On Getting What You Wish For

Like most people, I like to determine whether a film positions itself politically on the left or the right. Usually I find this easy; but not so with Eddington, Ari Aster’s latest. Unfolding in a small New Mexico town (the eponymous Eddington) during the early months of the Covid lockdown in 2020, the film stakes itself on the premise that there’s something important about our intensifying culture wars to be explored in that moment.

Eddington ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Ari Aster
Written by: Ari Aster
Starring: Pedro Pascal, Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone, Deirdre O’Connell
Running time: 145 mins

Pedro Pascal’s mayor Ted Garcia — coded touchy-feely but business-friendly neoliberal New Democrat — embraces masking and social distancing mandates. Joaquin Phoenix’s county sheriff Joe Cross — coded Trumpy Republican — is frustrated and convinced Garcia lacks the legal authority for this overreach (especially in the as-yet Covid-free town). It being an election year, he decides to run against Garcia.

Rendering the intersection of sovereignty and rights double-plus conspicuous, the film adds into the mix growing (mostly youthful and white) Black Lives Matter protests, a neighboring Native American reservation whose police force is often at odds with Cross, and a proposed (and anachronistic) AI data center which some people (including Garcia) anticipate will bring jobs, others (including many Natives and young social justice warriors) fear will threaten the town’s water supply, and still others (including Deirdre O’Connell as Dawn, Cross’s off-the-deep-end and in-denial-about-her-daughter’s-having-been-molested live-in mother-in-law) integrate into ill-defined conspiracy theories involving big tech and bodily purity.

Well-aimed cheap shots abound: Cross’s campaign truck sports a clownish overabundance of signs — both hand-stenciled and downloaded — blaring grammatically challenged warnings about big tech, vaccines, microchips, China, and the Constitution; a fundraiser for Garcia features music by Katy Perry; the mayor’s teenaged son and his friend Brian get involved in the BLM protests mostly because of a girl, Sarah, they’re both after; Sarah, kind-of the Borg Queen of the protest movement, humble-centers her privileged white self in BLM’s critique of white privilege; Brian becomes a BLM true believer and then turns up a year later as a MAGA influencer (interviewing James Woods on his podcast); the operator behind Garcia (whether he’s supposed to evoke more a Russell Vought-type manipulator or a George Soros-type financier is in the eyes of the beholder) ends up switching sides when necessary — ideology and personal dedication be damned — in order to get his AI data center built.

With so much pilloried and satirized, it’s hard to tell where Aster wants us. In fact, the film performs this ambiguity as self-consciousness, in the form of a mysterious band of well-armed agents provovateurs flown by private jet into town for a bit of the old ultra-violence; while they cosplay “antifa terrorists” — a specter introduced by Cross during an official appearance — it’s pretty clear they’re not that. The denouement comes after an apocalypse of killing partly filmed à la first-person shooter with Cross occupying the subject position but little else politically certain. It seems the well-heeled if uncertainly-stanced shock troops achieved their goal: the AI center is built and all secondary conflict is subsumed in the onward march of capital.

It’s easy to call the film nihilistic or cynical: everything is just discourse (or bullshit, depending on your training), the house always wins, there’s no difference whether you advocate social justice or fascist populism. In this account, rather than offering an analysis of the origin of the culture wars, the film posits the culture wars as the origin — and only reality — of (American) politics. Therefore there’s nothing ridiculous (or deserving criticism) in an erstwhile BLM protestor becoming a MAGAt.

While I wouldn’t throw good effort after bad in challenging a diagnosis of its nihilism or cynicism, I’m not convinced the film is (only) reactionary. It’s true: we can justifiably criticize the film for not taking most of its characters seriously. Cross is the major exception, and Phoenix is very good here. Additionally, Aster dismisses women as equal parts monstrous and ridiculous. Beyond BLM Sarah and nutjob Dawn (who ultimately proves morally and politically acrobatic), Emma Stone’s dysfunctionally post-traumatic Louise, Cross’s wife, who still suffers from her late father’s sexual abuse and live-in mother’s denial (and stays home sewing outsider-art dolls), runs off with Austin Butler’s Vernon, a pedophilia-and-bodily-corruption-obsessed cult leader; habitually denying Cross sex, she’s later seen on TV, smiling and pregnant, presumably by Vernon. But Eddington does I think want to take its characters’ struggles with self-imagination seriously.

We can defend Aster’s picture by describing it as interested in an interregnum, when people who can look around and quite reasonably conclude they’re being passed by are desperate for narratives that place them back in the flow of history: Eddington’s slow death, after all, isn’t all Covid’s fault. Everything may seem low stakes, even farcical, because we’re stuck in a small town, but then again that’s sort of the point. It’s Americans’ abiding demand that all politics be routed through the individual that’s actually reactionary.