James Y. Lee
Spoiler warning: This analysis contains spoilers for all four of Ari Aster’s films: Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid, and Eddington. Our non-spoiler reviews and articles about these films can be found in the links provided in their titles.
In starting to write this analysis, I paved my way through about three potential introductions before reneging on all of them for how they reeked of overwhelming despair. Inadvertently, that captures the kind of neurosis that I feel is emblematic about the release of a film like Ari Aster’s Eddington. It is a film so completely drenched in the nightmarish state of America that your only impulse to the idiocy that defines its satire early on is to laugh from disbelief, and your only impulse to the violence that unfolds towards its conclusion is to gasp in shock, then wither in acceptance of our unfathomably dire reality. The only thing left to do when it ends is somehow force yourself to make that bitter acceptance even the slightest bit palatable, with whatever convenient vice you can grasp, as you walk out.
In terms of it being a particular kind of genre exercise from erstwhile-horror-expert-turned-neurosis-flayer Ari Aster, Eddington—even as it bears the DNA of the Westerns that preceded it—clearly seems to sit somewhat closer to the darkly comedic paranoia of Beau Is Afraid than it does the cultish terrors of Midsommar and Hereditary. However, these films all share evident and striking commonalities, even as it eventually becomes clear that Eddington is setting out its own path. Some of them are frequently hilarious (especially the case for Eddington, even more so than Beau), and all of them are ambitious throughout, formally exciting, and potent in their unflinching portrayals of people destined to fail against powers that dictate their defeat from the start.
That kind of narrative framework is undoubtedly productive for the horror within Hereditary and Midsommar—the former outlines that helplessness through a high school English lesson about the prophecies of Greek tragedies. The latter literally opens on the sight of an expansive tableau depicting the entire story before it even begins. And in Beau Is Afraid, Aster’s undoubtedly personal neuroses about the dominating extents to which our families can destroy us unfurl in spectacular fashion. Over the course of three hours, its titular protagonist (Joaquin Phoenix) journeys through a subjectively paranoid and sometimes even fantastical world helplessly crushed under the iron grip of his own mother’s expansive industrial control.
Each of Aster’s previous three films tap into this frequency of helplessness through specific genres—and if not particular genres, in Beau is Afraid‘s case, atmospheres—oriented towards that despair, but rarely has he tapped into real-world concerns that expand beyond personal trepidations like familial troubles and catastrophic breakups. So, when one of our most forefront horror filmmakers turns the barrel of his gun towards the national nightmare of the United States of America, the results are undeniably more hilarious yet terrifying than anything else he’s put out before—simply because all of this is flesh-and-blood real.
Its satire is gut-bustingly hilarious precisely because its mask-mandate, protest-sanctimony, internet-conspiracy lunacy precisely aligns with the hilarity of the irreversible insanity seeping through every pore of our country. When Eddington inches closer to the horrific understanding it holds about our country—that we are unstoppably barreling towards a point of no return, and that COVID-19 severed any last illusion of a cohesive shared reality for a divided country already teetering on the edge—the despair behind that confirmation is more unrelenting than anything the beheadings, fires, and drownings that Hereditary, Midsommar, or Beau is Afraid have provided, by any reasonable measure. In crafting his modern Western, Ari Aster has finally unearthed true horror.
Where does one even start with picking apart a film as dense as Eddington? So much abounds within the details of its sprawling satirical narrative that the most apparent way to get to the heart of Aster’s latest is to start digging from what appears to be its surface. At first glance, Eddington is about a mayoral race, set within the small and fictional town of Eddington, New Mexico that ignites after the town’s sheriff, Joe Cross (Phoenix, again), gets fed up with the mask enforcements endorsed by current mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) in late May of 2020, and decides to run against Garcia for office. Anyone who’s been following Aster’s work knows that the truer foundations of his films always lies in their striking opening images. For example, in Hereditary, the diorama house of the Grahams pushes in to become their actual house instead, a foreboding image of all-seeing control that unfurls into family-destroying terror. In Midsommar, it’s the aforementioned tableau depicting the plot of the entire film and Dani’s (Florence Pugh) descent into the Hårga’s grasp. Beau Is Afraid had the POV shot of Beau literally being born and seeing the light for the first time.
