In 'Eddington,' Ari Aster revisits the 'living hell' of COVID-19
Some people made sourdough starters to get through the COVID-19 lockdown. Ari Aster wrote a modern Western.
Five years ago, when a pandemic and safety protocols further divided a politically tumultuous America, “I was just living in hell and I thought I should make a movie about that,” the director says of his new drama “Eddington” (in theaters now). “It felt like things were poised to really explode in a new way. And to be honest, that feeling has not left since. But at that moment, it suddenly felt like, ‘OK, I haven't experienced this before.’
“I just wanted to get it down on paper and describe the structure of reality at the moment, which is that nobody can agree on what is happening.”
Aster’s filmography is full of horror (“Hereditary,” “Midsommar”) and comedic absurdity (“Beau Is Afraid”), and with “Eddington,” he revisits the absurd horror movie we all experienced in real life.
Set in New Mexico during 2020, the movie centers on the fictional town of Eddington, which turns into a hotbed of bad feelings and controversy when awkward local sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) decides to run for mayor against popular progressive incumbent Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). Their feud turns increasingly personal and spills onto social media and the streets, and the situation ultimately grows explosive, bloody and downright bonkers.
Some scenes are a stark reminder of the time: For example, Sheriff Joe moseys into a grocery store without his mask – as an asthmatic, he’s not a big fan of personal protective equipment – and gets an earful from Ted and his fellow residents. To build his narrative, Aster took a lot of notes during lockdown, “living on Twitter and taking a lot of screenshots,” he says. The director went so far as to create multiple Twitter accounts, so he could create “different algorithms” for varying ideologies.
Aster built a cast of characters to run that gamut. Joe’s malleable wife Louise (Emma Stone) falls under the sway of both her conspiracy theorist mom (Deirdre O’Connell) and the charismatic leader (Austin Butler) of a QAnon-type cult. And when George Floyd protests make it to Eddington, they involve a Black police deputy (Micheal Ward) and a teen boy (Cameron Mann) doing some performative activism to woo a girl he likes.
“It is a satire," Aster says, but the real object of criticism is social media and “the maligned forces that have harnessed that technology to get us here and to divide us.”
“I wanted to make a film that was empathetic to all the characters. It's just that it's empathetic in multiple different directions and some of those are opposition.”
Since the pandemic, there have been movies set during COVID-19, but “Eddington” is the most high-profile project to really explore how it isolated neighbors from each other, literally and politically, and exacerbated an existing culture war.
“We haven't metabolized what happened in 2020 or how seismic COVID was. One reason for that is that we are still living through it,” Aster explains. “That was an inflection point whose consequences are very hard to measure, but they're huge. And it's an unpleasant thing to look at. And the future is a scary thing to look at right now."
Aster acknowledges he’s desperate for a vision of the future that's "not totally defined by the dread that I'm feeling. I wrote this movie in a state of anxiety and dread, and that dread only continues to intensify."
While many navigated the COVID-19 lockdown by binge-watching “Tiger King,” Aster had a different ritual to find his happy place. Quarantined in New Mexico, where Aster has spent much of his life, he found a “pretty comforting” routine of walking to a park and reading a book for two hours in the morning and returning in the afternoon for another hour or so. “I really liked that. That, I already have nostalgia for,” he says, laughing.
While Aster did end up having a couple of rounds of COVID-19 (“Not fun”), there are very few sick people in “Eddington.” One character has the coronavirus at the beginning, at least one other character has it by the end, but that’s it. Instead, “I’ll just say there are a lot of viruses in the movie. A lot of things going viral,” he says.
He points out that another key subplot of “Eddington” is the artificial intelligence-powered data center being built just outside of town. “The movie is about a bunch of people navigating one crisis while another crisis incubates, waiting to be unleashed,” Aster says.
An idea for a sequel percolates in his mind, yet Aster would like to just live in a less-weird time, please.
“It’s gotten incredibly weird. And with AI rushing toward us with the possibility of AGI (advanced AI that would match human thinking) and then maybe even superintelligence, things are only going to get stranger and stranger,” Aster says. “The human capacity for adaptation is amazing, and things become normal very quickly, especially once they become wallpaper – all of this has become ambient.
“It’s just important to remind ourselves, like, ‘This is strange.’ How do we hold onto that and maybe challenge it?”