The poster for Eddington vaguely resembles the famous Apocalypse Now poster, (which I used to own, until I sold all my movie posters to Posteratiti.)
In this apocalypse, the apocalyptic event is, basically, Covid and our horrific response to it. I’ve been through 2 pandemics: HIV and Covid. Our collective responses to both were absolutely horrible and incredibly selfish. Every time I see or hear the word “selfish” I think of Ayn Rand, a self-proclaimed writer and philosopher who I abhor. But the response to Covid was especially Randian, with so many right wingers like her complaining that their rights were being violated simply because they were forced to wear a mask in public spaces.
I think at one point in this movie there is a naive person who thinks she or he (I can’t remember the scene) can use reason and facts to argue with the depressed sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) about why people should wear masks. (Transmission drops to 3% with masks, from 90% with no masks.) He doesn’t care. Similarly, when he is texted with the results of his Covid test, he decides not to read them. By that point in the movie, everyone is lost.
No one gets away with being purely free of the insanity with the exception of the Pueblo cop who is investigating a murder committed from an Indian reservation on U.S. soil. If Ari Aster were following the 3 act script formula that I was ranting about in an unpublished post, that man would have been the Marge Gunderson of the story, and figured out from putting various clues together, like handwriting and gun ownership, who the murderer is. But that is not the point. The point of the movie is the chaos and I was reminded of Oliver Sack’s comment in The New Yorker essay, that “What we are seeing—and bringing on ourselves—resembles a neurological catastrophe on a gigantic scale.”
He was talking about cellphone addiction and cellphones are certainly a part of what’s happening in this little town in New Mexico.
At the end of the movie — and I couldn’t understand this until now — there is a fairly long series of short clips on a phone, but sideways. And to actually read the text that goes along with these clips, you have to turn your head. The clips are actually like the end clips from “Taxi Driver” and (later in Scorsese’s career) “The King of Comedy.” The clips are of someone who thrived after all this mess, but they are being watched by Phoenix, who is on his side.
I haven’t really given any spoilers or even tried to say what the movie is about, because I admire Aster in that he simply writes what’s in his head, and his movies have so far, always been a surprise. They do not follow the Syd Field formula, but they are still interesting, scary and, even more deeply, disturbing in a way that you can’t quite identify. His movies reach you in a place that most people would rather think doesn’t exist — the shadow self in psychology, perhaps or the Lilith Moon in astrology.
May have more to say later.
More to say. I’m simply stunned at some of the reviewers who apparently don’t understand this movie, or are viewing it through a personal lens of their own. I recently had to deal with a judge in a guardianship case, and after it was all over I realized that “judges exist in a bubble of their own expertise.” (I put that in quotes because that is what I told someone.) The biggest flaw of judges is that they a) don’t understand their own prejudices which may come from years of judging cases and seeing the same types of people come in and out of their courtroom, or b) genuine personal prejudice. The worst is religion. Probably second worse is skin color. And third would be… stupidity maybe? In any event, the reviewers that I’ve read seem to either understand the chaos of this movie or they see it through the prism of race and self-righteousness.
For example, in this small town of 2500, with 1 sheriff and 2 deputies, one of whom is black, there is a black lives matter protest of about 25 young people. There isn’t a black person among them, but these students and young people are adamant that George Floyd’s murder was the most important thing that’s happened in their lives. It reminded me of Macklemore when he said the defining issue of his generation was gay marriage, an issue that was never going to affect him either way (though, caveat, there’s nothing wrong about being an ally.) Later in this movie, one of the kids (the one who ends up a right wingnut living in Florida and running for office) tries to explain to his dad how they can destroy white privilege. His father screams, “But you’re white!” It’s a joke that works on many levels: the father is kind of saying, “We want white privilege,” at the same time as screaming about the obviousness of skin color.
Anyway, the New Yorker reviewer took some of these moments and conflated it into a movie that was about destroying and satirizing people who have sincerely held beliefs. That is ludicrous, because the right wingers are satirized even more brutally, mainly through Joaquin Phoenix’s behavior, but also the white sheriff who refers to the tepid 25 person BLM march through their town as “the riot.”
[And if you think back on how this “riot” actually was, there was a lot of milling about, some pushing and shoving, but basically the 3 authorities walked through the crowd and kept trying to tell the young people to go home. And that was the end of it.]
Later, some real racists fly in in some sort of private jet: echoing rumors going around at the time, that Black Lives Matter protests were being infiltrated by moles or troublemakers, who were trying to make the protests look like black people were arming themselves and killing whites. They are dressed like ICE agents, wearing masks and full body armor, but it’s clear their skin is white.
All of this is to say that although there are many people giving it bad reviews for one reason or another, most of those reasons are based on “confirmation bias.” That is how being offensive works. Go in front of a judge who has no true broad understanding of the issues and call her a “fucking bitch,” and see how fair that judge will treat you and how hard that judge will work to try to understand a little bit more than what she or he knows from their limited perspective.
As you may have noted, I dislike judges intensely. They are vain and they automatically think that when a case lands before them, the parties haven’t already gone through months or years of agony, trying to solve their conflict. The judge steps in at the end, not the beginning. But most seem to think the case really begins once they get involved, and that’s how they act and rule.