We live in (dare I say) uniquely frightening times, but so do these people, for whom the Cold War and a rapidly changing social order is their psychic wallpaper. That Anderson set Asteroid City in 1955 is a bit of trickery, a degree of separation between the characters’ reality and our own. The emotions we can’t outrun, but we try to anyhow. Real things, in other words, the kind everyone has to deal with. Living in the shadow of the bombs is what Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City is about - literal bombs, and also a host of other life-shattering things like loss, and existential dread, and a world changing so fast it’s hard to hang on to it. They trot out of the diner to look at the tiny mushroom cloud, snap a few pictures, and go back inside for more coffee. “Another atom bomb test,” the characters declare, with some combination of intrigue and boredom. Nuclear bombs keep going off over the horizon of Asteroid City (population 87).
