Targets, Asteroid City, and Metafiction

Accidental double feature, plus the Pegu Club Cocktail

The Pegu Club Cocktail is fairly simple: combine two ounces of gin (I used a bottle my mom brought back from France), three quarters of an ounce of orange liqueur (Cointreau is my choice), one half ounce of freshly squeezed lime juice, and a dash of orange and Angostura bitters in a cocktail shaker. Fill with ice, and give it a good shake– you’ll want the shaker to have a nice layer of frost on the outside. Strain into a chilled coupe glass. 

Gin is my liquor of choice, and it’s finally summer in Los Angeles. Long sleeve tees have finally been put away in favor of light body odor and sticky bangs. I’ve been working on the self-imposed assignment of 200 words on every movie I’ve watched since April 26th– it’s been about two full months now. But I’d been kicking myself for skipping my paragraphs on the five most recent films I had watched: The Life Aquatic, Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Asteroid City, and Reds. Four Andersons and a Beatty. I don’t know why I couldn’t come back to those and write something (anything). Maybe the bank of movies was too big, maybe I thought the Andersons were actually too thematically similar to each other, and possibly Reds was too big to tackle (not true, I think I was just lazy about that one). Anyways, I knew I had to get back on the horse with my next choice, or else I’d give up the dream of writing about film forever. Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets seemed like a good pick. I didn’t know much about it and assumed it was light fare, and a genre piece, which would lend itself to easier analysis. I had no clue I was about to get involved in 90 minutes of film devoted to ideas about gun control, violence in American culture, and what it means to be an aging movie star. 

Targets is Bogdanovich’s debut feature, produced by Roger Corman. As the lore goes, Roger Corman said he would produce the movie if Boris Karloff was in it, as he owed him two days of work, and if the movie came in under budget. I won’t summarize the movie here– you can go to Wikipedia, order a nice copy off Criterion, or rent it on streaming for as low as $3.99. In the first plot line, following Boris Karloff’s character, we get an examination of artifice and stardom. Karloff plays a character named Byron Orlok– not only does that sound a lot like Boris Karloff, but also Orlok is taken from Nosferatu’s er, Christian name (at least his last name): Count Orlok. Byron Orlok is a horror film actor at the end of his career, and apparently past his prime. He has just finished a film which he has decided will be his last – Targets was Karloff’s last prominent role in a film. The director of the film-within-the-film is Sammy Michaels, played by the director of our real life film: Peter Bogdanovich. The second storyline of the film is also based on reality, albeit a darker one. Bobby Thompson (played by Tim O’Kelly) is a clean-cut Vietnam vet living in Reseda with his wife and his parents. (Brief aside here: as a born and bred Angeleno, I love when we get to see the San Fernando Valley on-screen. And the 170 freeway? Hell yeah.). He’s a symbol of a certain type of Americana: he’s blonde, he loves guns, he loves a Baby Ruth bar, and he served this country. He buries his feelings just beneath the surface until they finally bubble up: he begins a shooting spree, starting with his wife and mother at home. He then grabs all his many guns (and some more Baby Ruth bars) and goes on a sniper mission around the 818. Bobby Thompson is modeled after the real life mass shooter Charles Whitman. In watching both storylines, we are constantly trying to parse out how fictional the fiction of the film is. Both stories rely on a bit of familiarity to feel grounded (truth is often stranger than fiction), and the entire time we watch the events of the film unfold we remind ourselves of the blurred lines between fact and fiction here. 

A week before I saw Targets, I went to see Asteroid City at my local AMC. On the surface it’s not terribly similar to Bogdanovich’s debut, but both deal with the nature of artifice and film as a medium. Where Targets is a fairly subtle exercise in metafiction, Asteroid City constantly calls attention to it. At this current stage in Wes Anderson’s career his aesthetic sense is stronger than ever, and he’s quite obsessed with the nature of creating art and different artistic mediums. The French Dispatch is about the creation and making of a newspaper, The Grand Budapest Hotel is about the performance and art of running a successful hotel. I watched The Life Aquatic for the first time recently, which is about the creation of a documentary within the film we watch. It seems to be a preoccupation of Wes’s, much like the seemingly random inclusion of bisexual men in Life Aquatic, Grand Budapest, and now Asteroid City, or the theme of boys and their fathers both vying for the same woman’s affection. 

In Asteroid City, we have more than one layer of metafiction at play. We have a television program in black and white Academy ratio which is about the play within the television show within the movie called Asteroid City. The events of the play, which I’ll call AC2, are shown in widescreen and in bright, unreal desert neon colors. It’s a neat framing device, made even more fun by the fact that the actors are all playing actors playing players– each character has their own identity to get lost in in many ways. Every once in a while we see some slippage where even the players become confused about who they are exactly. Asteroid City presents us with two moments where the blurring of the lines of reality are most apparent. Bryan Cranston plays The Host of the television documentary about AC2, so we only see him in the black and white sequences, and we only expect to see him there. However, in one scene where we are squarely in the play, he shows up briefly to say something, after which he realizes he’s not supposed to be in “this part” and disappears out of frame. Later on, we see the player Jones Hall (Jason Schwartzman) taking a smoke break on a fire escape, where he sees The Actress on the fire escape across from him. He says to her “hey, you’re the wife who played my actress!” in a very sweet moment of intratextual confusion. 

Looking back many days after seeing Asteroid City, I only recall being bothered by the Bryan Cranston moment, even though both call attention to the artifice and framework of Asteroid City. Perhaps I’m more generous when something is sentimental instead of silly. 

It’s funny that I was hesitant to write my little paragraphs on Life Aquatic, Moonrise Kingdom, Grand Budapest Hotel, Reds, and Asteroid City, because here I am now, starting a whole damn Substack. In my own wandering of the endless landscape of cinema, I keep finding what one of my favorite professors called internal thematic reverberations. Even in seemingly disparate and unrelated bodies of work, there are many similarities to digest and think about. 

Targets and Asteroid City are far from the only films that explore metafiction. But they stand out among the canon because they aren’t (outwardly, at least) dealing with the filmmaker’s feelings of regrets about his personal life. Some of the more prominent versions of the latter are 8 ½, Dangerous Game, and All That Jazz (all movies that I will enthusiastically recommend to those who haven’t seen them). Even with the inclusion of Peter Bogdanovich in the cast, neither Targets nor Asteroid City has the same hint of solipsism that the other films mentioned do– and I say that with affection for all the films discussed here. 

If you made it this far, thanks for reading. If you have recs for other films that fit the above criteria, please send them along. Make yourself a Pegu Club Cocktail and throw on a movie. Hell, make some fresh lemonade and enjoy the sun too. It is summer after all. See you next time!