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Asteroid City: America is a Strange Land
I didn’t like the movie, but it was strange. I suppose that’s positive . . . or at least, American.
The film is dysfunctional. Its shots are “off” (maybe because it’s filmed in the “Academy Ratio”). The characters are off. The “offness” goes out (the camera work) and the offness comes in (the characters). Everything is off.
It shows, in Techera’s opening words in his review essay, that “America is a strange country.”
I’d argue it’s a strange country because it is, and always has been, the Left Hemisphere Empire. De Tocqueville marveled at the hustle and bustle he found here: everyone intent on making a dollar. Efficiency, goals, ambition.
I speculate that the original settlers were heavily inclined toward the left hemisphere. America became the Left Hemisphere Empire because its wide-open possibilities attracted that type of person to begin with: The country where you can make your dreams come true . . . where you can aim, strive, succeed, and get rich.
And by attending to America’s land with such left hemisphere properties, Americans altered…
