Revisiting 2020

 

Far from the glamor of, say, New York in HBO's series The Gilded Age, Eddington, New Mexico, is a sad little fictional town in May 2020, stuck in covid pandemic lockdown, its almost empty streets the site for Ari Aster's eventually very violent movie condensation of the experience of our national virus-induced nervous breakdown and social reckoning.

Eddington, the film, follows the career arc of presumptively "populist," bordering on fascist Joe Cross, the town sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix), who chafes under covid restrictions, like mask-wearing. His wife Louise (Emma Stone) makes weird-looking dolls for sale and has fallen under the influence of a cult-like figure (Austin Butler), while his mother-in-law, who moved in for the duration of the pandemic, is fully immersed in conspiracy theories. Sheriff Cross goes out of his way to take up the cause of anti-maskers, which adds to his own alienation and puts him in conflict with the town's presumptively liberal Mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), with whom he already has a bad personal history for Garcia having once dated Louise, and whom he now challenges (on Facebook) for re-election as mayor.

The mayor comes across as a more sympathetic character, but he too has family troubles, having sometime earlier been abandoned by his wife and currently experiencing some apparent conflict with his son Eric (Matt Gomez Hiaka). Eric and his friend Brian (Cameron Mann) socialize in apparent violation of lockdown rules. Both seem attracted to Sarah (Amelie Hoferle), and they and their friends get on the post-George Floyd social-justice bandwagon in what must surely be the most satirically intended part of the plot. Sarah uses a Black Lives Matter protest to lecture Michael, the Black deputy sheriff (Michael Ward) on racism, while, at home in front of the family's gun cabinet, Brian lectures his parents about the problem of "whiteness."

That's the first, still somewhat sane-seeming part of an obviously insane story, which, however, eventually degenerates into an appalling orgy of gun violence, when the sheriff (suffering from asthma and possibly infected with covid) descends into  a kind of gun-inflected madness, which soon turns a dystopian pseudo-western of socially-distanced emptiness into a violent horror scene, which it would be hard to describe (and which frankly went on longer than any viewer should need).

The pandemic did not exactly create our current political polarization, but it intensified it in the crucible of isolation and loneliness and the phony world we call "on-line." Eddington highlights all the absurdities of the pandemic experience and all the social and inter-personal divisions it metastasized. Presumably, the movie intends to satirize and ridicule both the conspiracy-minded, anti-mask, supposedly individualistic right and the conspiracy-minded, progressive, self-hating left, both of which lose all rootedness in regular reality as they turn on each other.

When the violence is over, Eddington, the town and its sheriff, are left to an unenviable fate, which presumably bears some symbolic resemblance to the worst of our post-pandemic American society.