On Monday I went to the cinema to watch Asteroid City with John. I think it’s fair to say that we both left the screening quite baffled: as many others are currently saying, it’s a very cerebral film, better described as art than entertainment. It obviously wasn’t your usual Hollywood fair, although it is difficult to say what was going on or what the director was getting at. I felt compelled to write something about it here, but I had no idea what or where to begin writing any kind of review. There isn’t so much a discernible plot but a series of scenes set in a midwestern American city, themed around an asteroid crater and a visit from an alien. Although I enjoyed the film, I came home thinking that I would need to watch it a second time at least before I could write anything about it.

Interesting films, it seems, are like the proverbial London busses: you don’t see any in ages, and then two come along at once. I just got back from watching Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan with my parents. It was a film we were all interested in watching, so they popped over to this end of the metropolis and we went to my local Odeon. I again left the cinema resolving to watch the film again, although I must say that I was more engrossed today than on Monday. Interestingly, I think it’s worth pointing out that both Asteroid City and Oppenheimer are set in roughly the same area at roughly the same era – midwestern America in the forties and fifties – but are, of course, two totally different films. One is a lightweight, postmodern quandary by Wes Anderson: there is no plot, the film doesn’t really ‘say’ anything, and to a great extent can be dismissed as a garbled artistic mess, but nonetheless it leaves viewers intrigued. The other is based far more in reality and history, and is a retelling of the events surrounding the development of the nuclear bomb during and directly after the Second World War, followed by the descent into McCarthyism. Oppenheimer therefore carries much more gravitas through the historic importance of the events it depicts. Thus these are, to a great extent, completely different texts. Yet both clearly exceed the conventions of film; both play with how stories are told. Perhaps most notably, both use both monochrome and colour, and both play with conventions of time.

More to the point, both films deal with the same era of American history in very different ways. After all, it seems to me that the midwest in the middle twentieth century is a key aspect of the American mythos: it is an area and era where many of the stories Americans tell about themselves, are set, from Roswell to the tales of the travelling Motown singers. It was a period of great concern and anxiety about scientific progress, when people weren’t at all sure where inventions ranging from the Atomic bomb to space rockets to television may lead – an insecurity which may have resonance today. It is thus interesting that American culture seems to be revisiting that era in both these films.

Both films intrigued me and reminded me that I really should go to the cinema more often. I daresay we’ve all become so used to the usual superficial pap that when anything really interesting comes along it takes us by surprise. Yet both Asteroid City and Oppenheimer are great pieces of film in their own way. Of course they are very different, and both have very different relationships with reality, storytelling and film. Yet at their core, at least to a certain extent, in both we can read the same return to a facet of the American mythos which seems a central aspect of their culture.