Ari Aster's 'Eddington': A Satirical Look at America's Pandemic-Era Divisions

"Eddington" Is a Lethally Self-Satisfied COVID Satire

"Eddington" is a slog, but a slog with ambitions -- and its director and screenwriter, Ari Aster, is savvy enough to cultivate an air of mystery about what those ambitions are. His earlier chillers, "Hereditary" (2018) and "Midsommar" (2019), had their labyrinthine ambiguities, too, but they also had propulsive craft and cunning, plus a resolute commitment to scaring us stupid. Then came the ungainly "Beau Is Afraid" (2023), a cavalcade of Oedipal neuroses both showy and coy, in which Aster didn't seem to lose focus so much as sacrifice it on the altar of auteurism. With "Eddington," his high-minded unravelling continues. No longer a horror wunderkind, Aster, at thirty-nine, yearns to be an impish anatomist of the body politic. The times grow worse and worse; must his movies follow suit? "Eddington" cycles through genres with a deliberate yet half-distracted air, as if the very conventions of narrative have become caught in a feedback loop. The film has the dust of a Western, the snark of a satire, the violence of a thriller, the nihilism of a noir, and the bloat of an epic. It also has the stale taste of yesterday's headlines, peering backward, as it does, to the early days of COVID-19. Aster's subject is nothing less than the void of meaning -- the morass of misinformation and irreconcilable political rancor -- into which America has tumbled since the pandemic. The isolated, polarized way we live now, he insists, can be traced back to the misery of how we lived then. For proof, look no further than Eddington, New Mexico, a fictional town of two thousand three hundred and forty-five souls. (That number will dip by the movie's end.) A mask mandate is in effect, but several Eddingtonians prove defiant, including the sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), who doesn't realize that his asthmatic lungs have more to fear from COVID than from an N95. Joe is affable, obtuse, and easily aggrieved. He observes the slow-moving line outside a market where maskless customers are turned away, and scoffs in disbelief at such performative paranoia. The town's mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), firmly disagrees, placing himself and Joe on an ugly collision course. Ted is good-looking, popular, and civic-minded, which makes him, naturally, a disingenuous liberal scold. In Aster's cynical schema, ideology is the phoniest mask of all, to be slipped on and off with frictionless ease. Ted is running for reëlection, and his campaign ad, in one of the film's better gags, presents Eddington as a beaming multiracial utopia. (An onlooker wonders if Black extras were shipped in for filming.) But Ted's real agenda has nothing to do with diversity; it hinges on the promise of a vast A.I. data center that's being built nearby. The film's cinematographer, Darius Khondji, frames the construction site as if it were the monolith in "2001: A Space Odyssey," looming over Eddington like an omen. What it portends, though, is the opposite of a cosmic leap forward. The rise of artificial intelligence will only hasten humanity's inexorable decline. Bedlam is already upon us, to judge by the sheer quantity of invective we hear and, more important, see. "Eddington" is a visual harangue -- an onslaught of Facebook posts, TikTok captions, cable-news chyrons, and attack-ad slogans. The history of the present moment, it appears, will be written in a language that is imbecilic to the point of incoherence, and Aster has, accordingly, filled the movie with signs and blunders. "Your being manipulated," an anti-lockdown message booms -- one of several that Joe displays after he decides to run for mayor against Ted. Joe's decision infuriates his wife, Louise (Emma Stone), the latest setback in a marriage that already looks starved of joy. If something immediately feels off about "Eddington," it's how wasted Stone is in this role, whose delicate sadness Aster seems uncertain whether to ridicule or dramatize. Louise has a hushed, scandal-tinged history with Ted, and she fears not only that their secrets will be dragged back into the open but that Joe himself, in a misguided lust for revenge, will be doing the dragging. That political positions are often a cover for petty jealousy and one-upmanship is hardly news, but Aster inflates the idea into a governing thesis. In the wake of George Floyd's murder, anti-police protests reach as far as Eddington, and only a fool would assume the young activists charging into the fray are as pure of motive as they claim. For every Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle), a tireless proponent of Black Lives Matter, there's also a Brian (Cameron Mann), a tireless proponent of getting into Sarah's pants. So dedicatedly horny is Brian that he becomes remarkably eloquent about anti-racism -- a development that Aster regards as proof of just how easily, and mindlessly, the language of social justice can be co-opted. Anthony Fauci, Hillary Clinton, George Floyd, George Soros, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kyle Rittenhouse, hydroxychloroquine, Bitcoin, Antifa -- "Eddington" references all these and more, as if to position Aster as a nonpartisan provocateur. Why, then, given such a range of targets, is it the conviction of the young and woke that stings him into comic rebuke? The tell comes when Brian lectures his family on what it means to dismantle whiteness, setting up his father to deliver the script's idea of a knockout punch line: "Are you fucking retarded? What the fuck are you talking about? You're white!" The self-flagellating nature of progressive activism may be ripe for mockery, but Aster goes further than just skewering the pieties of the left; he panders for reactionary laughs. Would an "Eddington" set during a more recent wave of protests -- say, those on behalf of Palestinians, or undocumented immigrants -- dismiss the participants so blithely? Happily, we'll never know; the datedness of Aster's scenario has its uses. At any rate, the director evidently has more patience for Eddington's right-wing fringe. In one corner