Asher Luberto
There aren’t many universal good things to come out of COVID, perhaps except for an increased appreciation for nature, a newfound love of sourdough bread, and Ari Aster’s new movie Eddington, which tackles our collective anxieties and political paranoia during COVID with a bracingly nasty and bombastically amusing satire.
A cinematic version of doom scrolling, Eddington unmasks the controversies of the mask era. With many people looking back on COVID, wondering what the heck happened, Aster (Hereditary) conducts a diabolically sinister, distinctly wonderful and deliriously over-the-top checkup on the zeitgeist in 2020, searching for answers to an almost unanswerable question: where did it all go wrong? There isn’t a clear diagnosis to that question, other than it did indeed all go to hell.
It’s been nearly five years of citizens holding grudges over the way businesses and schools were shut down during COVID. Parents blame their kids’ social awkwardness on government lockdowns, many individuals blame their crippling debt on not being able to clock-in, divorce rates skyrocketed and social cues plummeted due to people not being able to gather in public places. (I personally was irked by such strict regulations — as a social person who enjoys gathering with friends, going out with my girlfriend and traveling around the globe, I found the laws to be stringently unfair — while seeing other sides as well, especially when my mother’s best friend died of COVID, a devastating, unfathomable loss that helped me understand the severity of the disease.)
Everyone has their own bouts with COVID, including the fictional characters in Eddington. A small town in New Mexico, Eddington becomes a microcosm of 2020 America, as talking points like political divide, racial disharmony, protest movements and mask debates are thrown into a blender to form a seedy smoothie of hysteria. When Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) is pulled over by an Indigenous sheriff for entering another jurisdiction without a face mask, he claims to be an asthmatic who can’t breathe with the mask on. His hatred of mask mandates pins him against the town’s mask-endorsing mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who is up for re-election and who is pushing a new artificial intelligence data center in town, which would gobble up resources of the people who actually want to live there.
Joe has other conflicts as well, including his uncommunicative wife Louise (Emma Stone), who creates dolls that look like they’re straight out of Aster’s breakout film, Hereditary, and his mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O’ Connell), who has moved into their home and blabs about conspiracy theories to no end. To say Joe’s life is a mess is an understatement. He’s swayed by a delirious activist (Austin Butler) into committing crimes, runs for mayor at the behest of others and eventually spirals into Travis Bickle-levels of insanity.
At points, the film bites off more than it can chew as Joe is thrown into a whirlwind of George Floyd protests, secrets involving government mandates, vaccines and coverups, throwing so many cultural talking points into the mix that it becomes overbearing instead of eye-opening. In this bleak film, there are no good guys, and everyone is reprehensible — all conspiracy theories come to fruition and all sides are hypocritical. When Black Lives Matter takes to the streets, brandishing signs over their heads, an egregious white liberal interrogates a black policeman for not joining their protest. “I have experienced racism, but you haven’t,” she declares, digging her pointer finger into his chest. You can practically hear the eye rolls from audience members around you.
All these characters are clearly recognizable, and Aster reluctantly understands them all, regardless of their political beliefs. He’s a keen conveyor of how humans can be pushed to madness, particularly when grappling with grief, a recurring theme he pairs with nightmarish visuals and almost unmatched mood pieces (see: Hereditary, Midsommar) and for the first movie in his career, he throws in humor, crafting a visceral, funny, absurd, annoying and frightening broken mirror to our shattered society.
After spinning through a constantly revolving door of crazed characters, Aster doesn’t so much arrive at a conclusion so much as he evokes more questions. Its lack of answers can be infuriating, offering few epiphanies and fewer resolutions along the way, but it very much does for COVID what paranoia films did for the 70s. It captures a feeling, not so much a story, and watching Joe lose his mind due to the tumultuous climate around him may very well make him the modern answer to Travis Bickle — just change his catchphrase from “you talking to me?” to “you Tweeting at me?” and you got a deranged activist for the COVID era.