'Eddington' is the movie we deserve

I'd been meaning to see Ari Aster's latest film, Eddington, ever since its first trailers dropped, and while I didn't read many reviews before seeing it, the little feedback I'd heard was that it was making a lot of people very angry for a lot of different reasons. I've already covered people getting angry at a movie for no discernible reason, so at least this time around I kind of understand why people would be angered by some things in here, but it still seems out of whack, and while this is a movie that on its face seems like a movie where there's very little subtext, just a little reflection after viewing seems to mitigate any of (what I understand to be) the overarching criticisms.

Doing a quick whip-around of some review headlines is also disappointing. The New Yorker refers to it as a "self-satisfied COVID satire." I don't think this movie is self-satisfied at all! That hyphenate could very well be applied to Aster's previous film, the exceedingly self-indulgent drama/satire/whatever-it-was-supposed-to-be, Beau Is Afraid, a movie with very long stretches that I absolutely despised, and yet still found things to appreciate. With Eddington, Aster actually has a story grounded in reality and has observations to make (although pointedly avoids explicitly saying what he wants to say). While the movie at first blush threatens to be as overstuffed as Beau Is Afraid, it's shocking to realize that COVID contained all of the craziness packed into this film (Black Lives Matter! Coronavirus! Child trafficking panic! TikTok! Kyle Rittenhouse! QAnon! LLMs!), and you essentially cannot discuss or encapsulate or reflect on the most pivotal stretch of months in our recent history without attempting to show the breadth of the mania and hysteria that first changed us, and then ultimately doomed us.

As I said, I understand a bit of the anger at a surface-level reading of this movie, as while I was watching, I was a little irritated that Aster seemed to be putting his thumb on the scale of "Antifa was almost as bad as the Right during this time." By the end of the film, it was crystal clear where Aster's convictions lie, but I also read some astute analysis pointing out that the film is bookended – literally begins and ends – with the big new business that is coming into the titular town of Eddington, a company named "SolidGoldMagikarp," which is a resources-plundering tech entity that is either AI, an LLM, or some variation on these two things that has every industry on earth so twisted up these days. The name of the company itself irked me right away, as I thought it was a bizarre and unsubtle Pokemon shout-out from the guy who made Midsommar and Beau Is Afraid. I have since learned that "solidgoldmagikarp" is often cited as an example of a "token," or string of words or characters, that makes AI and similar learning models behave erratically. In other words, when an AI like ChatGPT encounters a phrase similar to this, it cannot make sense of nonsense, so it tries to come up with a new reality where the machine understands what it means.

The positioning of this corporation as the center/crux/intent of the story, when it otherwise seems like a quaternary concern in the movie, makes it pretty clear that Eddington is not a film about the Left or the Right, but about how everyone in America is grist for the mill of capitalism, and that the agents of commerce will drive the populace as insane as they need to in the interest of gaining control of every available resource.

All of that to say: this is one hell of a movie, albeit one that is by no means for everyone. It's dark as hell, nasty as all get-out, and isn't afraid to kill its darlings. Joaquin Phoenix is incredible here, as he has absolutely cornered the market on "put-upon loser extremely out of his depth and entirely ill-equipped to handle the situation." It's what he does best, and you have to go back to Walk the Line or We Own the Night to find one of his roles that doesn't fit the description. (Okay, at least he is equipped to handle the situation in one of my favorite movies, You Were Never Really Here, but the vibes are certainly the same.) As Sheriff Joe Cross, we witness in seemingly real time a man with endless resentment get gradually nudged by his circumstances and the allure of social media to become a full-fledged monster by movie's end. Pedro Pascal and a stellar supporting cast all shine here, but this is Phoenix's story, top to bottom, and he nails every last bit of it.

I thought Eddington was fantastic, and it became more fantastic after I sat and ruminated on it and did even a tiny bit of reading of some deeper analysis. I hope that Aster reins in his worst impulses as gives us more Eddingtons going forward, and fewer Beau Is Afraids.

We will undoubtedly get many more movies about COVID in the coming years and decades, but I imagine few of them will be as unflinching and unsparing as this movie was. The truth is, we deserve every bit of shame to go around about how we, as a country, responded to that moment in history.