Eddington Reheats the Insanity of the COVID Era.

It was only a matter of time before we’d start getting flicks about people going insane during the COVID lockdowns. Eddington is a new A24 feature starring Joaquin Phoenix as a small town sheriff running for mayor and Pedro Pascal, the incumbent hoping to rejuvenate the little dustbowl town by attracting an AI data center to set up shop there.

It’s all set in the time of household isolations, masks and standing 6 feet apart. It all starts to feel more absurd the further we get from it, even more so when it’s people socially isolating in the middle of a desert. The film follows the pair as the towns 2000 citizens start to spiral into conspiracy and shootouts. It’s a western for the 21st century, and it’s as hilarious as it is depressing because of how true to life it feels in many ways, even when pushed to it’s absurd limits.

“Eddington is a Western, but the guns are phones.” says writer-director Ari Aster (Midsommar, Hereditary).

As if Pascal and Phoenix werent heavy hitter enough the film also stars Emma Stone, Austin Butler (Dune, Elvis) and Luke Grimes (Yellowstone, 50 Shades of Grey)

“Eddington is a microcosm of the early days of COVID, something we all went through together, and the aftermath of that,” says Luke Grimes, who plays Deputy Sheriff Guy Tooley opposite the embattled Sheriff Joe. “It’s a small town that stands in for all of America and how the events of one summer put fear into us and brought the country to a boiling point.”

“We all know that we’re in our own echo chambers because we’re trapped in a system based on feedback,” says Aster. “The problem is that people can’t remember that they know that. Eddington is about what happens when feedback ramps up beyond control and the bubbles collide.”

This period was bogged down in moralsing and finger wagging but Ari hopes that he’s managed to avoid any judgement of any particular group with the film.

“I wanted to make a film that felt like the country we live in without necessarily villainizing anyone or propping anyone up. I hope it’s democratic in the way that it gives equal weight to every instrument in the cacophony. And in the end, whatever our differences of opinion, we have to find a way to re-engage with each other. The powers of tech and finance have kept us frozen and in our individual silos, but we’re all in the same situation. We all know that something’s very seriously wrong.”

The movie was one of Aster’s first ideas, long before directing Hereditary in 2018. After going into lockdown in New Mexico he was inspired to re-situate the story in that volatile time.

“When COVID happened, and then the horrific murder of George Floyd, I felt it was the right time to revisit Eddington and use that confluence of events to try to make sense of what was going on,” Aster says.

He continues: “I think it’s about what it means to be an individual in this weird new world. The post-1960s ideas of individualism have distorted into absurd forms inside people’s heads and they’ve been waiting there for a feedback system like this to start sending each other this content, whose roots are really in American history. The film is in a way about American history and how it lives in people’s heads, and how this dominant feedback system brought this to a heightened intense state and got it all hitting each other. I wanted to set these free radical particles loose in this town, because when they collide in a vacuum, a weird and frightening new logic comes into play.”

“I’m consumed by how that haunting clashes with the dream of America,” Aster continues. “Its history versus its mythology, and how we try to outrun ourselves through mythology. We’re all so haunted by things that go all the way back to our beginning. When I started writing this script, it was the middle of lockdown — things move so fast now that it’s sometimes hard to trace where things were three weeks ago, let alone five years ago, and we’re living in a process. It feels like breakdown, but maybe it’s really a sort of fruition.”

Pedro Pascal summarised, “In true Ari Aster fashion, Eddington speaks to some of our deepest worries and fears. I found it to be a quintessentially dark American comedy, brutally funny and creatively dangerous, the kind of script that doesn’t come around very often.”