Ari Aster’s COVID-19 western opus “Eddington” left me with the same feeling I get waking up from a nightmare, one that seems to be part recollection and part premonition; that sensation that often lingers in the hangover of fitful sleep, where loved ones may be dead or maimed or sometimes disappeared from the face of the Earth. There is a yawning cavity at the heart of “Eddington”, both the town and the film presenting it to us, a fetid soup of inorganic red, white, and blue sludge that offers itself as fantasy but curdles into reality. I was unwell watching “Eddington” and that, of course, is the point.
“Eddington” places our 2025 audience smack in the middle of a cultural wasteland of fear, panic, good intentions, and death from whose primordial ooze many of our modern-day horrors have evolved. We’re talking, of course, of the malaise and terror that was the Summer of 2020. A former Native territory that long ago was murderously overtaken by copper miners, Eddington has become a shell of its former self, with streets empty save for the stray Sheriff’s patrol or homeless rambler screaming at ghosts in the desert. Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) is a pathetic, if annoyingly sympathetic creature; a weaselly, asthmatic man whose life was teetering on the edge of collapse well before the COVID lockdowns came down to finish the job. His wife (Emma Stone) is distant, spending her idle time crafting doll-like abominations as a hobby or amongst an online community of Q-Anon adjacent cultural evangelicals. In other news, his current mayor and longtime nemesis (Pedro Pascal) seems hellbent on preserving the “unreasonable” masking mandates from the government while quietly pushing for the construction of a water-guzzling AI generation facility named after a Pokémon. And to top it all off, his community seems to be tearing itself apart at the seams as the two-week-long national quarantine stretches on into an indefinite future of doom-scrolling and broiling racial tensions in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. Cross, a self-styled classic western “hero,” believes that something has to be done to heal the jagged wounds carved through his town by the phantom menace of COVID, ANTIFA, and the “ravages” of social justice. Infected by an American exceptionalism that has killed more people than any pandemic could ever dream of, Cross is assured that if nobody else is willing to take the mantle of leadership, he must be the man for the job. In a rambling phone video posted to Facebook, Sheriff Joe Cross decides, seemingly on a whim, that he is going to run for mayor of Eddington. If COVID was a powder keg, Joe Cross is the suicidal drunk with a Roman candle yelling “light ‘em up” while everyone else simply watches in placid acceptance of the inevitable and welcomes the sweet relief of obliteration. Sound familiar?
For the first half or so of the film, Aster (Writer/Director of “Heredity,” “Midsommar” and “Beau Is Afraid”) paints a world so steeped in the sense memory of that time that I felt physically ill. That Summer of 2020 is a blur for me, a technicolor oil slick haze of anxieties, crumbling relationships, and stimulus checks that, for the sake of one’s mental health, feels best forgotten. I can’t remember whole weeks from that time, as I’m sure many people can’t. All I do remember is the itchy sensation that this might never end, that this “new normal” was all we had to look forward to and would eventually consume us whole like Saturn devouring his son. Aster approximates this dread by concentrating its effects on this one town, a quiet place with its own interpersonal complications made even more chaotic by the influx of madness beamed onto phone and laptop screens, fueled by a napalm concoction of sensationalist news programs and “national interest” to prey upon well-intentioned and perpetually bored people. The children of Eddington, adrift in an unknowable future where traditional adolescence seems like a faraway fairy tale, take to the internet to learn the history that was denied them, mainlining the bloody reality of their privilege, and are righteously spurned to enact change. What else is there to do? The old timers, the ones around whom polite society has circled its wagons, who refuse masks because they ironically “can’t breathe,” are left befuddled at the state of things; the breakdown of “niceness” in favor of savagery and calls for justice. The nail that Aster smacks precisely on the head is the opportunistic nature of this time, of the way bad actors and con men took advantage of the flailing nature of America’s crumbling psyche and sought to profit from it. These snake oil salesmen came in many forms, from charlatans spouting new age religious hellfire (Austin Butler) to a young kid using the mask of social justice in an effort to simply get laid (Cameron Mann). Everyone has an agenda, that much is clear, and it’s the optimistic or lost that inevitably get swept into the meat grinder to be churned back out like so much unethically sourced sausage. “Eddington” would be a haunting curiosity if this were the whole of its aspiration, a snapshot of a time and a feeling those who lived through it would best leave in their rearview. But Aster has more on his mind, as the second half of the film takes flight from the literal and blasts like a firework into the realm of purgatorial hell.
The back half of “Eddington” should seem inevitable for anyone who knows Aster’s work well. His specialty is baking you into a world that feels recognizable, if unnerving, only to yank away any sense of normalcy in favor of nightmarish impressionism. All of us who watched “Hereditary” through their fingers can attest to this. What he is able to do with the final acts of “Eddington” is spin the literal into the allegorical, creating satire through the spilling of blood that punches through the miasma of COVID and gets at something more pertinent and present, a funhouse mirror held against a collage of confederate monuments torn out at the root but somehow reformed. Allowing his horror bona fides to take the reins, Aster creates for Sheriff Cross both fantasy and nightmare; a loony tune reality that echoes movies like “First Blood,” where it takes one man willing to do what is necessary to restore order against an impending cataclysm, no matter how many people have to die to do so. If that’s not a pinpoint-accurate metaphor for the deaths of 500,000 Americans in 2020 alone, I don’t know what is. A sacrifice laid at the altar of retaining the status quo. “We are living in history,” shouts Cross with an assault rifle in his hand. More than you know, Sheriff. More than you know.
Nobody came out of COVID better than when they went in. Nothing was gained or learned. Beyond the needless deaths, that’s the greatest tragedy of all. The social structure that millions of Americans took to the streets to upend eventually righted itself. The alleged anarchy that led to historic gun sales across the country amounted to little more than property damage in the grand scheme of things, beyond the dead protestors and the burgeoning podcast careers of their murderers. The same societal chess pieces that were standing on the board in January 2020 are still standing, perhaps just jumbled up a bit. Aster understands this and presents with “Eddington’s” epilogue the stinking afterglow of COVID, where a select few institutions were toppled only to be overtaken by something worse. The great equalizer is that we all lost something during that Summer, at the very least time and at the very most our lives. It sucked, but maybe it would have been at least worth it if the world had gained something, some wisdom, some lingering affection for their fellow man in the aftermath. Sadly, we did not. In Eddington, as in our daily life, we don’t learn lessons or pay our comeuppance. Here, retribution is a pathetic man’s bullet and the lunatic’s comfort that everything will be fine so long as someone else suffers for our sins. Despite its best efforts, even COVID couldn’t change the fact that this is America, and here we play the hits.
“Eddington” is a film worthy of long dissection and more than a little introspection; a movie that deserves reckoning even if it hurts. Sometimes worth carving open old wounds, if only to let the blood fall where it may.
You’ll be glad you did.
“Eddington” is playing at The Broad Theater and the Prytania Theatres at Canal Place.
