After a July 14 preview screening of Eddington, a moderator asked why Ari Aster wanted to make a movie about a time—2020—that “people don’t really want to think about.” She was “intrigued” that Aster wanted to “drill down into that very moment in American history.” Isn’t that what movies, music, and novels are supposed to do? I think about 2020 every day; it feels like two seconds ago, a year that never ended. Politics, Trump or Biden, the virus itself—none of them changed the world for the worse like Big Tech. The first three months of the lockdown, and then another year of softer restrictions, showed people they could live at home, sated by screens, vicariously half-living their lives through streaming and various strains of the internet. A majority of people were openly, and easily, manipulated by messaging that would’ve been impossible 10 years prior. The media coordinated, just as the candidates in the Democrat Party dropped out simultaneously to allow Joe Biden to beat Bernie Sanders.
But they were just following an agenda set out by Silicon Valley. Eddington is bookended by images of a massive data center called “solidgoldmagikarp,” the faceless villain of this powerful and disturbing film less interested in partisan politics than taking the temperature of the nation. The pervasive dread of 2020 hasn’t left us: Aster says that “we’re being siloed off from each other” and that “our brains have been colonized.” He’s right, no one disputes this. And it’s only getting worse: try reading Twitter, where Aster did much of his research, without spotting a typo or a clear grammatical error. Phone overdose, AI-addled spellcheck, and rotten education have made people noticeably less articulate than just five years ago when Aster made dozens of accounts, one for each algorithm, one for each black rabbit hole to fall into.
In Eddington, everyone has their own reality and “alternative facts.” Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe Cross, Sheriff of Eddington, New Mexico, married to Louise (Emma Stone) and forced to host his mother-in-law (Deirdre O’Connell) at their house. “I thought we said last year that she would be out by April,” Cross reminds his wife. “Don’t you know there’s a pandemic going on?” A litany of still-fresh buzzwords, phrases, and prefab activist “beliefs” pour out like pus from a pimple, and the first hour or so of Eddington is closer to South Park than anything else. Cross decides to run for mayor against unopposed incumbent Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) when they have words at a grocery store.
An older man named Fred is forced out of the store because he doesn’t have a mask; he says he can’t breathe with a mask; the owner grabs him and throws him out to the smug applause of the few customers inside. Garcia reminds Cross that “a COVID-19 person” has a 70 percent chance of infecting someone else, and it doesn’t matter anyway, because a state mandate has been put in place. Cross turns around, nearly looks into the lens, and says “Are you just going to keep filming this?” And of course someone has their iPhone out, the same woman who told the older man it’d be harder to breathe when he’s “in line for the ventilator.”
Arguing with the pro-mask owner, Cross says that “There’s a way to do this. There’s a way to treat people.” If the film has any “message,” it’s in those two lines. (And the already classic rebuttal by a budding “white abolitionist”’s dad: “Are you fucking retarded? What the fuck are you talking about? You’re white.”)
On first viewing, Eddington didn’t have any image that approached the surrealism of 2020: Pelosi et al. in Kente cloth, the priest baptizing a baby with a spray bottle six feet away. But there was one scene I couldn’t stop thinking about: Cross confronts Garcia at the latter’s home during a fundraiser; the Sheriff’s latest gambit has blown up in his face; they once again have words, and Garcia slaps Cross twice; Cross leaves without further incident, humiliated without totally losing it. At first. The scene is set to Katy Perry’s “Firework,” from Cross pulling up to the house all the way through his embarrassed exit. I vaguely recognized the song, not knowing who sung it or when it came out, but I assumed it was from the 2020s. In fact, it came out in 2010; Aster is correct that “pop music hasn’t really changed much” since then, and I probably heard “Firework” waiting in line for groceries or paper towels five years ago.
It’s the most unsettling sequence in American movies since the Spahn Ranch sequence in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, one that captures the ambient dissonance of this decade and the pandemic better than anything else out there. I’ll never forget standing in line at the grocery store the day that Larry Hogan locked down Maryland, and the song playing over the PA: “Roam” by the B-52’s. “Roam if you want to/Roam around the world/Roam if you want to/Without wings, without wheels.” Is that what people “don’t really want to think about”? I think about it every day.
A not insignificant number of people have criticized Eddington for being “centrist” and “having no message” and “no solutions.” Along with the gradual slide into illiteracy, even popular political terms have lost all meaning: in this case, “centrist” really means panoramic, by no means the masterpiece it references near the middle (Nashville), but similarly epic and pessimistic in its diagnosis of our country 50 years apart. My dad was disappointed, thought it was “fragmented” in every sense of the word; it is, but that’s what 2020 was like, and it’s remarkable how Aster is able to sustain both constant coronavirus callbacks (which serve as their own jokes) alongside the plot, far from nominal. Eddington’s less a pandemic movie than a state of the union: that things haven’t changed much, and that so many people are so resistant to it betrays their complicity and lack of action in this world of ever diminishing returns. This is a major American film (Cannes didn’t get it), and everyone in the country owes it to themselves to see Eddington and remember what their lives were like five, six years ago when everything changed overnight.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits