Ari Aster’s fresh movie, Eddington, pits Joaquin Phoenix against Pedro Pascal as men with conflicting takes on how to get their compact town through
Ari Aster’s fresh movie, Eddington, pits Joaquin Phoenix against Pedro Pascal as men with conflicting takes on how to get their compact town through the crisis of Covid. It’s also a film about the contemporary political crisis in the US and the influence of technology on our lives.
Adam Curtis’s latest documentary series, Shifty, covers similar themes but through the lens of British life in the Thatcher years of the delayed 1970s to early 1990s. This era, he argues, put in place a substantial shift in power away from the individual and the nation state, changes that are still playing out today.
Earlier this summer, the two men met in London to discuss the thinking behind their work, the questions that animate them and the corroding power of nostalgia.
Ari Aster: My family lives in New Mexico and I grew up there; it’s where I spent my adolescence. In 2020 a Covid scare brought me back home and I was in a situation where a lot of the people closest to me were in totally different algorithms. We couldn’t reach each other.
In early June, when the fever reached its highest pitch, I started writing down what I perceived to be in the air. I didn’t know whether things were about to explode and boil over, or if we would ever come out of lockdown, but I could tell that something was happening. I’ve also always wanted to make a film about New Mexico. And so it kind of became a western.
Adam Curtis: A thing I really like about the film is the sense that, up to that point, there was somehow a daddy in the room. Then, when Covid happens, Daddy leaves and all these groups are on their own. All the last vestiges of power, or large power, just disappeared. They can no longer see what they have in common.
AA: They’re all connected in that they all care about the world, and they all know that something is wrong. But that’s where the connection ends. I wanted them all to be distinguished by a yearning for the America they believe in, but they’re not living on the same plane.
Fighting for our lives … Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal in Eddington. Photograph: BFA/Alamy
AC: That’s the point where you start from: Daddy’s gone, they’re all on their own, they all have a dream of America, but they’re like billiard balls: they keep on hitting each other. And each time they hit each other they amplify each other’s version of reality and it just gets crazy.
AA: Yeah, they’re all paranoid. And as those billiard balls start knocking into each other, I wanted the film itself to also become gripped by that paranoia. I was trying to take a capacious, objective stance in the beginning, and then that objectivity kind of falls away. I don’t know if the film is apolitical or if it’s omnipolitical, but all those fantasies of what is happening start to take over the film. That’s the idea.
AC: If you have a world in which everyone is encouraged to be a total individualist, they tend to get trapped in that mindset. It’s wonderful when things are going well, because you, your own desires and thoughts are the centre of the world. But the moment things go wrong, you retreat into yourself. And the only thing you can trust is your own ideas. You come to believe in them intensely, because that’s the only thing that makes you feel secure. And I think that’s where we are now.
What has happened is that we have become totally atomised and cannot reach each otherAri Aster
In Shifty, I was tracing the roots of that in Britain and I was trying to do it sympathetically. And Ari, I don’t think that in Eddington you apply the normal righteous disapproval of so many films today, either. You actually take the characters on their own terms. You might not sympathise, but you get an understanding of why people have retreated into their own world and will not accept any other reality. I think you’re dealing with what comes next.
AA: They’re all unmoored, but they’re clinging to some buoy. Shifty really excited me because it felt like a mirror from the past. It was shocking to see how all these things that feel unprecedented right now are actually the current reverberation of something that started a long time ago. It’s just that the technology has changed, and because these things have been getting amplified for so long, the distortions have become more intense.
AC: The most arduous thing to do, especially in our time, is make the recent past unfamiliar. It’s almost impossible. And that’s the task I set myself. It’s a bit like the Mona Lisa. If you point it out to someone, they don’t see it. They go: “Oh yeah, that’s the Mona Lisa.” They don’t look at it at all.
Breaking out of the bubble … Ari Aster on the set of Eddington. Photograph: Richard Foreman
What you want to do is find a way of breaking that. It’s how you edit the stuff a lot of you have lived through together, to make you look at it fresh. If you just live in a world of continuous fragmentation, the past never has a moment to settle down. In previous eras, you would have all those fragments of experience, but over 20 or 30 years, which is the length of time I was dealing with, most of those fragments would just disappear, leaving a few to settle down, out of which would come an agreed narrative about history.
Instead, today we live in a world where those fragments are continually played back to us, as you show in the movie. I think that’s why people find it very arduous to understand how trapped they’ve become in their own world, because they have no story that explains how they got there. What you get is a continuous political narrative which says: politicians rise up, they prove to be shit, and they fall. That’s all we’re told these days.
AA: Eddington is a movie about the environment. It’s not a movie that says: “This is the way to think, this is the way to feel, this is what’s happening.” Because what has happened is that we have become totally atomised and cannot reach each other. And as long as that persists – which a lot of people have a lot invested in – nothing can change. Hopefully by being a little bit more egalitarian in the way I’m assessing the landscape with as much objectivity as I can muster, I can reach some people that have been totally alienated by my side of the culture.