skulks Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler), a seductive Christian cult leader who soon has Louise under his spell. More in-your-face is Louise's mother, Dawn, who is awash in sub-QAnon conspiracy theories, but whom Deirdre O'Connell plays with such verve that even her wildest ravings hold you oddly rapt. Most indulged of all is Joe himself, the kind of bogeyman that our headlines keep in dispiriting circulation: a white, middle-aged male with troubles at home and convenient access to firearms. When "Eddington" premièred, at Cannes, some invoked the novels of Jim Thompson. The comparison isn't exactly flattering; next to the unflinching nastiness of hardboiled prose, Aster's self-satisfied japes feel decidedly over easy. Unlike, say, Nick Corey, the small-town sheriff who leaves a bloody trail through Thompson's "Pop. 1280," Joe is pathetically hapless. He doesn't have Nick's insidious way with words, or his way with women. It's worth recalling that Phoenix played the beaten-down antihero of "Beau Is Afraid," and Joe, though far more of a fighter, is no less thoroughly emasculated: rejected and abandoned by Louise, implicitly cuckolded by Ted, and, in one gratuitous scene, dragged naked to a toilet. Don't ask why; it's an Aster joint, and full-frontal humiliation comes with the territory. It's worth wondering, after "You Were Never Really Here" (2018) and "Joker" (2019), why we need to see Phoenix descend again into bouts of murderous violence. (The film climaxes with severed limbs, an exploding head, and conjoined blasts of gunfire and hellfire, all put across with a juvenile smirk.) But Phoenix never plays the same monster twice, and he's attuned to the comic pathos of quieter moments. What you'll likely remember about "Eddington" is not just Joe's cold-eyed glare as he shoulders his rifle but also the endearing incompetence of his online campaign announcement, or the tenderness in his voice when he speaks of Louise. The trouble with Joe, then, isn't Phoenix; it's the conception of Joe as an ideal point of identification. Aster knows New Mexico well -- he spent part of his childhood in Santa Fe -- and he has spoken, in interviews, of his desire to capture a specific environment in which characters from all backgrounds could clash without judgment, and in which we could, presumably, catch a glimpse of ourselves. But why tether such a film to Joe's perspective? If the aim is a panorama, why privilege a sociopath? Really, the problem with "Eddington" is not that Aster judges his characters. It's that he barely finds them interesting enough to judge, and his boredom proves infectious. What purpose is served by the figure of Joe's deputy Michael (Micheal Ward), seemingly Eddington's sole Black resident of note? He exists only to stoically absorb punishment from white townsfolk, whether it's Sarah, who criticizes him for not joining a B.L.M. protest, or Guy (Luke Grimes), a fellow-deputy who turns against him overnight. Can we add Aster to the list of his tormentors? Ward is a fine actor, but the director gives him virtually nothing to play or express. He grants little more to the few Indigenous actors in the ensemble, including William Belleau, cast as Pueblo police officers from the surrounding county, who pop up on occasion to argue with Joe over jurisdictional issues. That's a sharper, sadder joke than I think Aster intends. These men have no place in Eddington -- and neither, in any meaningful sense, do we. ♦

How Ari Aster made the year's most divisive film

The horror director's "Eddington" tackles perhaps his scariest subject yet: America's culture wars. TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES, N.M. -- Past a petrified mastodon skull and display cases of glittering gypsum and halite, Ari Aster is gesturing to a room where, conjuring a bit of movie magic, he made Joaquin Phoenix fall through a roof, onto the bones of Geronimo. "It's a joke, the White man falling on Geronimo!" says Aster, gleefully describing how he had his set decoration team hire a company called Bone Clones build a skeleton of the Apache warrior from scratch, just for a two-second shot in his fourth film, the wickedly satirical modern western "Eddington." Set in a fictional New Mexico small town in May 2020, Aster's latest pitch-black comedy probes the tensions between a conservative anti-mask sheriff (Phoenix) and a cloyingly liberal mayor (Pedro Pascal), whose personal feud escalates into a culture war -- and then into a bloody vigilante war. In signature Aster fashion, the third act is so over-the-top violent that a woman at a Santa Fe screening asked Aster to explain how he uses special effects to create such a wide variety of deaths. "Like, how do you coordinate which body part flies where?" When it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May, "Eddington" was swiftly dubbed the most divisive film of the year. This is perhaps not surprising coming from Aster, the A24-anointed writer-director whose debut horror film from 2018, "Hereditary," features a levitating Toni Collette sawing off her own head with a piano wire. (See also: his demented follow-ups "Midsommar" and "Beau is Afraid," starring Phoenix.) "The film is about polarization, and it didn't feel wrong that it got a polarized response," he says about "Eddington." "Like, we knew that was probably coming as we were making it." The 39-year-old relishes in making audiences uncomfortable -- and is considered by his ardent fan base to be the one young director unafraid to make movies for "sickos," as one Reddit user put it. Much of the fun of watching "Eddington" is seeing half the audience gasping with laughter and the other half cringing. "Ari's a real filmmaker in the traditional sense," says Luke Grimes, who plays a deputy sheriff who starts making very bad (read: racist) decisions to get ahead. "He's gotten himself into a position, which is almost impossible, which is people are so excited to see your work that they're going to give you a lot of money to make a movie that they don't even understand." Aster says "Eddington" is not a horror film. But in a way it is, about our collective descent into partisanship and a world where no one can agree on the truth. He's called it "a western, but