If you thought cinema was dead, watch Eddington. She’s alive and kicking like a mare, or like a hip-fired .50 caliber machine gun. Ari Aster’s portrait of convulsion—social, political, and alveolic—in 21st century America mocks you without ever admitting that it’s doing so (and no matter who you are, or how elevated and holier-than-thou you consider your opinions on 21st century America, it had a point). Pretension and self-righteousness, antagonists in their own right, are laid low by the sheer stupidity of the actual characters they inhabit—characters just like people you know, or people you are. Fervent masking advocates who don’t wear their masks right. The white high schooler who denies herself the right to speak authoritatively on matters of race and justice in her authoritative speeches on race and justice. The asthmatic old man who gives himself the coronavirus, a disease that steals your breath, because the masks that prevent it make it harder to breathe. Characters swallow conspiracy theories about government tyranny, lockdown orders, and pedophilic sex trafficking cults that sublimate the real, dangerous, and utterly menial tragedies hiding beneath the surface of their lives.
There is one exception to the banality. As it turns out, there is an anonymous death squad masquerading as “antifa terrorists” wreaking havoc across the country. They fly by private jet, drive uniform black pickup trucks, they gladly gun down cops and civilians alike with assault rifles and make sure to keep the cameras rolling on their violent instigation, by drone or by phone. It’s not that Aster doesn’t bother to explain who they work for, what their end-game is, it’s that he doesn’t want to. He trusts you to figure out what’s going on. In fact, what isn’t said is generally more interesting than what is. There is no villain monologue, only mutual soliloquies between self-centered, ignorant nutjobs. Evil has a plan, for sure, but it works silently, while the idiots wear themselves out blaming each other for exactly the thing it’s doing.
True, it’s funny to watch them do it. But not quite funny-ha-hah. Refreshingly, there is not a single moment of self-reflection, self-criticism, or self-reference in the entire film. Every character is completely and sincerely committed to their own moronic duplicity and yet ready, at any moment, to pounce ruthlessly on the slightest whiff of each others’ hypocrisy. There is no meta-commentary or genre awareness, no witty asides that allow the audience to laugh off the film’s perfectly realistic absurdity. The characters are hilarious not in spite of but because none of them have even the slightest sense of humor. Everyone takes their own bullshit 100% seriously and is incensed by anyone who doesn’t.
The only characters who seem to give a single fuck about anything beyond their own ambitions and hangups are the people (mostly the sheriffs) of Pueblo. More than once, protestors remind us that the entire series of events takes place on stolen land, but the people it was stolen from are actually still around and aren’t all too concerned with what the white (and Black and Hispanic) man does on his land. They are very interested, however, in anything that happens on what little land still belongs to them. The opening scene makes that clear. They know exactly where the border of their turf lies, and they are going to make sure that anybody who sets foot or tire inside knows it too. For a brief segment of the second act they become temporary antagonists as they investigate Sheriff Joe Cross’s murder of his personal and political rival, Mayor Ted Garcia, not because they give a shit about the election or either of the men or the story unfolding on the screen, but because the killing shot was technically fired from over the county line. Pueblo art, architecture, and clothing is ever-present but never mentioned, even when our protagonist literally falls face-first into a Pueblo heritage museum. The Pueblo don’t seem bothered by the data center at the, well, center of the film, despite the fact that it threatens to soak up the entire region’s water supply (in the middle of a constant drought). Their exact role in the denouement is a bit unclear, but it seems that they get their share of the proceeds from its construction and manage to direct it into wind (and presumably solar) farms.
It’s difficult to determine whether anyone is truly better off at the end of the film than at the beginning. Except for the dead guys, that’s pretty obvious. Joe is disabled and constantly pestered by his whacked out mother-in-law, sure, but he’s a local hero and mayor. Yeah, his celibate wife left him and got knocked up by a cult leader, but now instead of taking care of her, her mother takes care of him. Along with her nurse boyfriend. And when he slaps Joe out of frustration at least his apology seems genuine. As for his wife Louise, she finally admits, publicly, that she was raped by her father, though off-screen. Superficially, she seems happy with her ending, but she smiles at Vernon on camera the same way she used to smile at her father. Michael, the only named Black character, probably ends up captain of the sheriff’s department just like he wanted. Sarah makes people care about social justice and it gets her boyfriend killed. It only came at the cost of betrayal by his closest friends and massive facial scarring. Everyone who lives pretty much gets what they want, and yet none of them are happy about it. Even the town itself doesn’t get off clean. The solidgoldmagikarp data center brings lots of jobs and money to Eddington. But what’s the price there? I think Aster’s point is that we watch them pay it over the entire movie. The antagonist operating behind the scenes is the product of those data centers. It’s the internet, the constant submersion into an endless stream of digital information and perpetual surveillance, personally tailored to make you crazy, to make you hate your neighbor. It’s why the opening shot is of a social media clip. It’s why we switch constantly between portrait mode and landscape, even tilting our heads to watch a TikTok sideways across the screen. It’s why the death squad films itself killing cops—they obviously aren’t anti-cop or anti-fascist, in fact it’s heavily implied that they serve fascism. They’re the tip of the spear of chaos, the internet is the shaft. And boy, is that shaft fucking us.
Irony Poison 