Eddington

 What was that all about?  This morning, as I walked my dog through the sullen, grey humidity, I passed a church, more or less killed by COVID.  In the darkened window, on the sill, I saw the pale apparition of a bottle of hand sanitizer.  Do you recall the pandemic?  The poorest people were deemed "essential workers" so they could be sacrificed to the endangered economy.  Trump wanted people to inject Clorox bleach into their bodies.  Mobs beat up Chinese people in retaliation for the "China flu."  Fights occurred in grocery checkout lines over masks.  Bar-owners defied the quarantine and went to jail.  And, in the midst, of the panic and fear, the police murdered George Floyd and there were super-spreader mass demonstrations, police precincts on fire, hails of rubber bullets. In hospitals, nurses and staff in hazmat suits stood bedside as people died without any of their loved ones allowed in the room. Corpses were stored in coolers in the parking lots of hospitals. Ventilators hissed and empty streets led to empty shopping malls and deserted skyscrapers.  Every kind of febrile fantasy imaginable spread with the speed of the Internet.  When an effective vaccine was offered, about 30% of the public inexplicably refused to get the shot.

I don't know exactly what happens in Ari Aster's Eddington (2025).  The film is about how tensions over COVID stretched communities and the country at large to the breaking point.  The film is a paranoid muddle, but its very incoherence is true to the historical moment that it depicts:  it's not clear what's going on, but, whatever it is, things are bad.  Aster, of course, became famous for making horror movies -- in that genre, allusion and suggestion are as important (or more so) that representation.  The really bad stuff that occurs in Eddington is off-screen, merely implied as opposed to stated.  The film doesn't make sense -- it's about two hours and fifteen minutes long, but you have the feeling that another hour of the picture ended up on the cutting room floor. (Aster is nothing if not ambitious; his previous film Beaux is Afraid is an enormous psychodrama that climaxes with the protagonist sailing into his mother's colossal womb, a watery chamber that doubles as an amphitheater stocked with thousands of CGI extras.)  Although the narrative in Eddington is impossible to recount, what lingers in the imagination is the film's weird ambience -- it's like a modern Western on the order of No Country for Old Men that has dissolved into frenzied delirium.  

Joaquin Phoenix plays Sheriff Joe Cross, a beleaguered lawman in a desert county somewhere in New Mexico.  The film's hallucinated topography is essential to its effect:  the town of Eddington, seemingly the county seat, looks like any number of desolate western villages -- to my mind, the town seems like Gillette, Wyoming in the Big Horn Basin or Winslow, Arizona (I think the picture's locations were largely shot in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico).  The town is sunbaked, treeless so that its naked ugliness is fully exposed, an array of nondescript commercial buildings in a downtown grid with barren gravel-covered hilltops rising over the empty wide streets and vacant lots -- there's a water tower on one of the piles of gravel adorned with a painting of cowboys and Indians. (In a zinc-roofed shed, there's a museum of pioneer artifacts and Indian relics.)  The wasteland is spacious -- pueblo-style houses of adobe are scattered across the pebbly, grim arroyos around the village.  In the opening sequence, a local drunk and mad man, muttering frantically to himself, stumbles over one of the piles of rock pimpling the desert and we see the town spread out below.  The drunk goes to a bar where he enters without a mask.  The COVID pandemic is in full spate but hasn't yet reached this rural county -- so far, there seem to be no verified cases.  Sheriff Cross thinks the town will be immune and refuses to wear a mask.  Everyone is tense, bickering with everyone else about what measures are necessary to combat the virus.  In the wake of the George Floyd murder, all the townsfolk have their cameras at ready, in holsters like revolvers and ready for a quick draw.  When Cross takes down the malevolent, insane drunk, of course, the altercation is filmed and leads to police brutality protests.  Pedro Pascal plays Mayor Garcia,, Cross' liberal antagonist -- he's a wine and cheese progressive who is courting a company that plans to build a huge data center on the outskirts of town.  After some confrontations with the Mayor, Sheriff Cross decides to run for mayor himself -- he enlists his deputies at the sheriff's office (which seems to be a violation of law) and tricks up his pickup with red, white, and blue bunting and inflammatory popularist slogans.  Sometimes, he drives through town denouncing Garcia using a loudspeaker mounted on the truck.  For the film's first ninety minutes, nothing much happens -- people get more and more paranoid about the virus; there are more squabbles about preventative measures and local kids (with some outside agitators) stage protests on the town's forlorn main street.  Things come to a head when Cross gets a noise complaint about music coming from Garcia's house where he is hosting a campaign party.  Driving his ridiculous gaudy truck, Cross comes to the party, confronts the mayor, and orders him to turn off the music.  Garcia's well-heeled supporters are openly contemptuous of the sheriff and disobey his commands.  There's a confrontation and Garcia slaps the Sheriff across the face -- it's a strangely shocking scene, similar to the moment in The Long Goodbye in which Henry Gibson slaps the enormous and menacing Sterling Hayden.  Cross is humiliated and doesn't respond, retreating from the party.  By this time, it's apparent that the sheriff is sick with COVID, feverish and on the edge of delirium.  Cross arms himself and returns after dark to a sniper's vantage near the Mayor's house.  He guns down the mayor and his teenage son for a good measure.  Then, Cross kills the crazy vagrant in the local bar where the man has broken in.  From this point on, all hell breaks loose and the film ends with an exuberant over-the-top rampage involving machine guns, drones dropping bombs, and all sorts of spectacular mayhem.

