In the early days of COVID-19, people grasping for precedents started reading up on the Spanish flu, the calamitous pandemic that began in 1918 and is thought to have killed 50 million people worldwide. More Americans died of that novel pathogen than in all our country’s 20th-century wars combined. But unlike those wars, it didn’t leave much of a cultural mark. With only a few exceptions, like the novel “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” it barely made its way into art or collective memory.
At the beginning of the COVID pandemic, I remember finding this puzzling. When it was finally over, it made perfect sense. Having slogged through something hideous, many of us were desperate to move on. There have been a few COVID novels, a handful of mostly forgettable movies and one truly great contemporaneous comedy special, Bo Burnham’s “Inside.” But mostly, artists have avoided reckoning with the apocalyptic events of 2020, even as we’re still trapped in their terrible aftermath.
That’s why I was so excited to see Ari Aster’s new movie, “Eddington,” the first film I know of to really capture what it was like to be alive during the year America cracked up. A director best known for his berserk horror movies — especially the lurid, hallucinatory “Midsommar” — he’s well suited to tackling the nightmare of our national descent. During the pandemic, Aster told me, “I was in a state of anxiety and constant dread. I still am now. It’s worse than it was, and that’s sort of the state that I was in while I was writing the script and making the film.”
As someone who’s been living in a similar state for years, I appreciated the way “Eddington” metabolized it into art. Such art might not be pleasant, but it can help us get our bearings in a world plagued by viral, political and epistemological catastrophes. “I have felt desperate for more art about this moment, and I’m always excited when I encounter anything that’s grappling with whatever’s happening,” Aster said. I feel exactly the same way.
Aster’s movie takes place in the fictional small town of Eddington, New Mexico, in the spring of 2020. The first half of the movie is a dark comedy about the conflict between Eddington’s beleaguered conservative sheriff, played by Joaquin Phoenix, and its slick, tech-optimist liberal mayor, played by Pedro Pascal. They live in a community convulsed by battles over mask mandates, rampant conspiracy theories and racial justice protests, and, in the background, a fight over the building of an artificial intelligence data center by a company called solidgoldmagikarp. But after starting as a quasi-realistic social satire, “Eddington” morphs into something far more surreal and violent, as if its characters’ mounting hysteria is infecting the storytelling itself.
“Eddington” was controversial when it premiered at Cannes; some people reportedly walked out, though the ones who stayed gave it a long standing ovation. Its politics are slippery; panning it in Vogue, Radhika Seth called out the film’s “punchlines about Black Lives Matter rallies, anti-racist rhetoric, notions of ‘dismantling whiteness,’ people listing their pronouns on Zoom and perceived political correctness gone too far.” I understand where Seth is coming from; I had a somewhat similar impression during the first part of the movie, before it takes a shocking turn. (Here is the place to stop reading if you want to avoid even vague spoilers.)
Initially, the movie’s sympathies seem to be with the sheriff, Joe Cross. We see him being hectored to wear a mask when he’s alone in his car and then sticking up for an old man who doesn’t want to wear a mask to the grocery store. (The image of masked and distanced people lined up for their turn to shop brought back a flavor of depression I’d somehow suppressed.) Cross seems basically decent but befuddled — by his sickly wife and her growing obsession with a QAnon-style cult, by bratty Black Lives Matter protesters, and by the general atmosphere of ennui and acrimony in his locked-down town. When he decides to run for mayor, his plaintive slogan is “Let’s free each other’s hearts.”
Watching this, I momentarily wondered if Aster was one of those guys who, over the course of the pandemic, had been radicalized against the left. But then, as Cross’ feelings of humiliation and frustration build, he commits a series of evil acts, as if he’s embodying the Black Lives Matter movement’s darkest suspicions about police criminality. In the film’s last section, the tone shifts again, as shadowy outsiders appear, and “Eddington” starts to seem like an episode of Alex Jones’ Infowars come to life. The movie’s characters are deeply paranoid, and in its final minutes, as Aster said, “the movie suddenly becomes paranoid, too.”
These narrative lurches are destabilizing. At one point near the end, I wasn’t sure I understood what was happening. (Are those outsiders … antifa supersoldiers?) The confusion seems somewhat intentional. “I wanted to pull back and basically describe the structure of reality at the moment, which is that nobody can agree on what is happening or what is real,” Aster said. “It’s about a community of people that aren’t a community. They’re living in the same rooms, but they’re not living on the same plane.”
One reason the pandemic so damaged America’s collective sanity is that it forced us to live on the internet, and “Eddington” is about a world where the borders between online and off have collapsed, perhaps by design. Ultimately, though it’s barely on screen, the movie’s most powerful villain is solidgoldmagikarp. It emerges, after a lot of blood and death, as a singular beneficiary of the town’s derangement and a reminder our informational pandemic is just getting started.
