When the world turned to shit approximately five years ago, satire marched ahead, determined to outpace the banality of lived reality. Old-school broadcasts and appeals to reclaim the political center lacked the traction of identity politics, the ironic pizzazz of deep-fried memes, and the virulence of everyone being everywhere all at once, doom-scrolling and tweeting from their living quarantines into deadly oblivion. Now, arguably, the satire industry is busy playing catch-up with the shit it spawned. Irony’s a poison, sincerity a fool’s rush-in, and any hint of the contemporary universe, violently expelled from the promise of nostalgia, meets with a reflexive shudder.
An exercise for the reader, then, is this: should Covid-19 and the past five years be satirized at all? Premiering under a second Trump administration and amidst the pandemic’s ideological fallout, Ari Aster’s Eddington goes for broke with its hysterical yet surprisingly empathetic cross-section of American ressentiment. A microcosm of the nigh-irreversible divide between left and right, the fictional town of Eddington, New Mexico, also straddles the polarized terrain between those subscribing to singular Truths and those who don’t. The town’s sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), is affable enough and generally competent with the management of law and order, with two deputies at his beck and call. But small-town logic can’t quite survive a global pandemic, much less the infectious tendrils of a router connection. What begins with the sheriff’s disgruntled resistance to the mask mandate declared by the town’s mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), rapidly morphs into a political fracas by all and none, for all or nought.
The beef between both figures of authority is personal. Ted spouts vapid, quintessentially liberal rhetoric, welcoming investment from abroad in the form of a proposed data center. (Never mind the energy consumption or the structural unemployment, or the otherwise rote acknowledgements of stolen land.) He also may have impregnated Joe’s wife, Louise (Emma Stone), when she was underage; her catatonic state and constant paranoia, the film implies, could stem from related and unresolved trauma. Joe, meanwhile, quickly escalates his vitriol and falls into a cycle of impulsive action, contesting the upcoming mayoral election with nothing but a makeshift campaign vehicle (his pick-up), his two underlings, and Louise’s increasing withdrawal from his orbit. For a good third of Eddington, the stakes are built around this relatively straightforward antagonism, buttressed by the predawn cracks of conspiracy mumbo-jumbo and Covid skepticism voiced by, among others, Joe’s mother-in-law (Deirdre O’Connell).
But Eddington doesn’t stop there, and taking the risky gambit of using the death of George Floyd as a catalyst for the acerbic carnage that ensues, the film propels itself on its sheer bite, descending into an indulgent if also intensely entertaining potpourri of absurdity. A gun-toting Western with Instagram and TikTok as its central mediums alongside several slurs to boot, Aster’s fourth feature will undoubtedly come under fire for playing it safe and irresponsible all at once, taking aim at both the heavy hand of performative politics as well as the heel of unchecked and unbridled brutality. This view, however, harbors the implicit assumption that satire as an interpretive category always holds post hoc; the collective madness of Eddington, in contrast, hasn’t quite withdrawn its psychological imprint, and the sheer range of its talking points presents a deliberate quagmire in which we — the self-assured arbiters of hindsight (“20/20,” the film’s tagline reminds us) — are meant to stew. Initially rumored to be a zombie flick, Eddington does not exactly head in that direction, but the literal state of things it intuits, coupled with the unsettling currency of its register, threatens to make figurative zombies out of us all.
Published as part of Cannes Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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