Complicating the situation are strange sexual subtexts.  Cross' wife (played by Emma Stone in an eerie, if underwritten part) steadfastly rebuffs his sexual advances.  Cross accuses the Mayor of having raped his wife when she was sixteen -- whether this claim is true is a matter of conjecture; this is the subtext of rivalry between the two men. Cross' mother-in-law is a Q-anon addict and conspiracy monger -- she seems completely crazy.  Midway through the movie, an enigmatic figure named Vernon Peak appears; he's a handsome young man who claims to have been sexually trafficked by his father to "ten older men" and, now, is some kind of politically opportunistic victim's rights advocate.  Cross' wife seems to be attracted to Peak who is accompanied by several young people who are political activists.  As the protests over police violence and the Floyd killing ramp up in Eddington, Peak and his followers also participate in sowing discord in the town.  Meanwhile some other sort of dark force is afoot, manipulating events.  An additional layer of complexity involves the reservation adjacent to town; the sniper's roost from which Cross fired at Garcia is on Indian land and the tribe claims jurisdiction over part of the investigation into the shooting.    

After the climactic shoot-out, an extremely gory and graphic affair, Cross is horribly injured.  We think that he's been killed but, in fact, he's suffered a brain injury that has paralyzed him.  In the film's epilogue, Cross has somehow been re-elected mayor (possibly due to his perceived heroism in the fire fight) but he's mostly mute and disabled, a stunted figure in a wheelchair.  Cross' wife, frigid with him, has run off with Vernon Peak and, in fact, is pregnant by the sex abuse crusader.  Cross' crazy mother-in-law now runs Eddington.  (There's a quietly devastated scene in which a male nurse hired to attend to Cross plops him naked on a toilet, casually cuffing the paralyzed man upside the head before apologizing:  "Sorry about that.")   Cross now shares a bed with his lunatic mother-in-law and the handsome health aide.  A concluding overhead shot shows the vast data center spraying a million volts across the naked desert with the smaller, dimmer lights of Eddington in the background.  

One of the most devastating aspects of the film is that one of Cross' deputies is a Black officer.  This man is loyal to Cross and supports his political ambitions. He is continuously assailed as a traitor to his people in the demonstrations arising from the death of George Floyd.  When the cops come to investigate the multiple murders of Mayor Garcia, his son, and the drunk desert rat, Cross pins the killings on the Black man, claiming he acted with the connivance of "Antifa."  The officer is thrown in jail.  Later, in a mysterious drone attack, he's badly injured.  In the film's penultimate sequence, the Black cop, badly scarred from the bomb dropped by the drone, lies prone on the desert floor, engaged in target practice with his rifle -- he's survived, if just barely, and there is a sense of palpable menace in the image of the figure lying in the dust, after dark, blasting away at the silhouette of a man on the target.  It's the fire of revenge, the fire next time.  

The movie is exquisitely made, but baffling.  The acting is all ferocious, pitch-perfect.  Some parts of the movie are darkly humorous.  After the Sheriff has slaughtered Garcia and his teenage son, Cross' own adolescent son gives an eulogy for the slain boy.  He says that as an exemplar of "White privilege", he's not qualified to talk about the death of the young man "of color".  After these self-righteous comments about not having the right to speak, however, he goes on and speaks, at length, anyway.  

This is an excellent movie, but I have no idea what it is supposed mean , nor do I know who was killing whom in the big battle at the end.   The picture has the expressive fury that I associate with Scorsese's early movies like Mean Streets and Taxi Driver.  It's very good but, in many ways, also indefensible. You should see this picture for yourself.