the guns are phones," for the way its characters wield their cameras and social media to carry out attacks and revenge. It's also one of the first films from a major filmmaker to tackle the pandemic and the political divisions it wrought, head-on. "I see covid as an inflection point," Aster says. "I do see it as the maybe the moment at which the last link to the old world, whatever that was ... was finally cut, where we all kind of had a common ground to stand on and an agreed version of reality." He continues: "We've become completely unreachable to each other. And the thing that scares me the most is I just don't know how that can be remedied." In "Eddington," Aster's made a movie in which no side of the cultural divide is spared, no topic too sensitive to touch. The movie seems designed to rankle both sides of the aisle. Phoenix's character, Sheriff Joe Cross, is living in a house where both his wife (Emma Stone) and mother-in-law (Deirdre O'Connell of "The Penguin") have been swept up in QAnon conspiracy theories and are obsessed with a YouTube prophet (Austin Butler, in all his swaggering glory). Pascal's slick, corrupt Mayor Ted Garcia is in the pocket of Big Tech and running for reelection so he can bring a resource-guzzling artificial intelligence data center to town. Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter protests led by White teens have overtaken the town. Aster, who says it felt "cowardly" to write about that time period and not include the movement, is trying to say something here about how liberals, too, were in their own bubble, casting moral judgment on anyone who didn't agree with them. In the film, one teenage girl (Amélie Hoeferle) keeps telling the town's one Black cop (Michael Ward) that he should join them. "Ari's a worrier and I feel like the movie is trying to suck you into the state of worry that he's in so that he can not be so lonely with it," says O'Connell. Aster started writing the script in June 2020, at the height of the pandemic, as protests over George Floyd's murder roiled the nation. He wrote it during Trump 1.0, finished it during Biden's presidency and filmed in the spring of 2024, having no idea he'd be releasing it into the turmoil of Trump's second term. What could have been a period piece about this crazy time we all lived through has taken on renewed relevance. "I wrote the movie because I felt something in the air that I hadn't felt before," he says. "Just, it felt fraught. It felt like things had come to a boiling point and they were about to explode. And it felt like people were being pushed toward violence ... and I think we're kind of still there." It's 100 degrees in mid-July and Aster is showing me around Truth or Consequences (T or C to New Mexicans), the tiny artists' enclave in the middle of absolute nowhere, where he filmed for four weeks out of the 10-week shoot. Watching "Eddington," you might think that production had to close down streets to give it an eerily empty feel, but that's just how T or C is. By my count, there's just one stoplight in the central area, and it simply blinks yellow all the time. Anxiously charismatic and serious about sun protection, Aster's cloaked in jeans, a maroon button-down and a black cap with red chiles on it. But everywhere he goes, he's stopped by people who worked on the film and want to get a picture with him or have him sign their homemade "Midsommar" shirt. Aster's not just a director who brought a $25 million movie here; he's something of a returning hero, even though he grew up three hours north in Santa Fe -- just 20 minutes from my hometown. (In a state as vast and unpopulated as New Mexico, everyone gets claimed as a local.) Aster and I had never met, but we both whiled away lonely adolescences sifting through used VHS tapes and DVDs at the now-defunct Hastings store in Santa Fe's DeVargas Mall, and obsessively watching movies at the same art-house theaters. "I was a fat kid with a stutter," says Aster, whose mom is a poet and dad a jazz drummer. He was also a bit of a rebel, getting expelled from the small private high school Santa Fe Prep for some "troublemaking" he can't remember. Eventually, he wound up studying film at the College of Santa Fe -- where we'd both watched old movies in a student-run theater equipped with couches and beanbags -- and then the American Film Institute. "I've wanted to make my New Mexico movie since I was a kid," Aster says later that night, introducing a special screening of "Eddington" that A24 set up in T or C for residents who helped on the movie, plus a busload of rabid Aster fans from Albuquerque who won tickets and traveled two hours and change to be here. It'll be followed by a street party, food trucks and a mysterious 1,000-drone show advertising Solidgoldmagikarp, the fictional company that Pascal's corrupt mayor tries to bring in to build the data center. First, though, he's got to tour a new exhibit about the movie in the kitschy, fascinating Geronimo Springs Museum, where Aster filmed Phoenix's roof-collapsing stunt. They've put all the broken wood and sugar glass from the scene on display. Lining the walls are before and after pictures of buildings the production transformed, and one of the frightening dolls that Joe's wife makes in the film, with tongues for eyes and another smaller head in its mouth. A life-size cutout of Pascal greets visitors at the entrance, as does a sign reading, "Our town was occupied!" The mother of a local 9-year-old who's in the movie for a millisecond runs into Aster at the museum and asks him if "Eddington" is kid-appropriate. "It's a little violent," he says, absolutely downplaying the "Rambo" levels of gore that dominate the last 30 minutes. A publicist reminds him there's also a moment of full-frontal nudity with Phoenix. "Oh yeah," says Aster, laughing. "There is a penis." When Aster talks about Phoenix, a raw nerve of an actor who's become his closest collaborator, he sounds like a proud code-breaker who's also teasing a dear friend. "I know what he's going to do," Aster tells me several times, relating his improvised solutions to getting around his lead actor's deep aversion to being told what to do. When Aster found a cowboy-ish New Mexico