Review | Eddington – Ari Aster Transforms the Pandemic into a Political and Violent Tragicomedy

Where can intolerance between political extremes take us? Ari Aster responds with sarcasm and despair in Eddingtonhis fourth feature film, which abandons literal psychological horror to delve into contemporary social horror. In a rocamboesque tragicomedy — so absurd that it seems familiar — the American director constructs a parody of current times, in which polarization has become a way of life. Armentists versus identitarians: two caricatures that social networks insist on presenting as real political spectrums. Aster is not interested in ideological precision, but rather in the spectacle of ignorance.

Inspired by the chaos of May 2020, Eddington recreates a fictional city in New Mexico that becomes the stage for what has become our daily lives: discursive disputes between science and denialism, paranoia and common sense, sanity and misinformation. It is a microcosm of a global decadence, where the Covid-19 pandemic serves less as a backdrop and more as a magnifying glass for the collapse of coexistence.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Sheriff Joe Cross, a man consumed by the rhetoric of resentment and half-truths, whose personal crusade is to defeat Mayor Alex Garcia (Pedro Pascal), a Latino politician who tries to maintain order and promote basic public health measures. Between the two, there is a third protagonist: social networks. Or rather, the social network — a ubiquitous and mutant organism that defines what is real, who is a villain and how to manipulate collective perception.

Aster has no shame in ridiculing the vices of contemporary communication: inflammatory speech, the construction of narratives without a factual basis, the fabrication of enemies and the spectacularization of tragedy. In one of the most striking scenes, Joe records a video accusing Garcia of crimes against his wife (Emma Stone) and other atrocities — not because he believes in it, but because it is strategic.

Two-time Oscar winner Stone appears to make a cameo as the depressed wife, cooped up during the pandemic and devastated by a personal tragedy. She finds support, however, in the figure of a spiritual guru (played by Austin Butler), who accurately embodies the loudmouths of faith — with inflammatory religious speeches and promises of a single path to salvation.

More than a critique of the right or the left, Eddington is a portrait of the bankruptcy of public debate — of the replacement of politics by a reality show where participants don’t want to govern, just win. Aster directs with surgical precision, alternating the grotesque with the pathetic, the satire with the horror, the comic with the tragic. Laughter here is always uncomfortable, as we are one step away from the reality of Civil warof Alex Garland.

In the end, what begins as a discursive dispute — although full of fake news, mockery and cynicism — ends in an explosive turn of events. The clash between Joe Cross and Alex Garcia abandons any veneer of civility and escalates to disproportionate violence, in a third act that transforms Eddington into a modern western — or rather, an anti-western, where there is no longer any difference between good guys and villains. Everyone is armed, everyone is right, everyone has a cell phone in hand.

Aster films this collapse as if it were the last act of a ridiculous play that forgot to be tragicomic and went straight into the grotesque. Shots are fired as easily as a conspiracy theory is shared. Groups organize themselves like digital militias that went from the screen straight to the streets. The old spirit of the Wild West resurfaces not as nostalgia but as dystopia: a land where the law is personal opinion and the truth is an optional detail.

Although the narrative presents us with a big corporate winner in the final act, in fact, there are no heroes in Eddington. Nor outright villains. What exists is a bunch of characters blinded by their certainties, willing to do anything — literally anything — to win. The sheriff and the mayor become versions of each other, mirroring each other in an authoritarianism disguised as “salvation”. In the final duel, the one who wins is the true protagonist: the machine that doesn’t care whether the current speech is from the right or the left — what matters is making the gears turn and generating wealth for a few, under the veneer of progress for all.

With his morbid humor until the last minute, Aster doesn’t scandalize, surprise or terrify us – he scales truths. The violence in Eddington It grows so much that the shots upon shots make the film lose some of its fun, although it gains in action. To some, this climax may feel like a break in tone; for others, it is consistent with the spiral of madness. Still, we have allusions to comedies of errors in the style of Fargoby the Coen brothers, always with an ironic ending, where tragedy becomes a spectacle.