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.”
