[COLUMN] Eddington is a True 21st Century Western | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Eddington, which is available now on premium video on demand. Real, serious spoilers about major plot developments within the movie - and kinda what the movie ultimately is. It’s hard to recommend Eddington, which is - like Beau is Afraid before it - a very provocative and bold work from a provocative and bold filmmaker. It is, however, one of the most compelling and urgent films I’ve seen in the past year, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot. So consider that a guarded recommendation.

Ari Aster’s Eddington opens with a shot of a barefoot homeless man named Lodge (Clifton Collins Jr.) walking down a long rural road, trying to balance on the thin white line. It’s a clever establishing shot, setting up one the film’s key thematic ideas: boundaries and demarcations.

Like any good western, Eddington returns repeatedly to the question of jurisdiction. The first time that the audience meets Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), he has accidentally strayed beyond the bounds of his authority, crossing into territory policed by the Pueblo, who have their own sheriff. The murder of Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) is complicated because he was shot by a sniper rifle on Pueblo land, with the bullet flying into Eddington, leading to jurisdictional friction.

Throughout Eddington, characters are often separated by physical barriers. When Pueblo Officer Butterfly Jimenez (William Belleau) arrives at the crime scene at Garcia’s mansion, he is forced to remain outside, conversing with Joe Cross and his deputies through broken doors and windows. The film’s first substantial conversation between Joe and his wife Lou (Emma Stone) takes place through a closed patio door, Joe shouting in at his wife, who is curled up on bed unable to look at him. Lou refuses to allow herself to be touched, creating a marriage without any intimacy.

What makes Eddington a neo-western is the film’s understanding that in the modern age, these sorts of barriers and boundaries need no longer be physical. Early in the film in particular, Lou tends to speak about herself in the third person (“has she not gone through enough?” she asks Joe at one point), effectively distancing from herself. So many of the characters in Eddington live their lives through screens – televisions, laptops, phones – effectively constructing a barrier between themselves and reality.

Eddington is a period piece. It is set in 2020, in the midst of the global pandemic. The film is very consciously situated in that particular moment, with key real-life events – such as the death of George Floyd – serving as major plot motivators. Early on, the film places a lot of emphasis on the markers of that period, particularly mask mandates and social distancing. People cannot see each other’s faces and exist at a very real physical remove from one another.

Eddington understands that the pandemic was not a root cause of this collapse of civility and community, but instead an accelerant. In a campaign video, Garcia acknowledges “the racial  and economic inequities that COVID-19 only made worse.” However, Eddington suggests that the lockdowns and health guidelines designed to limit the spread of the disease also create an ideal set of conditions for America’s underlying social issues to metastasise in something more insane.

Throughout Eddington, there is a strong recurring sense that human beings have lost the capacity to talk to one another in any meaningful way. One of the film’s first dialogue exchanges finds Cross arguing with a Pueblo police officer about his wandering into their jurisdiction. “Just listen,” Cross protests.  “I am listening,” the other officer assures Cross. Immediately, he follows this with an imperative: “Shut up.” This quick and early exchange is so much of what Eddington is about. Talking without conversing. Yelling without listening.

When Cross decides to run against Garcia for Mayor of Eddington, the two enter a stand-off in the street. “Can we just talk about it?” Garcia implores Cross. However, the two men quickly get into a posturing stand-off that will end with Cross murdering Garcia. Communication is next to impossible. Eddington suggests that if people were actually able to engage in conversation with one another, so much of the carnage and chaos of the current political moment might be ignored.

In Eddington, the personal is political. The film seems to suggest that a lot of the violence that comes to the eponymous New Mexico town is rooted in the psychosexual hang-ups of the male characters, who lack the ability to properly express themselves and so channel their frustration and their energy into ultimately destructive pursuits. Garcia is a single father, “abandoned” by his wife. Cross is clearly struggling in his childless marriage to Lou, the two having difficulty communicating.

Cross is introduced watching a YouTube video about how best to convince a partner to have children, rather than actually talking to Lou about his own desire to have kids. The couple’s first real conversation in the film involves the pair shouting through a pane of glass. Even something as basic as dinner between a married couple becomes a negotiation. “Let’s have dinner tonight,” Joe pleads. “Let’s just get together, you and me.” He begs, “You and me, dinner tonight, can we?”

Even that small intimacy is impossible. Joe cooks dinner, but Lou shows up with her mother Dawn (Deirdre O'Connell), a charismatic cult leader named Vernon (Austin Butler), and two complete strangers. “I’m so sorry,” Lou apologizes. “I texted you but it never went through I guess.” Later that night, as they lie in bed, Joe makes an effort to talk to Lou, asking her gently about the sexual abuse that she experienced as a child at the hands of her father, who had been the sheriff before Joe. Lou cannot or will not talk about it.

However, despite these small gestures, it’s clear that Joe has no real interest in hearing what Lou has to say. Later in the movie, Joe attempts to use Lou’s status as a sexual assault victim to attack Garcia, accusing Garcia of raping Lou as a way to bolster his own mayoral campaign. In the aftermath of this, Lou records a message about the sexual abuse she received as a child. Joe has no interest in hearing her story; his response to Lou’s unburdening is to cut it off on his phone and unplug a television playing it.

