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PORTSIDE CULTURE

EDDINGTON IS A TRAGIC MASTERPIECE OF THE 2020S  
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Dustin Guastella
July 30, 2025
Jacobin
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_ Ari Aster’s new film, Eddington, pulls no punches against the
Right or the Left. Yet its message is anything but moderate. _

Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal in Eddington. , (A24)

 

I did myself no favors by checking to see what critics are saying
about Ari Aster’s new film, _Eddington_, a movie that could go down
as something like our generation’s _Network_ or even _Dr.
Strangelove_. “_Eddington_ is so solemnly goofy that its vision of
polarized America might as well not be a satire,” says
[[link removed]] Armond
White of the _National Review_. On the other side of the
politico-literary spectrum, a critic from the _New Yorker _frets
about
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director Aster tries to “score points off mask-wearers, young
progressives, anti-racists, and other targets beloved of
reactionaries.”

Then there are those further on the Left who — after watching a
movie where (spoiler alert) a small-town sheriff machine guns a
cop’s leg off only to get stabbed in the skull by an Antifa
supersoldier — complain that it’s dull. A quick round up of takes
on Letterboxd and social media confirm that countless progressives are
now griping about just how uninteresting the whole thing is — which
is really just zillennial code for “we don’t want you to see this
movie because it has a perspective that makes me uncomfortable.”

That’s unfortunate. Because _Eddington_ is not only a great film
but an uncompromising reflection of all the ways — funny,
embarrassing, shameful, and horrifying — that America put the pedal
to the metal on social breakdown in 2020. And it’s a message that
anyone who purports to care about improving the social condition
(i.e., socialists) needs to hear.

Why Eddington Unnerves

_Eddington_ is a neo-Western about the breakdown of social order in a
small town in New Mexico during the spring of 2020. The twin pathogens
of COVID-19 and a proposed data center by a faceless AI company called
“solidgoldmagikarp” have set the town’s denizens at each
other’s throats before the movie even starts. Joaquin Phoenix, in
one of his best performances, plays the local sheriff, Joe Cross,
whose vaguely conservative, populist outlook clashes with the town of
Eddington’s mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who enforces mask
mandates and wants to roll out the red carpet for
solidgoldmagikarp’s data center. The sheriff then decides to mount
his own campaign for mayor against Garcia.

To say that “mayhem ensues from there” is a vast understatement.

While the action between these two starts to heat up, Black Lives
Matter protests, which broke out during lockdown, throw a wrench in
their respective campaigns. Predictably, some critics are annoyed with
the portrayal of these protesters — the first of many things that
seems to bump them while watching _Eddington_. What we see in the
film are a handful of screen-addicted teens (one with an Instagram
handle containing the phrase “bernieorbust”) who seem more
interested in scoring points with local girls than anything related to
social justice. In other words, they behave like teens actually
behave.

During the protests, _Eddington_‘s lone black cop, Michael (Michael
Ward), is subject to a torrent of abuse by an almost entirely white
group of  #BLM protesters. They scream at him that he doesn’t
understand whatever it is they have in mind when they decry
“racism.” They can’t imagine that a black guy would even want to
be a cop and accuse him of betraying “his people.”

Did this kind of thing happen in 2020? Of course. We all remember it.
Does it make progressives look bad? Yes, it does. And it should. Not
just because it’s ridiculous behavior but because the protesters
in _Eddington_ demonstrate that they are totally blind to the ways
race and racism _actually_ function in the context of the town’s
political and economic life.

Upon being promoted, Michael asks Sheriff Cross whether he was made
lieutenant because of the “news” (meaning, George Floyd). Right
then, you can tell: Michael is perfectly aware of how race gets
mobilized cynically by all sides. Wistfully, he says that his dad,
despite having a long career on the force serving alongside Sheriff
Cross, never made captain. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out
that Michael’s father was likely kept from his promotion for the
exact same reasons Michael suspects that he is now being promoted.

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Still from Eddington. (A24)

That seemingly perpetual cycle of racecraft
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what Aster zeroes in on. He wants us to see exactly how anti-racism
functions to divert our attention from the real drivers of social
inequality in much the same way racism does.

As the focus on race consumes Eddington, a jealous white deputy (Luke
Grimes) suddenly starts to see race everywhere. What before was a
natural bro-y work relationship becomes fraught as Michael is
suspected of being in league with some nefarious black movement (as
his coworker calls it “_Blacks_ Lives Matter”) that flashes
across television screens and social feeds. Meanwhile Michael just
wants to shoot guns in the desert and gamble on crypto. He’s no
paragon of virtue but why should he be? He’s a young man in a small
town in America — of course he likes guns and crypto.

