be a reflection of Anderson's belief that life has no discernible meaning, and so there is nothing much to do other than create aesthetic illusions (an idea explicitly alluded to in more than one of his films). Nathan Douglas defends Anderson's style as sincere, in service to something more than shallow visual pleasure.

But we all agree on one thing: Wes Anderson is in despair.

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0:00 The prosecution

39:15 The defense

But we all agree on one thing: Wes Anderson is in despair.

DONATE to make these shows possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

Go to Catholic Culture's website for tons of written content, including news, articles, liturgical year info, and a vast library of documents: https://www.catholicculture.org

Previous Episode

Caviezel's Sound of Freedom: a thriller about fighting child trafficking

Jim Caviezel’s latest project, The Sound of Freedom, is a harrowing but thrilling look at the fight against the global sex trafficking of children. Caviezel's intense but nuanced performance plays well into both the serious subject matter and the film's mainstream appeal. The film's spiritual relevance is increased by the choice to include not only protective fathers, but a repentant exploiter among its protagonists.

Though the film isn't about Hollywood, one of its best scenes offers what may as well be a portrayal of how the entertainment and modeling industries sexualize children. The impact is all the more unsettling for how subtly and tastefully the scene is handled.

Though they praise the film, Thomas and James express some reservations about the “you must see this movie for the cause” style of promotion.

Next Episode

Empires of death: Apocalypto (2006)

Mel Gibson's Apocalypto is one of those works of art whose reputation has suffered from its circumstances. Its release in late 2006, two years after The Passion and six month after Gibson's infamous DUI, more or less coincided with the director's blacklisting from Hollywood. Thus Apocalypto tends to be overlooked by critics, despite having been hailed as a masterpiece by the likes of Scorsese, Tarantino, Edgar Wright, and Spike Lee.

Apocalypto has also been attacked for its portrayal of "first peoples". Set in Mesoamerica immediately before first contact with the Spanish, it features a protagonist from a small forest tribe who is captured by Mayans for the purpose of human sacrifice (depicted as the mass-scale brutality it was) and must try to escape back to his family.

Gibson's depiction of Mesoamerican peoples is sensitive and sympathetic but not PC. Rather than sneering at how terrible a pre-Columbian civilization could be, in portraying the Mayans Gibson wanted to make us reflect on the decadence of the modern West and in particular the American Empire. The film is about a culture of death not unlike our own.

Filmed, like The Passion, in a language most people have never heard, Apocalypto is a stunningly ambitious recreation of a lost civilization, but also a thoroughly entertaining chase movie. Gibson is known for his singular approach to cinematic violence, and Apocalypto gives ample opportunity to discuss the specific artistic choices that are overlooked when we wave off all movie "blood and guts" as the same.

Links

Essay by the film's historical consultant https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288187016_Relativism_Revisionism_Aboriginalism_and_EmicEtic_Truth_The_Case_Study_of_Apocalypto

DONATE to make these shows possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

Go to Catholic Culture's website for tons of written content, including news, articles, liturgical year info, and a vast library of documents: https://www.catholicculture.org