The Empty Provocations of “Eddington”

In the dusky light of the waning sun, an indigent man called Lodge (Clifton Collins Jr.) wanders barefoot down an empty highway, muttering feverishly as he descends into a small desert town cradled by jagged bluffs. The camera lingers on his matted gray beard, slick with sweat and spittle, before a distant shot captures his lonesome silhouette dwarfed by the steel carapace of a data center perched upon secluded mountains. With that, Ari Aster’s Eddington plunges us into that socially distanced spring some five years past, staging the Covid crisis as a decadent western. Roundly despised and regarded as a nuisance by the locals, the mercurial, drunken Lodge emerges here as a rueful harbinger of the delirium soon to overtake the titular town (and perhaps America more broadly).

At the center of this anarchic tumult is Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), a bumbling, asthmatic lawman who defiantly flouts mask mandates, much to the chagrin of Eddington’s charismatic liberal mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). Behind Joe’s reactionary impulses lurks a profoundly frustrated, insecure man. He dotes on his wife, Louise (Emma Stone), but she is skittish, emotionally distant, and increasingly distracted by the viral ravings of cult leader Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler), who insists that pedophile cabals populate the corridors of power (an allegation that, for Louise, contains the bitter sting of truth and may betray the seeds of her sexual troubles with Joe). Her QAnon evangelist mother, Dawn (Deidre O’Connell), living with them in lockdown, inflects their already fraught domesticity with displaced paranoia and the specter of past betrayals. Sensing a fledgling unease ripe for mutiny, Joe announces his mayoral campaign on a Facebook livestream.

Aster ostensibly organizes the film around this standoff—between Joe and Ted, conservatives and liberals—but the real animating force of his farcical western is American hysteria, exacerbated by social media. Only sordid self-interest seems to divide Eddington’s denizens into their sectarian factions. Joe awkwardly mounts an anti-masking platform with few other policies to speak of. (His patrol car is plastered with misspelled, nonsensical slogans: “Your Being Manipulated” and “Don’t Let Eddington, NM turn into Facebook, NM!”) But it soon becomes clear that his jealousy over Ted’s brief romantic history with Louise drives this largely one-sided rivalry. Ted remains altogether more preoccupied with the construction of a nearby corporate data center, without his constituents’ full knowledge of its environmental implications. Meanwhile, high schooler Brian (Cameron Mann) nurses a crush on would-be activist Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle), and his disastrous efforts to win her attention produce hollow diatribes against white privilege. Soon, he’s marching in Black Lives Matter protests, joined by his best friend, Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka), Ted’s son, who also has his eye on Sarah. 

Aster’s case begins to take its oblique shape. Between feckless liberals and puerile conservatives, any attachment to ideology reveals itself as either fickle or fraudulent, imposed rather than naturally cultivated. If Brian and Sarah are emblematic of white liberal allyship, superficially adopting the language of social justice, then Joe is a useful simpleton. Corporate overlords leave their fingerprints everywhere, but which no one can see, blinded by the ultramarine glow of the screens eroding their inner lives and intimate connections. 

Such aspersions are not entirely untrue, but the writer-director undermines his own effort to satirize the conditions that have long plagued our hyperpartisan public life. Far from illuminating the origins of our discontent, Eddington eludes certain demonstrable facts about America: a Puritan nation, rehearsed in fanaticism, inclined to build (literal and psychic) monuments to its worst myths. Indeed, the spirit of the nation has always tilted toward madness.

Eddington may generically depart from Aster’s previous fare (even 2023’s Beau Is Afraid passes as a horror movie), but otherwise it contains all the classical furniture of an Ari Aster production: the dysfunctional family, mental illness, grief, isolation, mother wounds, and above all, the blistering tension between the collective (families, neo-pagan tribes, ancient covens, etc.) and the individual. This tension—the threat of being absorbed into the communal, independence and agency obliterated—is the thread that stitches all these other ideas together.

Laden with the symbolism of psychosis, this primal conflict has catalyzed some of the most eloquent sequences in Aster’s films. In Hereditary (2018), a bereaved mother succumbs to the demon that has generationally plagued her family and saws off her own head with a piano wire to make way for her son’s occult “inheritance.” Betrayed by her boyfriend in Midsommar (2019), Florence Pugh’s Dani sinks to the floor embraced by the women of a Swedish folk commune who mimic her anguished cries, transforming her private trauma into a united performance of grief, as if they are all one body. No sequence better exemplifies Aster at his best than this scene, equal turns cathartic and terrifying, for we have already seen how violently this community, called the Hårga, rejects difference or, for that matter, individual will. They achieve cohesion through a specifically ethno-racial homogeneity and coercive effacement, collapsing the boundaries between self and other. For all that’s been made of Dani’s climatic smirk, as far as “final girls” go, she doesn’t quite survive either: Revenge becomes her last act of agency before she melts into the Hårga’s hive consciousness.

If horror is fluent in society’s hostility toward the outsider, then the western idealistically flips that premise, reveling in the glories of individualism embodied by the solitary wanderer. Perhaps no genre reveals more about the American crisis of identity, aswirl with mythmaking and paranoia. Eddington belongs much more to the conservative tradition of Sam Peckinpah, Don Siegel, and Clint Eastwood, where the lawless frontier beckons a man of dubious morality to right society’s ills, than the revisionist renditions of late—3:10 to Yuma (2007), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), The Power of the Dog (2021)—with their morose, doomed “heroes” whose foibles finally catch up to them. Whatever its cinematic transformations over the years, the vestiges of the Hollywood western survive everywhere. It is no accident that of America’s cowboy presidents—trust-busting “Rough Rider” Theodore Roosevelt, the “Great Society” Texas cattleman Lyndon B. Johnson, and an all-but-forgotten George W. Bush—the most revered among the right is still Ronald Reagan, the B-movie actor who only played gunslingers on-screen and managed to reinvent the nation in his own western-coded fantasies. 

