The World Has Gone Haywire in Ari Aster’s Eddington
In the desert, a man walks alone. He is dirty, disheveled, and muttering to himself as he passes by a sign promoting a new data center being built nearby. Off in the distance stand the remnants of agricultural industry. The man ambles his way back into civilization—in this case a small town surrounded by mountains, its streets mostly empty.
Welcome to Eddington, New Mexico, the fictional setting for writer-director Ari Aster’s new film, Eddington. The year is 2020, and the Covid-19 pandemic is in full swing, with the small southwestern town under an uneasy lockdown. Fifty-seven years ago, the opening sequence of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western classic Once Upon a Time in the West focused on a new railroad transforming the Old West, upending community and unleashing violence. In the world of Eddington, the internet is the big change agent, and smartphones are the guns. (Though guns are also the guns, as the film’s characters will be tragically reminded.)
Eddington follows the story of Joe Cross, the town sheriff, played by Joaquin Phoenix. Confined with wife Louise (Emma Stone) and her mother Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell) through the early months of the pandemic, Joe is bursting with frustration. When we meet him, it’s nighttime and he’s parked in his police SUV on the border of his official jurisdiction, earning him a visit from the neighboring police force, who tell him to scram. Even as sheriff, Joe gets no respect, and his authority is limited. Starting an argument with them over jurisdiction and the pointlessness of masking up in his own car is his feeble form of rebellion.
While his mother-in-law has fully descended into the Facebook conspiracy hole, and his wife has fallen under the spell of an online religious cult leader (Austin Butler), Joe’s feelings of impotency brought on by the lockdown are finally too much to bear, and he begins attempting to assert more control over his life and his town. First, he takes up the cause of anti-maskers—an asthma diagnosis is his halfhearted reason for not wearing a mask himself—before announcing an impromptu run for mayor against the incumbent, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). As the race (and the lockdown) wear on, a sense of social breakdown looms. Young people take to the street during Black Lives Matter protests, and Joe is increasingly unable to hold anything—his family, his job, his town, or his sanity—together.
“I do love an evil movie,” Aster said recently on Chapo Trap House’s Movie Mindset podcast. “And that probably has something to do with the fact that the world feels evil to me.” This comment probably doesn’t come as a shock to anyone who’s seen Hereditary, Midsommar, or Beau Is Afraid, his first three films, each of which plunges the viewer into a world of cruelty, manipulation, and inescapable anxiety, all wrapped in a smirk. Aster’s works are about the sick joke that is living in the modern world, though Eddington starts off feeling like a departure—from the Charlie Kaufman-inflected absurdity of Beau, from horror, and from the more internalized psychology of those earlier films.
Hereditary, which launched Aster as a feature filmmaker, is the story of a family haunted by a demon, and what makes the movie so deeply scary is its overriding feeling of inevitability. These are doomed characters, set on a path fuelled by familial narcissism and abuse; the horrors to come will unfold regardless of their attempts to stop it. Watching Hereditary is to immerse oneself in the psychological torture born of generational traumas with no way out. Midsommar, which pairs a kind of breakup comedy with the folk-horror spectacle of classics like The Wicker Man, works in a similarly representational manner. The calm, slow, ritualized behaviors of the cult are simultaneously unsettling and lulling. It’s a seduction technique on Aster’s part, a cool manipulation that mirrors the manipulations of star Florence Pugh’s jerky boyfriend, as well as the murderous cult she slowly replaces him with in her search for community and safety.
Aster’s misanthropic sense of humor lays the track for his films, which take some acknowledged measure of glee in punishing the audience. The director joked in the Movie Mindset interview that he deliberately made the three-hour Beau Is Afraid feel like it was about to end two hours in, just for the pleasure of forcing the audience to sit through a third. That film (his first with Phoenix), felt like it was tapping directly into the zeitgeist, rendering recent concerns over urban crime and societal deterioration as an outlandish series of set pieces reflecting its protagonist’s severe mental health issues. The world as it actually exists is immaterial next to the feeling of living in it for Beau, a man hopelessly warped by his controlling, narcissistic mother, terrified of everything around him, and ultimately alone.
Where Midsommar and Beau Is Afraid expanded Aster’s scope of interest in social and political realities, Eddington makes them its subject. The first half is awash in screens—characters constantly watching videos, texting each other, and doomscrolling. A shot of Joe turning away from his wife in bed only to gaze at her image on his phone’s lock screen exemplifies the film’s disinterest in subtlety. The people of Eddington—like the rest of us—lead split lives, online and IRL, the lines between the two perpetually blurred. There are plenty of person-to-person interactions in the film, such as a very western-coded scene in which Ted confronts Joe on the town’s main drag, complete with trash blowing across the screen. But even these supposedly human interactions are mediated by life online, where communication is more performative than substantive, and perceptions of reality are individually tailored. Throughout their face-off, Joe has his phone in his shirt pocket recording a video of the whole thing, making any real conversation impossible. Nobody can actually talk to each other in Eddington. “I am listening. Shut up!” Joe sputters hilariously during one of the film’s earlier confrontations—another in which, inevitably, he comes out on the losing end.
One imagines the delight Aster must have felt approaching controversial subjects like Covid hysteria, the George Floyd protests, and the general rottenness of social media. He does enjoy his petty provocations—beheading a child in your debut feature sets a nice template—but they’re rarely meaningless. The specifics of the debates that take over the town of Eddington are not, in and of themselves, important: Joe and Ted may be fighting over masking, the mayor’s race, and a data center, but it is Joe’s insecurity over his wife having once dated Ted that’s actually driving their conflict. Meanwhile, Louise, who often appears despondent and regularly refuses intimacy with Joe, won’t discuss the sexual assault she experienced as a child with him or with her mother, trusting instead the charismatic cult leader she’s discovered online. Louise’s mother, too, seems to be lost in her own distress after the death of her husband and becomes lost in internet conspiracies.
These dynamics aren’t limited to Joe’s family. His mayoral rival Ted is increasingly alienated from his son, Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka), who has been flouting lockdown rules to party with his friend Brian (Cameron Mann). They both have a crush on Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle), who once dated Michael, a sheriff’s trainee (Michael Ward), and now fancies Eric. It’s Brian and Eric’s sexual interest in Sarah that has them spouting ever more absurdly self-deluded ideas about social justice, ideas they clearly only care about abstractly, if at all. A scene in which Brian goes on a long rant about systemic racism in front of his parents’ open cabinet of assault-style rifles earns an especially big laugh (and likely a few eye rolls). Better to talk to his parents about social issues, after all, than his love life. In the middle of a BLM protest, Sarah rants at Michael, who is black, in language no doubt gleaned from her social media feed. “You’re wearing a uniform of a system built on hundreds of years of institutionalized racism!” In Eddington, everyday human social dynamics are mediated and perverted by the screens that refract them. Eventually—inevitably—these dynamics explode into violence.
The introduction of that violence sends the film off in a different, more paranoid direction that begins to resemble Aster’s earlier films. Rather than merely mirror the real world, Eddington starts to feel more and more like the fever-dream reality so often generated online. A private jet full of antifa super soldiers flying into town is among the movie’s most slyly funny moments, signalling the shift the film has taken into a representational space recognizable to anyone familiar with Aster’s work.
If less outright disturbing than his forays into horror, Eddington’s punch comes from the way it wraps in on itself to find resolution. Just as there is no escape from generational abuse in Hereditary, and no escape from anxiety in Beau Is Afraid, the characters in Eddington cannot escape the fact that their distorted reality and all the resulting chaos is a product of bigger, corporate forces exerting social control. Our psychological distress, Eddington suggests, is a shared reaction to a reality deliberately designed to alienate us from ourselves and each other. No wonder Austin Butler’s cultist preacher appeals with messages like, “Love is slavery,” and “Evil is sentimental.” In Eddington, basic human feeling is a vulnerability—or a threat.
“There’s a way to treat people,” Joe admonishes an employee of a local grocery store after witnessing him push a maskless man out the door early in the film. This is Eddington’s true instigating incident, in which Joe makes a show of solidarity by entering the store himself without a mask. That his big stand results in little more than some personal embarrassment is what helps drive him to madness, as well as his mayoral run (not necessarily in that order). Aster loves an emasculated man, and in Joe he finally allows such a man the opportunity to go right off the deep end.
After all the social media arguments, protests, crashed political fundraisers, cult indoctrinations, and brutality, the film ends on a note reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange. The world has been rearranged but not fundamentally changed. Locked away within his own mind, Joe is left to watch as the reality behind all his nightmares takes shape. It’s a bleak, Asterian conclusion, but his surface-level misanthropy reveals a genuine concern for the state of the world and the people living in it. The world feels evil to Aster; what can one do but expose it?