Set in late May 2020, Ari Aster’s Eddington is the first epic Covid period piece in American cinema. At times it draws upon the expansiveness of directors like Robert Altman and Paul Thomas Anderson but in a locked down, socially distanced era, by way of a cast of characters that radiate out from two men in a small New Mexico town: Mayor Ted Garcia, played by Pedro Pascal, and Sheriff Joe Cross, played by Joaquin Phoenix. From the advertisements, it looks like this might be a simple standoff narrative, a more dramatic riff upon Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis’ showdown in The Campaign,but the plot is far more diffuse than that. Likewise, the message of the film as a whole is much blurrier than the promotions would suggest; at times, Aster seems to be deliberately opting for ideological messiness in opposition to the pandemic’s rhetoric of purity and purification. Across it all, Aster also works in wonderful period touches, whether it’s news events playing in the background, the social media blackout in the wake of George Floyd, or the escalation of misinformation as vaccines emerged on the horizon. The sum total is a simmering unease that bleeds the Covid era into the present, drawing surprising and often provocative connections between the ways we think and feel now and the lingering effects of the virus.
In that sense, Eddington attempts to visualise something like Covid affect – or perhaps more accurately, long Covid affect. First and foremost, Aster imagines the Covid era as a western, full of standoffs at thresholds, people pointing fingers’ in each other’s faces. However, this western focus is merely part of a broader attempt to evoke the dissociated spatiality of Covid America, one driven by atonal juxtapositions between cavernous socially distanced spaces and social media that is too bright, intense and close to our faces. Much of the first half of the film alternates between the enormous tumbleweed vacancies of the classical western (now reimagined as the mandatory six foot distance between people) and social media interfaces that flood and crowd the screen. Right when it should be opening up the world, technology is deadened and leadened by torpor and opacity, leading one character to question “is the end goal of media the end of mediation?” and producing vertiginous oscillations in scale between the widescreen grandeur of mid-century cinema and the screenlife style of cinema pioneered by films like Unfriended, Searching and Profile. These latter films, which unfolded entirely on social media interfaces, make themselves felt at key moments in Aster’s screenplay, such as when Mayor Garcia is holding a Zoom meeting while emails pop up, or when Sheriff Cross is scrolling through his phone at the office. In both cases, as in the screenlife thriller, social media downtime is imbued with an eerie sense of prescient apprehension, as if the key to some nefarious conflagration of events is just a click or a tap away.
This alternation between space and screen situates much of the film in the soporific torpor between sleep and waking that was one of the signatures of the pandemic. Most of the characters don’t seem to sleep per se – they just experience ellipses in consciousness, which are reflected in a soundscape that is largely silent but with an edge of distant dissonance. In a throwback to Beau is Afraid, the more chaotic lockdown becomes, the more that Phoenix’s character, in particular, sleepwalks semi-obliviously through it (his first purchase at the supermarket is SleepAid), as bed and phone collapse to produce images that are irreducibly of the pandemic but in ways that are hard to fully define; most memorably, a laptop lying on its back, screen facing the ceiling, keyboard suspended in space, next to Sheriff Cross’ couch, dropped there in some semi-sombient desuetude that he no longer remembers. This fusion between bed and phone informs the general blurring of all the film’s spaces; the sense that social media is too close to the physical world and yet incapable of providing it with any reprieve, as when the main street lurks, indeterminate, in the background of a shot in which Sheriff Cross films himself on his phone, his hands on the steering wheel reflected on the screen, before we cut back to the face of his wife Louise, played by Emma Stone, reflected in her laptop as she watches it. These reflections and reflections-of-reflections percolate throughout the film, as social media interfaces leave a sticky residue on Aster’s own images, preventing them from properly immersing us in the spaces that they tackle in turn.
