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.
(Welcome to another Ted Talk by Moth. A Moth Talk if you will. Where I complain about media! There are spoilers for Stranger Things S5 here. Shout out to Birdee for ranting about this with me all day.)
My love for Stranger Things has been waning for a while but whatever good will I once had for the show, is dead. I came away from the new season of Stranger Things (or at least the first 4 episodes of it 🙄) with one thought: Stranger Things has a TLOU problem. Now, there are lots of issues with Season 5 (tone, acting, nothing making any god damn sense) but I have TLOU brain rot so I am compelled to discuss the Joel and Ellie of it all (and then some).
If you’ve watched the new episodes of ST, you’d be hard pressed to miss the similarities between the shows. And I really wouldn’t complain about turning Hawkins into a post outbreak au (militarized quarantine zone and all). Nothing is original. I write fic for fuck’s sake I have no issues about borrowing story elements from other media. The problem is, it really doesn’t work for this show.
El and Hopper’s relationship is often compared to Joel and Ellie. I’ve heard tell that they are inspired by Druckman’s characters (I am too lazy to confirm this and it doesn’t matter to me). The show renders this dynamic in the most ham fisted of ways. This season our father/daughter duo are sent on a side quest to the upside down so we can be told over and over again how much they love one another. Maybe Harbor and MBB just don’t have the chemistry. They’re not really given the chance to show not tell. It’s spelled out for us almost any time they share the screen. In case you missed it while you were scrolling on your phone, Hopper cares about El!
And, sure, I guess. But it leaves me feeling nothing. Compare Harbor’s lines about killing anyone who tries to hurt the one person he loves with Pascal’s tearful scene on the porch. There’s weight to the love in TLOU. Stranger Things uses it as an excuse to mow down a squad of NPCs.
There’s been a lot of complaining about Hopper’s action herofication over the past few season and, while I agree with that, what really struck me in season 5 is the violence. In these few episodes, Hop has gunned down at least a dozen people without a second thought. Hell, even El is getting in on the action using her mind powers to snap necks. Remember when this was a show about kids playing D&D?
Sure, ST isn’t interested in reckoning with what we’re willing to do for love, but the disregard for human life is frankly shocking. Each kill took something from Joel and Ellie’s soul. Hopper and El on the other hand are like Rambo and Sarah Conner. It has me questioning who the good guys really are here and, well, this show doesn’t do shades of grey.
It’s not just the family dynamics at play in Stranger Things. My jaw hit the floor when I watched that final battle scene. I was having flashbacks to Kansas City. There were so many beats from the KC bloater battle but, again, I’m not here to cry rip off. It has the camera work from Children of Men, the feel of any first person shooter. Regardless of who they were mimicking, the question I was left with was, is this appropriate for Stranger Things? Sure it looks pretty sick (I mean if you ignore the CGI monsters) but is this Stranger Things? Did we tune in to this show for gritty action and a guy getting his fucking eyeballs impaled?? (And does that even mean anything when El is doing force murder?)
I’m not even sure the show is bought into its own premise. There’s a 7 year old wailing “I don’t want to die!” which is comedy gold (tbh I love Derek) paired with what could be a scene from an Alex Garland movie. It’s one of many tonal inconsistencies in the season and the only conclusion I can come to is that the Duffer Brothers (or Netflix or whoever is flying this plane) are trying to follow in the footsteps of other prestige TV like GOT/HOD or TLOU. Which is a shame because they had a good thing going doing their own thing. Even when Stranger Things was doing insane shit before, I was having fun watching it.
In the end, they’re cribbing from TLOU in the most shallow of ways. It takes the images and ideas without the depth, without the meaning. And what we’re left with is…whatever I just watched.
