Modern Transcendence in Movies: Mapping Out the Intersections of Asteroid City – Christ and Pop Culture

The opening article of this series, on David Lowery’s Mother Mary, began with a question asked by one of its lead characters. “Where do ghosts go when you don’t need them anymore?” In the context of Mother Mary, the matter is brought forth by the restless haunting that gives the movie its mystical edge. But the question also served as a generative entry point for the ongoing exploration of transcendence in the modern movie landscape. And if movies form the landscape for this journey, then Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age serves as our compass, orienting us as we go along.

Our exploration has relied on both of these. First, the films considered—Mother Mary, The Green Knight, Annihilation, Interstellar, and La Chimera—have clarified and concretized aspects of Taylor’s analysis, giving a force to his ideas even if none of these movies share an explicit connection with A Secular Age. But Taylor’s critique also opens up particular readings of these films that allow us to see aspects of our contemporary cultural life that we may never otherwise notice.

To remind us of our original departure point: In A Secular Age, Taylor interrogates the ways that the conditions of (or for) belief have changed across the past few centuries. His point is not simply that religious participation is shrinking, but that our world now forms us to be “buffered selves,” individuals who live within “an immanent order… without reference to interventions from outside.”¹ Our world has gradually become disenchanted; at the same time, we are “cross-pressured” by the myriad of options available to us in terms of beliefs about the world. “We live in a condition where we cannot help but be aware that there are a number of different construals.”²

The generic storyline of our contemporary age is that we no longer need supernatural forces or sources of meaning, be they ghosts, gods, angels, demons, or fates. Scientific reason, natural materialism, economic systems, or the innate power of humanity are all that really counts for anything. Yet the longing for meaning beyond these options seems harder to surrender than we thought. This is Mother Mary’s ghost, haunting her despite living in a world structured by rational explanation, restless because she has no place in her world that it can rest. Expanded in multifaceted directions, the ghost also represents the insatiable search for transcendent meaning. On one level we, as a culture, readily believe that all things must be explicable, the world ordered and systematized. On another level, however, our art and entertainment consistently allures us through depictions of powers and forces that resist the calculus of our systems.

One crucial aspect of A Secular Age that is at the heart of Taylor’s project is its hopefulness. This is also the component that many Christian writers, speakers, and thinkers seem most likely to miss or misconstrue. Some pick up Taylor’s critiques and give it the somber tone of a lament, wishing for a return to a past where cultural conditions enforced religious practice more cohesively. But Taylor isn’t being pessimistic. Instead of asking How can we become un-secular?, he emphasizes the fruitful pathways into belief that dot the landscape of our secular world. “Our age is very far from settling in to a comfortable unbelief. Although many individuals do so, and more still seem to on the outside, the unrest continues to surface.”³

The unrest with the generic storyline of our age is, in fact, increasing with each passing year. Cultural conditions may not reinforce belief anymore, but they are insufficient to obstruct such paths. This dissatisfaction “can send people off in many directions… they also can open avenues to faith.”⁴ Instead of seeking to return the world to an un-secular state, Taylor encourages the Church to observe the progressing inclination toward “post-secularity.” There are paths in all sorts of directions, and some of them—maybe more than the Church has traditionally imagined—can lead to a deep, transcendent faith. A Secular Age is not a lament but an exhortation for Christians to locate unexpected crossroads, points along the landscape where someone longing for meaning might turn down a path that brings them to a new belief in God.

One subset of crossroads is formed by art and entertainment, just like the movies that have mapped this series. Throughout these articles we’ve journeyed with characters whose paths are interrupted by inexplicable and transformative powers—powers that send them down new, unexpected paths. Mary, Gawain, Lena, Cooper, and Arthur act as symbols and guides for audiences increasingly eager for transcendence. They each feel a sense of unrest, whether that comes from within themselves or is brought on by some external event, and through mystic landscapes, the cosmos, the underworld, and their own pasts, they find a more powerful source of meaning.

But this raises one final question for our series to address. We’ve been turning to movies to articulate meaning in our modern culture, but can movies do more than just articulate or serve as examples? Can fictional art and entertainment actually spark transformation and transcendence? To ponder this, let’s consider one more film, Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City. Within its matryoshka structure and playful sensibility, Asteroid City is, deep down, a movie about finding meaning to answer the inner unrest of the modern soul.

True Meaning Amid Fictional Stories in Asteroid City

Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schartzman) is grieving. He’s just lost his wife, and now he’s stuck in the desert of the American Southwest with his young daughters, his adolescent son, Woodrow (Jake Ryan), and his father-in-law, Stanley (Tom Hanks). Woodrow’s here for an astronomy convention hosted by the Junior Stargazers, and while the boy quickly connects with the other precocious kids, his father wallows in a taciturn sadness that only actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) seems capable of breaking through. Things get worse for Augie and Co., however, when the brief arrival of an alien sends the whole town into strict quarantine.

