Ari Aster's new movie, Eddington, is a polarizing representation of a polarized nation. Riley and Gita sat down to chat about what works, and what doesn't.
Gita: Hi Riley! Both of us are here to talk about Eddington, the confounding new film from director Ari Aster. I know my interest was piqued in this movie when I saw the absolutely stacked cast--Pedro Pascal, Joaquin Phoenix (my husband's favorite actor), Austin Butler, and Emma Stone all appear in the film. What got you interested in this movie? I'm not sure if I can call myself a fan of Ari Aster's work, but he certainly gets my butt in a seat.
Riley: I saw someone post about the trailer on social media and it looked interesting; I feel like I haven't seen a ton of media that straightforwardly grapples with COVID, and I was intrigued by what I saw as folks saying it was a Western. I'm not a big going-to-the-movies person, a fact that, combined with the only available seats at our showing being right in the front such that the movie was very literally in my face, made it a pretty intense experience.
Gita: Oh my god. I saw Hereditary and Midsommar in theaters and I would not want to be literally right in front of the screen for that. I enjoyed both Hereditary and Midsommar, but I also have problems with both these films. I think for me, I wanted to go into Eddington and see what he can do outside of the horror framework and honestly, I think this Aster's best work yet.
We chatted a little bit about this earlier, but you mentioned not being a horror guy but also having seen Beau Is Afraid and liking it. That's the only Aster I haven't seen. What's your general opinion of Aster?
Riley: I don't really have one--at the risk of sounding like a philistine, I'm not big on particular directors or anything. I saw Midsommar because it was supposed to be about religion and was disappointed when it wasn't terribly, and I never saw Hereditary because I am a weenie who hates horror. I really liked Beau Is Afraid, or at least the beginning of it (an opinion I also have of Eddington, which I imagine we'll get to!). As a very anxious person, I was intrigued by the idea of "what if all your anxieties are real, though?" because one of the problems I've found with my many anxieties is that sometimes they are, and that just convinces your (my) brain to keep having them in case one day they're real again.
Gita: You don't have to be a big movie guy when you're our resident boat expert. I, unfortunately, have a degree in cinema studies.
I know we both agree that the first act of Eddington is probably its strongest. I saw this movie in a theater that was full of people over 50 and they were all screaming at each twist and turn. Before the second act plot twist, this is a really compelling movie about how living on the internet during lockdown kind of broke everyone's brains. Essentially, Pedro Pascal plays the liberal mayor of Eddington, new Mexico, and Joaquin Phoenix plays his disgruntled sheriff who doesn't want to wear a mask. That conflict is basically the basis for the first half of the movie, before things take a turn for the worse.
Riley: Yeah, I really liked that setup. I think seeing the movie in New York gave that initial conflict a certain weight that I wondered if would read differently elsewhere. My sister lived in suburban Texas when COVID started and we had very different opinions about masks, but I could hold that some of that came from what Phoenix's character starts off saying: you have these blanket rules across the country, but the lived experience of a certain place might make them chafe more than they did in, say, NYC.
Hot take: I thought that the movie started off at least with a kind of earnestness that I think did undergird at least some regular people's descent into conspiracies and anti-public health stuff. People seem to be honestly looking for meaning wherever they can find it in a scary new situation. Some people took advantage of that to prey on others, and some took advantage of it to rise to a kind of power that we've now seen wreak destructive havoc across the country. But I thought the movie and many of its characters did start out with their hearts sort of in the right place, even if I don't believe what they believed.
Gita: I think the most interesting subplot in the movie is Emma Stone's, who plays Joaquin Phoenix's wife. At the start of the film, we see that she stays at home making these incredibly weird dolls all day, while her mother listens to conspiracy podcasts. She's not especially sexually open with her husband, and he clearly loves her and wants to protect her but doesn't quite know what to do.
Over her few appearances, we start to see her listen to Austin Butler's character's podcasts, which are all have a Q-Anon-esque, "Save The Children" slant. The idea of harm against children clearly really affects Stone's character and she slowly slides into conspiracy because of her own unaddressed childhood trauma. That was the most convincing example of how a person who's basically reasonable can start believing something that simply doesn't make sense.
Riley: Yeah, totally. I wish they did more with that guy, I was really intrigued by that. But I wish the movie did more with all of its ideas in general.
Gita: I think this is generally my issue with Aster: in a horror context, you can allude to interesting ideas and not fulfill that promise, because horror often relies on the fear of the unknown. I do think he's better about this without the framing of horror--there's way less shocking moments for the sake of being shocking in this movie--but there's still that lingering sense of the ideas being unresolved or passed over.
Riley: Yeah, I felt like the same thing happened in Beau Is Afraid. The movie starts with all these strong, real things: Phoenix's character running for mayor, and the conflict with his wife, and the drama at the police department and with the town kids' Black Lives Matter protests. Some of this stuff is played for laughs in ways I'm not sure it had to be--the protests are a punchline, but they also made me think about, well small towns can also have protests!--and then all the tension rises to one really strong boiling point. But after that, I felt like instead of following through, Aster just kind of veers in another direction that makes the whole thing feel more like a shrug.
Gita: The protests were really interesting in that they are definitely set up as a punchline: basically Pedro Pascal's son is deliberately trolling his white male friend by hooking up with the extremely woke white teenage girl who plans the protests. But it was interesting to me that the movie also vindicates her in the second half of the film. Everything she says about whiteness defending itself and police violence does end up being correct. It's maybe the only part of the second half of the movie that makes it feel grounded in reality.
