Behind the miscommunication of a political exploitation film
Martin Scorsese gives a lesson in reading pop culture through his defense of Ari Aster’s Eddington, an apocalyptic satire about post-Covid America. Speaking to the New York Times, Scorsese inadvertently nails what’s wrong with this frantic political spasm.
Aster’s conceit contrasts competing mayoral campaigns in the fictional town of Eddington, N.M., during the height of Covid panic in 2020 — that of Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) against the bid of the incumbent mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). The Covid era marks the start of America’s social collapse, eventually leading to the politically agitated George Floyd riots — a psychic disintegration that resembles Aster’s previous Hereditary, Midsommar, and Beau Is Afraid, horror-movie spectacles that some impressionable people take seriously.
Scorsese implies that Covid left Americans aggrieved, exclaiming that the film “externalizes the emotional violence” that’s behind the physical brutality, yet he never specifies how the Covid-apocalypse intensified the political enmity that had already descended upon the country (via the duplicity of Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx in Operation Warp Speed). Fact is, Eddington inadequately accounts for the tyranny that Americans felt during Covid, enforced by one political side and suffered by the other, that pushed countless fragile sensibilities over the edge.
Thus Aster’s alarum: Conservative Joe Cross objects to the mask mandates and insists that “there is no Covid in Eddington,” yet he faces other personal anxieties, including marriage to unstable, sexphobic Louise (Emma Stone), such that he can’t pinpoint his anxiety. Liberal Ted Garcia is a slick political phony — a cartoonish whitewash of actual government authoritarians (Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, Andrew Cuomo, etc.). This simplistic contrast between Cross and Garcia is unenlightening. Aster’s extreme political poles, transferred here into the generic format of a modern Western, trivialize the class tensions that horror films Night of the Living Dead and Texas Chain Saw Massacre used more effectively.
Fanboy Scorsese must know that a truly expressive, culturally reflective film is never merely topical. (Were that the case, Scorsese’s own crazy, Aster-esque grand guignol Shutter Island would be the ultimate World War II satire.) Eddington depicts the Covid experience through broad topical indices. Many recognizable details of posters, bumper stickers, cellphones, social media obsession, and partisan mindsets recreate a panicky atmosphere, pointing to it as the source of social division. A constant background noise of media commentary conveys an unconscious psychic influence (something Zack Snyder did better in Man of Steel). Yet by avoiding 2020’s questionable election, Aster gets the essential national betrayal disastrously wrong.
A supporting cast of sheeple-activists and brainwashed citizens crowds the narrative, preventing any helpful recognition of the period’s distress, humiliation, and oppression. More scandalous than Aster’s omission of a questionable election is the film’s opportunistic George Floyd analogy of racial unrest. It’s a mob-driven flashpoint, whereas a later Biden analogy that places Sheriff Cross in a vegetative state merely seems fortuitous. Both ploys are superficial, as is Aster’s sarcastic critique of Big Tech (called “Solidgoldmagikarp”) as a scare tactic. Big Tech symbolism is Aster’s fail-safe, replacing religion and philosophy. Ultimately, Eddington is no more credible than such trash as Civil War and White Noise.
According to Scorsese, Aster “dives right into the side of American life that many people can’t bear to look at or even acknowledge — no one wants to listen to anyone else, which is frightening.” Such soft-headed thinking could also be applied to Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese’s own shaming of America’s social rot and systemic racism. That was Scorsese’s first politically pointed movie, conceived during Covid’s national insecurity. But Eddington is equally out of touch; it’s just another overblown Aster horror show (Beau Is Afraid, Part 2) and, because of its violent excess, of little significance. Eddington is so solemnly goofy that its vision of polarized America might as well not be a satire. Scorsese’s praise sounds significant, but by leaving out the word “exploitation,” it’s his political cop-out.
Scorsese and the coterie of reviewers who praise Eddington don’t seem to realize that they’re issuing cultural mandates, just like the arrogant media elites who pushed the Covid-19 crisis and whom we can no longer trust. The Los Angeles Times raved, “If we’re cackling at ourselves together in the theater, we’re less alone.” But that’s the same leftist, “we’re-all-in-this-together,” Move On malarkey that made the Covid years so infuriating. (That L.A. Times reviewer calls Aster’s mention of Antifa mere “innuendo,” as if the violent organization didn’t exist.)
Film-culture gatekeepers can’t keep up with the myriad ways media make us miserable. Godard is dead. So Aster’s 2020 fable omits the news of the disputed election and its cataclysmic, still-reverberating aftermath. The Times, Scorsese, plus Aster himself, a visually gifted Tarantino, perpetuate the corporate media’s Covid narrative. Desperate to continue authoritarian argument, they misrepresent Eddington as a grand summing-up of the era on the level of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita or Godard’s Weekend. (Consider Eddington an A24 version of what Francis Coppola flubbed in Megalopolis.) They all bypass the genuine expression of polarization captured in S. Craig Zahler’s Dragged Across Concrete or Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, failing to see that Aster is a hysteric, not a rationalist or aesthetic moralist like Godard. The miscommunication that Scorsese’s blurb refers to as the essence of our crise is the product of both political tragedy and B-movie sensationalism.