‘Eddington’ Is a Visceral Reflection of a Fractured Time
Ari Aster’s fourth film stands as an incisive departure for the trailblazing director
It’s not terribly hard to see why Eddington has become a hotbed of controversy in recent weeks. Set in May of 2020, the movie revolves around the pandemic and the tensions that followed as lockdown/Black Lives Matter protests swept the country. Given Ari Aster’s creative history, I’m convinced that the purpose behind the film was to elicit exactly the shock, awe, and ire that it has.
It’s a calculated provocation by a director whose keen eye for human nature has served as a through line in each of his films. But in his first few, that pathos was more of an embellishment than a centrally defining feature. With the entire town of Eddington as his crucible, what once only simmered toward his stories’ outer edges finally draws enough oxygen to combust. And the finished product is as tense and divisive as life during that fateful pressure cooker of a year.
Half of a decade after the pandemic, the tension in the titular and fictional New Mexico town feels as intimate as it does distant. Aster captures what a strange pocket in time those early days of Covid-19 were, and catapults a collective trauma to the forefront that many of us thought had already faded in our rear view mirrors. Going into the movie, I hadn’t realized quite how much 2020 had been clouded over by time and repression. But there’s something that’s equal parts revelatory and disconcerting in seeing such a loaded year back in the limelight.
Some have charged that it’s too soon to revisit the pandemic. But for me, the demand for movies like Eddington speaks to something I’d begun to notice three years ago. The days of lockdowns and social distancing feel like ancient history. Watching the movie, I was struck not only by how much has changed in five years — and how many of those early-pandemic controversies paved the road to where we are now — but how the recent past can quickly become a bygone era.
By mid-2022, we’d grown so stultifyingly accustomed to a world of N-95s, cycling vaccines, and splintering divisions that our nerves were frayed. Even then, reminiscing on our toilet-paper hoarding hysteria and Tiger King-binging isolation felt like reflecting back on another life. We’d all learned so much, experienced so much, and changed so much — as a society and as individuals — that those frenzied incarnations of ourselves had begun to look naive, even foreign.
Yet despite being one of the most momentous and transformative years to happen in any of our lives, it’s had surprisingly little representation in cinema outside of the seminal Bo Burnham: Inside. 2020 isn’t a place in time that many are eager to revisit. But for viewers like myself, there’s a sort of catharsis in the confrontation Aster offers.
One unexpected takeaway from Eddington for me was that, as scabrously divided as America is in 2025, only five years ago, things were arguably worse. We have a hapless tendency to inflate the hardships of today and downplay the awful lows of years passed. It’s easy to forget the magnitude of what we survived. 2020 was a raging garbage fire that police brutality, conspiracy theories, and mounting death tolls only added napalm to.
It’s atypical that the five year benchmark is long enough for this kind of narrative to feel like a historical documentary. But 2020 had a time-distorting effect that Eddington expertly characterizes. Days dilated at the same time that they accelerated. Fraught months flurried by even if the moments that comprised them were crushing, fearful, and claustrophobic. They were simultaneously grueling and splenetic. Slow, suffocating, and rapid-fire frantic. And the director pulls no punches in exploring those dichotomies.
Living through it, I was sure we’d reached a shift so profound that it would delineate everything into a stark before and after. “Before Corona,” and “After,” we’d soberly say as though we were preparing to reset our 2,000+ year count. We spoke of “new normals” and “old ways” that would never return. We mused seriously about the demise of movie theaters and handshakes and all of the never agains, but eventually — miraculously — we resurfaced on the other side. And now, there’s an eerie humor in seeing on the big screen the ways in which our alarmism was overblown.
Aster illustrates how that “great pause” was more congruous with the electronic lives we’d built than we understood at the time: we reverted to the worst forms of ourselves and became more digital creatures than we were already. Rather than the end of an old age and beginning of a new one, it served as a hard launch of the digital world we’d begun erecting twenty years prior. It was just the flashpoint when the rising tide could no longer be ignored.
The discords of 2020 remain a wellspring of unresolved tension, and I think there are few directors more equipped to address the horror and disunion it entailed than Ari Aster. Yet more than a horror movie, unlike his first two films, this fourth entry is a darkly satirical, psychological, and meticulously scattered romp of a story.
But emerging from the fever dream that is Beau Is Afraid, Eddington may actually be the director at his most grounded yet. The cinematic prowess that defined his first few films is muted. But the restraint serves the story well. A few scenes illustrate Aster’s love for the perfect shot, but it’s the manic and unadorned camerawork that drives home the chaos of the moment.
One of the components that makes Eddington most divisive is its scathing analyses of both Republicans and Democrats. The right wing is made to look like reactionary fools for their denial of the virulent disease spreading the country, and the left wing is made to look impressionable and self-righteous for championing political talking points derived from their Instagram feeds. Pedro Pascal’s Ted Garcia, the town’s Democratic mayor is generally well-meaning, but is nearly as ideology-driven as his fragile, hypocritical, and anti-mask opponent, Ted Cross, played by Joaquin Phoenix.
Among the townspeople are raving conspiracy theorists, virtue-signaling progressives, and undecideds at the mercy of their social media algorithms. Few figures, if anyone at all, are depicted generously. They’re little more than caricatures, but I can’t help but find a biting accuracy in the one-note portrayals.
It was interesting being forced to consider what role my friends, family, and I played in the microcosmic portrait of America that Aster paints. Were we reflexive in our beliefs? Did we buy into the half-truths? The outright lies? Did we castigate our neighbors through masks that hung beneath our noses? Were our politics performative? Did we struggle to balance the loneliness of life in quarantine with the danger of the disease? Did we mistake outrage for accuracy?
Another theme I took away from Eddington was that, even as our politics tear us apart, some things remain the same. Five years after the virus, it’s easier to level blame against the CEOs and social media titans that encouraged our divides. The unrepresented are still unrepresented, the insane are still insane, and the corporate fat cats still find ways to come out on top. Regardless of the weight we put on individual candidates and races, there’s a daunting inevitability to certain outcomes. And there’s an underbelly of society that lives in stark-raving indifference to all of it. In Eddington, it’s the town’s drunk that seems the only one who’s oblivious to the pandemonium taking place around him, and there’s something enviable in his disconnect.
In some ways, Eddington is the photo negative of Aster’s prior film. Where Beau Is afraid was all style with little takeaway, Eddington is raw and undecorated, yet bursting at the seams with ideas. Some of its themes feel at odds with one another, but it’s that moral friction that makes it feel like such an impeccable glimpse into that hectic point in time. It’s supposed to feel dizzying.
Interpretation is left largely up to audiences. There are red herrings left and right throughout the movie, and determining where the plot is headed in any given moment will be tricky for even the most eagle-eyed observers. Piecing together what it all means once it concludes may be more challenging still.
But when movie discussion hijacks the car ride home, it’s generally a good sign. And Eddington unapologetically continues Aster’s record of leaving viewers with a copious amount to discuss.
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You're an excellent and insightful writer, Ben, and your article makes me want to see this film.