No Hard Feelings about the Flash over Asteroid City

Three wildly different films poke certain liberal orthodoxies

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A still from a Wes Anderson superhero sex comedy about the Flash (AI generated)

I saw three movies in the theater this week. As much as I love making grand connections between seemingly unrelated things, I feel the need to be honest here. None of these movies have anything to do with any of the others. Not really.

So here is the point in the essay where I attempt to wrangle these unrelated species into the same ark.

In no order whatsoever:

The Flash. A superhero multiverse movie (I know AGAIN with the multiverse crap). The Flash finds out that he can travel back in time and he tries to stop the tragic foundational event in his hero's journey: the murder of his mother and wrongful conviction of his father in that crime. Even though he was warned against doing it by Batman, he does it anyway and causes a cataclysmic chain of events that threatens the multiverse.

No Hard Feelings. An honest-to-God sex comedy in this day and age if you can believe it. Jennifer Lawrence needs a car to earn money as an Uber driver to save the home her mother left her. A rich family wants a woman to initiate their son into the world of sex, hoping that will lure him out of the virtual world of his electronic devices and into the broader physical world of actual things before he goes to Princeton. In exchange for this service, they will give her a used car.

Asteroid City. It's a Wes Anderson movie, a fact which is the focus of most of the conversation about the movie. "Wes Anderson has a style, so you love/hate him for it." But the movie exists beyond this silly online discourse as well. It is a play within a play, translated as a film. A set piece in the desert where disparate characters are brought together to celebrate budding young scientists. They deal with their anxieties, an alien shows up, and they ask each other and the play's director what it all means. It's an old-fashioned existentialist play gorgeously stylized for your cinematic pleasure.

So you see what I mean when I say that the movies are not really engaged in a definable conversation about aesthetics or any of the pressing issues of the day. They are all very good, I thought, but each goes very much in its own direction.

Yet they share one thing. Each cuts against a particular cultural grain. I still consider myself a person of the Left, but I can imagine a certain liberal/left type, Extremely Online and confidently doctrinaire, to recoil at certain aspects of each of these films.

The Flash

Apparently, not enough people saw the film to make the studio happy, but those who did collectively agreed to ignore the ethics of watching a film with Ezra Miller in it (if you don't know, just look it up) and they by and large enjoyed the movie. And they should have because it is really fun and thought-provoking as well.

When the Flash goes back in time, he ends up interfering in events moving both forward and backward in time. (Michael Keaton’s Batman explains the complex physics using spaghetti as a metaphor). He meets a younger version of himself as well as a Keaton’s version of Batman, and Superman has been erased and replaced by Supergirl instead. In his continued attempts to fix the problems he created, he comes to learn an essential truth about reality in the multiverse: there seems to be certain events that are unavoidable. The timeline insists on them no matter what, and you can’t really do anything about it.

In the film's climax, he and his younger self keep trying in vain to fix the negative outcomes in the battle they fight. The Flash from our universe comes to understand that some things can't be fixed. The world they are fighting to save is doomed and they cannot change that fact.

At one point, Flash comes face to face with the monstrosity at the center of the time loop. It is a dark version of his himself, driven mad by his quest to right the wrongs of history. Flash has a front row seat to witness how his nobler angels eventually become mutilated into a demon of history.

What could be more unacceptable to the policy-obsessed political partisans? The idea that some bad things can't be fixed, and that continued efforts to do so only create destructive chaos is anathema to most of us today. The Flash's conclusion, that you can only do the best you can to help you who can, feels astonishingly alien in today's political climate.

Asteroid City

Much has been written about Asteroid City, both because it is great and because Wes Anderson is a lightning rod for hot takes. But let me just say that the film is wildly enigmatic. And I wonder if the value of enigma is what the whole point is.

The Washington Review of Books

has provided a great deal of insight into the development of, the purposes for, and the varying degrees of success in Anderson's style. It’s a wonderful piece and I'll just emphasize here that I think style is the point in Asteroid City. It seems to me that the film is constructed to purposefully frustrate viewers who detest the idea of "art for art's sake." The movie seems to be a defense of Anderson's devotion to fantastic stylization at the expense of practical realism.

There is a certain kind of critic of Anderson's films. That critic finds them precious, cloying, and aloof from the problems of the world. To this critic, Anderson's movies are playing make-believe, when what we need now is to "do the work." As I watched this film, I wondered if Anderson was taking the idea of Grand Budapest Hotel, that one of fascisms many sins is the destruction of the beautiful, and aiming it at this motivated liberal partisan (and again, I still consider myself a person of the left).

The movie's climax, where the characters began chanting, like a mantra, "You can't wake up unless you fall asleep," is central to understanding the film's message. Anderson insists on the value of dreams, essentially. His films often employ the logic of dreams which is frustrating to people devoted to their logic of reality. But just as dreams are valuable biological responses to reality (helping us interpret and grapple with the inexplainable and unimaginable), so does art have real value in providing what Kenneth Burke called “Equipment for Living.” The art we consume gives us tools for survival at the level of desire and inspiration. And Wes Anderson declares in this movie his preference for the therapeutic logic of dreams as suitable equipment for living.

In some ways I was reminded of Lionel Trilling's arguments about liberalism in The Liberal Imagination while watching this movie, particularly the climax. Trilling feared that a liberalism too deeply mired in its own orthodoxies and too demanding of art that "makes the right arguments," was doomed as a political force. Wes Anderson's film should be a call for liberals to renew their imaginations from time to time.

No Hard Feelings

Well, as much as I appreciated the Washington Review of Books analysis of Wes Anderson, I have to say I think they missed the point a bit on this film.

The WRB review praises the movie's accomplishments as a throwback sex comedy, but scolds it for trying to wedge in certain social issues, like class warfare, housing costs, and helicopter parenting. I think this review miscategorizes the film entirely.

In the end, I don't see the film as primarily a sex comedy. I see it as a class critique using the venerable form of a sex comedy to make its point. And to stick to my theme in this review, I will suggest that wealthy liberals that some would apply the controversial term "woke" to. (By the way, I can't help but think that Wes Anderson had the notion of "wokeness" in mind with his mantra "you can't wake up unless you fall asleep,” going back to my “equipment for living” argument).

The film's sexual premise doesn't exist without the economic context of J Law's Montauk, a beach community over-run by wealthy liberals who have priced everyone else out of their homes and imposed a sanctimonious ethos of virtue-signaling on their poorer lessers. Let's look at an example.

When she is "interviewing" for the position, Maddie is told by Percy's father (hilariously played by Matthew Broderick -- I really could see this being the person Ferris Bueller grew into) that he and his wife have a tremendous amount of respect for sex workers. Maddie is not a sex worker, but that really doesn't matter to Percy's parents. While they use the politically sensitive term to show their respect, they are still buying a woman's body to make up for their parenting mistakes. They and their entire enlightened, liberal class are essentially treating Maddie and the rest of this community like sex workers, their great respect notwithstanding.

The film is filled with insightful critiques of a form of liberalism that has become dominant on social media and in important journalistic outlets like the New York Times and The Atlantic. No Hard Feelings is practically a harpoon aimed at wealthy liberals who publicly lead the charge for progressive identity politics.

So these three movies, which really have nothing in common, all share one trait. They challenge certain political orthodoxies of the very sort that a person who writes movie reviews for the big publications probably has. It's a bold move and I applaud each of the films for challenging my own political assumptions, making me uncomfortable at times. But it a good way.

I hope I have not offended anyone, but if so, there is a comment feature where you can let me know.