sheriff he thought Phoenix would find "interesting" as a basis for Joe, he instead brought Phoenix four people to meet and watched as the actor gravitated to the one Aster knew he was going to like. "So, it was Joaquin's decision," he says, laughing. Every time there was a stunt, they had a ritual. Phoenix would say he wouldn't do it and tell Aster to get his stunt double ready, which the director says he'd do to humor him, and then wait for the moment when, watching rehearsal, Phoenix inevitably would change his mind. "I think part of what you're seeing [in the movie] is Joaquin at war with Ari and surrendering, and Ari at war with Joaquin and surrendering," says O'Connell. "It's incredible the drama that goes on and what they're able to make. ... It's very intense!" At the Cannes premiere, the feeling in the room was one of muted bafflement. "I think nobody knew what they were walking into," says Grimes, who was there. "The first act of the movie played a little slow. People were kind of like, what am I watching? Is this a comedy? I think by the end of the movie, everyone was on board." Several audience members walked out mid-screening. Some critics raved that it was "brazenly provocative" or "the first truly modern Western." Others called it "a slog" with "a fatal amount of smug self-satisfaction." Many Europeans simply didn't get it. ("I don't know. Sorry?" Aster said, jokingly, in his post-standing-ovation speech.) Is this movie too late? Too soon? Too political? Not political enough? And, most crucially, in our year 2025, do people really want to go to a theater to watch a movie recreating the pandemic? As "Eddington" hits American theaters Friday, the big question is whether its quips about mask mandates and White kids constantly shouting "this protest is happening on stolen land!" might play better here than they did overseas. "The film is so American," says Aster, "and I think a lot of those things might fly over the head of somebody who doesn't live here." "Every review I've read said good things," says a woman at the museum. "Not every review I've read!" says Aster, laughing. We settle into a booth at Garcia's, the elaborate set built for the bar Pascal's character owns in the film, which isn't exactly functional but looks pretty great. (Fortunately, you can get Eddington Red, Joe Cross Lager and A24 Ale on tap at the nearby Truth or Consequences Brewing Company.) Aster shows me a mural he commissioned for inside Garcia's depicting the history of Eddington, the entirety of which he made up and has written out. It starts with a conquistador standing atop a mountain and then stretches around the entire room. Aster says his "biggest disappointment" was that he only shot that bar in darkness, so the mural never made it into the movie. Later, when the A24 bus shows up plastered in campaign signs from the fictional mayoral battle, he points out his favorite one that never made it into the film because they only shot Joe's car from one side: "My barber is going to be homeless but at least Ted Garcia is getting an Xmas bonus from Google." Setting the movie in New Mexico was natural. He saw it as an unexpected microcosm of America, given the state's violent history. "Growing up, I was always very aware of the class and racial resentments that are so strong in New Mexico, and that's something that I wanted to be a central part of the film," he says. "There's always been a tension between the Hispanics and the Whites, and then of course there's the Indigenous communities that have, for the most part, separated themselves completely -- and which were kind of abandoned during covid and were dealt the harshest blow." He revised and revised while editing "Beau." Then in 2023, he came back to New Mexico and drove from town to town, talking to sheriffs, police chiefs, mayors -- and also visiting several Native American pueblos. The point was to get as broad a picture of New Mexico's political climate as possible: a blue state filled with small red towns who were going up against a controversial Democratic governor (Michelle Lujan Grisham) who'd enacted the lockdowns and a Biden presidency they didn't think was legitimate. "A lot of these people in these red towns were very upset about the state of things, and were very passionate about what they felt was happening, especially with the governor. I found a lot of them very surprisingly sympathetic," Aster says. T or C, too, went for Trump in 2024, despite its decidedly funky, artistic flair, and the "Eddington" production felt those tensions from time to time -- especially when a Baptist church on a major street insisted their building not appear in the movie, requiring frustrating work-arounds. "They didn't want any Hollywood Satanists," Aster says. One thing Aster, who is liberal, was adamant about was not letting his politics seep into the movie. He doesn't consider it nonpartisan so much as omni-partisan, taking shots at, empathizing with, and wanting better for all its characters, who each care about the world and are living under a cloud of fear that something is terribly wrong. "It just felt too narrow to just make a film where some people were bathed in a heroic light and the other people were dehumanized," he says. "And when people are pumped full of messaging 24/7, that affects you and it changes you, and it's really frightening to me." He's heard angry feedback that the movie doesn't take a hard enough stance. Selfishly, he told the audience at a Santa Fe screening, he chose inclusivity over partisanship. "I have people in my life who are very close to me who are in different algorithms, and it's become increasingly not hard, like impossible, to reach them. And it's become increasingly impossible for them to reach me. And I feel heartbroken over it." Perhaps "Eddington" can be a bridge. Perhaps "everybody can sit in the theater and recognize the insanity of that time ... and maybe think, 'Huh? Is this the path we want to be on, and is there maybe a way to get off of this road?'" The movie offers an alarming view of America. But does he have hope? He pauses for a long time before answering. "I'm looking for hope," he says. "Yeah, I have a lot of hope. But I don't have a lot of confidence."

