Eddington
Ari Aster wants you to face your demons in Eddington
It can be necessary to focus on and continue living in the past when something traumatic happens. As individuals and as a society, we tend to dwell on past events and analyse them to no end in order to understand what went wrong, and how we can do better. On the other hand, it’s easy to just completely erase the narrative from your mind and forget said trauma. Why relive something that was so hard to live through in the first place? Ari Aster’s newest film Eddington thrusts viewers into the un-comfortability of reliving our generation’s defining moment, the COVID-19 pandemic.
In May 2020 in the small town of Eddington, political and social tensions rise when a hyper-scaled data centre is being built nearby. This is the catalyst for increasing uproar in the community, starting with peaceful protests led by the teenagers in town and leading to outright anarchy. Within the confines of this film, Eddington is the boiling pot of unrest in modern America. Although I’m not American, this backdrop is incredibly familiar, and it will be to anyone who was politically conscious in 2020. Aster combines the individual and collective experiences of this event to create a cacophony of bizarre characters who intertwine in various ways.
Aster frames this anxiety through a western lens, with Eddington being a sweltering town in New Mexico, miles and miles away from any other cities. So, not only is the town itself casting all sorts of aspersions on the characters, but it’s the interpersonal relationships that unfurl the most political stress. The two protagonists, Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) and Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) have equal influence in the town, but are vehemently opposed to one another. Cross is your typical redneck conservative who has a narrow view of the world, and he tends to thrust that view onto anyone who slightly challenges him. Whereas Garcia is a rule follower - for the most part. Garcia seems to be on the same page as Cross politically, but his social attitudes are vastly more acceptable, hence his popularity against Cross when he tries to oppose Garcia as Eddington’s new Mayor. They represent two sides of the same coin when it comes to toxic masculinity, which makes for a bizarre showdown of two egos. There are outrageous moments between the two that at the end of the day aren’t so funny as they were when the scene began. Garcia is heralding the end of the community as we see it with an AI data centre that will wreck the surrounding environment and its people but benefit his pockets. Meanwhile Cross is doing so by upholding backwards views of society that do nothing but divide people further.
There are plenty of other characters who reflect every view someone could possibly have of the political landscape that existed in 2020. You have teenagers reacting to the George Floyd murder, creating their own Black Lives Matter movement in Eddington. Some are authentically passionate about the cause, and some are participating to earn brownie points before turning back to the convenience of their white privilege. Then there’s the conspiracy theorists whose reality becomes distorted into believing the insanity of those who make them believe there is a greater reason for all the madness. Cross’ own wife (Emma Stone) & mother-in-law (Deirdre O’Connell) fall into this trap. When they give into the paranoia, Cross loses all sense of decorum (if he had any to begin with) and this is when Aster’s chaotic nature really takes off. All of these people deeply care about the world and agree something is wrong, but nobody can agree on exactly what that is, which is the defining rhetoric of the film.
The final act of Eddington is the explosion that the film is building to in the hours preceding it. Cross descends into madness after his world as he knows it falls apart, and as a result political violence erupts. It upholds the dread you feel and brings it home in a hilarious yet depressing way. The balance Aster strikes here is admirable and reminds me why he is one of my absolute favourite filmmakers; he makes the image of a facemask and an IPhone as powerful as that of an assault rifle.
Due to the nature of highlighting every side of the conflict unfolding in Eddington, Aster has been accused of being bilateral in his approach. These criticisms fail to miss the point that Eddington is not setting out to prove a political point. Aster is not trying to appeal to conservative or liberals. He is merely holding up a mirror. We are watching a heightened reflection of our society, and what we see and interpret from that is up to us.
Eddington is in Australian cinemas on the 21st of August!