Riley: I feel like we're trying to avoid talking about spoilers but we could do that!
Gita: God, okay. It's spoiler time.
SPOILERS
Gita: After an INCREDIBLE usage of Katy Perry's Firework at Pedro Pascal's mayoral fundraiser, after Joaquin Phoenix has been humiliated by him in every possible way, Joaquin Phoenix decides to kill him. And the rest of the movie is Phoenix's increasingly harebrained schemes to cover up the murder and pin it on his black deputy.
Riley: I wasn't sure if he pinned it on the deputy on purpose, or if things just kind of shook out that way? But he definitely wants to pin it on--sigh--antifa and the protestors.
Gita: Okay so, here's the thing. I don't think those were actual antifa supersoldiers (a very funny sentence to write). Throughout the film--in fact, the very first thing we see in the film--there's talk about Eddington building data centers for a tech firm called SolidGoldMagikarp. They're backing Pedro Pascal 100%. After Pascal's death we first see the so-called antifa, but the look mercenary, military, and are notably white and extremely sophisticated in their methods of hunting Phoenix down. The last thing you see in the movie is the successfully built data center, pristine in the middle of the desert. I think these soldiers were sent by SolidGoldMagikarp to protect their financial interests, which would also handily tie into the way that technology is portrayed throughout the movie.
Every time someone takes out their phone in this movie, everything gets worse. It's like a damage multiplier. Aster shoots people taking phones out of their pocket like someone unholstering their gun. Ultimately, the internet and technology is behind every single moment of conflict, and the second half of the movie literalizes that.
Riley: Hhm, that's an interesting take! A friend told me "SolidGoldMagikarp" is an AI reference?
Gita: Not so much a take, I guess. It was the conclusion I drew as soon as I left the movie, one that other theater goers shared with me and took as fact (ALL the old people in my theater wanted to talk to us about what the hell they just watched, lmao). Given the rest of Aster's oeuvre, the guy just has a nastiness about the human race. Evil often wins out over good. I just don't buy the idea of antifa super soldiers being "real" in the context of the film. Earlier in the movie, there's footage of a shootout with police in another city, and we later see that on the phone of one of the soldiers that comes to hunt Phoenix down, as if they're deliberately trying to stir the pot. And I think actually this reference to AI solidifies that for me.
All these characters live on their phones, especially during lockdown. They don't experience reality, but a secondary "hyper reality" that feels more concrete than the actual material world. Antifa super soldiers exist within that hyper reality, a deliberate fiction given flesh by SolidGoldMagikarp. But it becomes the truth, anyway.
Riley: Yeah, definitely. And I think that cynicism goes sort of hand-in-hand with the swerve the movie takes. I thought it started off being about "real" things but then, for whatever reason, couldn't keep it up and just had to dive into weirdo nonsense/ "look at these dumbasses" kind of stuff. And I don't love that, not just because I am an avowed hater of nonsense but also because there isn't that much to do with that as audience member. Like, what kind of lesson is "everyone sucks" or "phones are bad for you," the latter of which I think was especially complicated during the early days of COVID lockdowns because, like, what else were you supposed to do?
Gita: Right! I think the more that Aster delves into the metaphysical, the more he loses me. I don't disagree with the general idea that safeguarding capital interests is behind a lot of what is wrong with out society, but he loves to take an extremely simple idea and just be……. extremely fucking vague about it.
Entities like SolidGoldMagikarp are portrayed as forces of nature. In the final shootout, the super soldiers seem inhumanly strong and powerful, it's honestly a great bit of filmmaking and thrilling to watch. But it's not like a hurricane or an earthquake--it's people making choices, and I suppose I don't see people are fundamentally evil in the way that Aster does.
Riley: Yeah, I wish it had stayed pressed against the setup--is he going to caught for shooting the mayor, what will happen next, what about his wife--and forced all that into its conclusion, instead of going "ah well here's an antifa supersoldier." I think there is something really interesting to mine in the idea of, what if certain conspiracy theories were true, but I also think it's weird that of all the ones in the movie, that's the one to pick? And then don't even do anything particularly interesting with it?
Gita: It's also just………. bonkers violent. It's violent in a way that felt almost funny at a certain point. People get their LIMBS shot off!
Riley: Haha, it's nuts! It's such a contrast to that first shooting of the guy in the bar, which I also felt like was the most shocking violence. I think the bigger the violence got, the more I was like, OK this is just movie violence.
Gita: I am not usually squeamish but the shot of the knife going into Joaquin Phoenix's head got me.
Riley: Yeah, ugh!! But at the same time I'm just like…why? Why any of this?
Gita: The point of the movie seems to be "we are living in a hell of our own making." I don't necessarily disagree with that, but the movie makes it feel inevitable in a way that… I just don't agree!
I don't really enjoy media about why everything is pointless. That said, Aster did for at least half the movie tap into something very real. I don't think I've seen the pandemic portrayed more accurately in media--not a high bar, since it's rarely portrayed at all.
Riley: Yeah! I am not as familiar with his whole deal as you, but I wonder if it didn't just become… too much, the way I think a lot of the consequences of the pandemic are when you look at them too hard. Like, I don't know what I would have done with the movie instead, I don't know how you answer the question of, like, "what is wrong with everybody now and can it be fixed?"
Gita: I suppose I can cut Ari Aster some slack for not resolving the major question of the world's society in a movie.
