Trying to arrange the work of director Ari Aster into tidy boxes is becoming an increasingly difficult task. Slotting 2018’s Hereditary and his 2019 follow-up Midsommar into the horror genre seems straightforward enough (even though both films are just about as far apart from each other on that spectrum as one could get), but with 2023’s Beau is Afraid, Aster went completely off the rails and crashed headfirst into the sort of surrealism usually reserved for only the freakiest of filmmakers.
His latest film, Eddington, about a small town in New Mexico in the early days of COVID and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, might be the least conventionally “scary” movie in the ever-growing Aster filmography, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still chock full of dread and paranoia. Easily Aster’s most politically savvy film to date, Eddington is poloarizing by design – a notion that may turn off those in search of traditional horror but gleefully entices those who realize the best horror is almost always political anyway.
An important thing to remember while watching Eddington is that nothing in it is meant to be taken literally. Sure, much of it is presented “realistically,” but it’s our compliance with our own memory about this chaotic time that gives Aster such a loaded gun to work with. We were all there, after all, fighting our own battles with family and local governments over proper masking procedures and the effectiveness of mass protests. Aster brings all the uncertainty and fear we all felt (just five years ago – which impossibly feels both like the distant past and as if it happened just yesterday) to the screen with such accuracy that, when things begin to veer into the uncanny, it can be difficult to distinguish our own lived reality from Aster’s pointed satire.
Taking things a step further, it’s also important to remember that the point of Eddington isn’t to showcase Aster’s literal personal perspective on COVID precautions, the Black Lives Matter protests, or white privilege, but to view the world through the eyes of his characters (which include a cavalcade of eccentrics played by Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Deirdre O’Connell, Austin Butler, and others).
When Sheriff Cross (Phoenix) listens to annoying and moronic-sounding white teenagers wax philosophical about race relations in America, we’re not hearing Aster’s judgment about those teens, we’re hearing what a large swath of an aging, out of touch population hears.
When a luxury jet full of well-funded Antifa soldiers targets the small New Mexico town for a terrorist campaign of violent bombings and mass shootings, we’re not seeing Aster’s view of anti-racist activism, but a commentary on the delusional messaging that right wing media uses to deliberately stir up people who are convinced that big city problems are about to spill over into their peaceful hamlets at any moment.
Eddington exists not as an endorsement of its characters’ behavior but as a biting and satirical condemnation of it. Eddington is your racist uncle at Thanksgiving. It’s white law enforcement acting without fear of consequences. It’s the comment section on your hometown newspaper’s website. It’s Twitter and Facebook, and most of social media in general. It’s the ignorant and gullible among us who are afraid of large cities and who rarely travel more than 100 miles from where they were born.
Eddington is the anti-vax movement and the QAnon followers who used to be reasonable people. It’s the person in the restaurant who has their phone ringer set to the highest possible volume, who doesn’t use their turn signal, and who believes every AI image or meme they see online is real and true. And I’ll be damned if it isn’t right on the money.
There’s a great scene near the end of the movie that parodies the Kyle Rittenhouse fiasco that took place in Wisconsin in 2020. In it, a local political strategist is showing Sheriff Cross a video on his phone, but throughout the scene, he unknowingly keeps the phone turned horizontally while the video is vertical. It might not seem like much, but this brief sequence is the cherry on top of a movie that expertly and subtly lambasts the least informed yet loudest segment of a woefully ignorant America.
