Feelin’ Seen
by Guy Lodge
Eddington
Dir. Ari Aster, U.S., A24
The first commercial films to address the COVID-19 pandemic were chamber pieces, by both practical and thematic necessity: a run of quickly, opportunistically shot exercises that confined a manageable number of characters in a single location—or worse, in screen-life limbo—and fretted over the social consequences of lockdown. Language Lessons, The End of Us, Locked Down: claustrophobic time capsules they may be, but their air of anxiety over quarantine now looks quaintly off-base. People had been living in a kind of social isolation long before the coronavirus briefly enforced it; online community, presented as a lifeline in those glum first years of the 2020s, has always driven more people mad than it has kept sane.
Eddington, Ari Aster’s long cold sweat of a COVID movie, is everything those early pandemic films were not. Muscular and expansive, it spreads itself across every inch of the fictitious New Mexico town of the title, touring its streets and community spaces with a patient gaze, and reveling in the jagged sprawl of its sunbaked outdoor landscape. It’s a film both narratively crowded and busily populated, which isn’t to say it’s all that socialized: it bears Aster’s guarded suspicion of his fellow man as heavily as his riotously misanthropic picaresque Beau Is Afraid or his nothing-so-queer-as-folk horror Midsommar. Much art made in the heat of COVID (even Bo Burnham’s otherwise jaded Inside, with its concluding refrain that “it’ll stop any day now”) projected a hope that we’d pull through and that everything would be okay. Eddington wields a half-decade of perspective to instead assure us that we didn’t, and that everything is pretty much fucked.
“Hindsight is 2020” states the film’s tagline, a bit ruefully and even gleefully. Though first written by Aster in the early months of the pandemic, Eddington plays now as a kind of anti-nostalgic period piece, evoking 2020 with a needling specificity that extends from mask discourse to political sloganeering to social media trends. (If you, like millions of others, posted a black square to Instagram in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, prepare to cringe.) It’s all recognizably past tense, but not because it’s over. In picking out a surfeit of tensions consuming the eponymous town—and, by extension, America at large—in May 2020, Aster invites us to consider just how those conflicts have lingered and metastasized in the years separating the end of President Trump’s first term and the beginning of his second. The memes have changed and the masks are off, in all senses, but otherwise the meticulously reconstructed recent past of Eddington isn’t nearly past enough. There’s no cozy retro quality, either, to the arid, tumbleweed-strewn western styling applied by Aster to a story that actually supports the genre callbacks, with its clash of predominantly male egos at the site of a crumbling southwest American frontier.
Chief among those egos, fittingly, is that of the town sheriff, though Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) wouldn’t have passed muster at the OK Corral. Appearing nearly as wan and disheveled as in Beau Is Afraid, Phoenix plays Joe as another entry in his growing gallery of darkly addled losers, a character template he’s happy to apply to Napoleon and the Joker alike. He wears his white Stetson like he’s waiting to grow into it, his badge a would-be talisman awkwardly stuck on his belt. As such, he cuts about the right figure for Eddington, a stubby, unprepossessing settlement that juts out of the Southwestern desert like milk teeth out of dry gums, any folksy charm having long evaporated from its scattering of essential businesses—a bar, a supermarket, a Tex-Mex diner, a gun store—and Spanish-style stucco houses. The population is small but not neighborly, rife with latent political and generational divisions that will lay low only as long as nothing happens.
Enter 2020, enough of a happening that even Joe, heretofore the kind of milquetoast conservative who hasn’t actually had to consider a political identity, is inspired to action—the wrong action, at every turn, but action nonetheless. Growingly incensed by the mask mandates dutifully enforced by the town’s notionally progressive mayor Ted (Pedro Pascal), Joe rashly announces his intent to challenge Ted in the upcoming mayoral election. It’s a move actively applauded by few and received with outright hostility by Joe’s wife, Louise (Emma Stone), a QAnon-pilled introvert steadily fed a stream of right-wing conspiracy theories by her overbearing live-in mother Dawn (a delicious Deirdre O’Connell). To Louise, all politics and public services are vehicles for her worst fears; far more seductive to her is the fascistic everyone-but-you-is-to-blame nihilism peddled by slick YouTube cult leader Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler, ideally cast).
Given minimal assistance by his equally naive deputies Michael (Micheal Ward) and Guy (Luke Grimes), Joe’s campaign amounts to little more than plastering his police vehicle in misspelled anti-lockdown slogans (“Your being manipulated,” warns one) and slinging dubious rape accusations at his rival. But it’s enough for a faction of townspeople irked at being told what to do. Ted isn’t offering anything much more compelling: his ads espouse flannelly family values; his campaign anthem, hilariously, is the warmed-over empower-pop of Katy Perry’s “Firework”; while behind the scenes, he’s most focused on courting a massive AI corporation to build their latest data plant on the town’s outskirts. Neither man is equipped to fight an actual culture war, as Joe, this time with his sheriff hat on, demonstrates when the nationwide wave of Black Lives Matter protests finally crashes over Eddington: the rioters here are few, and mostly, stridently white, but loud enough to expose the general lack of conviction in any town leaders.
Thus is Eddington, in a sense, the lawless town of many an Old West shoot-’em-up: there’s ostensibly law and order here, but none that anyone passionately believes in, including those entrusted with keeping the peace. As the town’s already tenuous civility breaks down—and the guns come out of their holsters—Aster tracks the ensuing discord with a sharp, antic sense of farce but also a chilly, let-it-burn remove that some will see (and already have, to judge by the film’s polarized reception at Cannes) as irresponsible “both-sides-ism.”
Certainly, the script is peppered with scabrous jokes at the expense of both hateful alt-right crankery and hollowly performative liberal activism, but it’s not amoral or politically uncommitted: Aster plays into viewer biases before confronting them with inconvenient truths. The unlovable BLM protestor Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle), berating black cop Michael for his complicity while checking her own white privilege in the same breath, at first seems like catnip for smug anti-woke critics—though Michael’s subsequent betrayal by his own police brethren does nothing to prove her wrong. In the event that right-leaning audiences take Joe’s common-man-against-the-system shtick at face value, they’ll be sorely disappointed by his later unraveling. And if anyone is struggling to identify one clear black-hatted villain in Eddington, the preying presence of technology in everything—most ominously represented here by fictitious AI corp Solidgoldmagikarp, wielding greater power than any human figure—is facelessly staring right at them. It’s America that comes across here as ultimately rudderless, socially and politically stymied by an internet-led culture in which everyone absorbs news and worldviews from a separate source.
To that end, it feels apt that Eddington’s images shift between two wildly opposed aspect ratios. Cinematographer Darius Khondji luxuriates in the wide proportions of midcentury westerns, as Eddington itself is dwarfed by rolling expanses of clay earth and crisp blue sky—only for Aster to frequently disrupt the frame with the rude vertical thrust of cellphone videos, flicking agitatedly from one short-form snippet to another, as his characters doomscroll their way into the void. Numbing digital distraction is the only calm on offer in this savage, brilliant, gut-churning vision of a country idly at war with itself. When the phones are down, Eddington touches grass, hurtling into a vast outdoor climax of shootouts and mortal peril. Here, the film speaks the very language of American epics being rendered obsolete in a time of diminished attention spans and machine-recycled content—with chunky SUVs for horses, artificial intelligence for manifest destiny and, well, guns for guns. That much, across a seething, turbulent national history, has stayed assuredly the same.