It’s not all in your head; they really are out to get you. This is the message of director Ari Aster’s films: Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid, and now the horror-comedy-Western, Eddington. Each explores the premonition that forces beyond our imagination, outside the frame, have a wicked plan that is slowly coming to fruition—and you’re a part of it. This makes Aster the perfect storyteller for our conspiracy-theory-addled age. With Hereditary, that force was a dead grandmother’s demonic cult preying upon her descendants; with Midsommar, a pagan sect’s plot against a group of outsiders; and with Beau Is Afraid, an overbearing mother’s surreal curse from the grave. In Eddington, Aster applies his paranoid style, with a twist, to the most insanity-inducing subject of all: the year 2020.
The story’s protagonist is Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), sheriff of the small New Mexican town of Eddington during the early days of the pandemic. Frustrated by the mask mandate (he is ordered to wear one while in his car, alone, at the edge of town), as well as by a troubled wife (Emma Stone) and an unhinged mother-in-law, Cross declares his run for mayor to restore common sense to town. His opponent, the liberal mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), seeks reelection by promising to establish a massive data center, earning him the backing of an ominous tech company. It being 2020, no character avoids going (further) off the deep end as the campaign heats up, with everyone suspecting that someone else is machinating away. It doesn’t help when George Floyd’s death triggers protests among the town’s pent-up youth.
In Aster’s hands, the pandemic offers a chance to peer beneath our seemingly divergent convictions and discover a shared conspiratorial mindset—the ubiquitous sense that someone, somewhere, is plotting my demise! Cross accuses Garcia of being in cahoots with Bill Gates, while his mother-in-law reads stories about whether Hilary Clinton is wasting away in Guantanamo. Cross’s deputy, meanwhile, is an ardent advocate of cryptocurrency, which will fix … something. And did Garcia really rape Cross’s wife and force her to get an abortion? Maybe, maybe not. Given their tenuous attachment to reality, the decision to believe any one character over another is arbitrary. In the same way, everyone in Eddington is free to believe whichever narrative they wish, as one screaming BLM protester realizes when he pivots in an instant to Kyle Rittenhouse-esque rightwing hero. In 2020, the only certainty is that, as Cross’s campaign declares, “Your [sic] being manipulated.”
And what is wokeness, which Aster merely needs to play straight to convey its wackiness, if not a set of interlocking conspiracies? Woke intersectionality, which focuses on the union of every form of oppression, suggests that all the whites have colluded against all the blacks, at the same time that all men, black and white alike, have colluded against women; then the police, of whichever race and sex, have teamed up against the misunderstood criminals; and so on. Only the most devoted of truthers could make sense of it, as Cross’s black deputy learns when his white ex-girlfriend berates him for being a race traitor.
Aster’s movies have all involved a kind of reverse intersectional conspiracism: the foreboding intimation that there is a set of omnipotent schemers who alone know the master plan and see how everything will finally fit together. What is new to Aster’s paranoid style in Eddington is that it hardly even matters which conspiracies, if any, are actually true. In Eddington, you can spout the kookiest of theories and still end up running the town. You can be an obvious snake-oil shaman-salesman, warning about the pedophiles lurking around every corner, and still win the allegiance of Cross’s wife.
In fact, as Aster shows, in a world of competing lunacies, your best bet is to up the conspiratorial ante and blame your own skullduggery on whichever faction you think has it out for you at the moment—evidence and motive not required. The masked gunmen who come to town in the film’s final act, when Eddington hits peak COVID craziness, might be with Antifa, but couldn’t they just as well be working for the tech company to tarnish Antifa’s good name? Any conclusion must be totally speculative; as Aster says, “It felt important and maybe a little impish to leave that to the viewer.” The thrill of the paranoid style is that, unconstrained by legitimate authorities or credible sources of knowledge, we are free to believe whatever we want. As Aster suggests, no one can tell us we’re wrong.
Eddington also captures the role of social media in undermining old sources of truth and spreading the conspiratorial mindset. Social media facilitates paranoia through context collapse, which compresses the messy particularity of an event into a single neat video or image. The citizens of Eddington are constantly scrolling their phones, helpless to transcend mere virality and attain something like the truth.
It’s that unattainability of the truth that moves Eddington a step beyond Aster’s previous films. His first three conclude with a scene of apocalyptic disclosure, in which the scheme that the protagonist (and audience) have dimly perceived but been powerless to thwart is at last revealed in its awful clarity. Hereditary and Midsommar pulled off this trick to terrifying success; Beau Is Afraid, with its three hours of Freudian fever dreams, was simply too absurd to stick the landing.
But Eddington offers something else, suggesting the one thing more horrifying than the existence of an inescapable conspiracy: the lack of any such conspiracy. The film’s unresolved mysteries and ambiguous ending offer a disturbing new possibility: what if there is no master plan after all? What if we are perpetually stuck in the unfalsifiable theories we’ve constructed to achieve a vestige of understanding about the world? By disintegrating any hopes for a final explanation or source of meaning, this scenario represents the culmination of the paranoid style.
Like the invaders in C. P. Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians,” whichever villain one puts at the center of the web—the vax-pushing globalists, the would-be fascist coup-stagers, the pedophile ring, the shadowy tech interests, Aster doesn’t care—offers “a kind of solution,” a fulcrum of sense in an otherwise nonsensical world. It’s almost a sick kind of relief, permitting an abdication of responsibility, to think that at least the monsters know what’s going on. But once you break into the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria and realize the trafficked children aren’t there—that the Pizzagate theorists and QAnon prophets were wrong all along—what then?
As America remains trapped in its own incommensurable narratives, and conspiracy-mongers offer a fine selection of tin foil hats to suit any political taste, the paranoid plight of Aster’s characters is ours, too. Eddington is Aster’s second film starring Phoenix; perhaps it’s time to go for a hat trick and cast him as Jeffrey Epstein. Can’t you see it?
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