In a similar fashion, Aster shows how easy it is to develop totally
wrongheaded understandings of the needs of any group once race —
instead of, say, their job — becomes their defining characteristic.
In the film, we see the underfunded tribal police from a neighboring
Pueblo reservation complain that they never get help from
Eddington’s (equally tiny) police force. This is a very real gripe,
one that has to do with how dysfunctional municipal government and
local policing has become.

Aster shows how easy it is to develop totally wrongheaded
understandings of the needs of any group once race becomes their
defining characteristic.

Just this month the _Wall Street Journal_ lamented
[[link removed]]:
“The Rapid Rise of Killings by Police in Rural America.” And what
is the source of that rise? The long slow depletion of resources:
“Lower salaries hinder sheriffs’ ability to attract experienced
and qualified candidates.” Worse, as rural America more and more
experiences the kinds of crises long common to urban precincts —
drugs, mental health crises, endemic poverty — deputies are placed
in ever-tougher situations with less support than before.

The _Wall Street Journal _piece makes it clear: low pay, bad
training, no supervision, and a lone-deputy system have led to surging
police violence in America’s rural counties,
something _Eddington _puts front and center. Yet is anyone in the
film interested in tackling the challenge? No. Instead, protesters
spend their time screaming about “stolen land” as if this provides
some solution to the Pueblo’s cash-strapped services. Meanwhile,
Sheriff Cross finds it annoying that the Pueblo officers keep
badgering them to coordinate more, even as it’s clear that his own
deputies have been dropping like flies thanks to a combination of
fentanyl and reckless behavior. His ludicrous commitment to a
lone-ranger model means everyone suffers.

_Eddington_ offers a strong rebuke of that supposed rugged
individualism, embodied by the affable but dim-witted Sheriff Cross.
Aster’s other conservative characters have all the vices common to
their political tribe. A palpable sense of grievance, a quickness to
judge, and a deep hypocrisy between the ways they live their lives and
the world they profess they desire.

Cross claims he can’t wear his mask because of his asthma, not
realizing just what COVID does to a person’s lungs. Moreover, the
movie offers a searing indictment of our uniquely American obsession
with guns. As a friend of mine remarked, it’s rare that a movie as
violent as this one can make a person so afraid of firearms. Yet it
does.

The guns in _Eddington_ are terrifying. There was an audible gasp in
the theater when the shooter of a sniper rifle was finally revealed. A
reminder of how easily someone can go from righteously aggrieved to
murderer in a country so awash with firearms and ammunition — and
remember: 2020 featured one of the highest spikes in gun purchases
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American history. Certainly, it was no small contribution to
the historic murder wave
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crested around the same time.

Eddington’s Tech-Induced Social Psychosis

Whatever is happening to Eddington, it’s not happening because
anyone wants it to happen. It’s that total loss of control, that
loss of democratic sovereignty, over our political and economic lives
that informs the slow and steady loss of psychic control
that _Eddington_‘s characters experience. The psychosis isn’t
simply induced from too much doomscrolling or isolation. It’s that
there is no alternative to doomscrolling and isolation.

The movie opens with liberal Mayor Garcia fighting to get a massive AI
data center built on the outskirts of Eddington. And, of course, he is
doing this not because he’s an evil Silicon Valley pawn but because
small towns need investment. Badly. What _Eddington_ shows is just
how helpless these locales are against forces so much larger than
themselves, and how helpless we are against the crazy-making machines
they’ve convinced us to carry in our pockets.

Not only is the fictional company solidgoldmagikarp able to
effectively colonize Eddington (literally stealing native land)
without so much as a smidge of resistance but it does so entirely
behind the backs — and over the heads — of the main protagonists,
right and left. Nothing can stop the coming AI revolution, everyone
knows that. Everyone thoughtlessly gets on board.

Each character in _Eddington_, through constant interaction with the
social media feedback loop, becomes a caricature of themselves.

It’s why Aster gives the mayoral campaign the not-so-subtle
double-entendre slogan “Your Being Manipulated.” Yes, Cross
can’t differentiate between _you’re_ and _your_. But the result
is more thoughtful — your being, manipulated. Your mind, yourself,
completely mangled by overexposure to the endless reels, the
intentionally outrageous algorithms, and the hyperreality that is our
digitized social world.

Each character in _Eddington_, through constant interaction with the
social media feedback loop, becomes a caricature of themselves. A
liberal leader who seems thoughtful, if slightly patronizing, becomes
overbearing, elitist, and scornful. A sheriff who seems affable, if
slightly incompetent, becomes a ruthless, rageful murderer. 
Unfounded accusations ratchet up and out of control. Everyone becomes
the very thing their online enemy swears they really are.

