In November 2020, the Washington Post ran a story with the headline “Shakespeare wrote King Lear during a plague. What great work will emerge from this pandemic?” It was a stupid question at the time, and five years on, a cursory survey of the cinematic output that deals in some way with COVID turns up very little of significance. The films range from the justly forgotten star-studded comedy The Bubble to the superb, though substantively unrelated, Zoom horror film Host. Mainly, filmmakers rely on shallow, obvious references to recognizable hallmarks: masks, social distancing, toilet paper hoarding, Fauci. This is inevitably shot with a degree of gravity that, while understandable, treads a careful, deliberately inoffensive line. Perhaps it’s because those early years were also marked by massive political upheaval and what might be, politely, termed social breakdown that it’s so difficult to fully dramatize what was happening.
Plus, no one wants to think about COVID anymore.
Ari Aster’s new film Eddington positions itself, then, as both an exaggeration and a riposte of the collective skittishness and amnesia about 2020. Rather than a realistic depiction of the entire country’s response—how could there be?—the film keeps its focus on a sliver of the state in which Aster grew up. Set in the titular fictional small New Mexico town, Eddington follows the foolish exploits of Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), a cowboy hat-wearing conservative more bluster than bang, as he runs for mayor against the nominally progressive incumbent Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). Cross’s wife, Louise (Emma Stone), languishes at home making weird art alongside her mother Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), who descends further and further down various conspiracy rabbit holes. Later in the film, Louise will be drawn into the cult of a charismatic online preacher named Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler), who weaponizes the right’s obsession with child abuse and government coverups to grow his loyal, dead-eyed following. At the edge of town, a faceless AI corporation named solidgoldmagikarp (fittingly a multifold IRL reference to either a meme coin, a Reddit username, or a ChatGPT glitch, no one seems to know) plans to build a massive data center and, behind the scenes, asserts its influence on Garcia’s re-election campaign. Meanwhile, as COVID slashes through the country, Eddington’s citizens reluctantly abide by mask mandates they deem unnecessary because COVID hasn’t yet reached their town.
Cross runs for mayor on a platform of opposition to these ever-changing regulations, which he views as cruel, and against the smug entitlement of Garcia, who parrots recognizably milquetoast Democratic platitudes with a blinding smile. Phoenix and Pascal are ideal scene partners in this scenario, with the former sporting glasses, a whitening beard, and the hint of a Western accent, his hand resting on his sidearm like a child clutching their teddy bear, external markers and gestures that do little to mask Cross’s deep insecurity and lack of political conviction. Pascal, roughening up his increasingly cookie-cutter celebrity persona, portrays Garcia as almost entirely superficial, a squeaky clean dream of a local politician with a dark undercurrent, hiding out at his secluded estate with his impish teen son. The stakes of Eddington, at their core, are simple and familiar: the American struggle between safety and freedom. All the while, everyone is screen-addled, the film’s cinematography split between grand vistas and the garish ubiquity of portrait mode feeds.
Once he decides to run for mayor, Cross outfits his SUV into a makeshift campaign vehicle, plastering the sides with red, white, and blue sequins and a number of slogans hastily drawn up by his two deputies. The phrase “Your Being Manipulated,” used as a recurring (and increasingly hilarious) sight gag throughout the film, has become a meme in its own right, gesturing towards Cross’s mounting suspicion of the government and his own constituents. It also serves as a fair assessment of Aster’s gambit with regard to Eddington’s message and outlook. Critic Adam Nayman at The Ringer calls it a “mission statement.” Maybe a dare is more accurate. Part of the appeal, and obnoxiousness, of Aster’s film is how the director uses low-hanging jokes to provoke the audience. For example, shortly after the film opens in May of 2020, George Floyd is murdered, sparking a global BLM movement that finds its analog in Eddington, a town with seemingly one black resident, who also happens to be a cop. Eddington’s youth are portrayed as well-meaning, but obsequious white allies spouting the same talking points about colonialism, race, gender, and systemic oppression so often derided by conservatives as DEI wokeism. These characters are written to be laughed at.
But Aster is also aware that this will incite a certain paranoia in viewers about why people are laughing. Aster, who has recently endeavored to distance himself from his early career in horror, is a filmmaker compelled by the specific idiosyncrasies of human reaction. Rarely do characters in his films act in the way you might expect. In previous films, this unpredictability imbued his work with a sense of dread and unease; in Eddington, it is in service to farce. It’s tempting, but mistaken, to view Eddington’s small-town setting as a hyper-dilation of America at large, little more than an overlong, cruel commentary. Instead, it’s a keenly observed comedic yarn clad in the trappings of a Western. Its setting in the American Southwest, that same area of political and cultural contradiction where Aster grew up, is integral to the narrative.
And while those same silly teens leading the protests are consistently shown to be acting according to petty jealousies that have nothing to do with any real political commitments, the issues that seem irrelevant to their town—police brutality, racist scapegoating, sexism, political corruption, murder—turn out, in the course of the film, to be pressing. Indeed, one of the film’s most upsetting throughlines is also the very first person the audience sees: a homeless man ranting to himself stumbling into Eddington, a perpetual nuisance to Cross and the town’s denizens, shooed away, unsightly but harmless, until he meets a shocking end.
The absurd, performative efforts of a few influence the perception of a wider phenomenon, fueling the undeniably stupid lengths people will go to ensure they’re perceived as righteous and noble. Eddington unravels more like an extended nightmare, a hallucination of the feeling of 2020, rather than an objective depiction, the outlandish and panicked actions of people willfully blind to their own peril. Fitting, then, that Eddington’s incendiary folktale concludes with a shot of the gleaming behemoth facilities of solidgoldmagikarp squatting on the outskirts of Eddington as the credits roll.
