Asteroid City

Renowned for meticulous set design, symmetrical shots, pastel colours and dry humour, Wes Anderson loves to weave a story that captures a very specific time and place (think of his memorable mountainside resort in The Grand Budapest Hotel). From the opening moments of the Asteroid City official trailer, we are transported to a small desert town in mid-1950s America.

The trailer features two songs with vocals, and is edited to balance sung lyrics and actors’ dialogue simultaneously. These songs, both skiffle hits from 1957, propel the trailer forward.

Skiffle music is a style of 1950s pop music from Britain (The Beatles got their start playing skiffle music as The Quarrymen) and sounds like an upbeat blend of bluegrass, folk music and swing. The trailer’s first skiffle song is Johnny Duncan’s ‘Last Train to San Fernando.’ A cover of a calypso song written by Silvester DeVere, Mighty Dictator and Randolph Padmore, it enters at 0:10 with guitar emulating the ascending and accelerating sound of a locomotive engine. Segue to the title card at 0.17, which is timed to begin with the skiffle rhythm guitar setting up the song’s vocal hook, as a yellow train chugs through a desert landscape. This song is edited short, retaining only the intro, vocal chorus and guitar solo. The chorus is high in Johnny Duncan’s vocal range, and does not conflict with the simultaneous lines of dialogue deep in Jeffrey Wright’s baritone range. Wright plays the host of the Junior Stargazer conference (Marvel fans will recognize Wright’s authoritative voice from his role as The Watcher in the recent What If…? Disney+ series). As the dialogue moves on from Wright to Scarlett Johansson and Hope Davis, the song has also moved on to a guitar solo, higher-pitched than the female dialogue, thus avoiding multiple voices in the same range competing for our attention.

A sonic bridge takes us from 0:47, to 1:07 while the trailer’s narrative hints at the arrival of aliens. Repetitive motifs on bells and woodwinds evoke the happy-go-lucky melodies and ostinatos in Alexandre Desplat’s scores for recent Wes Anderson films. Conveniently these bells highlight a short sequence in which the dialogue refers to unidentifiable “beeps and blips.”

At 1:07 another toe-tapper from 1957 emerges: ‘Freight Train,’ Nancy Wiskey and the Chas McDevitt Skiffle Group’s biggest hit. Written by African-American singer Elizabeth Cotten several decades earlier, ‘Freight Train’ was originally a slower folk blues song. In Nancy Wiskey’s version the melody is passed back and forth between female vocals and whistling. From 1:15-1:44 in the trailer we hear the song’s first chorus and first verse, with 50 words of sung lyrics set behind 112 words of spoken dialogue from 8 different scenes of the film, all in under 30 seconds. Given that the trailer has had over a minute of exposition by now, this is a great point to introduce a rapid-fire stream of information to give the audience multiple reasons to become curious about the film. The juxtaposition of the dialogue against Nancy Wiskey’s vocals invites the audience to pay close attention here.

While the trailer could have played it safe with a more obvious mid-century rural America musical reference such as a Hank Williams tune, the choice of British skiffle covers of songs by black American and Caribbean singers is nevertheless effective in setting the scene. The peppy sounds from a short-lived musical style that feels frozen in time in 1957 provide a taste of Wes Anderson’s sense of humour and the Asteroid City vibe.

Asteroid City is out in theatres June 23rd.

— Jack Hui Litster