For Eddington, that image is of Lodge (Clifton Collins Jr.), an unhoused vagabond spouting foreboding nonsense as he walks down an empty road towards the streets of Eddington, with Darius Khondji’s camera panning over to reveal that he’s just passed by a sign marking the beginnings of a massive data center to be built by a tech conglomerate known as SolidGoldMagikarp. Aster is nothing if not consistent, as all of his opening images all have an echoic relationship to his closing shots. Hereditary ends on a dollhouse view into the Grahams’ treehouse and the emergence of Paimon in Peter’s (Alex Wolff) body. Midsommar sees Dani fulfilling the tableau’s story, and Beau Is Afraid ends with the moment of Beau’s underwater tribunal demise. In Eddington, the completed data center is the final image of the film, a menacing presence in the wake of all of the carnage that’s preceded it… and an indicator towards what we should have been paying attention to all this time.
To that point, which I’ll circle back to—Aster has spoken repeatedly on the record about how Eddington is his method of portraying the starkness in difference between our political realities. We are all universally striving towards the general ideal of a “freer America,” yet irreversibly barreling towards violence over the fact that any notion of a shared common reality, frequently forged by mass liberal democracies, has been completely disintegrated in an age of powerlessness and disengagement brought about by a pandemic that completely isolated us in our individual uncertainties. Eddington frequently proves itself to be the definitive cinematic document of the COVID era on that front, showing people insulated in worlds of their own construction that have annihilated any vestigial attempt at connection towards each other, even within their own households.
Look no further than the household of Joe Cross himself, a disintegrating family brought about by scandal, and a microcosm for the ways that even different extremities of the modern American right are perpetually in conflict with each other. His wife, Louise (Emma Stone) is emotionally unstable, brought about by a strongly implied history of prior sexual abuse by her father—her mother, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), rambles to herself about conspiracy theories about the 5G-induced spread of COVID while verbally tearing down Joe, providing easy exposure for Louise to beliefs of such dangerously pervasive ilk. Her marriage to Joe is profoundly troubled, and the cracks within it are steadily torn apart as a result of his repeated attempts to draw attention to his family for his own political gains in the mayoral race.
In other words, she’s the kind of deeply tragic person who’s sadly susceptible to the throes of conspiracy theories spouted online by Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler), a thinly veiled pastiche of Alex Jones-types. He’s a manosphere-adjacent, fundamentalist-in-all-but-name radicals who spew apocalyptically fascist disinformation about pedophile Jewish deep state elites and Satanic Democrats as a ploy to sell medically dubious supplements.
Joe himself belongs to a breed of conservatism that derives from Marlboro-man-esque macho-isms, believing himself to be the kind of person who upholds masculine ideals. But, Eddington brutally subverts the image of the Western hero by making him epitomize the scourge of American individualism. Even as he earnestly—and perhaps even sympathetically—believes that the town of Eddington, and by extension, the country, is headed on the wrong track, his persistent emasculation and humiliation by his family, by Garcia, and so on, is what ultimately drives him to violent self-interest, accelerating the problem of division that even he sees as an issue
Look no further than how earnestly he eschews anything to do with mask regulations and the zeal with which the people of Eddington and Ted choose to uphold them—and no further than how totally vindictive he is so as to shoot and kill Lodge, as well as Ted and his son, Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka), after Ted humiliates Joe for his attempt to turn the race around in his favor by accusing Ted of raping Louise in the past. Not once is Joe’s violence—racist, classist, and colonialist in nature—ever seen as a successful attempt to strive towards a collective greater good. Rather, they are unequivocally portrayed as his means of exterminating anyone who clashes with his personal vision of a better Eddington—the completely insular reality he chooses to enforce on the town he oversees.
Yet, Eddington takes no prisoners on any side of the political spectrum in terms of who it chooses to lambast before flaying open for relentless critique. The American left comes under Aster’s sights as well—but it’s clear his criticism is aimed at those who don’t earnestly believe it. Contrary to beliefs of this film’s centrism or lack of political commitment, the film makes its own stance substantially clear within the blunt lines of its own text.