There is a solipsism in Eddington. Cross is running for Mayor of Eddington, but he streams videos of himself delivering stirring campaign oratory while driving through empty neighbourhoods, speaking to nobody. Ted’s son, Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka), mocks Cross, “There’s no one here.” It is all performance. It is all spectacle. It doesn’t seem to serve any real purpose beyond allowing Joe to feel like a man, to feel powerful and valuable

Eddington parallels Joe’s self-centeredness with some of the younger characters, notably those who start a Black Lives Matter chapter in the town. During a protest, white social justice influencer Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle) lambastes Cross’ Black deputy, Michael Cooke (Micheal Ward), for standing against them, leading to an absurd sequence in which the teenagers demand that Michael “take a kneel.” Brian (Cameron Mann), Eric's white best friend, joins the movement to impress Sarah.

In a world where everything is online, every action becomes performance and other human beings become props and tools. “They’re just trying to piss us off, so they can film us and use it against us,” Guy Tooley (Luke Grimes) warns Cross as they prepare to confront young protestors. Cross breaks up the protest carrying a ring light and spends more time talking into the protestors’ phones than he does actually talking to the protestors themselves.

The protestors campaigning for the civil rights of a man killed in Minneapolis are horrified by the intrusion of Lodge, a local homeless man, into their space. Slapped across the face by Garcia, publicly emasculated, Cross heads down town and shoots Lodge dead. It seems that this is the only way that Cross can prove himself a man. After murdering Ted and Eric Garcia, Cross frames Cooke to conceal his own crime. The climactic shoutout finds Cross demolishing the local museum dedicated to the region’s indigenous inhabitants.

There is a strong recurring sense that the gap between the citizens of Eddington has created space for outside insanity to creep in. That outside intrusion is initially abstract, with the protests and the culture war. However, it is ultimately literalized with a private plane carrying a set of “antifa terrorists” (or “crisis actors”) flies into New Mexico to bring urban warfare to Eddington. Aster’s film begins on the edge of reality and soon flings itself into the abyss. Insane ideas are made real. Crazy conspiratorial thoughts are rendered tangible.

Eddington remains sympathetic to its subjects, even as they unravel. It understands their displaced anxieties, which often arise from a failure of others to listen. At dinner with Vernon and Joe, Lou starts to discuss elaborate pedophile conspiracy theories, talking about how abusers “keep these kids quiet so that they think that it's just… it's only them.” Lou isn’t really talking about “Pizzagate.” She is talking about her own father. Like Joe, Lou is turning her own psychodrama into a larger narrative. Her mother Dawn responds to this unarticulated allegation by shutting the conversation down, protesting, “I don't even know what this is.”

Nobody is listening. Nobody cares. Garcia does not deserve to be murdered by his political rival, but he is a cynic and a hypocrite who has sold his constituents out to big business interests. Cross is an impotent man, powerless in the face of larger systems, desperate to seem important. “I'm the one that's taken action,” he tells Dawn. “All I had to do was start it. And now I have to finish it. We are in the center of it right now. We are in history.”

As with Aster’s other films, Eddington is suffused with a very arch sense of humour. At one point, as Cross interrupts one of Garcia’s parties, the sheriff’s internal crisis is articulated by Katy Perry’s Fireworks. As the track stops and restarts, Perry seems to be speaking directly to Cross’ insecurities. “You don't have to feel like a waste of space,” she sings in a repeated line, as if addressing Joe individually. “You're original, cannot be replaced.” It is a delightful snapshot of masculinity in crisis.

It is very telling that so much of Eddington is built around Garcia’s push for the establishment of a massive data center in the region, “Solidgoldmagikarp.” The film itself is somewhat ambiguous about what that center will actually do - “some random AI or deep learning or some crap” – but it will drain the area’s resources and economy. It also serves as an expression of one of the movie’s central themes: the internet is colonizing reality, the “stolen land” claimed by the settlers is becoming a stolen reality, and the barrier between the real and virtual worlds is collapsing.

One of the darker punchlines of Eddington is that the election is actually immaterial. That boundary is irrelevant. Cross is elected Mayor of Eddington, and the data center is still built. Of course, by this point, Cross has been stabbed through the head by one of the mysterious armed mercenaries who turn Eddington into a warzone. To return to that idea of borders and boundaries, Eddington visualizes this knife-to-the-brain by bifurcating Cross’ point-of-view. What Cross sees is literally doubled.

There is something bleakly poetic in the closing moments of Eddington, as Cross is left trapped inside his own body, unable to speak or communicate. Instead, he is made to watch endless online videos and classic movies like John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln. It is in many ways the logical extrapolation of the film’s core themes, a grim vision of the future, the experience of being force-fed an unending diet of vacuous meaningless content in the hope that it might be enough to keep one placid.

Eddington is a true 21st century western, about the erosion of the last frontier.