With this humiliation, Joe snaps, and, in short order, commits several shocking acts of deadly violence. His brazen maneuvers to cover his tracks soon give rise to tense standoffs with another sheriff (William Belleau), a Native American, and who makes jurisdictional claims so that he can conduct his own investigation of the killings. By this point, the movie’s film-noir framework reveals ample psychological, moral, and symbolic dimensions, and one that is explicitly political—the potential for police officers to abuse their power and frame others for their own misdeeds. “Eddington,” however, never develops any of these themes: Aster is so intent on using ripped-from-the-headlines events that he fails to make proper use of them, and ends up cynically debasing them all.
If Aster uses sex to weaponize Ted and Joe’s disagreement about masking, his sexualization of the issues surrounding the George Floyd protests is even more repellent and sneering. Eric and his friend Brian both have crushes on a girl, Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle). She’s presented as a stereotypical woke white woman and social-justice warrior, boasting on Instagram about the joy of reading James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room.” The boys crudely joke about her (“Blond bitches named Sarah think they’re Rosa Parks”) and Eric, being Hispanic, also jokes that Brian can use their friendship to display allyship. Sure enough, one night, at an outdoor socially distanced gathering, Brian sees Sarah carrying a book by Angela Davis, Googles the name, and starts a conversation. As the two white teens chatter on about “privileged white kids,” another girl comments that Sarah is just trying to make “her old-ass boyfriend”—a “cop”— jealous. Later, once the George Floyd protests start, Sarah, Brian, and Eric all take to the streets and, at one demonstration, Sarah confronts Michael, one of Joe’s two young deputies, who is Black and is also the “old-ass boyfriend” in question, challenging him to leave the force and join the protest. Brian piles on, calling Michael a traitor, while Sarah implores him, saying, “You should be with us.” A few days later, Brian, holding forth about “dismantling whiteness” at the family’s dinner table, is mocked by his father —“You’re white!”—and then Brian sends Michael a photo of Sarah and Eric kissing.
For Aster, the significance of the protests is twofold: first, young people make fools of themselves with their performative activism; second, the point of this is to get laid. “Eddington” shows boys whose interest in racial justice is sparked by their lust for a girl whose interest in racial justice is strongly linked to her feelings for a Black man. The movie mocks teens for the awkward and clichéd expressions of ideas, but how could they not be awkward, let alone unoriginal, when struggling, likely for the first time in their lives, with issues of national and historical significance which also involve their personal identities and family lives? Yet Aster casts their motives as unprincipled and self-serving. By contrast, Joe’s bewilderment about their assertions of racist policing—what, racism in Eddington?—is treated with absolute earnestness. The movie vulgarly sexualizes youthful political ardor and, even more contemptibly, the very notion of racial justice.
I’ve avoided mentioning another element of the movie that, while decidedly political, isn’t linked to the fateful year of 2020. A tech company is lobbying to build a large-scale data center on the outskirts of Eddington. Ted supports the project, and, at first, only one town councillor, a restaurant owner named Paula (Rachel de la Torre), opposes it. Soon, however, Joe sees the chance to make common cause with Paula—to snag his first prominent supporter by opposing the data center himself. And, just as the movie operates a double standard when it weighs issues of justice, so, too, not all conspiracy theories in “Eddington” are created equal. Joe’s mother-in-law, Dawn, long in thrall to the far-fetched theories she reads about online, introduces a charismatic fanatic (Austin Butler), who’s obsessed with pedophile rings and related depravities, into the household. Meanwhile, the tech company behind the data center sees a way to manipulate public opinion in its favor with a conspiracy of its own, a far-reaching and brazenly destructive one. The effect of these two developments—equal but opposite, as it were—is, strangely, to depoliticize the movie: a delusional rightist demagogue appears as an ideologically neutral voice for the isolated and the traumatized, while the debate around tech investment is played not as a complex mapping of the town’s social divisions and conflicting interests but as Grand Guignol fantasy.
What goes unsaid in “Eddington” is all the more noticeable for being hinted at throughout. I counted seven mentions of the word “shame” (or forms thereof), and most of them are related both to sex and to social media. Aster is obsessed with people’s unchecked power to shame others online, whether with the truth or with unfair fabrications. It’s online posting that stokes the humiliation Joe feels about Louise’s experiences with Ted to murderous heights. Likewise, the young peoples’ embarrassment about failed relationships and unfulfilled desires is magnified and intensified by the leap from private gossip to the mediascape. Aster’s devil is a tech company, and, along the way, he shakes his fist not only at its ruthless potentates but at the internet over all and at social media. In so doing, he treats his protagonists as automata, manipulated from the outside, devoid of ethical compasses or underlying ideals or prejudices. “Eddington” is filled with nostalgia for a quieter, simpler, more isolated era, when local news stayed local, when private matters weren’t made public, when the personal wasn’t political. The focus of its nostalgia is the figure of Joe, the small-town sheriff, troubled and kindly, whose old-school commonsense conservatism has been overwhelmed by the forces of modernity and driven by them into MAGA-styled extremes. Were Aster truly interested in the phenomenon, he’d have set the movie in 2016. ♦
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