Metabolizing into art the year America cracked up

In the early days of COVID-19, people grasping for precedents started reading up on the Spanish flu, the calamitous pandemic that began in 1918 and is thought to have killed 50 million people worldwide. More Americans died of that novel pathogen than in all our country's 20th-century wars combined. But unlike those wars, it didn't leave much of a cultural mark. With only a few exceptions, like the novel "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," it barely made its way into art or collective memory. At the beginning of the COVID pandemic, I remember finding this puzzling. When it was finally over, it made perfect sense. Having slogged through something hideous, many of us were desperate to move on. There have been a few COVID novels, a handful of mostly forgettable movies and one truly great contemporaneous comedy special, Bo Burnham's "Inside." But mostly, artists have avoided reckoning with the apocalyptic events of 2020, even as we're still trapped in their terrible aftermath. That's why I was so excited to see Ari Aster's new movie, "Eddington," the first film I know of to really capture what it was like to be alive during the year America cracked up. A director best known for his berserk horror movies -- especially the lurid, hallucinatory "Midsommar" -- he's well suited to tackling the nightmare of our national descent. During the pandemic, Aster told me, "I was in a state of anxiety and constant dread. I still am now. It's worse than it was, and that's sort of the state that I was in while I was writing the script and making the film." As someone who's been living in a similar state for years, I appreciated the way "Eddington" metabolized it into art. Such art might not be pleasant, but it can help us get our bearings in a world plagued by viral, political and epistemological catastrophes. "I have felt desperate for more art about this moment, and I'm always excited when I encounter anything that's grappling with whatever's happening," Aster said. I feel exactly the same way. Aster's movie takes place in the fictional small town of Eddington, New Mexico, in the spring of 2020. The first half of the movie is a dark comedy about the conflict between Eddington's beleaguered conservative sheriff, played by Joaquin Phoenix, and its slick, tech-optimist liberal mayor, played by Pedro Pascal. They live in a community convulsed by battles over mask mandates, rampant conspiracy theories and racial justice protests, and, in the background, a fight over the building of an artificial intelligence data center by a company called solidgoldmagikarp. But after starting as a quasi-realistic social satire, "Eddington" morphs into something far more surreal and violent, as if its characters' mounting hysteria is infecting the storytelling itself. "Eddington" was controversial when it premiered at Cannes; some people reportedly walked out, though the ones who stayed gave it a long standing ovation. Its politics are slippery; panning it in Vogue, Radhika Seth called out the film's "punchlines about Black Lives Matter rallies, anti-racist rhetoric, notions of 'dismantling whiteness,' people listing their pronouns on Zoom and perceived political correctness gone too far." I understand where Seth is coming from; I had a somewhat similar impression during the first part of the movie, before it takes a shocking turn. (Here is the place to stop reading if you want to avoid even vague spoilers.) Initially, the movie's sympathies seem to be with the sheriff, Joe Cross. We see him being hectored to wear a mask when he's alone in his car and then sticking up for an old man who doesn't want to wear a mask to the grocery store. (The image of masked and distanced people lined up for their turn to shop brought back a flavor of depression I'd somehow suppressed.) Cross seems basically decent but befuddled -- by his sickly wife and her growing obsession with a QAnon-style cult, by bratty Black Lives Matter protesters, and by the general atmosphere of ennui and acrimony in his locked-down town. When he decides to run for mayor, his plaintive slogan is "Let's free each other's hearts." Watching this, I momentarily wondered if Aster was one of those guys who, over the course of the pandemic, had been radicalized against the left. But then, as Cross' feelings of humiliation and frustration build, he commits a series of evil acts, as if he's embodying the Black Lives Matter movement's darkest suspicions about police criminality. In the film's last section, the tone shifts again, as shadowy outsiders appear, and "Eddington" starts to seem like an episode of Alex Jones' Infowars come to life. The movie's characters are deeply paranoid, and in its final minutes, as Aster said, "the movie suddenly becomes paranoid, too." These narrative lurches are destabilizing. At one point near the end, I wasn't sure I understood what was happening. (Are those outsiders ... antifa supersoldiers?) The confusion seems somewhat intentional. "I wanted to pull back and basically describe the structure of reality at the moment, which is that nobody can agree on what is happening or what is real," Aster said. "It's about a community of people that aren't a community. They're living in the same rooms, but they're not living on the same plane." One reason the pandemic so damaged America's collective sanity is that it forced us to live on the internet, and "Eddington" is about a world where the borders between online and off have collapsed, perhaps by design. Ultimately, though it's barely on screen, the movie's most powerful villain is solidgoldmagikarp. It emerges, after a lot of blood and death, as a singular beneficiary of the town's derangement and a reminder our informational pandemic is just getting started.

