"Your Being Manipulated": On Ari Aster's Eddington

Image courtesy of A24

Ari Aster’s Eddington is of a piece with a few other new releases, namely Takeshi Kitano’s Broken Rage and Bruno Dumont’s The Empire, which use satire to lament the dystopian state of 2025. All of these films channel a potent bitterness, reflecting the audience’s presumable confusion and despair. Eddington goes about this in a deliberately provocative manner by recreating a collective moment of turmoil: the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Set in the fictional town of Eddington, New Mexico, Eddington centers the the town sheriff, Joe Cross’ (Joaquin Phoenix) crisis of masculinity. His wife Louise (Emma Stone) suffers from an unknown illness, and their marriage is joyless and sexless. Joe funnels this emasculation into a simmering rivalry with the town’s bourgeois mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who may have had a sexual tryst with Louise when she was still underage.

Eddington begins by documenting how the events of the pandemic exacerbate these existing interpersonal tensions. As COVID-19 proliferates throughout the country, Ted leverages the mask mandate as a form of virtue signaling, preaching community as part of his mayoral campaign, which also plans to construct a data center that would upend the local economy and environment. After Ted humiliates Joe in the grocery store for not wearing a mask (along with a chorus of applause from onlookers), Joe kickstarts a rival campaign, touting freedom, kindness, and a different set of All-American communal values. The campaign, which he runs with two deputies, is incompetent, and quickly derailed by protests in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. Meanwhile, Louise spends her days at home scrolling TikTok and Youtube, falling prey to online conspiracies with her virulently right-wing mother. The pair’s growing distrust towards Joe is eventually justified when he impulsively decides to use Louise’s ambiguous personal trauma as part of his election strategy, pushing Louise to leave him for the Q-Anon type figure, Jackson Peak (Austin Butler).

It’s initially unclear what Eddington is doing besides making a blanket statement about how everyone on both sides of the political spectrum appropriates politics for personal benefit. Aside from being a reductive, egregiously cynical outlook, the first half of the film that’s devoted to this form of observation plays like a bad sitcom, complete with a kitschy, snare-heavy soundtrack. In some cases, the jokes simply aren’t funny, such as the 20 or so minutes devoted to arguments about masking. In one of the more embarrassing examples, I wondered if the strange love triangle between Joe, Ted, and Louise was contrived just so they could stage an early altercation around the phrase “Say Her Name”. In other instances, jabs at land acknowledgments and performative protestors, one of whom becomes anti-racist to win the affection of a girl, run simple jokes into the ground. It’s hard to say whether time will make these references less grating, but what will probably remain frustrating is how Aster refuses to stand behind any of the film’s more politically-charged observations. Giving himself plausible deniability by hiding behind the subjectivity of an easy target (a conservative, self-righteous white man), the tone he creates is somehow inflammatory and utterly bland.

Eddington is much stronger when it doubles down on Joe’s paranoia. Once the film morphs into a deranged thriller, it becomes Aster’s most gripping to date, finding a strong balance between pure genre thrills and dark comedy. The hysteria that ensues resembles a fantasy of conservative fear-mongering rhetoric that devolves from a power trip to a nightmare of commodification. It’s this immersion into Joe’s frenzied desperation that registers more than the half-assed cultural documentation. Not for nothing, the portions of Eddington that focus on Joe’s increasingly-isolated delirium also look better. Widescreen landscapes treat the southwest as a flat expanse sprinkled with shrubbery, positioning both the city and private residences as lonely pockets of civilization. In contrast, Joe’s dissipating position at home is conveyed through cramped compositions of vertical lines, shadowy interiors, and reflective barriers that separate and obfuscate bodies. A particularly memorable exchange in this respect features a shot reverse-shot conversation between Louise (Emma Stone) and a conspiracy theorist Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler). Conversing between a patio and an office as she prepares to consummate her Safe-esque narrative arc, Joe is reduced to an invisible obstruction, a silhouette in a doorway for the characters to talk through.

One of the major questions looming over Eddington is the purpose of its pandemic invocation. The myriad answers reveal the scope of the film’s ambition as well as its fundamental incoherence. Eddington wants to be a realistic document of a fraught historical moment, but is somehow both neurotically specific (e.g. it includes characters scrolling through Instagram feeds of Blackout Tuesday posts) and grossly incomplete (where is Trump?). In treating the pandemic as a turning point when control over America transferred from white men to tech companies, its focus on Joe is problematic. Eddington is an examination of white masculinity, peeling back the violent context that informs Joe’s perspective. At the same time, Aster also means to use Joe’s descent into his own personal hell as a universal representation of the technological bubbles we find ourselves in.

In retrospect, Eddington’s inelegant transition from befuddlement to flop-sweat feels indicative of its failure to connect broader sociopolitical portrait with personal fixation beyond an intellectual level. The only hint of the nastiness to come manifests in the form of the town’s sole homeless man, Lodge. Eddington’s opening shot depicts Lodge trudging towards the town, a tragic figure destined to spend the rest of the film as a dehumanized caricature. The film’s initial conflict is introduced when Ted calls the cops on him. As Joe and Ted, separated by a pane of glass, turn the situation into a partisan argument, they’re united in their collective disdain for a man who’s been failed by the systems they control. Lodge becomes a lode-bearing character, the ultimate object of the cruel American gaze. His treatment is utterly pitiless, and the concision of his plight in relation to the sprawling madness around him is genuinely chilling. Regardless of Eddington’s general inconsistency (I think it’s still Aster’s best film), I haven’t been able to shake Lodge’s peripheral tragedy. Its dark truths about our self-obsessed contemporary moment thrust a depth of feeling onto the whole that make the entire experience worthwhile.

Eddington is distributed by A24 and is in theaters now.