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Ari Aster’s latest film, Eddington, is the first attempt of a mainstream artist to take on the nuances of the COVID-19 era. While the movie is a period piece set firmly in 2020, the themes go well beyond the pandemic and explore the radical lengths that people go to be seen, heard, and find belonging in the 21st Century. 

Indeed, at its core, Eddington is a tale about communication—or, rather, miscommunication—of our desires, identities, and realities. The settings and personalities are held distant enough to let us laugh at the caricatures, but not held so far that we lose sight of our own reflections. Delightfully non-partisan, Aster manages to take the mick out of both the far right and far left in order to illuminate the subtle, but exponentially more influential, technological forces at play. I would like to highlight a few of these that stood out to me while watching.

Setting

A majority of the film’s runtime is spent with Joe Cross, the conservative sheriff who announces his bid for mayor of Eddington in a momentary fit of passion. Joe is the perfect protagonist to the story because, unlike all the other citizens of Eddington, Joe is only kinda sure of the things he wants. Ted, a virtue-signaling incumbent mayor, wants esteem. Ted’s son wants his father’s affection. Ted’s friend, Brian, wants a girlfriend. Louise, Joe Cross’ wife, wants to be heard. Louise’s mother, Dawn, wants to speak. But Joe… Joe doesn’t know what he wants. At moments he wants to be mayor, other moments he wants his wife, sometimes he wants his conspiracy-theory-spouting mother in law out of the house. But ultimately, Joe is directionless and his decisions are made more and more haphazardly as the film progresses. Running background to all of this is SolidGoldMagiKarp, a BigTech company that wants to build a data center on the outskirts of the town. That part is important. 

Global Village

Halfway through the film, as outrage over the murder of George Floyd is beginning to rise and riots are kicking off in Minneapolis, Joe Cross’ deputies ask him what they are going to do if people begin to protest in Eddington. “That’s there, not here,” Joe responds. And that is the lynchpin of many of Joe’s woes. In the world of social media, everywhere is “here” because there are no geographical boundaries — everywhere is constantly at the doorstep and internet etiquette is now the driver of “IRL” behavior. The town of Eddington is an allegory for the global village — it is the internet encased in flesh. 

Yet, when the world’s problems are pressing on everyone, who really gets to be heard? When the world is in crisis, how do I get someone to witness my personal pain, which is so small in comparison? This question is why spectacle plays such a major role in the development of the story. Cut off from one another and incapable of having honest, emotional conversations, multiple characters take to the familiar Tiktok/Facebook selfie video, complete with a Ring Light or in the front seat of a parked car, in order to air out their complaints. Accusations of rape, disclosures of incest, domestic terrorism; all of it dramatically unfolds in pixels and soundbites because virality is the only way to send a signal through an otherwise impenetrable universe of noise.

An audience is not the same as an empathetic witness, but it gives attention all the same— and attention is a fundamental human need.

Conspiracy

Another major theme is how conspiracy became mainstream in lockdown — a subject elegantly handled in Eddington by juxtaposing the mother-daughter duo, Louise and Dawn. While many people think of conspiracies and ideologies as social phenomena, it is sometimes useful to think of them as a type of psychological technology.

From the outset, it is clear that Louise suffers from poor mental health, at least partially derived from her mother’s perpetual denial of Louise’s childhood trauma. Joe’s reluctance to delve deeper into the subject has created distance between him and Louise, who are no longer sexually intimate. This creates a void that is eventually filled by Vernon Jackson, a Q-Anonesque spiritualist with questionable sincerity who validates Louise’s experience and gives her a position of importance in his anti-trafficking cult. Dawn also goes down the rabbit hole of conspiracies, but for almost opposite reasons. Dawn uses conspiracy as a means of insulating herself from the harsh realities of Louise’s trauma and to avoid the probable truth that Louise’s condition is likely hereditary, passed down from Dawn who is herself very unwell.

In both cases, we get a clear glimpse of how ideology and conspiracy can be used as instruments for taking control over uncertain situations and digesting incomprehensible facts. Whether designed by bad actors looking to weaponize fear or by despairing individuals looking to reenchant their life with a sense of mystery, conspiracies allow people to connect the unrelated dots and make sense of the disparate events that threaten their confidence in reality. In other words, ideologies are useful tools for sense-making. In the case of Louise, Vernon’s religion provides a shortcut to being understood — a bridge that allows her to communicate her pain and revive her desire for intimacy. Dawn, the ultimate conspiracist, becomes a conspiracy — the shadowy puppet master operating behind the scenes.

Violence

Another vehicle for communication that is explored in the film is violence. Violent acts, in many cases, stem from a desire to assert oneself, often in response to a perceived lack of self-definition. Violence forces others into an experience of you, which is the harshest but most definitive form of expression. Marshall Mcluhan in his final interview put it this way:

All forms of violence are quests for identity.  When you live out on the frontier, you have no identity. You’re a nobody. Therefore you get very tough. You have to prove that you are somebody, and so you become very violent. And so identity is always accompanied by violence.

Ordinary people find the need for violence as they lose their identities. So it’s only the threat to people’s identity that makes them violent. Terrorists, hijackers, these are people minus identity. They are determined to make it somehow, to get coverage, to get noticed.

There are multiple statements in this quote that are directly relatable to Eddington. The final act of the film transforms the town into a western-style shooting gallery, where Sheriff Joe Cross is running for his life, firing a gatling gun at faceless, nameless figures he does not know and can’t identify emerging from blackness. This is, apparently, Ari Aster’s interpretation of the internet circa 2020 — a lawless frontier and lethal mud-wrestle for self-efficacy with people that you’re not sure even exist. Is this meant literally or digitally? It’s hard to say — but that’s by design. The character Brian, an obvious nod to conservative darling Kyle Rittenhouse, demonstrates the blurring of these realities. 

BigTech

The clearest winner of the film is SolidGoldMagiKarp— the Crypto/AI company that gets to build a data center in Eddington. The name of the company must have been carefully chosen by Ari Aster, as SolidGoldMagiKarp is a relatively obscure term that used to be able to be put into Large Language Models like ChatGPT to make it speak gibberish. Essentially, the term was able to capitalize on a flaw in training data to scramble the output and cause nonsensical statements to be spit out. 

This is a fitting metaphor for the notion that, despite our technological sophistication, the tools we’ve invented to communicate aren’t capable of translating us faithfully and, perhaps, aren’t even built to do so. These corporations profit and thrive on the chaos they themselves facilitate. Aster ends the film on this deeply unsettling note, with a warning about the fate of a society lulled into passive acceptance of the systems mediating our relationships — a people doomed to being a prop for the voice and agenda of others rather than pioneers and participants of real-world relationships and authentic connection. In fact, the biggest hint to the meaning undergirding Ari Aster’s COVID movie might be this: 

The one thing that no one died of in Eddington was COVID.