The Only Way to Understand Eddington Is to Lose Your Mind

Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Sam Adams? In Ari Aster's movies, the price of understanding how the world really works is your sanity, if not your life. His first three movies -- Hereditary, Midsommar, and Beau Is Afraid -- center on characters whose feeling that there's something sinister going on beneath the surface of their existence is eventually proved to be correct, but it's as if their bodies aren't equipped to contain that knowledge. By the time the credits roll, they're either dead or catatonic. One way or another, their minds are gone. The people in Aster's polarizing fourth movie, Eddington, a Western-inflected psychodrama set during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, don't get off so easy. The stress test of a rapidly spreading virus with no known treatment exposes innumerable cracks in society's facade: the gap between remote workers and people forced to risk their lives in order to earn a living; between people who breathe a sigh of relief when they see a police car approaching and people who have to be sure to keep their hands in plain sight. But bringing those inequities to light doesn't make them disappear. The movie's characters can see how broken the world is, but they're condemned to keep living in it. COVID broke a lot of things, some more obviously than others. Vaccination rates have tangibly declined; less tangibly, people still seem to drive more recklessly, and more angrily, than they did in 2019. But one of the most profound and long-lasting things the pandemic did is break people's faith in science and, more crucially, the logic underlying it. As researchers struggled to understand a previously unknown virus -- and officials struggled to translate that process into actionable public messaging -- it felt as if the advice could shift radically from one day to the next: The virus was airborne or it lingered on surfaces; you didn't need to worry about masks, then you needed to wear one all the time. Uncertainty is part of science, both as a placeholder for future discoveries and as a reminder that nature is bigger than our minds can encompass. But anxiety abhors a vacuum, and the greater the public's fear grew, the more desperate we were for clear-cut answers, even if they were the wrong ones. For some, it was less unsettling to believe that Anthony Fauci was part of a vast deep-state conspiracy than it was to accept that the smartest people in the world simply couldn't figure out what was happening. Eddington drops us right into the swirling waters of early-COVID chaos, and though we may chuckle knowingly when a self-righteous masker reminds his son that the virus can live on paper for days, the movie is less interested in judging or even documenting that period than preserving for posterity what it felt like to live through it. And Aster doesn't just want to capture that madness. He wants to communicate it, to strip his audience's sanity away one piece at a time -- slow enough that you can feel your mind going but you can't do anything to stop it. In May 2020, the people of Eddington, New Mexico (population 2,345), are right at the point when the old reality has begun to fracture and a new one is taking hold. Businesses are shuttered and indoor gatherings forbidden, which leaves residents two places to be: out in the streets or at home on their phones. In the streets, the town's young, mostly white residents gather to protest police violence, spurred on by the murder of George Floyd a thousand miles away. But it's at home where the movie's true interests lie. As people seek comfort in virtual communities, their tether to the physical world starts to fray. On the internet, there's no social distancing, no one to tell you what you can or can't do, and whatever question you might have, there's someone who claims to have the answer. Not all of those questions are new. When we first see Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), he's in his county-issued truck, watching a YouTuber explain what to do when you're ready to have children and your spouse is not. But up next in his scroll, peeking up from the bottom edge of his glowing screen, is a video about hydroxychloroquine, the junk remedy for COVID-19. Joe, a mild asthmatic who claims he can't breathe in a mask, will later insist, loudly, that "there is no COVID in Sevilla County," and for at least some of the movie, he appears to be right. (The county and the town are both fictitious, but Aster grew up in New Mexico and returned home during the pandemic because of what he called "a COVID scare.") There are no overflowing emergency rooms in Eddington, no piles of corpses or devastated families. But there is madness, which is as contagious as the virus, and just as difficult to treat. The first person we see in Eddington isn't Joe. It's an unnamed transient played by Clifton Collins Jr., his face and clothing smeared with dirt, who gazes down on the surrounding hills, then descends on the town, muttering curses under his breath. Lodge, as the credits call him, might as well be plague personified, and indeed, he's the only one with the telltale dry cough. At least, that is, until a pivotal encounter between him and Joe about halfway through the movie. (Spoilers follow.) Riled up by his humiliation at the hands of the town's mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), whom he has decided to challenge for office, Joe drives past the bar Ted owns and finds the front door smashed. Inside, Lodge is ranting almost unintelligibly as he pulls bottles off the shelf, one liquor after another spilling out of his mouth. But he's not just trying to get drunk. As the liquid pours down his chin, you can hear him cry out, "It all tastes the same." Then, without any provocation, Joe shoots Lodge dead, wraps his body in plastic, and throws it into the river. After that, Joe starts coughing, and before long, he's spitting out his morning coffee in disgust. And though Joe never opens the email with the results of his COVID test, we know what they are long before he starts wheezing as if he's at death's door. The virus robs Joe of his sense of taste, but even those who aren't testing positive lose the ability to tell one thing from another: fact from fiction, systemic injustice from far-fetched intrigue. Joe's mother-in-law, Dawn (Deirdre O'Connell), is knee-deep in online conspiracy theories, rattling off Facebook posts and forwarded emails about how the government cooked up COVID, Plandemic-style, and 9/11 was a controlled demolition. His wife, Louise (Emma Stone), meanwhile, has fallen under the sway of a grifter guru (Austin Butler) who spins elaborate tales involving Tom Hanks' birth year and the mayor of Seattle and tells his followers, "You are not a coincidence." What he means is that things don't just happen. They have meaning, and if you can't find one, you just need to look harder. COVID turned us all into conspiracy theorists, one way or another. The first thing you did when you caught the virus was try to figure out who you caught it from, where you let the mask slip. The chances were often just as good you got it from a passing stranger, or someone who was in a room five minutes before you got there. But it's more reassuring to feel as if you did something wrong than to confront the idea that fate is simply random, that one person dies and another lives