'Eddington' is the First Great Art About the Pandemic
Ari Aster plumbs our fractured national psyche, synthesizing the upheavals of the pandemic into something approaching arthouse South Park (complimentary).
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The paradox of 2020 is that it’s a year that most of us would rather forget and yet it’s hard not to trace so much of our present psychosis to that exact moment. How can you even explore contemporary society without reckoning with the fallout of social distancing, school closures, and superspreader events? As Werner Herzog famously said after getting shot with an air rifle, “Ze poet must not avert his eyes.”
Reckoning with this societal moment would seem an artistic imperative but few want to, and honestly, who could blame them? Just typing “mask mandates” makes me want to shut the lid of laptop forever. The small handful of movies and shows that have attempt to explore this period mostly make you wish they hadn’t. I get PTSD just thinking about Locked Down, starring Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor. After that, we as a society mostly made a tacit agreement not to bring it up again, and frankly, I was fine with it. Better silence than another Locked Down.
With Eddington, Ari Aster becomes the first high profile auteur to “go there,” a poet refusing to avert his eyes until he nearly blinds himself. Aster doesn’t exactly create a unified theory of how the pandemic broke our brains, and he leaves some of the strands of his story tastefully untied, but there is perhaps no filmmaker alive more uniquely capable of exploring the alienation and paranoia of mass isolation and a breakdown in public trust. Like Beau is Afraid, Eddington is also deeply funny. Maybe the key to Aster’s genius is that he strenuously, almost maddeningly at some points, resists preaching or editorializing, merely synthesizing every pandemic-era absurdity into a wholly original farcical pastiche that plays almost like arthouse South Park.
If Beau is Afraid felt like Aster meticulously dissecting his personal neuroses, Eddington sees him looking outward, and maybe that’s what allows him to take on 2020. He gazes deeply into the abyss as a reprieve from gazing deeply into his navel (I love Beau is Afraid).
Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe Cross, the Sheriff of fictional Eddington, New Mexico (feel free to nudge your date every time he appears onscreen and say “That’s Eddington.”). The first scene sees Cross defending an elderly man who refuses to mask up inside the town’s only grocery store. The temptation for any Hollywood movie would be to portray a small-town Sheriff anti-masker as the stereotype and nothing more, just a dumb bigot who has been brain poisoned by social media memes and algorithmic content. Aster doesn’t soften Joe, exactly, but he finds the little nuances that go beyond easy caricature. Joe seems to believe this whole pandemic business is sort of nonsense, sure, but he does actually have asthma, and may actually be in part motivated by compassion for an old guy who doesn’t want to put a mask on. That’s part of the trick with Joe Cross, you can never quite tell if he’s motivated by compassion or vindictiveness, personal convictions or outside influences.
Likewise, perhaps the smartest thing Aster does, and key to his entire approach, is to depict the way that the personal and the political are often inextricable. Eddington’s America is a polity of familial squabble, where friendships sometimes fracture along ideological grounds, and other times politics are just window dressing for pettier conflicts, cherry-picked for maximum self-righteousness. Is that really a “Karen” or is it just a woman that you don’t like that you’re filming?
Joe Cross is married to Louise, played by a make-up-free Emma Stone with ginger eyelashes (her natural hair color is supposedly dark blonde so that must’ve taken work), an introverted artist with an aversion to being touched. When Joe tries to caress her in bed, she abruptly shells up and rolls over, but assures him, “I’m getting better!”
Depicting bellicose conservatives as guys with troubled personal relationships is such a banal observation as to be hack at this point, but we’re also used to seeing portrayals of rural America as a monolith. As if “red states” and “blue states” are separate entities rather than just polyglots of varying ratios that could shift depending on where you draw the borders. That Eddington’s bumbling Sheriff is married to a shy artist, who, in turn, used to date the slick technocrat mayor, is much closer to the truth of small-town USA, or really any-town USA.
