Eddington (2025)
Written and directed by Ari Aster
I wrestled with making this or One Battle After Another my top film of the year, and I ultimately decided this should be the one. That likely won’t surprise longtime readers, as I haven’t hidden my love of Ari Aster’s work. Like everyone else, I was a little thrown off by Beau Is Afraid, but I still loved that film. There was an honesty in how Aster addressed the anxieties of the modern age—the creeping, agoraphobic paranoia that feels as if it has swallowed American society whole. He understands that we are living in a time where reality is warped to a breaking point, and with that comes a deep, growing sense of unease. If I had to compare Eddington to another film, I’d probably say Todd Haynes’s Poison: a contemporary horror story that leans more toward the slow-burn dread of Carcosa than a gory slasher.
Aster tackles 2020 and the effects COVID had on one community in the American Southwest. It’s late May in Eddington, New Mexico, and the societal cracks are about to grow much wider. Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) lives with his emotionally unstable wife, Louise (Emma Stone), and her mother. Something happened to Louise when she was young, and Joe comes to conveniently believe it was his rival in town, Mayor Ted Garcia. The two get into a spat over mask-wearing in the local grocery store, and from there Joe becomes convinced he should run for mayor. In the background, other townsfolk become caught up in the Black Lives Matter protests happening across the country, though several of them are involved for personal reasons rather than the movement itself. There’s also the reservation police attempting to maintain their boundaries from Eddington, as well as a creepy, charismatic preacher who Louise becomes enthralled with.
Of all these subplots, the most important is the love rectangle that forms between two teen boys—one of them Garcia’s son—a cute young blonde activist, and her ex-boyfriend, one of Joe’s deputies and one of the few Black people in Eddington. While Joe posts videos about his frustration with masks and what he sees as a growing lack of respect between people, the Black Lives Matter movement becomes a stage for this four-way relationship of conflicts. This isn’t a critique of the ideals of the activism at all, but rather an authentic take on how hyper-individualism and petty grievance so often subsume social justice movements in the United States.
Every character in the film is frustrated and fixated on some personal problem, failing to notice the real danger to the community looming in the background. SolidGoldMagiKarp is a data center attempting to buy land in the city to build its facilities. They’ve cozied up to Mayor Garcia and don’t really seem to register as a concern for Joe. We’ve all read the news stories about data centers popping up across the country and bringing with them pollution and drought. These developments happen because we get caught up fighting our neighbors over the divides our institutions encourage. Similar to COVID, we failed to see it coming, and by the time it arrived, there was only stasis in its wake.
Aster isn’t being darkly serious, as that has never been his style. The sweeping vistas and classic score are meant to evoke Westerns, a genre rooted entirely in American myth. Westerns played a significant role in post–World War II efforts to build a national identity through media. Cowboy stories had been popular since the 19th century, but the deluge brought on by mass media and television intensified their cultural impact. Ronald Reagan’s image in a cowboy hat on horseback is one of those pieces of Americana burned into my childhood memory.
What ultimately earned this film my top spot is that it stands as a perfect piece of art about our present moment. I believe art should be descriptive, not prescriptive. Art should be a carefully curated exploration of whatever the artist finds worthy of sustained attention. It’s because of the inane, surface-level discourse I’ve seen over the past year surrounding films like One Battle After Another, Bugonia, Marty Supreme, Sinners, and others that I have zero interest in the opinions of 99% of people in the United States about anything. The inability to process nuance or understand the complexities of a theatrical performance has rendered these reactions utterly useless. The majority seem to view film as just another form of emotional numbing, a simplification of morality. They want Disney Channel acting in their media.
Eddington is an epitaph. Aster never offers a solution, because that’s not the purpose of art. Art is a mirror. He simply shows us how the country looks to him from his perspective, and I believe he is an astute observer. Every person in the film completely lacks empathy. Some fake it for a while—Joe included—but when he gets his feelings hurt, he becomes the worst of them all. The United States, as we know it, is over. Our lack of empathy at the height of COVID made that painfully clear. I sit here not contemplating a hopeful future, but hoping for a peaceful death. I don’t believe all of humanity is doomed, but this particular place is rotten to the core. James Baldwin once said the world is held together by a very small number of people, and he was right. Imagine what kind of place this could be if we amplified that empathy. I don’t imagine it will happen here, and certainly not in my lifetime.
Humans are awakening apes. We barely comprehend the cosmos around us, often fashioning crude explanations rooted in superstition to avoid diving headfirst into learning and evolving. You see it in the way the slogan “Black Lives Matter” was disparaged by reactionaries spouting “All Lives Matter.” Then cut to Renee Good being murdered in cold blood by ICE slave patrols, and not a peep from those same people. These are also the people who like to talk about “Second Amendment solutions” while kneeling down to lick shit off fascist bootheels. Eddington’s central theme is that people are so consumed by petty grievance that they are blind to the civilization-ending perils just outside their periphery. To say Aster is wrong is simply to broadcast your ignorance.
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