The Thin Line Between “Outlandish” and “the Real World of the
2020s”

And that gets to what makes _Eddington_ such an uncomfortable
experience for so many — the elements that seem most far out, most
difficult to make sense of, all have a kernel of truth. “Your pain
is not a coincidence. We are not a coincidence,” says Austin
Butler’s character, Vernon Jefferson Peak, a charismatic YouTube
influencer. Vernon believes that he was abducted and molested by some
powerful figure or figures but managed to escape his captors and now
spends his time trying to expose an elite cabal of pedophiles. He
eventually seduces Cross’s troubled wife, Louise, played brilliantly
by Emma Stone. And she takes off with him.

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Emma Stone and Deirdre O’Connell in Eddington. (A24)

But is she really that crazy to believe such an insane story? Just
this week, news about Ghislaine Maxwell possibly getting pardoned
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no less than the White House provides plenty of reason to suspect that
something is amiss. Another bit deemed beyond parody is that
sophisticated Antifa-aligned terrorists would be flown into a little
town via private jet. The scene got belly laughs in my theater. Partly
because it seems to be making fun of the oft-repeated rightist
paranoia that George Soros ships in paid agents of chaos whenever
there is a protest, even to tiny towns like Eddington. But it’s also
clear that Aster is aware that our reality is getting ever-stranger by
the day. In _Eddington_, the viewer isn’t totally sure whether the
Antifa supersoldiers are paid for by SolidGoldMagikarp, some
government agency, or simply a figment of Cross’s
coronavirus-infected imagination. But in the end, it certainly all
seems real. It did happen. In an age of thin social ties — and
social media–induced psychotic fantasy — fever dreams can easily
become reality.

That brings us to the tech company’s very name. It turns out
“solidgoldmagikarp” is a reference to an actual AI phenomenon. A
couple years ago, ChatGPT users discovered that if they asked the AI
to repeat the phrase “solidgoldmagikarp,” it caused the chatbot to
fritz out, unable to make sense of the command. Why? Because for
years, a Reddit user named “solidgoldmagikarp” would log on to the
subreddit r/Counting and simply post ascending numbers. So every
instance of that phrase was linked to a string of numbers in order.
Because these stupid chatbots can’t reason, the machine just spits
out something unintelligible. The error has since become a meme. And
by becoming a meme, the chatbot can only _now_ make sense of the
thing. Digital hallucinations, which are not real in any sense, become
real by virtue of people talking about them enough.

If none of this makes any sense, that’s kind of the point. When we
first meet her, Cross’s mother-in-law, played by Deirdre
O’Connell, babbles totally incoherent conspiracy theories. By the
end of the film, she’s babbling totally incoherent politico-speak at
the solidgoldmagikarp data center ribbon-cutting: railing against the
leftist cabal in government while celebrating new renewable energy;
complaining of the panopticon while praising a tech giant whose aim is
nothing but datamining. The movie opens as it ends, with crazy people
muttering crazy things.

_Eddington_ is a remarkably complete portrait of America during a
period of social and political breakdown.

In other words, _Eddington_ has everything. It’s a remarkably
complete portrait of America during a period of social and political
breakdown. It hits so close to home that it’s — at times —
difficult to watch. Right down to the personal aspirations of ordinary
people and how the society, arrayed as it is, frustrates the
realization of those aspirations. What does Sheriff Cross ultimately
want? We learn in his very first scene: not to be mayor, but to be a
father.

 

Cross’s descent into hell begins with a simple, and reasonable,
desire. A desire for some sense of rootedness and meaning. A desire
that eludes him to the tragic end. And one that so many young people
have found elusive. Instead, he gets glory, fame, and the attention
that all internet-addled would-be influencer superstars crave — a
fate that renders him enfeebled, crippled, and semi-comatose.

While _Eddington _skewers both the Right and the Left, socialists
shouldn’t take offense — not if they have their priorities
straight (after all, the ultimate villain of _Eddington _is a giant
tech company). Besides, the aim of socialism isn’t “to grab a win
for the Left,” whatever that is. It’s much more ambitious than
that — we’re aiming for a victory for humanity itself. For society
to assert itself against the compulsions of anti-social, market-driven
forces. For our pursuit of the collective good to triumph over the
immediacy of our personal vanities. And that’s
something _Eddington_ has a lot to say about.

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Contributors

Dustin Guastella is director of operations for Teamsters Local 623 in
Philadelphia and a research associate at the Center for Working-Class
Politics.

 

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