In this way, the town of Eddington becomes the void at the heart of Covid – a space where everyday life gradually loses its tonality, its cohesion, its rhythm, the thresholds that keep it regulated. Interiors are dim, exteriors are dirty, and there is no proper juncture between light and dark, night and day, especially in Sheriff Cross’ bedroom. In one scene Louise lies in bed, Sheriff Cross is almost blinded by the glary light outside and Louise’s mother Dawn, played by Deirdre O’Connell, can dimly be seen through the curtains, in three incommensurate and incongruous chunks of space (too dissonant to even be described as “planes”). With no external world to calibrate reality any more, it’s almost inevitable that the characters in the film start to spiral off into occult ceremonies and arcane rituals, producing a looming sense of doomsday, albeit without a properly collective dread of the end times. This is apocalypse without shared experience, an eschatology revealed to each person in their own monadic isolation.
That makes for quite a complex atmosphere, one in which grandiosity can easily and queasily lapse into absurdity at any moment. Aster often captures this through his soundscape, which is difficult to situate decisively as diegetic or as non-diegetic and always feels as if it could cut out or escalate at any moment. He also links this constant oscillation between pathos and bathos to the rise of a “very online” class that emerges from the pandemic. Often the starkest and most cinematic scenes turned out to be footage filmed by local aspiring influencers for their Instagram reels – and we typically only find out halfway through the scene, right when we’re becoming immersed. Yet this online class isn’t generational either; there are plenty of older participants, such as a middle-aged man who photographs himself without a mask for Facebook. It’s the rise of a new era of performative politics, an inflection point in “woke” that marks the pandemic as the moment when the injunction at the end of Jordan Peele’s Get Out – “Now stay woke!” – started to morph into something more cynical and calculated. In one of the most memorable scenes, a local youth pretends to like Octavia Butler, and then “likes” a Black Lives Matter post, as a way of building clout with his high school crush.
Throughout all these scenes, Aster imagines the pandemic as unleashing a surplus of chaotic affect that sees people scrambling to harness it, contain it, monetise it, in ways that don’t exactly break down political boundaries but invest both sides of the political fence with a hallucinatory intensity. Aster focuses especially on what might be described as white-absurdist discourse, which on the right quickly congeals into nationalism and supremacy, and on the left takes the form of self-flagellating white posturing, of white people centring themselves to aggressively remind everyone around them that they have no right to centre themselves. In fact, that lefist bind may be one of the reasons why Aster’s own film is so deliberately decentred, so wonky and off-kilter in its messaging. One of the things that Aster really nails about this pandemic-era leftism is the blitheness with which it collapses personal and private, individual and systemic, the present moment and the entire arc of exploitative history – a stance that Aster seems to see as directly stemming from the pandemic era, when so much of personal, individual and private life was hollowed out and evacuated of its meaning, making it easier to reduce the people around you to mere pawns in broader systemic injustices. With personal history before the pandemic receding so rapidly, it can be rewritten in an instant according to the most absurd conspiratorial coordinates – and one of the eeriest subplots sees Louise team up with Vernon Jefferson Peak, a charismatic speaker played by Austin Butler, to completely reimagine her own past and abruptly leave her husband and mother behind. True the film’s total immersion in Covid, we barely glimpse Louise’s “real” past, let alone her pandemic present, before she has reinvented herself as an investment in the post-Covid future.
Against that backdrop, narrative doesn’t exist in a conventional way; or rather, each character is attempting to craft their own personal journey through the pandemic and harness this amorphous affect into a self-narrative they can broker with the world at large. Perhaps the most resonant of these narratives belongs to Sheriff Cross, if only because of how vigorously, as a proponent of law and order, he attempts to reinstate the thresholds that once defined everyday life in Eddington – even if he has to break the law to do it. In the actions that set the crisis of the film in action, Cross is finally driven over the edge by witnessing a local vagrant break into a bar, a traversal of thresholds that propels him to shoot Mayor Garcia and his son while they are in their home living-room. Yet the very effort to re-establish these thresholds simply jettisons Cross into an even more liminal space, as he discovers that he fired the shots on the exact threshold between the town and tribal land, meaning he can’t rely on his own police force to cover it up and has to answer to the local Pueblo police instead. And that scenario – an effort to re-establish boundaries and resurrect normality that only ends up enhancing the alterity of the film’s world – is perhaps its most uniquely pandemic-centric motif. To watch it is to immerse yourself back in the Covid era’s uncanny ability to defamiliarise everything, even the routines, expectations and narratives that it itself spawned.