That slick technocrat mayor is Ted Garcia, played wonderfully by Pedro Pascal, in what feels like a veiled slap at Gavin Newsom, if Newsom wasn’t so transparently slimy and palpably unctuous. Whereas Newsom’s ex-wife, Kimberly Guilfoyle, famously went on to date Donald Trump Jr., while Newsom went onto have an affair with his campaign manager’s wife, in Eddington, Garcia makes his wife leaving him part of his political origin story (as we learn through a devastatingly funny campaign ad). We meet Ted at his bar, trying to convince Joe to toss out the town vagrant (played brilliantly by Clifton Collins Jr.) who keeps interrupting Ted’s meeting with the town council, who he’s trying to convince to back his plan to build a massive, surely water-poisoning data center.
While Ted and Joe publicly clash over mask mandates, their beef actually goes back much further, to Ted dating Louise when she was a teenager, with an abortion six months later for which Ted denies responsbility. That Aster could weave a fictional tapestry of political and personal conflicts a fraction as complex as Newsom and Trump is impressive in its own right, and yet he creates characters so fully fleshed and original here that it works even if you don’t immediately recognize the parallel.
It turns out even a young country can’t escape the weight of the past, and so it is that virtually every Eddington character bears the burden and/or responsibility of a parent or offspring. Ted has a teenage son, Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka), who’s sort of an opportunist, equally infuriating (but also puckishly funny) to almost everyone as he seizes on politics as his cover to steal his friend Brian’s crush, Sarah (Amèlie Hoeferle). Sarah is the town’s token SJW, with “Bernie” in her Snapchat handle, who Eric trashes ruthlessly (and seemingly accurately) to Brian, as a virtue signalling phoney, only to swoop in on her himself as soon as he senses an opening. If there’s one truly Trumpian character in Eddington, ironically it’s probably Eric, an amoral actor who uses everyone else’s earnestness against them. Sarah, meanwhile, is the ex of Joe Cross’s Bitcoin-loving black deputy, Michael (Michael Ward), who was presumably dating her when she was underage (Libertarians gonna Libertarian). Every character in Eddington has either an embarrassing relative or damaging dirty laundry, usually of the sexual variety.
If there’s a flaw in Eddington, it’s that whereas Aster studiously resists the temptation to turn Joe the dumb cop and Michael the ambitious Deputy into lib stereotypes of fascists and conservatives, Sarah, Brian, and Eric basically are conservative stereotypes of BLM protesters—signalling virtue, constantly apologizing for being white, and protesting injustice solely because it’s the hip thing to do (respectively). It’s hard to tell whether Aster is conflating liberals with leftists himself here through sheer carelessness, or if it’s a deliberate provocation aimed squarely at his presumptive audience (doubtful many Gutfeld! viewers are rushing out to see Eddington). Either way, Brian screaming into a microphone at the top of his lungs about how he shouldn’t even be speaking because he’s a cis white male is solid comedy.
Deirdre O’Connell, meanwhile, plays Joe Cross’s overbearing, live-in mother-in-law, Dawn, who essentially functions as the film’s comment section, always pushing the latest rightwing conspiracy and who we hear almost entirely as background audio, as everyone has long since learned to tune her out. She has her own skeletons, related to her daughter’s unwillingness to be touched. Her political swing seems as personally driven as everyone else’s, and it’s unclear how much her hectoring is pushing Joe to do what Joe does.
With all the allusions and allegories it’s tempting to try to find Aster’s larger “message” in Eddington, which probably accounts for the middling reviews. We hate it when a movie doesn’t confirm our priors and tell us exactly what we want to hear. “He can’t quite decide what he wants to say” they’ll inevitably charge.
That Aster studiously avoids this is what makes Eddington so strong, allowing him to explore the way 2020 collapsed the personal, the pathological, the petty, and the political into a toxic stew of paranoia and magical thinking without painting himself into a partisan corner.