This isn’t my normal content but I’ve been thinking about this a lot since last week so I thought I’d share my little Ted Talk. I get it if you’re heard enough about this. Feel free to scroll on. There will, of course, be heavy spoilers for Eddington below the cut. Also I hope I don’t get sent to the gulag for this but these are the times we live in.
Eddington is a weird little movie. I really enjoyed it and I think it might be the best project Pedro’s taken on. The first three quarters are a spot on skewering of America during COVID. I won’t get that here but it was really pitch perfect.
The ending takes a hard turn and it really stuck with me. It’s nearly unintelligible (I tried explaining its events to someone which was…impossible), so bizarre and outlandish that it felt (upon first watch) like it belonged in a a completely different film. I spent a lot of time thinking about it and trying to parse its meaning. After last week, it’s making a lot more sense to me.
At the dramatic turning point, a group of masked baddies begin wreaking havoc on Eddington. The right would have you believe (as declared in the epilogue) that they are antifa terrorists, just as they did in the wake of Kirk’s death. Trump was frothing at the mouth to blame left wing radicals and declare war. But, of course, they aren’t Antifa super soldiers. They’re shown flying into town on a private jet emblazoned with the logo of some sort of globalist cabal, cigars in hand. It’s possible they’re working for SolidGoldMagikarp or, perhaps, are agents of the pedophile elites as Louise’s mother speculates. In our reality, when the dust settled, the shooter was more likely aligned with online extremism, nihilists, and accelerationists than a woke transgender Democrat.
Eddington beautifully illustrates this idea that there’s conflict between the left and the right being exploited by a more mysterious, more dangerous, less predictable force.
There's a more direct parallel with Joe's teenage savior Brian filming himself as he guns down the attacker. A more heavy handed movie might have had Brian drop his Tik Tok handle and urge viewers to subscribe. In real life, content creator(??) Elder Tik Tok did just that as the crowd around him fled the site of the shooting.
And then there’s Joe’s fate. Joe is paralyzed and becomes a puppet of the powers that be. He’s carrying out their bidding, forced to watch them guide his hand. He’s lost all of his agency. He’s literally in bed with his mother in law, conspirator in chief, who is cashing checks from SolidMagikarp et al. Whether he likes it or not, he’s become an object.
Charlie Kirk is just as much a vegetable as Joe. The minute he died, he became a pawn in his own game. No one on the right actually cares about him. His wife is getting a fresh manicure before posting photos of his corpse on instagram. Trump is lowering flags to half mast and will use his death to start a civil war, no matter who pulled the trigger. He’s a prop, a piece of propaganda. His humanity has been lost (not that he had any to begin with).
Maybe I’m giving Ari Aster too much credit but it’s brilliant how prophetic this film is, how it’s really captured the zeitgeist. And, also, how insane our reality has become that this farce feels believable.
