Eddington Is the Must-See Covid Masterpiece
Insufferable liberals. Unbearable conservatives. Eddington, New Mexico has it all.
The fourth feature-length film from the American director Ari Aster, Eddington is a deeply political, darkly humorous, and searingly sober critique of our media-saturated political hellscape and poisoned American experience. Set at the onset of the Covid pandemic, Eddington is a rich and layered exploration of the hyper-consumed media atmosphere that pervades every aspect of modern society and works to derail peace and stability in our daily lives.
Joaquin Phoenix stars as a populist sheriff who runs for mayor of the small, dusty New Mexican town of Eddington after he and an elderly townsman are shamed for buying groceries without wearing state-mandated masks during the early days of the pandemic. The town’s incumbent Mayor Ted Garcia, played by Pedro Pascal, is a centrist Democrat who chides Phoenix in public but struggles to meet his own government’s lockdown and mask mandates when in the privacy of his friends and family. Sound familiar?
Aster takes full advantage of two of Hollywood’s great modern leading men in the prime of their careers. Phoenix delivers a knockout here. He is sensational as the slightly slow and insecure Sheriff Joe Cross, who struggles to connect with his permanently-online, conspiracy-obsessed wife and her even more insane live-in mother. Emma Stone plays the wife, and she’s at her spooky best in this setting. Catatonic, confused, and bed-ridden, her depression stems from a mysterious event in the past. Her outlet: the internet and its endless rabbit holes. That’s Eddington in a nutshell, really. Everyone is dealing with something tragic as the weight of a global health crisis tears out the last threads of civilization.
From the very first moment we meet Sheriff Joe, he is struggling to breathe. An asthmatic, he is scolded by native police when he refuses to wear a mask on pueblo lands. Joe’s wheezing and panting throughout the film are illustrative of the panic and mania that everyday Americans felt throughout the pandemic. The onslaught of information and ever-changing rules of the Covid era left most average Joes struggling to breathe, and Phoenix’s physical performance here embodies that reality.
The children in Eddington are a mess, too. Two teenage boys fight for the love of a mask-clad social-justice warrior who complains about her whiteness and eventually leads protests against the sheriff and his two deputies, one of whom is the only black man in the town. Here, Aster explores the performative nature of social justice and how interpersonal conflicts play central roles in the public display of theatrical and often violent outbursts such as the ones we saw across America in the summer of 2020.
Aster, who wrote the film, could have easily pitched the narrative to make the left the good guys in Eddington, but his nuanced vision of a small town beset by global anxiety shows that both sides, just as in real life, lost touch with reality during the Covid crisis. “It is a satire, but if it’s especially critical of anything, it’s the atmosphere that we’re living in where everybody is living in a different reality,” Aster told a Santa Fe audience after a screening of his film at the Center for Contemporary Arts last month. “I have people in my life who are very close to me who are in different algorithms, and it’s become increasingly not hard, like impossible, to reach them, and it’s become increasingly impossible for them to reach me.”
To that end, there are many screens in this film. The digitization of the human experience is as central to the remote town of Eddington as any cast member. Aster’s admission about the impossible nature of social media as a communication device is a motivating factor in this film. No more is that apparent than with Phoenix’s wife, a manic depressive, ghost-like figure who spends her days searching the internet for “the truth.” Eventually, she runs off with Van Jefferson Peak, a charismatic online influencer who is touring the United States and giving speeches about pedophile rings. That begins the belated downward spiral of Sheriff Joe, who violently turns on the town in a fashion befitting the Joker. He eventually squares off with an Antifa death squad straight from the terror visions of the producers at Fox News.
Amid the interpersonal chaos in Eddington, a faceless AI company called “solidgoldmagikarp” closes on a building site outside the town. The MAHA-types in Eddington attempt to slow construction, arguing the data centers will suck dry the little water available to its desert community. But nothing can slow the tide of new tech; by the end of the film the data center is built and radiates a deeper and brighter light than the town itself, casting a warm glow of the digital onto the uncomfortable darkness of the real.
The best thing about Eddington is how darkly funny it is. There were numerous times I laughed out loud as Aster poked fun at both sides of the political landscape, capturing the ridiculous situation we all experienced through our phones and in real life during the pandemic. In one particularly humorous scene, a white teenager explains to his aging parents what it means to be a social justice warrior. The perplexed father, with food dangling from his fork, replies dryly, “Are you retarded? You’re white!”
For conservatives who felt unheard during the Covid era, Eddington is oddly destined to become a stranger-than-fiction cult classic, if and when they finally see it. Box office figures show the film has only grossed $9 million on an estimated budget of $25–50 million, with the movie likely on its way out of nationwide theaters by mid-August. It’s Aster’s second big-budget flop in a row after Beau Is Afraid, a surrealist odyssey influenced by the works of 20th century French filmmaker Jacques Tati, struggled to connect with audiences in 2023. The poor returns are more of an indictment on the movie-watching public than Aster’s ability as a filmmaker which shines brightest in Eddington. With this weird film in the desert, Aster has crafted an enigmatic narrative that will leave audiences of all political leanings with something to chew on.
At its core, Eddington is deceptively funny and deeply mysterious. Aster has done something brilliant here—he’s made the lunatics palpable and showed just how insane the normies became. Underneath it all is an introspective conversation on how technology warps reality and leaves us all more disconnected than before. The film’s poster campaign of buffaloes barreling off a cliff and the tagline “Hindsight is 2020” is the perfect summation. Eddington is blunt, it’s hilarious, and it will leave you contemplating which character you took on during the pandemic. I can’t recommend the film highly enough: a true masterpiece of the post-Covid era.
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