Whoever Wins, We Lose

While I intended my original column on Eddington to be definitive in order to avoid the circularity of conversation Ari Aster’s films create, it’s worth going further into how his films do this. What germinated this thought was the way Nicky Otis Smith rebuked a couple of points made in my column in his own. Interestingly, two of the positions he contends aren’t made by my column at all. These can come down to simple misreadings.

First, he claims that I describe Aster’s film as acting in “bad faith” (the crux of most of his rebuke), which he extrapolates from me saying how “Aster stages a bad-faith political debate between the impotent MAGA-coded sheriff and the smarmy liberal mayor,” i.e. that Aster is portraying two political actors working for the sake of themselves rather than the values that they attempt to publicly espouse, not that Aster is working from a position of bad faith himself. Second, Smith claims that my saying “the contemporary split in American politics comes from the veil of unity projected by the Obama years, ripped apart by the right-wing racism that had been fomenting since then, leading to the psychosis of the Right’s veneration of Donald Trump” is in reference to what “got Trump back in office.” This, I thought, was a clear allusion to birtherism, which Trump participated in heavily, marking his shift from a liberal Democrat donor to a Republican presidential hopeful.

One point that I thought about expanding in detail when first writing my column, but decided against because they seemed so obvious to me, was the “anachronisms and composites” that I mention in the conclusion. When Smith asks what I believe is “untrue” about Eddington this is what I mean. I’m talking about the way that Aster holds on an image of a cell tower in the beginning, implying the film will include some reference to the 5G conspiracy theories from the early days of Covid, and links that with signage about the building of a data center. Signage against that construction references how it will suck away the local population’s water, which is a political debate that wouldn’t start happening until a couple pf years after 2020 and also calls to mind protests of yore, with the late Obama-era movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline whose largely-Indigenous activists were dubbed “water protectors.”

I’m talking about the film’s floating political images, like its Kyle Rittenhouse stand-in being a teen who tries to adapt activist language in a failed attempt to impress a girl, but finds acceptance in the conservative grifter circles. It’s funny because you could easily pull examples from either side of the aisle for that working (you need not look farther than Obama talking in his autobiography about reading Frantz Fanon in college to get laid), but it supports a point Aster is making about conservative politics born specifically out of impotence, no better demonstrated than in Joaquin Phoenix’s sheriff whose wife refuses to touch him. And while that character does become MAGA-coded, he does so organically, as if he’s the first person to ever do it—he is MAGA in Eddington, not a part of it. He lacks history or context within the real America. The town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, as rendered by Eddington is about as close to “real” American history as Monument Valley is to John Ford’s mythic west. Like how Ford pulls the audience out of his world of mythic Americana into the world of American history at the end of Young Mr. Lincoln, Aster uses his epilogue to place Eddington firmly in the present.

Smith aptly points to how Black Lives Matter protests were “a steady presence in America as early as 2014,” and it’s important for the space that Eddington takes place in that in the film’s diegesis, this movement appears out of left field. It’s not reflexive but inflexive—it adopts the images and tonalities of a time rather than strictly analytic of it. After all, how analytic could something be of that specific moment if it doesn’t firmly plant its roots there, and instead chooses to place itself in a symbolic desert full of amalgamated images? Eddington is as Trump and the peak of the pandemic as much as The Searchers is about Andrew Johnson’s administration. Instead, these works are reaching for something more timeless (with The Searchers performing a shockingly modern breakdown of American racism while Eddington ultimately tries to reveal the corporate order that is obfuscated by the two-party political masquerade). This will become more apparent the more time is separated from the film’s release, making it easier to separate the moment from a lived one and rather one understood as the images that were left behind from it.

The problem, for me, is that Aster’s work here is that it’s designed to litigate those unrealities. Smith points to Eddington’s focus on pandemic-related issues as why it struggled at the box office, which is possible, although it seems that’s what advertisers believed was the angle to stress in order to get the most butts in seats, and is roundaboutly discussed on social media which too can bolster interest. But performance aside, it’s important how much the pandemic issues which make up the body of Aster’s text aren’t what the film is really driving a political point about. I talk about this in my original column, about how it “could’ve fit into 2018 as much as it did 2025” not just because it was originally intended to be Aster’s first film and was rewritten to fit in the pandemic, because it focuses on what’s going on behind the curtain of hot button du jour and not those surface level debates themselves.

I’m resistant to doing a line-item counterargument to other things Smith says that I disagree with, as I think that kind of point-for-point squabbling is exactly what Eddington shows as effectively useless when not addressing the more underlying machinations at hand in the American political system. Eddington works as an interesting political text because of this and fails as a film given that it has enabled the very circularity it wishes to criticize. Or, conversely, in the “troll cinema” sense, one could argue that the film is successful in that it proves that people would rather debate endlessly than look behind the curtain. In an intellectual way, I might agree, but it’s dismissive of progress people make on the streets. Just last week, through community organizing and activism, Tucson’s City Council unanimously voted against greenlighting a new Amazon data center in their area. In Aster’s town, activist interventions are merely quixotic exercises, ones purely symbolic rather than practical—but how could anything be practical in a world of symbols?

It leads to Smith’s conclusion that 2024’s re-election of Donald Trump was a rebuke on the protest summer of 2020, which is a strange argument at first because after that summer Joe Biden was elected to office in what was framed as a rebuke to Trump (why would that response take four years rather than be immediate backlash?), and fails to recognize that 2016 was also framed as a rebuke, as was 2008. It’s more likely that the yo-yo’ing is more about the present electoral condition. It’s revealing, too, that Kamala Harris’ most popular point in the 2024 general was when she took the stage from Biden, implying a certain shift in the Democratic Party, or a veil of a shift, one whose illusion rapidly eroded as she (unsurprisingly) stood with the establishment and so with it evaporated her polling numbers. American voters aren’t ideologically coherent beings, even the ones who think they are, and the functionally binary system they have to interact with to attempt to achieve their wishes ends up swinging on blaming whoever’s immediately in power. It has little to do with the “left” or “right,” in part because those aren’t monolithic in practice (despite being framed as such conceptually)—look at the left’s reaction to a Dem admin enabling the genocide in Gaza vs. how that admin blamed the “left” for their loss in the general, or how the second Trump admin so far failed to resolve it’s romantic, classicist ideals (represented by the “again” part of MAGA) and it’s futurist impulses (the Musk/Thiel wing) in the way that Mussolini was somehow able to synthesize D’Annunzio and Marinetti.

Yet all of this belies what’s going on behind the scenes, the bureaucracies that keep stamping or cameras that keep recording or the machines that keep printing bullets. Whatever spectacle we’re stuck arguing about always necessarily obfuscates the real machinations that govern the American system.