Sarah (Amélie Hoeferie) might be the most comically overzealous white girl at the frontlines of Eddington’s Black Lives Matter protests. She screams at Michael (Micheal Ward), the sole Black officer in Joe’s office, to “join their side” at protests devoid of any context, her first appearance in this film is the sight of her doing a TikTok dance to James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room.” Sarah performatively and exclusively seeks to date people of color throughout, and she bails at the first sign of legal pressure from authorities. She is evidently not holistically representative of Aster’s viewpoint on the BLM movement’s revival, nor is she entirely the subject of the film’s worst mockery—by all appearances, she genuinely cares about her intentions to take on a meaningful social-justice cause, even if her methods are hilariously privileged and misguided.
Rather, Aster’s most acerbic critique towards performative leftism is pointed at the boys surrounding her, who, unlike her, could not care any less about the Black Lives Matter protests themselves, and are all the funnier for it. In particular, there’s Eric, who is exclusively in the game to try and romantically leverage Sarah’s former relationship with Micheal against her, and Brian (Cameron Mann), who is similarly in the cause exclusively for the sake of social karma, and abandons the cause after the Republican Party and manosphere right adopts him following his shooting of the “Antifa” assailant who stabs Joe in the head. The overwhelming quantity of these sanctimonious, mostly majority-demographic activists in this film is also a deliberate detail in its own right, an acknowledgment that a small town like Eddington in New Mexico has a smaller Black population, rendering the cause abstract in a way that cannot authentically challenge these characters’ convictions.
For what it’s worth, a few more meaningful questions about the film remain. Are white kids who boast about how they’re “upending institutions of whiteness” actually worth celebration instead of gut-busting mockery, given that most of them would happily, if not coyly, return to the comfort of their inalienable privilege that perpetuates the systems they critique when seriously confronted? How is Eddington a film that “ignores” Trump and the MAGA-sphere’s infection of American political discourse, when Joe’s anti-mask rhetoric directly apes many of the anti-Fauci MAGA talking points against COVID regulations? How is that true when one of its defining final visual gags is the shock inclusion of then-MAGA-zealot representative Marjorie Taylor Greene uplifting Brian following the film’s grittily tense final shootout?
Performative leftism is treated in this film with a range of deserved mockery to utter scorn, viewed at its worst as political cynicism and/or dishonesty susceptible to the truly dangerous ideologies that exploit it best. That isn’t to say, however, that the film puts actual leftism itself on the chopping block, because the film textually acknowledges that characters like Sarah, even if misguided in their earnestness, make a fundamentally correct point. The violence that occurs throughout the film is predominantly the work of the right, and its most predominant victims in this film are of Joe’s doing, all universally targeted towards members of underrepresented classes, communities, and demographics. Joe shoots the unhoused Lodge in a bar he repeatedly breaks into. He snipes the Garcias to death in their own home. He frames Michael for that exact assassination when he starts to feel the heat. Even the Pueblo Butterfly Jimenez gets caught in the crossfire of Joe’s paranoid shootout against the “Antifa” extremists after trying to expose the truth about his killing of the Garcias.
When the dust settles, none of this is what actually, truly matters. Ari Aster continues to draw attention to the completion of the SolidGoldMagikarp data center, supported by Garcia and his corruption, completed under a now-paralyzed Joe’s term as mayor, and ultimately endorsed by his conspiracy theorist mother-in-law, as a final marker of the system that continues forth and benefits from the terrible noise of our country. In various interviews, Aster highlights his dread towards the advancement of modern AI systems; their encroachment on industries they don’t belong in, their incessant hunger for data to absorb, and their inevitable destruction of the human element in the workforces it is bound to overtake. Repeatedly, he describes Eddington when prompted as a film “about a large-scale data center being built,” and that lens is perhaps the most salient through which anyone should be examining Eddington through. In fact, the divisive controversy surrounding this film both flagrantly misses and definitively proves Aster’s point.
Think about the rest of Ari Aster’s filmography this way. Hereditary is not “really” about a family grieving a loss. Rather, it is about a demonic cult in the final stages of summoning their master in his desired vessel. Midsommar is not “really” about a traumatized young woman escaping the contempt of her abusive boyfriend. The film is is about an isolated Swedish cult reaching the culmination of its centuries-long tradition. Beau Is Afraid is not “really” about a neurotic man’s journey through his paranoia after his mother’s supposed demise. It is about a mother reasserting nigh-totalitarian control over a son who has failed to love her in the exacting way she desires. Eddington is not “really” about the implosion of a small town in the wake of a global pandemic that shreds their values of shared decency and reality. It is about the construction of a data center by a tech conglomerate that actively benefits from the town’s noise and chaos, and accelerates that chaos whenever it can.
