True satire is, by its very nature, emotionally unsatisfying, because the theme of satire is that there are no solutions to the low and fallen condition of human nature. Satire gives you no one to root for; every genius is a fool, every fool is a knave, and there is no transcendence to be had.
The greatest satire ever written, Candide: Or Optimism, is a classic “hero’s journey,” in which the idea of heroism itself is Voltaire’s punching bag. Candide murders people, finds his great love again only to discover she has grown hideously ugly and unlovable, is seduced by a series of corrupt philosophers into acts of extreme foolishness, and ends up right where he started with some very plain guidance for how to live: Tend to your own garden. Stay home. Don’t bother anyone else. All you’re going to do is ruin everything.
I’m not saying the writer-director Ari Aster is Voltaire (among other things, he’s not one of history’s most rabid anti-Semites, which Voltaire was). But in our desiccated culture, he’ll have to do. His new movie, Eddington, might be one of the signal works of satire in our time. I say “might be” because it’s just too soon to know whether this seemingly small-scale but actually sprawling account of how America went insane during the COVID epidemic will continue to resonate a few decades from now when the memory of COVID no longer has the power to sting.
Eddington compresses the two-year-long American response to the pandemic into a few weeks in the late spring of 2020, just as it compresses America into the titular community in New Mexico. Eddington looks unpopulated, slapped up on a couple of streets like a new town in a John Ford western set in the aftermath of the Civil War. But it has just enough people to have masking wars, Black Lives Matter demonstrations, smashed storefronts, hypocritical politicians demanding others cover their faces while they meet unmasked in private, and the ever-present Internet putting everyone’s private life on public display. And then Antifa arrives.
The story centers on the town’s two leading figures. One is the sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), who seems like a good and overwhelmed man trying to figure out how to get through the day in a town divided. An asthmatic, he cannot bear wearing a mask, and as a libertarian of some sort, he cannot bear the fact that the governor of New Mexico has declared a “mandate” requiring masking. He cannot understand why his fellow townspeople have lost the ability to express even elementary kindness toward one another in a difficult time.
In this respect, the townspeople are more aligned with their mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who is running for reelection by touting his closeness with the governor and a new and suspiciously incomprehensible green-friendly, AI-friendly office park that could have come straight out of the Inflation Reduction Act.
The two men have a history. Joe has been told by his mother-in-law that his deeply depressed wife, Louise (Emma Stone), was impregnated by Garcia as a teenager, though she will not talk about it and will not allow Joe to touch her. (In one of the movie’s few poignant moments, Joe sits in his police car and searches YouTube for information on how to talk your spouse into wanting to have a baby.)
Both wife and mother-in-law are full-blown QAnon types fascinated by an Alex Jones-like preacher (Austin Butler), whose ministry is based on the idea that there is a global network of child molesters secretly running the world. It turns out this idea is of particular interest to Louise. When Joe impulsively decides to run for mayor against Garcia on an anti-mandate, anti-masking ticket, the plot kicks into gear and then (if this is possible) methodically spins out of control.
Joe goes around town blaring his message through a car-top loudspeaker to streets emptied because of the pandemic. Garcia’s obnoxious son Eric rides by on a bike and points out that it’s lockdown and there’s no one outside to hear him. Meanwhile, Garcia yells at Eric for going to an outdoor gathering outlawed by the governor’s mandate because if word gets out, it will make him look bad.
A pretty local girl who is reading the work of Angela Davis catches the eye of both Eric and his best friend Brian. They Google Angela Davis so they can make conversation with her. When George Floyd is killed, they become the core of the town’s demonstrators, even as they question why they should be allowed to speak, given that they are scions of white privilege—though no one in this town looks even remotely privileged—and live on native lands stolen from the First Nations. Brian earnestly lectures his parents at the dinner table about “land acknowledgments” while sitting in front of a cabinet full of guns.
Meanwhile, a ranting and violent homeless man has wandered through town, the personification of the disease that has yet to reach Eddington… until his arrival. Aster captures in these and other ways a society that has completely lost its moorings and is only cohesive in its common use of screens.
Aster’s inspired conceit is to view with dispassion every possible angle on COVID. Masking is necessary—or it’s ridiculous. Paranoid hustling freaks on the Internet are seducing people with reckless theories—or maybe those theories are correct. Conservatives will believe in just about anything… or leftists will do just about anything. The black comic truth he establishes in Eddington is that people cut loose from the basic rules that govern how we live together can descend with startling rapidity into moral, spiritual, and homicidal psychosis.
Aster’s depiction of Eddington’s descent into the fever swamps of 2020 is often hilarious and always disturbing, as it should be. This is not a movie for which you will feel a fondness, but it becomes increasingly gripping and tense and concludes with a coda about how America emerged from the pandemic in a grievously wounded condition that is profoundly disturbing and entirely earned.
Aster’s notable previous work includes two horror films (Hereditary and Midsommar) that looked so scary I couldn’t bear to see them. And despite my almost unqualified admiration for his work in Eddington, now I really won’t be doing so, because he’s so expert at building up tension and then bringing it to a climax, I fear I wouldn’t be able to sleep for a year. You’ll be able to sleep after seeing Eddington. But you’ll think about it all the next day. And the day after that.
Candide learns he must tend to his own garden. That’s not a solution in the America of Eddington, where no one has his own garden. Your garden is my garden. There is no privacy. Everyone is filming everyone else. Everyone is judging everyone else. Everyone is finding everyone else wanting. And with reason.
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