Your Being Manipulated: “Eddington” Is the Definitive Commentary on the United States’ 2020s Batshittification

After seeing Ari Aster’s newest “divisive” ride, Eddington, I returned home and put on Darryl Cooper’s three-hour marathon “Jeffrey Epstein: This was your life!” episode of Tucker Carlson. While I didn’t make it through that long haul in one night, Cooper’s deep dive into Bill Barr’s daddy and Epstein’s first employer after dropping out of college, Donald Barr’s bizarre alien sex slave, Dianetics wannabe sci-fi side project, Space Relations; international arms dealing; Robert Maxwell’s body floating next to his yacht; dead cat heads on Graydon Carter’s porch; and an international pedo ring connected to, well, a whole lot of people on the Fortune 500 list would be an appropriate bloodshot-eyed nearly six-hour double feature with Aster’s too-long but still brilliant, Internet-poisoned, COVID-brained, pitch black satirical Western. This is not just because Tucker’s baffled resting face makes an appearance in the movie, pre-Fox News firing and independent media rebrand, which had me pointing in the theater like the much-shared image of Leo DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. And not just because the “You are here, paying taxes to pedophiles” meme, briefly zipped by in one of the many scenes of vacuous iPhone scrolling, feels more accurate than ridiculous this week, given Donnie T’s Lynchian love letter/birthday card to Epstein.

This exhausting double-feature would be appropriate because Eddington is set in a small, sleepy (fictional) New Mexico town wherein all the town folk are completely fixated on conspiracies, plots, and, sometimes, very real inequities (though they respond to those in narcissistic ways related to their own desires rather than advocating for others), while ignoring the bigger threat—a very real predatory techno-capitalist conspiracy—looming right in front of them. That threat is a forthcoming data center, which will suck up all the water and electricity from the town, much like similar data centers have throughout regions of the United States (my favorite of these stories relates to a poor neighborhood in Texas getting sound-poisoned by a crypto-mining operation. We live in hell). Aster introduces this data center in the opening scene in which a blathering homeless man, who appears to be an escapee from the Skid Row chaos in Aster’s previous Beau Is Afraid, rattles and rambles his way down to the valley where Eddington lies, an almost cartoonish image that reminded me as much of Warner Bros. as macho Western film. In doing so, the hobo passes a sign for the data center, a perfect representation of contemporary America: the mentally ill, who the country refuses to offer proper treatment, and the resources that are going to be drained by corporate demons encouraged by ever-loosening governmental regulations. *chef’s kiss*

I’d say don’t lose sight of that data center, the imminent demise of this town’s very existence. But you will, just like everyone in Eddington itself. They’re too busy unraveling themselves within the batshittery of 2020. Remember that? Furious mask wars between equally annoying proud mouth-breathers and nebby hall monitor maskers. 6-foot social distancing and grocery store lines (a 2020 horror I had entirely repressed). Performative white people hijacking BLM protests. TikTok anti-racism. The black square. Drive-thru COVID test nasal penetration. Smug superspreader government gatherings during lockdown. Well, Aster resurrects it all, like a slow-motion, real-life horror movie. He does so through the eyes of Sheriff Joe Cross, played by Joaquin Phoenix, who is first seen lectured by the neighboring Pueblo cops for not wearing a mask alone in his car. Phoenix’s Sheriff Joe isn’t quite as mommy-issues castrated as his prior Beau, but he’s still emasculated. Case in point: He had been watching YouTube videos about how to convince a child-free partner to have kids before the Pueblo cops stopped him for his free-breathing on Indigenous land. The resistant partner with whom he wants to start a family is presumably his saucer-eyed wife Louise (Emma Stone), or as he calls her in a grating whine, “Rabbit,” who spends her days lying in their hoarder house bed in the dark, making deranged little art dolls that resemble knit versions of Johnny Horne’s gaping-mouthed fishbowl teddy in Twin Peaks: The Return (I want one), and avoiding engaging with her InfoWars mother, Dawn. In an ingeniously cracked performance by Deirdre O’Connell, Dawn prints out nutty articles about the Federal Reserve sinking the Titanic for a little light family reading (note: I saw this tweet in the wild while writing this article).

