Faith And Conflict: How ‘Eddington’ Hits (And Misses) Its Pandemic-Era Satire Of America
(REVIEW) It’s been said that the pandemic was as defining a moment for this generation as the Great Depression, World War II or the Vietnam War was for previous ones. It’s no surprise that Hollywood would start to make movies wrestling with COVID-19 and what it means.
Ari Aster’s “Eddington” is one of the first mainstream films to directly address the pandemic and what it means for our society. Aster made a name for himself making acclaimed horror films like “Hereditary” and “Midsommer.” This film is his first neo-Western black comedy, particularly one that so directly tries to address social issues about the time we live in. And while the ambition is laudable, and a lot of ideas land, the unfocused script ultimately ends up feeling more like doomscrolling than storytelling.
Set during the COVID-19 lockdowns, the film follows the standoff between a small-town sheriff Joe Cross (played by Joaquin Phoenix) and mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) over such policies. This fight — along with problems in their own families, like the deteriorating mental health of Joe’s wife Louise (Emma Stone) — sparks a powder keg as neighbor is pitted against neighbor in the fictional town of Eddington, New Mexico.
There’s a lot of smart social satire in the movie. Aster’s filmic thesis is that the problem with the post-internet era, as seen throughout the pandemic, is that we’re all trying to live within a community while all having our own conversations with separate communities online, and the conversations we have with each other mediated by the internet. This makes our conversations unintelligible to those around us — only to further divide society.
Garcia is listening to the governor and his special interest groups. Louise listens to charismatic preacher cults online. Teenagers Sarah and Brian are listening to left-wing antiracists online. Joe listens to his own corners of the internet, his mother and his constituents. On and on it goes.
Aster makes you feel this alienation throughout the film. We don’t get to see the full arcs of the characters, or the full conversations they’re a part of that motivate their choices. This often makes them as unintelligible to us as it is to them. Louise’s descent into Vernon Jefferson Peak’s (Austin Butler) throng, in particular, only comes in frustratingly sparse snippets. This is really effective in communicating how it feels for someone you love to fall away from you by being sucked down a rabbit hole you have no experience in. Another vivid example of this is when Brian starts reciting Critical Race Theory to his parents and the dad asks if he’s stupid.
Lots of instances of blocking do this as well. Characters who wear masks keep us from feeling connected to those who wear them in conversation. Characters will often talk to each other in seperate rooms, blocked by doors or just out of sight. This makes us feel the alienation of the characters from the people who are closest to them. In one of the best third act fight scenes in recent memory, Joe literally has a shootout with masked men in the dark who he doesn’t know and he can’t see. Living life fighting culture wars online literally makes you fight in the shadows against people you don’t know, but convinced are your enemies.
The character of Vernon Jefferson Peak is fittingly the main religious representative in this film. Progressive fears of hyper-charismatic religious leaders like Peak went into overdrive during the first Trump administration, particularly during the pandemic, because of how many refused to follow pandemic lockdowns. Many of them saw Trump as chosen by God to lead the country. For secular coastal liberals, the fact that these preachers — with vast online and network TV audiences — influenced so many countless people to see completely alternative realities to theirs was seen as terrifying. It became the subject — either directly or indirectly — of numerous think pieces, books documentaries during the pandemic (like “God + Country”, which I reviewed), and movies (the best of which, to me, was “Knock at the Cabin”).
This fear was always overblown and often laced with irony. It’s true that charismatic churches like Assemblies of God are the fastest and most sustained growing Christian denomination in the U.S. And it’s true that — like with Louise — mental health concerns are a motivating factor for embracing faith.
Broadly speaking, however, conservative evangelical Christians they fall under are the least political within American Christendom. As sociologists George Yancey and Ryan Burge have noted: Progressive mainline Christians and atheist/agnostics in America are far more political. And they’re just as likely to believe in conspiracy theories as evangelical Christians, just different types.
One of the film’s strengths is acknowledging this. Even as Louise is falling prey to a charismatic cult leader, young guys are joining the Black Lives Matter movement in order to get girls. The BLM movement is shown to have its own conspiracy theories, such as that everyone doing violence in their movement is secretly a right-wing agitator — although this commentary is partly undercut by the context of the scene.
The problem is that the satire starts to fall apart and become unfocused to the point of tedium. Far too many of the problems in the film can be explained less by the society-wide dissolution of embodied relationships and more by certain central characters — particularly Joe Cross — being unhinged lunatics. Joe ruins his relationship with his wife in large part through idiotic unforced errors like announcing his run for mayor online without consulting her. When he finally makes his most drastic choice that defines the third act of the film, Cross has gone so far off the deep end that it no longer feels like a critique of modernity, but that of a lone psychopath.
Likewise, much of the inability to follow each other’s conversations is intentional. At the same time, many of the various conversations were so underdeveloped it didn’t allow the film to say much about them. The female characters were often underutilized and typically only existed to provoke reactions in the male ones.
Stories help us sift through the seemingly random events of our lives into something coherent. COVID was a seminal time in American life, and it’s more than right that we should tell stories about it. But without something coherent to say, those stories stop being useful ways to interpret the noise, and instead just add to it. “Eddington” may make a series of smart observations like a series of social media posts, but it will likely be forgotten just as quickly.
Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at josephholmesstudios.com.