The quarantine becomes a pressure cooker that ferments the impatience of adults and children alike. The child astronomers were hard enough to handle, and now their parents are at wit’s end. Thrust together for an extended period, they form an eccentric collective. In addition to the Stargazers’ parents, there’s also Steve Carrell’s enterprising motel manager, Rupert Friend’s cowboy, Montana, and Jeffrey Wright’s General Gibson, who’s trying his best to hold everything together. The result is an abundance of gleeful chaos, from skeet shooting with a ray gun (sorry, make that a particle disintegrator) to an impromptu singalong with the opening line of “Dear alien who art in heaven.” Even with all the fun, though, Augie’s grief and frustration anchor the story. His ability to relate to his family and others around him is hamstrung by his loneliness, and the bright heat of the sun can do little to lift his spirits. But there’s a catch to all this: Augie isn’t real.  

Now, of course Augie isn’t real. He’s played by Schwartzman, after all. But what I mean is that the events surrounding the Junior Stargazers’ convention only form the bottom layer of Anderson’s narrative. These events are actually a play being directed by Schubert Green (Adrien Brody), written by Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), and starring Jones Hall and Mercedes Ford (Schwartzman and Johansson, respectively). Moving up a layer—away from fiction and closer to “reality”—we witness the preparations, rehearsal, and premiere of the play. We realize the town is just a set. The alien spacecraft is just a small prop with green lights. And the alien—the latest unexpected, supernatural presence of our explorations—is actually Jeff Goldblum in costume.

But all of this—the set construction, the rehearsals, the rewriting of the script—is actually just a reenactment. A middle layer, another fictional one. Because moving up once more, we’re shown that everything in this middle layer is a televised recreation (hosted by Bryan Cranston) that includes not only the scenes of the play’s preparation, but also excursions into the writing process, casting decisions, and actors’ studio. So from the outside in, from the level closest to “reality” to the inner core of fiction, Asteroid City is arranged: a televised recreation, then the preparations for and performance of play, and lastly the story of the play, itself. The world of the play is ironically presented as the most immersive: the voice-over is excluded, and the world is presented in full color. As we move up a layer—theoretically closer to reality—Anderson adds a perceived falseness. The scenes are arrayed in black and white, and flourishes of falsity punctuate, as when Green shadowboxes while making noises as if he’s hitting a speed bag.

Throughout every layer of Asteroid City, the artifice is continuously made explicit, so that the audience cannot be naïvely immersed in the film’s world, yet the movie generates meaning despite and through these limitations. We see this play out in the connectedness between the bottom and middle layers of the story: Green repurposes Midge’s line in the play, “Maybe we are doomed,” as an elegy for his fracturing marriage. To an even greater degree, though, the actor Hall is troubled by part of Augie’s arc, specifically his line positing that maybe life does have meaning, after all. What, precisely, is the actor’s frustration? “I feel lost… I feel like my heart is getting broken, my own, personal heart every night… Isn’t there supposed to be some kind of answer out there in the cosmic wilderness?”

Augie’s transformation unsettles Hall’s certainty. The possibility that this character might locate transcendent meaning dislodges the stale flatness of the actor’s world, kindling the longing within him. Hall approaches the director complaining that, even in the middle of the premiere, “I still don’t understand the play.” “Doesn’t matter,” Green replies, “just keep telling the story.” The story moves him forward in his search for a cosmic meaning to life. This story, as all stories, forms an intersection between our lives and the lives of others. And even if those lives are fictional, their paths can redirect us in our own quest for meaning.

So we return to Taylor’s exhortation. He envisaged that in the new existential landscape, people would find transcendence by being “moved by a ‘mystique’”⁵ instead of enforced by social conditions. This means two things: First, we moderns want to feel that we discovered this meaning ourselves. Second, we are drawn toward a deeper meaning by some source of mystery, something that goes beyond our ability to explain. Mother Mary’s ghost; Gawain’s encounter with saints, woodland powers, and giants; the Shimmer; the strange gravitational behavior in Murph’s bedroom; Athur’s Etruscan bust; and the arc of Augie’s story all contain this mystique that sends these diverse characters down journeys into transcendence. As with the characters, so with the audience. The movies, books, music, and other forms of art that we encounter can bear this mystique and therefore introduce us to new paths.

A secular or post-secular culture does not have to be a barrier to Christianity. As Taylor notes, “modern culture is not just the scene of a struggle between belief and unbelief… The camp of unbelief is deeply divided.”⁶ The same cross-pressures that play a role in diminishing religious practice also pressure easy categories of unbelief; there’s an abundance of pathways into meaning for a person to journey along, and many of those can guide one toward Christian faith. Taylor himself was hopeful, declaring that “we are just at the beginning of a new age of religious searching, whose outcome no one can foresee.”⁷ This searching plays out in our encounters with art. There’s an adventurous energy that propels us toward the movies, the books, and the music that moves us, because they move us in new directions. And as Taylor insists, many of these new directions can lead toward a newfound or deepened sense of faith. So let us be inquisitive of the works that we’re drawn to, and let us continue mapping out those that form generative crossroads with the growing desire for transcendence.

1. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007), 543. ↩︎
2. Ibid., 11. ↩︎
3. Ibid., 727. ↩︎
4. Ibid., 533. ↩︎
5. Ibid., 748. ↩︎
6. Ibid., 636. ↩︎
7. Ibid., 535. ↩︎