Why else would private-jet boarding, militantly equipped and trained agents be aggressively seeking to assassinate and incapacitate Joe, a political agent who vehemently opposes the construction of the data center, under an “Antifa”-buzzword masquerade specifically designed to validate his paranoia? Why would Ted’s advisor, who has strong ties to the governor and even Washington’s political operations, be repeatedly insisting that Ted focus on the data center instead of his personal foibles and the mayoral race, before then standing behind the paralyzed “mayor” Joe when the data center finally opens? Why would the wildly conspiratorial Dawn be brought in as the now-paralyzed Joe’s spokesperson for the data center, which represents virtually everything about the technological world she ostensibly seems to despise?
Major tech conglomerates frequently exercise both governmental power and corporate espionage. In the world of Eddington, that takes the form of violence when it finally explodes and becomes a warranted means of legitimate advancement. Political loyalties are meaningless to capitalist interests that will always follow what is most immediately influential. In Aster’s film, the earnest are killed, corrupted, or brutally incapacitated so that the most extreme and dishonest—which represents the most profitable and convenient to those in dire straits—may thrive.
SolidGoldMagikarp isn’t just a throwaway shiny Pokémon reference. In fact, it is the actual name of an AI machine learning phenomenon in which a certain set of informational inputs, or “tokens,” provide abnormal outputs that are both nonsensical and unexpected, with no real relation to the input in question. In other words, it’s the exact kind of catastrophic failure in communication that plagues the people of Eddington all throughout the film. Despite receiving the same set of “inputs” in relation to the pandemic—i.e. the existence of the disease, the imperative of wearing masks, the racial crises that followed the murder of George Floyd—every single person’s output in regards to their beliefs is different and contextually irrelevant to each other, constructing worlds of their own that metastasize to a point where the original input becomes irrelevant relative to the chaos and violence that unfolds.
We have completely lost sight of the fundamental tenets of reality that forge a country of “United States,” and that insulated division is what the techno-capitalist forces that sit above all democratic echelons of power are both actively benefitting from and trying to further exacerbate for the sake of their own expansion. The true nature of the SolidGoldMagikarp data center as an omen in Eddington becomes clear when you consider the encroachment of AI across all conceivable corners of our online-dependent worlds. Even the events of Eddington are to be treated as data points for further disinformation that can be churned out faster than any human input can provide, all of which will spread to corrupt the industries we work in, and further destroy the shared values of reality that a country needs to even exist at all. Ultimately, when SolidGoldMagikarp—and all the tech conglomerates that resemble it—wind up getting their way, the human element will be removed entirely from the fabric of democracy, again killing off the earnest for good and providing a thriving ecosystem for the dishonest to proliferate their bile.
Ari Aster’s plea at the end of so many of his interviews related to this film is one of reconnection; that we are heading towards a terrifying point of no return, and we need to engage with each other’s worlds before it is too late. In Eddington, we not only see a vision of the violence that will erupt if we refuse to, but something even more chilling; the ways that the machines of profit will continue to function even after the arms are put down and the blood is washed from the streets. It’s not in cults that manipulate or relieve us of familial and romantic strife, or in domineering industrial-CEO mothers with an abnormal grasp over our reality that Aster finds his greatest source of terror. Instead, it’s in the Western techno-capitalist realm that he finally unearths it, a cult of its own that will feed our hatred and division and walk away uncaring, having earned their fill from our carnage—and we, like all of Aster’s helpless protagonists, will be playing into their machinations unless we fully wake up to what’s going on.
Perhaps the terrible genius of Eddington is that even the stark division surrounding this film is still part of the point it’s making. Here we are, staring down an event horizon, devoid of solutions to escape it, the future reduced to a void in front of us, as the reality becomes clear that we are merely consumable products. Yet, all we do with this impending disaster is squabble over a piece of art for knowing better than to endorse any one of our irreconcilable realities about a better future, themselves engineered and amplified by the technological realms that drive the wedges deeper. At the end of it all, what are we left with? What is our generation supposed to look forward to? What world has the old left behind for us? What world could we possibly make for the generations that will follow us?
We used to have answers to those questions. Eddington is perhaps the only movie thus far that truly understands how we lost those answers—and after the catastrophe of COVID, how we may never find them again.
I think this is agreat analysis.