For his part, Aster spent much of his boyhood in Santa Fe and has long admired the genre. True to his meticulous eye, Eddington bears all the signs of mindful authorship. Cinematographer Darius Khondji’s remote frames sweep lavishly across the grandiose landscape, with its winding sprawl of sun-dappled plains and soaring sierra, as magisterial as any Thomas Cole or Frederic Remington painting. One of the earlier confrontations between Joe and Ted winkingly features detritus drifting along the street like tumbleweeds before a shootout (although that will come later). Aster’s fastidious attention to craft, to say nothing of the cast’s electric performances, makes Eddington, like most of its predecessors, compulsively watchable. He has a propensity for the theatrical; for better or worse, his films often resemble plays, from the starkly symmetrical production design in Hereditary and Midsommar to the diegetic theater in Beau Is Afraid. Yet where this predilection has previously offered a compelling dimension, here it becomes decidedly intrusive. The characters never rise to much more than ideological archetypes, spouting the beliefs foisted upon them in a contrived effort to stage specious political observations.

Such heavy-handed design need not preclude a film’s capacity for insight, yet Eddington notably dispenses with anything resembling factual context, ensuring that it almost never encounters any real resistance to its overarching contention. Far from either liberal or conservative in its loyalties, the film neglects those variables discernibly responsible for our present-day circumstances, ceding the possibility of cogent analysis. (Donald Trump, for instance, never comes up.) One sequence in particular demonstrates this central disingenuity. In the middle of a BLM protest, Joe’s piddling police department of three—including the lone Black officer, Michael (Micheal Ward)—wade into the crowd, cartoonishly outnumbered and shortly humiliated by the righteous indignation of the masses. Anyone paying even cursory attention to those protests in real life (and the several that have followed since, including, most recently, those on behalf of Palestinians facing genocide in Gaza) cannot have missed the exact opposite imagery of law enforcement’s reliably disproportionate response: militarized police departments dispatched to crush civilian dissent with tear gas, rubber bullets, and brutal beatings. In the face of Joe’s paltry team, the film transforms their demands to “defund” the police into a contemptuous joke.

In general, Eddington seems only superficially self-aware about the racial machinations it so perilously trafficks in. Michael operates principally as a servant to plot or humor; he frets about his poorly timed promotion to deputy, which Joe is too guileless to have devised. Later he becomes a convenient patsy, and the subsequent assault he endures on-screen seems a predictable culmination of his character’s accrued indignities. Indigenous actor William Belleau, best known for Blood Quantum (2019) and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), must weather similarly patronizing writing as Pueblo cop Butterfly Jimenez, who tussles with Joe’s blithely incompetent staff for jurisdiction of a murder scene. He solves the case right before he is summarily executed in the climatic, video-game-esque shootout.

Aster’s provocative impulses often derail the more generative elements of his work. For instance, he once characterized his controversial early short film The Strange Thing About the Johnsons (2011), which revolves around a Black patriarch repeatedly raped by his 12-year-old son, as a “role-reversing incest whatsit.” This incurious open-endedness fails to transcend its transgressive premise, not unlike Beau Is Afraid, a rambling, overstuffed Oedipal nightmare that Aster literally couldn’t figure out how to end.

Unsurprisingly, in Eddington, he doesn’t know what to do with Louise or her sexual trauma either; her descent into Vernon’s cult (of formerly sex-trafficked acolytes) remains curiously marginal until Joe harnesses her past as incendiary fodder for his campaign. Her arc, perhaps more than any other, best reflects the country’s own deluded vision of itself: as a principled custodian of godliness and innocence, defending against perversion and corruption. Conspiracy unites much of Aster’s work, and through Louise Eddington at least recognizes that the horror so often projected outward exists, unimpugned, in our most intimate spaces—far from spurned, embedded in the very social fabric of our world. But one gets the sense that the film would rather not look too closely either, surrendering its best instrument: the stories we tell about ourselves.

The conspiracy theory shares much in common with religion—faith in the unseen, a restoration of order in the world—and, like the cults in Hereditary and Midsommar, swallows its believers into shared observance of a unifying narrative, a Freudian shadow of repressed past events. (Change a couple words and the prevailing anxiety that unsuspecting white women may reasonably expect to be abducted, shackled on boats, and shipped across the ocean for sexual exploitation sounds chillingly familiar, a revision of America’s own none-too-distant history.) Aster seems drawn to visual and narrative melodrama but not always interested in its implications. In the final act’s incursions by “antifa” mercenaries, the film has so long tested the bounds of reality that one could be forgiven for mistaking these figures, in the world of Eddington, for actual patrons of antifa. Thus we have a project that may not consider itself apolitical, but so treasures its own complacence that all meaning is shorn from the symbols it corrals.

Dabs of truth can flourish even within the most nihilistic cinema, but so much of what doesn’t work about Eddington finds its origins in this lack of curiosity and reticence to reckon with the uglier dimensions of what afflicts this country. There are stretches of the film that promise something more ideologically clear-eyed, but Eddington retreats each time into maximalist violence and buffoonish comedy. Technology may be, as science fiction always presaged, our final undoing, but the ingredients have been there all along. Consensus reality no longer exists, but it has always been the case in this country that the truth matters much less than a “unifying” fantasy.

Read More