for no earthly reason. Anything that felt as if it might be true was better than not knowing at all. Eddington is framed as a Western-style showdown between Joe Cross and Ted Garcia, with the future of the town hanging in the balance. But we can see early on that the town is screwed either way. Sure, Joe is a right-wing loon, a sad and angry man with a gun who compensates for the impotence he feels at home by exerting his power elsewhere. But Ted is a glad-handing hypocrite, scolding others for not wearing masks while bending the rules for his own benefit. There's something Trumpian, or Boris Johnson-esque, about the way he flouts lockdown rules by holding a meeting in his bar, then insists that it qualifies as "essential business" because the mayor's office is wherever he happens to be. His big plan for Eddington's "tech-positive future" involves diverting town funds toward the site of a prospective A.I. data center that would require massive amounts of water to keep it cool, in a county that's always in the middle of a drought. Conspiracies, in this sense, are real. Mundane, even. We know that deals are made in backrooms every day, between people with more money and power than we can ever hope to possess. But those conspiracies have often already been exposed, and they thrive all the same. So we find or invent new ones, fiendishly intricate, complex knots that give us a rush every time we untangle a strand. They can be terrifying, but in the way a horror movie is -- which is why Aster's movies can toggle so easily between horror and paranoid thriller. Both genres lead us toward knowledge, pulling us, with a sickening mixture of dread and excitement, ever closer to a truth we can't turn away from, no matter how much we want to. Perhaps we'd never go down to that dark basement or slip past that No Entry sign, but we need our heroes to be braver, or more foolish, than we are. Aster's movies don't just unravel conspiracies. They're built like them. From the occult symbol carved into Hereditary's fatal telephone pole onward, they're crammed with details that are decipherable solely after multiple viewings, proof that the evidence was always right in front of us, if only we'd known where to look. But they're also morbid jokes on the idea that life makes more sense the second time around, given that his characters, like us, get just one shot. Eddington isn't quite as symbol-mad as Beau Is Afraid, but it bristles with half-seen signs like the copy of The Secret tucked between seats in Joe's truck -- a key indicator, if you happen to catch it, that he's a man invested in the idea that you can remake reality through sheer belief. Some are hidden clues, some sight gags for Easter egg hunters, and some are warnings about the danger of reading too much into incidental details. The company that wants to build Ted Garcia's data center is called Solidgoldmagikarp, a name derived from an internet joke about ultrarare Pokémon. But as internet jokes often do, it acquired multiple meanings over time and also refers to a term that, for unknown reasons, causes large language models like ChatGPT to start spouting nonsense. In other words, it's an A.I. facility named for something that makes A.I. lose its mind. Everyone in Eddington believes they're on the trail of some vast conspiracy; the characters all think they're the lead in an Ari Aster movie. But Joe finds an actual conspiracy, or at least falls victim to it. After he kills Lodge in the bar, Joe murders Ted and his teenage son with a long-range rifle, then frames one of his deputies for the crime. But while he's away from the station, someone sets a blaze outside -- a literal dumpster fire -- and uses the distraction to spring his patsy. When Joe tracks the deputy down, he's standing in the middle of the desert, a drone hovering ominously overhead. The deputy can't speak, but he tries to warn Joe off -- too late to prevent him from triggering a massive explosion. As Joe, deafened by the blast, struggles to regain his senses, Aster cuts to the drone's point of view, where we can see flames igniting a message already traced in the dirt with gasoline: NO PEACE. The rest of the movie unfolds as a brutal, comically gory gunfight -- think the Coens' No Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading playing on top of each other -- between Joe and a number of masked assailants whose motives never become clear. But we do get a hint as to who's behind it all. Just before the explosion, the movie cuts abruptly to the inside of a passing jet, where a figure in tactical gear is watching the plan unfold. There's a stack of signs in the aisle reading "The White Man Is the Virus, Here Comes the Cure," and the unidentified figure's backpack bears a patch reading "I Am Duncan Lemp," a slogan used by far-right militias that invokes the name of a self-identified Three Percenter killed by police in a no-knock raid. Are both the left and the right being manipulated by the same mysterious entity? And if so, who on earth could it be? The logical inference, as Nate Jones suggests at Vulture, is that the A.I. company, or big business more broadly, is behind it all. After that climactic shoot-out, which winds up with Joe taking a knife to the top of his skull, the movie skips forward to Joe, now the mayor, presiding over the ribbon cutting for the Supermagikarp facility. His brain injury has rendered him incapable of movement or speech, but his mother is happy to act as his mouthpiece, and a local power broker watches approvingly from the back of the crowd. Warren (King Orba) was once Ted's main financial backer, but now he's got Joe in his pocket, and the end result is the same: The rich get what they always wanted. But while you can draw that conclusion, I think Eddington means to leave you just short of being able to put all the pieces together. By the end of the shoot-out, we're fully inside Joe's point of view, to the extent that, when he methodically scans the street for assailants, the camera spins with him, and all we hear on the soundtrack is his COVID-ravaged lungs gasping for air. That's to say, it's not that what we're seeing isn't real, but that we've lost the ability to tell what is from what isn't. Aster doesn't mean to suggest, even within this context of his absurdist farce, that anti-racists and anti-vaxxers are all puppets dangling from the same set of strings. (Nor, although some have raised the concern, is he making fun of Black Lives Matter as a whole; he's very specifically targeting the kind of white liberals who rushed out to buy Ibram X. Kendi books but never got around to reading them.) He is, however, acknowledging that neither side has a monopoly on conspiratorial thinking, and that thinking can turn people against each other who might otherwise find themselves united against a common enemy. For those positioned to exploit unrest for their own gain, the "no justice" part is optional. It's the "no peace" that matters. And so this tiny town gets its A.I. data center, soaking up water and power while it spits out dehumanized slop that looks and sounds like truth, even when it isn't. No one's any closer to being happy or fulfilled, to living in a world that's more harmonious or more fair, but they've got a nifty new tool that lets them think less and consume more, that commingles reality and delusion so thoroughly it's not worth the effort to try and separate them. Garbage in, garbage out.

In 'Eddington,' Ari Aster revisits the 'living hell' of COVID-19

A New Mexico sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) and the town mayor (Pedro Pascal) butt heads in the early days of COVID in Ari Aster's Western "Eddington." Some people made sourdough starters to get through the COVID-19 lockdown. Ari Aster wrote a modern Western. Five years ago, when a pandemic and safety protocols further divided a politically tumultuous America, "I was just living in hell and I thought I should make a movie about that," the director says of his new drama "Eddington" (in theaters now). "It felt like things were poised to really explode in a new way. And to be honest, that feeling has not left since. But at that moment, it suddenly felt like, 'OK, I haven't experienced this before.' "I just wanted to get it down on paper and describe the structure of reality at the moment, which is that nobody can agree on what is happening." Aster's filmography is full of horror ("Hereditary," "Midsommar") and comedic absurdity ("Beau Is Afraid"), and with "Eddington," he revisits the absurd horror movie we all experienced in real life. Set in New Mexico during 2020, the movie centers on the fictional town of Eddington, which turns into a hotbed of bad feelings and controversy when awkward local sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) decides to run for mayor against popular progressive incumbent Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). Their feud turns increasingly personal and spills onto social media and the streets, and the situation ultimately grows explosive, bloody and downright bonkers. Some scenes are a stark reminder of the time: For example, Sheriff Joe moseys into a grocery store without his mask - as an asthmatic, he's not a big fan of personal protective equipment - and gets an earful from Ted and his fellow residents. To build his narrative, Aster took a lot of notes during lockdown, "living on Twitter and taking a lot of screenshots," he says. The director went so far as to create multiple Twitter accounts, so he could create "different algorithms" for varying ideologies. Aster built a cast of characters to run that gamut. Joe's malleable wife Louise (Emma Stone) falls under the sway of both her conspiracy theorist mom (Deirdre O'Connell) and the charismatic leader (Austin Butler) of a QAnon-type cult. And when George Floyd protests make it to Eddington, they involve a Black police deputy (Micheal Ward) and a teen boy (Cameron Mann) doing some performative activism to woo a girl he likes. "It is a satire," Aster says, but the real object of criticism is social media and "the maligned forces that have harnessed that technology to get us here and to divide us." "I wanted to make a film that was empathetic to all the characters. It's just that it's empathetic in multiple different directions and some of those are opposition." Since the pandemic, there have been movies set during COVID-19, but "Eddington" is the most high-profile project to really explore how it isolated neighbors from each other, literally and politically, and exacerbated an existing culture war. "We haven't metabolized what happened in 2020 or how seismic COVID was. One reason for that is that we are still living through it," Aster explains. "That was an inflection point whose consequences are very hard to measure, but they're huge. And it's an unpleasant thing to look at. And the future is a scary thing to look at right now." Aster acknowledges he's desperate for a vision of the future that's "not totally defined by the dread that I'm feeling. I wrote this movie in a state of anxiety and dread, and that dread only continues to intensify." While many navigated the COVID-19 lockdown by binge-watching "Tiger King," Aster had a different ritual to find his happy place. Quarantined in New Mexico, where Aster has spent much of his life, he found a "pretty comforting" routine of walking to a park and reading a book for two hours in the morning and returning in the afternoon for another hour or so. "I really liked that. That, I already have nostalgia for," he says, laughing. While Aster did end up having a couple of rounds of COVID-19 ("Not fun"), there are very few sick people in "Eddington." One character has the coronavirus at the beginning, at least one other character has it by the end, but that's it. Instead, "I'll just say there are a lot of viruses in the movie. A lot of things going viral," he says. He points out that another key subplot of "Eddington" is the artificial intelligence-powered data center being built just outside of town. "The movie is about a bunch of people navigating one crisis while another crisis incubates, waiting to be unleashed," Aster says. An idea for a sequel percolates in his mind, yet Aster would like to just live in a less-weird time, please. "It's gotten incredibly weird. And with AI rushing toward us with the possibility of AGI (advanced AI that would match human thinking) and then maybe even superintelligence, things are only going to get stranger and stranger," Aster says. "The human capacity for adaptation is amazing, and things become normal very quickly, especially once they become wallpaper - all of this has become ambient. "It's just important to remind ourselves, like, 'This is strange.' How do we hold onto that and maybe challenge it?"