Though I saw Ari Aster’s novel film, Eddington, way back in May—and thought it was a frustrating, occasionally invigorating grumble about current tim
Though I saw Ari Aster’s novel film, Eddington, way back in May—and thought it was a frustrating, occasionally invigorating grumble about current times—I decided to give the movie another shot last week. I wanted to pay particularly close attention to the balance of its politics, to the way that Aster uses the story of a diminutive New Mexico town in 2020, beset by COVID and other present-day ills, to measure the forces of Trumpism against those of the broadly defined social justice movement.
The first time I watched Eddington, I believed Aster was equating the former with the latter—perhaps making the outrageous, though all too common suggestion, that precocious, hyper-woke kids are just as bad as malevolent MAGA acolytes. This is a common false equivalency, one that leads to a warped perspective where morality has been relativized into nonexistence. I wasn’t sure if Eddington was positioning itself that way as a mere arch bit of trolling, or if its vague argument was coming from a place of actual conviction.
I went into my second viewing of Eddington spoiling for a fight. Almost immediately, though, I began to see the film in a different way. Yes, Aster’s making mordant jokes about contemporary political pieties, as well as the occasionally absurd alarmism about COVID protocol that arose in those early, grocery-washing days. But those jokes are less malicious than I had once thought. And Aster has his knives out for the other side of things as well: the self-radicalized conspiracy nuts; the paranoiacs frightened of and hostile toward things they don’t understand; the many itchy trigger fingers of this nation. It’s not so much equal-opportunity offense as it is a tossing of all the animus and anxiety of contemporary America into the same stew pot.
Eddington is, I think, less about political axe grinding, or even point making, and more about what it feels like to have all the noise of the world descend upon you at once. It is essentially a horror-comedy about the whole of the internet arriving in a diminutive town seemingly in a single day.
During a post-screening Q&A, Aster did describe his first pandemic months as a Twitter doomscroll through the “screaming pain” of the world, a sensation he ably allegorizes in many of Eddington’s tense, grating scenes. Yes, the kids hectoring for social change are cartoonishly aggressive (and often ill-informed), but I think Aster is mostly simulating what watching them might feel like for Joaquin Phoenix’s recalcitrant sheriff character. Aster is not condemning their intentions himself, though he is at least somewhat critical of their methods. Is diving into the mind of an older white guy who becomes a vengeful spree killer—and thus risking some kind of empathy for him—the most healing, cathartic tack for a movie to take these days? No. But it is grimly fascinating. And it’s the kind of nervy provocation that first attracted fans to Aster’s work.
A perspective shift on the movie doesn’t exonerate it from all of its problems. Eddington is still too long, and still has too many unsatisfying plot threads. (Emma Stone’s character could almost be removed from the film entirely, with little ill effect.) Eddington’s pessimism may be well placed, but the film sometimes takes on an acrid smugness that undermines what is otherwise a jolting vision of societal decay.
A striking image endures nonetheless: of an America that descends into violent chaos, reemerges seemingly repaired, but is actually possessed of a toxic optimism, designed to occlude the final nefarious corporate takeover of the country. By the end of the movie, the data center once backed by Pedro Pascal has been built—so presumably the pueblo’s water is drying up. Phoenix’s character, incapacitated by his own ruinous impulses (and, amusingly, by the shadowy antifa operatives he almost worried into existence), becomes the prop of a venal restoration of the town’s identity. He’s literally rolled out as an emblem of Eddington’s renewed sense of forward progress—a symbol that’s really leading them, and us, into some kind of postcapitalist nightmare in which only a select few people really win.
Or that’s what I think, anyway. Eddington is a strange, erratic film, coy about its motivations. If you left the theater this weekend scratching your head or rolling your eyes, you are by no means alone; I had both reactions after my first viewing. But a revisit helped clarify things, and deepened my appreciation for what I think it is that Aster is doing. Maybe that’s a testament to not trusting first critical impulses. Or it’s just where I’ve arrived after enduring a few months more of our ailing, unhappy American tale.
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