#i did not know he was also a coppola lol. talented guy tho!

[knightotoc]

Asteroid City spoilers (seriously watch the movie first, it's great) --

I'm so stuck on the line "the wife who played my actress." It broke my heart, and I don't even know why or really understand it, but I feel like it's the key to everything.

We know Jason Schwartzman's character, the actor, was having an affair with Edward Norton's character, the playwright; their love at least partly begun because the actor played the writer's character so accurately. Margot Robbie plays another actor, who plays a dead character whose part got cut, so they can only meet in the liminal backstage area. I love the staging in this scene, the actors on their separate balconies like two Juliets.

The play-within-the-movie is about a family going through grief and quarantine, which makes it relevant to us even though it is set in the 50s. (There are a lot of terrifying parallels between now and the 50s: fear of apocalypse, Cold War, sliding back into conservatism, obsession with controlling gender, repressing emotions, overblown hype for technology -- all things, to various extents, present in the movie.) But the backstage story reveals the real grief: the playwright died, leaving his lover alone to portray his own too-timely tribute to fictional death.

So I'm stuck on this wife/actress line because it's so sad and mysterious. I wonder if she really was his wife, and either he was cheating on her, or she was his beard. Or, she wasn't his wife and he was just joking, which might mean that they're great friends/love working together and are bummed out that their beautiful scene got cut. It is unfair that the playwright liked the husband character so much more than the wife character.

Another more spooky explanation is that the playwright started to identify with the wife as his love with the husband's actor deepened. So he might have cut their ghostly scene as it became just too personal or too tragic to bear. The chronological story is then one of dramatic irony, and their offstage, unsanctioned reenactment is catharsis.

But I'm trying to think of a metaphorical, non-chronological way to understand the movie. Jason Schwartzman's character is really anxious about trying to find meaning in this play. I can understand his frustration even if it really is that simple, as I was also going through it, trying to make sense of this confusing movie. But I think it's clear that he's not really upset about the meaninglessness of the play, but the meaninglessness of life itself.

And so the absurd coincidence of a playwright writing about death and then dying starts to collapse, and some truer idea about grief emerges. When someone dies, we get trapped in a script. When a queer person dies, they might be misrepresented as someone more socially acceptable. So a real gay lover becomes a fake wife in a big silly costume (and perhaps a reference to Schwartzman's role in Marie Antoinette?).

So "the wife who played my actress" isn't either of those things. The reason the phrase makes no sense is that death makes no sense, homophobia makes no sense, and post-death homophobia makes the least sense of all. It is a really cool way to portray a ghost.