Though passive in his private life, Sheriff Joe finds his voice and purpose after intervening in a grocery store mask-off after an elderly non-mask-wearing man gets chased out by a gaggle of do-gooders who applaud not letting an old man eat. After buying the man’s cart of groceries and taking a selfie, Joe sees an angle. Firing up his smartphone, he films a car video and announces his free-breather run for mayor, pitting himself against the town’s smarmy incumbent and his nemesis, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). Ted holds Gavin Newsom-esque city council meetings in a bar during lockdown while calling the cops about the ever-present homeless guy (Make him a drink, Ted!) and makes hilariously soppy campaign ads exploiting his wife’s abandonment of him and his obnoxious son, Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka). Joe’s run alienates Louise, who runs straight into the arms of Austin Butler’s Vernon, a cult leader who spins an updated Satanic Panic tale of his own child sexual abuse at the hands of a Bohemian Grove-like cadre of elite pedophiles. If that wasn’t enough, Sheriff Joe also has to contend with a growing Black Lives Matter movement in the mostly white town, sparked, no, not because of George Floyd’s public murder, but because Eric’s friend and lovestruck competition Brian (Cameron Mann) wants to impress a white antiracist influencer cutie who interpretive dances her response to James Baldwin and attends parties holding Angela Davis books like a prop.

Aster excels at satirizing both the left, the right, and everyone else in between’s complete crack-up during this single year, aided by his cast of well-formed certifiably bonkers characters. I’m not going to be a wet lib complaining about the mockery of white antiracist smugness, as Brian’s unwelcome dinner table discussion about dismantling whiteness, which earned him an “Are you fucking retarded” reminder that he is, in fact, white, definitely deserved a chuckle. However, it’s almost too easy to praise. I was more impressed by Aster’s impeccable grasp of conservative camp aesthetics. Take Sheriff Joe’s souped-up SUV turned roving mayoral campaign ad. Plastered in screaming, all-caps misspelled signs like “Your being manipulated” and scaremonger-y photos of Ted Garcia, Joe’s car looks almost exactly like a photo my Florida-dwelling friend sent me of her MAGA neighbor’s 5G, anti-Fauci, pro-Donnie fence, like a live version of your QAnon uncle’s Facebook feed. To nail the look of a terminally online Coen Brothers’ movie (No Country for 4Chan Men?), Aster unquestionably had to spend a lot of time on the Internet, curiously searching the same wacko conspiratorial dusty corners and listening to the same podcasts I do (The whole thing kind of comes off like an extended, absurdist episode of Tim Dillon. At the very least Ari has to have watched the Tim Dillon/Alex Jones episode of Rogan). How else to explain the pitch-perfect visual gags of cuckoo websites, aimlessly scrolled by, with news articles about child sex traffickers taking advantage of masks? I also recognize that if you don’t spend as much time wading in these cesspools as I do, Eddington may not have the same impact. If so, congrats on living a productive life; one movie shouldn’t matter!

It would be a mistake to shove off Eddington as yet another lame centrist “both sides are nuts” argument, which is the error a lot of cranky critics are making. First off, the right-wing-coded characters are clearly more wacko than the left. By far. Those white Eddington BLM protesters may be privileged and self-involved, but at least they are slightly well-intentioned. In contrast, Sheriff Joe wheezes through Charles Manson-resembling race riot-attempting cover-ups, middle-of-the-town shoot-outs with black-wearing masked men, and, of course, a few exploding heads (this is an Ari Aster movie) after his final trigger, a confrontation with Mayor Ted set to the most rewarding use of a Katy Perry song on film. Joe goes so fully off the rails that it’s hard to tell what is real and what is the manifestation of his paranoid, brain-fogged mind. More than favoring one “side” over the other, I’d argue that Aster shows how these sides are porous, particularly for opportunistic white people if they’re provided enough money and attention, especially given a later, rewarding plot twisty punchline with the arrival of a selfie with Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Aster’s critique is even bigger and smarter than that, though, which might explain why the woman in a mask in my screening endured the whole film rather than kneejerk stomping out in a misreading of its intent. This is what sets it apart from so many other 2020 postmortems I’ve suffered through in the last few years like Nellie Bowles’s Morning After the Revolution and Thomas Chatterton Williams’s forthcoming Summer of Our Discontent—and, you know what, I’d add Jeremiah Moss’s godawful Feral City in here too, given its unintentional depiction of the ravages of the woke mind virus, like sneering at people picnicking in the park while you’re enacting an imaginary revolution. Barring Feral City, what most of these 2020 postmortems have in common is a predilection for monomaniacally focusing on the cringiest misguided examples of white guilt in White Fragility seminars or goofy corporate overtures to antiracism while only tossing a cursory glance at the right’s descent into conspiratorial lunacy that resulted in people I know enduring daily death threats for the crime of working retail and faithfully implementing their store’s mask policy. While laughing at the left is more likely to get podcast invites and comes with the added bonus of immediate hypocrisy when turning around a couple of years later and demanding the same kind of free speech crackdowns against rhetorical “violence” now that students are protesting a genocide in Gaza (I’m looking at you, Nellie), it doesn’t fully contend with why so many lost their minds that year—and every year since.

