"Asteroid City" (2023)

Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City presents itself as a meditation on confusion, uncertainty, and the absence of meaning. It does not merely depict a world that feels strange or difficult to understand. It insists, repeatedly and explicitly, that understanding itself may be unavailable. Characters confess that they do not understand the play they are in. The story folds back on itself, reminding the audience that what they are watching is constructed, staged, and ultimately unresolved. The mantra is clear. Life does not make sense. Meaning is not given. The best we can do is keep telling the story.

What makes the film striking is not that it raises these questions, but how confidently it answers them. The uncertainty is not tentative. It is taught. By the end of the film, confusion has become a kind of virtue. The refusal of meaning is no longer a problem to wrestle with, but a posture to adopt. And that confidence is precisely where the film begins to undermine its own claim. A story that is so carefully constructed, so symbol laden, so intentional in its framing is already operating within a world thick with meaning. Asteroid City is not chaotic. It is precise. Its colors, compositions, repetitions, and nested narratives are doing exactly what they are meant to do. The film knows what it wants to say, and it says it clearly. That clarity sits uneasily beside the insistence that clarity itself is an illusion.

This tension is not unique to Anderson. It runs through much of modern absurdism.

Albert Camus famously argued that the universe is silent and indifferent, that human beings are thrown into existence without explanation or purpose. The proper response, he claimed, is not despair or faith, but revolt. We live fully while refusing appeal to transcendent meaning. Yet Camus cannot make this argument without assuming that truth, courage, and intellectual honesty matter. He expects his readers to recognize the nobility of his position, to see it as more truthful than religious belief. But nobility, truthfulness, and moral seriousness are not neutral concepts. They already assume a meaningful moral landscape. The universe Camus describes cannot supply the values his philosophy depends on.

Terry Pratchett offers a gentler, more playful version of the same problem. His Discworld novels often mock religion, fate, and cosmic purpose, suggesting that the universe runs on accident, irony, and human stubbornness. And yet Discworld is one of the most morally serious fictional worlds in modern literature. Justice matters. Compassion matters. Tyranny is wrong. Hypocrisy deserves ridicule. Death itself becomes a character who cares deeply about humanity. Pratchett’s satire works because he believes some things are genuinely better than others. His universe may joke about meaninglessness, but his stories refuse to live as though nothing matters.

Joss Whedon’s work similarly trades on this contradiction. His characters often insist that the universe is indifferent and cruel. There is no grand plan. No final justice. And yet again and again, his stories hinge on sacrifice, loyalty, and love. Characters lay down their lives for others, and the narrative treats those acts as deeply meaningful. The heroism is not ironic. It is sincere. The universe may be cold, but goodness is still worth dying for. That conviction does not arise naturally from an indifferent cosmos. It is smuggled in through the back door.

Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City belongs squarely in this tradition. It wants to tell us that meaning is something we construct, not something we receive. The universe offers no explanation. The alien arrives and leaves without comment. The story loops and repeats without resolution. And yet the film itself cannot stop behaving as though meaning exists. It arranges its confusion with exquisite care. It invites interpretation. It expects the audience to notice patterns, symbols, and resonances. It is, in every sense, authored.

This is the fundamental problem with absurdism as a worldview rather than a mood. As a description of human experience, it often rings true. The world is confusing. Suffering is disproportionate. Answers are not easily available. Scripture itself gives voice to that reality in Job, Ecclesiastes, and the Psalms. But absurdism does not stop at description. It draws a conclusion. It claims that the confusion is ultimate, that silence is the final word.

The moment a writer tells that story, however, the conclusion collapses under its own weight. Stories presume authors. Authors presume intention. Intention presumes meaning. If human creativity can generate worlds rich with purpose, structure, and moral weight, then it is not silly to ask whether the universe that contains such creativity might also have an Author. It is, in fact, the most natural question in the world.

The Christian claim is not that life is easy to understand, but that it is intelligible because it is spoken into being. Meaning is not something we invent to stave off despair. It is something we discover because reality itself is not accidental. The Bible does not deny absurdity at the experiential level. It denies that absurdity is ultimate. The silence of God is acknowledged, even agonized over, but it is never treated as proof that no one is there.

What Asteroid City and its absurdist cousins finally offer is not humility, but resignation. They teach us how to live comfortably with the idea that nothing means anything beyond what we decide. That position presents itself as honest, even brave. But it depends entirely on borrowed capital. It relies on moral intuitions, aesthetic judgments, and narrative coherence that make far more sense in a universe with an Author than in one without.

Absurdist stories keep insisting on meaning even as their philosophy denies it. The art knows something the theory will not admit.

And that is why these works remain compelling. They are not convincing arguments against meaning. They are testimonies to how difficult it is to live, create, and tell stories as though meaning were not real.