Eddington, writer-director Ari Aster’s polarizing new black dramedy, opens with a troubling sight: an unhoused and clearly distressed man walking through the New Mexico desert, bleating an incoherent ramble of modern buzzwords.
Troubling not for the man, but for the content of his ramble and the time: late May, 2020. TikTok. My immediate reaction was a derogatory “oh no”. Aster has specialized in gut-twisting, unworldly horror, the kind of brain-searing, highly symbolic shocks that linger for weeks; I watched large stretches of his first two features, the demonic family parable Hereditary and Swedish solstice nightmare Midsommar – through my fingers. But in Eddington, he took on not one but two insidious bogeymen haunting our psyches: phones in movies and Covid.
Nearly every character in Aster’s black satire of Covid-era upheaval possesses a device essential to modern life but often incompatible with cinematic storytelling. People trawl Instagram for updates on their crush, sell crafts on Etsy, watch videos on the Bill Gates microchip conspiracy, receive updates via Pop Crave. Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), the walking ego bruise of a protagonist in Aster’s vision of a small western town, announces his snap campaign for mayor against nemesis Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) on Facebook Live. In one of many blows to his tenuous dignity, he discovers message boards of pedophilia panic frequented by his wife, Louise (Emma Stone); he’s awakened from a depressed, drug-tinged sleep binge by frantic iMessages from his two hapless deputies.
Such verisimilitude to how most of the movie-going public live our lives – online, on screens, absorbing toxic dosages of information in our own private bubbles – usually spells disaster for a Hollywood project. Decades into the internet era, most movies and TV shows still cannot get the internet right. Second screens are inherently un-cinematic, and the tighter the internet’s hyper-loops of viral attention coil, the harder it is to capture in cinematic projects that usually spans years from conception to audience. Something almost always feels off – the interface distracting, the tone askew, the liminality and speed incongruous with the story. I can probably count on two hands the films that have captured digital life in a way did not feel inaccurate, didactic or self-important, let alone seamlessly woven it into story – Eighth Grade, Sweat, Tár, Dìdi, Past Lives. I remember them because it’s still so rare; it is difficult to incorporate the mundane minutiae of screen life, tie oneself to time-stamped events, or tap into the propulsion of social media and succeed. It is just as tricky to burrow into an identifiable cultural moment without coming off as horrifically smug – both the climate emergency satire Don’t Look Up and billionaire-skewering Mountainhead were so politically self-satisfied as to be nearly unbearable.
Much has and will be said about Eddington’s portent precarious ambiguity, its mid-act tonal shift and descent into violence, about Aster’s divisive transformation from horror wunderkind to high-minded auteur. (I personally found the shift dubious and the second, should-be thrilling half a tedious slog, though in the hands of cinematographer Darius Khondji, everything looks fantastic.) But on this front – the task of handling real events on a real timeline with a real sense of the vanishing boundary between online and off – Eddington is a success. Aster’s film touches so many of the third rails of modern cinema – the internet, screenshots, Zoom, celebrities, political figures, bitcoin, 9/11 – and yet somehow survives.
It does so by grounding this admittedly bloated satire of political and social turmoil in a hyper-specific moment in late May 2020. Whereas the winners in the digital culture film canon usually succeed by using the phone screen as a window into one character’s psyche – think the surveilling Instagram Live that opens Tár, or the Instagram scroll montage in Eighth Grade – Eddington aims for a specific cultural moment; phone lock screens keep time during a week deep in US lockdown, as frustration, anger, fear and outrage fester into outright chaos. My particular brand of brain worms means that I remember, in crystal-clear chronological order, the concerned Atlantic articles, to NBA cancellation, to Tom Hanks coronavirus diagnosis death spiral, to New York completely shutting down on 11 March, as well as the beginning of the Black Lives Matter protests after the murder of George Floyd on 25 May. What I chose not to remember, at least until watching a scene in which the sheriff refuses to wear a mask in a grocery store, prompting a showdown with frazzled employees, was the lost etiquette of 2020 – standing 6ft apart, silently judging those who wore their masks on their chins and those who policed, constantly assessing others’ propensity for a fight. Traversing fault lines everywhere.
Eddington’s characters implode and tangle and lose their minds against this chillingly familiar backdrop – half-masked high-schoolers gathering in clumps outside, mask mandates handed down from the governor, virtual town halls. Some tumble down internet rabbit holes into delusion. (A too-broad, conspiratorial wellness guru, played by a too-intense Austin Butler, makes an unfortunate IRL appearance in Eddington.) Others follow Instagram to the growing ranks of BLM protests across the nation. Neighbors doubt neighbors, and even the mention of Black lives exposes barely hidden racial tensions. Everywhere, at least for the film’s superior first half, there’s a feeling of trepidation – a familiar disorientation from the rapid blurring of right and wrong, a deluge of high-octane headlines and a potent confusion of sympathies that cannot be resolved.
Aster is not always fair in his rendering, sometimes stacking its deck in favor of the needling center that is Sheriff Joe. But the internet is going to flatten everyone into statements and identities, and Eddington takes swipes in all directions. Tár is nimbler at skewering so-called “social justice warriors”, though at least Aster captures how some white leftist activists are primarily driven by ego, how much of the body politic is straight-up id. About a quarter of the way through the movie, Joe confronts an onslaught of national anger with his own projection; he dismisses concern from deputy Guy (a savvily cast Luke Grimes from Yellowstone) about the Black Lives Matter protesters (or “looters”) seen on TV with a blanket “that’s not a here problem”.
Except, of course, it is. Five years on, we have only just reached some critical distance from the rupture that, judging by the lack of retrospectives this March, no one wants to remember. In Eddington, that upside-down, unreal reality begins to come into focus. There is no such thing as a “here problem”. Everything is an everywhere problem. At any point, the worst parts of the internet – which is to say, the worst parts of people – can descend on your town at terrifying speed. To see that environment rendered believably on screen is, ironically, the most thrilling part of it all.
