By Drew Dietsch
| Published
I dipped out of Black Mirror after Season 5. I can’t speak to what came after that, but by that point, I felt I’d gotten all I was going to get out of Charlie Brooker’s particular perspective on our ever-changing social landscape. If I’m being honest, the show never got better than its first two episodes in regards to making deserved statements about the New Information Age, even if it had more creative stories or better produced episodes after that.
I kept thinking about those early Black Mirror episodes –– “The National Anthem” and “Fifteen Million Merits” –– while I was watching Ari Aster’s newest panic dream, Eddington. Here is Aster painting an apocalyptic breakdown through the worldwide nightmare of the COVID pandemic and the society that has taken over since then.
Firing In All Directions
Of course, so much of that society is about our phones, social media, and how we are succumbing to evil mindsets from every direction. Since Eddington is a satire attempting to wrangle every politicized angle and alignment, there is going to be a lot of the movie that either makes you legit angry or foolhardily agree with because you’re taking it at face value.
Aster certainly captures his paranoid rage by the film’s climax, with Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) firing off machine guns in a ghost town where the ghosts are shooting back. Like the rest of Aster’s films, there is a climactic moment of paranoid chaos unleashed that doesn’t feel like it’s “making a point.” It just feels like the peak of Aster’s particular dread choosing the form of the story’s Destructor.
Eddington is set in May 2020 but it’s not trying to be some kind of earnest period piece. It’s arguing, like musician Nick Lutsko did in his song “2021 Has Been So Fun”, that the monstrous fervor that spawned out of the COVID lockdown has never stopped. We’ve been clawing at each other under the spell of something called America, but what does that even mean anymore other than violent noise?
Art Isn’t Always About Answers
While I might feel more strongly about certain subjects than others in Aster’s crosshairs, it’s undeniable that he’s still using film to display his anxieties in the only voice he feels fluent in: movies. Yes, it’s the old “men will make a two-and-a-half movie instead of going to therapy” excuse. I don’t fully subscribe to that since I think art is very often therapy, but I do hope Aster has spoken to a professional about his mother issues.
I was also thinking of the film The Standoff at Sparrow Creeka rural paranoid fantasy made real that reveals how there are no actual heroes to look toward. Eddington is a slow, aggressive, uncomfortable, and bleak cry into the darkness about the emptiness of America’s supposed values. Aster has said that the final shot of the movie is his strongest statement in the film, and it’s a cold accusation about the real New Frontier for the country.
I Can’t Recommend Reality Or Eddington
I can’t really recommend Eddington to anyone. Its topical ambition is too big even for Hell-crafter Ari Aster to make something fully cogent. But it’s a dream and dreams have no regard for “making sense.” As a nightmare, Eddington just feels like the place we’ve made America. In the movie, a character says they encouraged someone to “do their own research” as a jab at that often moronic advice for going down a conspiracy rabbit hole.
When I got in a rideshare to go home, the driver had his radio tuned to a political talk show and the host said he encouraged the audience to “do their own research.” It was the perfect immediate reminder of the mirror Aster was holding up to us. Naturally, the driver was playing the radio from his phone, our omnipresent little black mirrors.
I have to give movies and shows review ratings on a five-star scale. I’ve stopped doing this on my Letterboxd account because I don’t like having to treat art (especially art whose goals are attempts at making you angry/uncomfortable/confused etc.) like a refrigerator I’m making a consumer report on. So, my rating is more about how successful I think Eddington is at achieving its purported goals.
