\n<\/p>\n
Eddington, writer-director Ari Aster\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201coh no\u201d. 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 \u2013 through my fingers. But in Eddington, he took on not one but two insidious bogeymen haunting our psyches: phones in movies and Covid.<\/p>\n
Nearly every character in Aster\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s awakened from a depressed, drug-tinged sleep binge by frantic iMessages from his two hapless deputies.<\/p>\n
Such verisimilitude to how most of the movie-going public live our lives \u2013 online, on screens, absorbing toxic dosages of information in our own private bubbles \u2013 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 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 \u2013 Eighth Grade, Sweat, T\u00e1r, D\u00ecdi, Past Lives. I remember them because it\u2019s 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 \u2013 both the climate emergency satire Don\u2019t Look Up and billionaire-skewering Mountainhead were so politically self-satisfied as to be nearly unbearable.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Much has and will be said about Eddington\u2019s portent precarious ambiguity, its mid-act tonal shift and descent into violence, about Aster\u2019s 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 \u2013 the task of handling real events on a real timeline with a real sense of the vanishing boundary between online and off \u2013 Eddington is a success. Aster\u2019s film touches so many of the third rails of modern cinema \u2013 the internet, screenshots, Zoom, celebrities, political figures, bitcoin, 9\/11 \u2013 and yet somehow survives.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s psyche \u2013 think the surveilling Instagram Live that opens T\u00e1r, or the Instagram scroll montage in Eighth Grade \u2013 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 \u2013 standing 6ft apart, silently judging those who wore their masks on their chins and those who policed, constantly assessing others\u2019 propensity for a fight. Traversing fault lines everywhere.<\/p>\n
Eddington\u2019s characters implode and tangle and lose their minds against this chillingly familiar backdrop \u2013 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\u2019s superior first half, there\u2019s a feeling of trepidation \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
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. T\u00e1r is nimbler at skewering so-called \u201csocial justice warriors\u201d, 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 \u201clooters\u201d) seen on TV with a blanket \u201cthat\u2019s not a here problem\u201d.<\/p>\n
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 \u201chere problem\u201d. Everything is an everywhere problem. At any point, the worst parts of the internet \u2013 which is to say, the worst parts of people \u2013 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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