‘Eddington’ Review
2020: The year we all went a little nuts.
Out of the darkness steps a man.
The man—caked in filth, dressed in rags, hair matted, teeth rotten—is ranting and raving, screaming into the desert night about boxes and control and millions of dollars, that his opponents will fall prostrate before him. He’s mad, but most prophets are, and his point of origin, a new data center being built in the midst of Eddington, New Mexico, to power God only knows what type of monstrous apps and AI, is telling.
The man might be crazy. But he’s our future. And he’s descending on all of us.
THE TAGLINE ON ARI ASTER’S EDDINGTON—part comedy, part western, part anthropological study—is “Hindsight is 2020,” and it’s the only movie yet made that has captured how completely insane everyone went in that completely insane year. Just the convergence and confluence of so many events, all piled up on top of each other, all coming to a head at once.
There was COVID, of course, which was followed by isolation and lockdowns, which led to masking, and then social distancing, which was then overcome by Black Lives Matter protests following the killing of George Floyd, which then devolved into riots and cable news footage of burning buildings and white kids screaming about the wickedness of whiteness, all of which occurred while lunatics on the internet joined a cult arguing that kids were being sold in discount home furnishing, and all of it captured live on social media, streaming 4K video right to the little box in your hands, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
(Oh. And there was an election going on. You might remember it.)
Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) is the sheriff of Eddington and finds himself at the center of this unexpected and unwanted maelstrom, the intrusions on his personal autonomy rapidly multiplying. As an asthmatic, he doesn’t like to mask and is tired of being told to do so; after a confrontation with Eddington mayor and local tech magnate Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) at a grocery store, Joe decides to run for mayor on a platform of personal freedom. He adorns a police jeep with various deranged signs and slogans, and in a lesser movie he would be the obvious and only villain of the piece, the butt of every joke.
But this would be untrue to the moment the film covers, and one of the fascinating things about Eddington is how it distributes its absurdities if not quite equally than with plenty of fairness. Masking and distancing are often less about health protection than trump cards to be played in an argument—Joe himself tells Ted to back off at one point—and throughout the film you see folks with masks usefully around their chins telling others to mask up, or the COVID-conscious Mayor Garcia breaking quarantine to have a drink and a meal indoors with a business associate at Eddington’s version of the French Laundry despite restrictions on gatherings, or a the mayor’s son telling the sheriff to give him six feet despite walking right beside a buddy on the street, neither one properly masked.
Once the Black Lives Matter protests kick off, all of these hypocrisies multiply. Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka), the mayor’s son, posts a deceptively edited video of Sheriff Joe insinuating that the cop attacked a homeless man, which leads to marches in the streets, smashed windows, and an end to distancing. That the homeless man himself comes to the protest and starts attacking protesters who have to pretend they aren’t being attacked just puts a nice little bow on top. Eventually, Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle), Instagram handle bernieorbust, begins delivering lectures on the nature of white supremacy, despite being white herself, which in turn leads the desperate-to-get-laid Brian (Cameron Mann) to do the same, at one point saying during a vigil, “I shouldn’t even be speaking now” or some such. Indeed, the funniest joke in the movie comes after Brian (who is white) tries to explain the importance of dismantling institutional whiteness to his parents (who are also white), prompting an excellently timed comedic pause and the perfect rejoinder. It’s the funniest gag of the year, but only because it feels real, and reality was ridiculous.
Again: 2020 was a very weird time, and this is very much how it was, just a series of minor hypocrisies and self-flagellations, all wrapped up in a pandemic that would ultimately claim hundreds of thousands of American lives. After Joe gets COVID—because of course he does—about 90 minutes or so into the movie, Eddington hits a sort of fever-dream logic and the movie spins out of control. But even here, Aster’s cinematic point is on solid footing, as anyone who suffered through one of those early COVID bouts can attest. The whole country had a fever, and sweating it out was no fun, man.
WRAPPED UP IN ALL THIS is the omnipresence of cameras, the self-created panopticon in which we live. It’s not just that every trip out in public now comes with the implicit threat of some yahoo whipping out their cell phone and filming you for the reprobation of the nation; it’s that we spend our days online, scrolling through endless videos, watching clip after clip on Instagram and TikTok, convincing ourselves that the world is a horrible place.
That Joe’s mother-in-law, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), and his wife, Louise (Emma Stone), fall under the sway of what is at least partly a QAnon-style cult is the cherry on top of the crazy sundae that is Eddington and was 2020. It is, however, interesting that they also wind up as, more or less, the only truly happy characters we follow by film’s end. They went down the rabbit hole and found everything they ever wanted.
Not already a Bulwark+ member? Then sign up today with no charge for the first thirty days. With a FREE membership, you can read our locked newsletters and listen to our locked podcasts. We bet you’ll like it enough to stick with us.
Eddington is only marginally about COVID or masking or MAGA or BLM or any of the events that marked 2020. The insanity was all window dressing, in a way. The events only mattered because we have changed how we live, how we consume news, how we absorb the world around us and project ourselves into it; 2020 was simply the moment when all that came to a head. Eddington is, ultimately, about those little boxes. It’s about that mad prophet stumbling out of the data center in the desert, ranting about control and submission. The little box is an accelerant, one that connects people all over the country: It makes problems in your town problems in my town, it builds bridges between disparate communities of nutjobs. Once upon a time, the town crank had a mimeograph machine or a megaphone; their reach was limited to the people near them, most of whom could smell them well enough to know to stay away. Now the town crank has Instagram, TikTok, YouTube; their reach is limitless.
And we love it. Just make sure to subscribe and smash that like button so the hate machine will feed another nutritional pellet right onto your little box, beaming idiocy straight off the little screen and into your little earbuds. The feed never stops, the algorithm never tires. There’s always more. It never ends. Just a few more videos. You can sleep later. You can never sleep, if that’s what you’d prefer. Who knows what you’ll miss when you’re asleep?
And we wonder why everyone has gone a little nuts.