Asteroid City
REWATCH TIME!!!!! I DEFINITELY LOVED IT A LOTTTT MORE!!! ill put all the notes I sent to my buddy phyll as my thoughts on what the movie meant, it literally took like 110% of my brain power to come up with a concrete reasoning I literally had to close my eyes and scrunch my head:
- you can’t wake up if you dont fall asleep = you cant realize your fault if you dont stop and actually reflect, or with their trauma, you can’t reflect on your grief if you dont stop to care = you cant find meaning in the random events of life if you dont just take it for its randomness, it doesnt have a set meaning as to why things happen, you cant expect a noisy structureless life to give you a structure on its own.
- the meaning with the stargazers position in it is because they DO accept the randomness of life, but they are forced to question it (with religion, episcopalians are centered around structure etc., and also they have to grieve with their own losses which needs structure to rely on. i think them trying to find their way to solve their own problem with the alien was also an attempt to try and grasp a meaning out of something that they couldnt understand/was out of reach, which is probably a huge barrier for them as their status of “brainiac” likely led them to be expected of figuring everything out in life.)
- augie and midge are both at a standpoint of being completely aware that they dont process their own trauma, they are kind of at a complete peak of nihilism, carrying the complete burden in the form of emotionlessness. i think augie put his hand on the burner because its probably a subconscious form of needing something else other than letting everything brush past
- another thing with the alien is it shows how misinterpretations and structures fail to grasp life even in completely extreme circumstances, how like it feels unrecognizably hard to control grief compared to how unbelievably hard it is to comprehend the alien event. it is kind of emphasized in how its a sort of creator of artist who is a creator of an artist and this is all being controlled by another god who cant comprehend it (bryan cranston)