Perhaps because Ari Aster isn’t operating in the same University of Austin sphere as many of these 2020-analyzing public intellectuals, alongside the benefits of a visual medium and a good sense of humor, Eddington can get at an integral part of what happened (and is still happening) to America’s addled citizens. Aster captures the logical conclusion of the alienated phenomenon Robert Putnam noticed in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community: not only has the fabric of civic US society ripped apart as everyone became increasingly isolated but the constant shit-filled sewer pipe blast of national and international news controversies contained within our phones, laptops, and other devices permanently gripped in our hands has filled the gap. Eddington depicts this quite literally with so many characters blankly watching videos of Antifa riots, demanding access to Instagram DMs, or soaking in 5G rants via osmosis while they sleep. The town of Eddington itself, at least in the beginning, has little going on beyond messy personal grievances and that lovable homeless guy’s permanent presence. But, you wouldn’t know it from the locals who rant about 9/11, the World Economic Forum, mask restrictions, and white traitors.

And this is scarily accurate as so much of our focus gets gobbled up by, say, Donald Trump’s swollen cankles rather than things that are happening in our immediate surroundings. We weren’t supposed to know what was going on at all times everywhere in the world—or hear everyone on the Internet’s stupid, malformed opinion about it (and about us). Now, some of this awareness is good. It’s good to be aware of horrors like police violence, Aligator Alcatrez, or Palestinian children being shot in the head by the IDF while trying to get food. And Aster shows that some of this alarm is warranted, like the real racist framing that happens in the Eddington Sheriff’s Department. Yet, in general, Americans cannot handle this continual firehose of information. We’re too self-absorbed. We’re too needy. We’re too crazy. We are not responsible. We don’t really want to deal with how our day-to-day life sucks, as we don’t have healthcare or have a bajillion dollars left in our student loans or are probably never going to be able to retire or are just simply traumatized like Emma Stone’s poor Louise. So, instead, we spiral out and attack pizza joints after staring at Tony Podesta’s art collection, plan to kidnap a governor in a PT Cruiser (with the help of the FBI), torch a Target in a whipped-up fury, or fuck off to live with a cult leader. It’s a fucking dumpster fire.

Literally. Eddington features a scene of dumpster fires. On the nose in a very Trey Parker and Matt Stone way? Sure. But hilarious and effective nonetheless. Aster has never shied away from obvious jokes, like the penis monster hidden in the attic in Beau Is Afraid. At first, I thought of Eddington as a companion piece to Beau, except rather than inward Oedipal anxiety, this is a representation of that wild-eyed fear turned outward into complete societal breakdown and USA USA USA psychosis. Yet, though worlds away from the perpetual daylight sex, murder, and flower crown festivities, Eddington’s dusty southwestern world, where errant napkins roll through in place of tumbleweeds, may have as much to do with Midsommar and the draw of escapism and deranged communities, whether cults or conspiracies. It’s also a better representation of conspiracy than David Cronenberg’s disappointing The Shrouds, which, other than the gleefully morbid premise of watching your loved ones rot on an app, was a mess of AI hotties, lopped-off limbs, and Cronenberg preventing us from seeing Vincent Cassel’s girthy dick (UNFAIR!).

Rather than the slick, techy world of The Shrouds, where conspiracy goes nowhere, Eddington shows how the rabid rubes that populate this country, spending their time working themselves into a lather about masks (while getting COVID) or what makes an antiracist (while soon becoming the next Kyle Rittenhouse)—or whether we should like Eddington—mostly for their own self-serving reasons, don’t realize that the very real conspiracies, like tech oligarchs or, say, honey pot operations that use and abuse underprivileged, underaged girls for intelligence blackmail, are taking advantage of this distraction. Because if you’ll notice, what the citizens of Eddington rarely froth into a frenzy about is that goddamn data center, which just may have required a private corporate jet and a false flag to pull off.