AC: A good political film makes people reflect on themselves. The problem is that over the past 30 or 40 years, the movies that call themselves political have actually been the very opposite. They groom their audiences by saying to them: “You are right to think and believe the way you do.” In that way, they encourage people to wallow in their self-righteousness and so block any self-reflection. Which means that so many “radical movies” are actually reactionary.
‘Nobody believes in the future any more’ … Emma Stone, Pedro Pascal, Ari Aster, Joaquin Phoenix and Austin Butler at Cannes film festival in May. Photograph: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images
There is no way forward unless people actually reflect on the limitations of their own self-righteousness and the possible dangers it has for society. That includes well-meaning liberals as much as it includes extreme rightwingers or tech-bro conspiracy theorists: it stops them realising that everyone might be part of a fresh system of power which works through increasing fragmentation and increasingly shrill self-righteousness. And I think it should be a badge of pride if you, Ari Aster, get that self-righteousness to squawk at you with Eddington. It’ll prove that you’ve done it right.
AA: There’s a feedback loop of nostalgia. Not just nostalgia and trauma. We’re always looking back into the past to see why we are here right now. “Oh, it’s because this happened to me.” As opposed to – and this is what you’ve been talking about for ever – where is the fresh idea? Where is our vision of the future? Because nobody believes in the future any more. I don’t believe in the future, and I’m desperately looking for it.
AC: You’re right about trauma. Increasingly over the last four or five years, people have retreated into themselves and are blaming their own past. They’re not only playing back the music or films of the past, they’re playing back their own past and finding in those fragments of their memory the reasons why they are feeling bad, anxious, uncertain, afraid and lonely – and it’s given the term trauma. Trauma is a very specific, real and frightening for those who experience it. But recently it’s been widened to such an extent that you are blaming yourself all the time through your own reworking of the past. Rather like AI goes back and reworks the past and plays it back to you. Now you’re doing that to yourself.
The universe is not exclusively rational. It’s full of strange swirling waves of feeling and ghosts and myths that are often completely unrealAdam Curtis
AA: All the characters in Eddington are living in different movies. The film is a western, right? But Joe [Joaquin Phoenix’s character, the sheriff of Eddington] would have seen all the westerns. That’s a huge part of his identity and what informs everything he does, including having become a sheriff in the first place. The way he walks is informed by the way John Wayne walks. He’s a 50-year-old man, so the action movies of the 80s and 90s would have been significant to him. And then at the end of the movie, he gets to live in his own action movie. He’s shooting at phantoms. But that applies to every character in this film. The one thing that is definitely happening in Eddington is that a hyperscale datacentre is being built. And really, all of the stories in Eddington are just data, from one perspective.
AC: Don’t give it away!
AA: OK, sorry. Yes, I won’t give it away. But you’re right. There are other things outside they don’t see.
AC: The most significant thing that political film-making should do now is make us aware that there’s something else beyond – including beyond the internet. Everything now in movies really comes through the internet. But we know, logically, that the internet is not everything. There is something else there, but no one’s telling us about it.
What I really like about Eddington is at the end you say there is something else outside. Something beyond the lean crust of hysteria and fear that keeps all of us trapped in bubbles today.
People only search for conspiracy theories these days because no one else is giving them any stories. You know: those in power just want to manage you. And, quite frankly, managers never tell stories. They keep you there by repeating and repeating. So that’s why people don’t trust them and the most significant thing to do is to acknowledge that.
‘Shooting at phantoms’ … Joaquin Phoenix in Eddington. Photograph: Richard Foreman/Joe Cross/Mayor LLC
That’s why I call my series Shifty. That actually, nothing is certain and the only way you can deal with that as a journalist is by acknowledging it and trying to explain why the world feels like that today.
The organisation I work for – the BBC – has created BBC Verify to try to reassert certainty. It is significant because rationality is still the only thing we have to manage the complexity of the world. But on its own terms it’s not enough, because the universe is not exclusively rational. It’s also full of all kinds of strange swirling waves of feeling and ghosts and myths that are often completely unreal.
A confident system of power takes all those mad psychodramas and creates a dominant story out of them. But when that goes – as has happened today – they run out of control sweeping through societies, creating uncertainty and suspicion.
BBC Verify is significant but it’s not enough because the universe is not exclusively rational Adam Curtis
What journalism and films should be trying to do today is to explain how that has happened – to acknowledge that uncertainty is the realism of our time because that is how people experience the world today. If you don’t do that, the people in their bubbles will be very suspicious of you. Because they know that we the journalists and the politicians and all the experts suffer from that same uncertainty. And we know that they know that. And that becomes toxic.
AA: Certainty has gone for ever now. With the advent of deepfake and AI-generated imagery, belief in what we’re seeing and hearing is now forever gone.
AC: Which means that the most radical thing to do is to say the only way we’re going to move forward is by bypassing all those things, movies, most popular culture, as evidence of the future. It’s a lovely nostalgic world you can go and play in. But actually, real politics, real moving forward, it’s going to come somewhere else, where the complexity of reality might be repossessed in a really fundamental way. I’ve got no idea what it is, but it ain’t going to come through movies or me making pretentious television programmes. It’s just not.
Eddington is released in the UK on 15 August
COMMENTS