Demons and Space in EDDINGTON
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| Emma Stone and Deirdre O'Connell spiraling into conspiracy |
The western has always been about space. The spaces between settlements, between cultures, between familial divides. The vastness of the American west served as the perfect backdrop for valorizing the violent men of the new nation’s mythology, yet in the lens of certain filmmakers, it also served as a defaultly alienating space. As a swallowing hole of equally great beauty and suffocation. This, often as subtext, is certainly present in the films of John Ford though it becomes more overt in newer films like Meek’s Cutoff from Kelly Reichardt and now with Ari Aster’s truly modern western Eddington. The film divorces the western’s traditional devotion to the past and plants its feet firmly in the volatile soil of May 2020, a date that should cause at the very least a shudder down the spine of anyone who lived through it. Yet, while the film certainly chokes its audience awash in the vastness and aesthetics of the American delusion (a sentence I promise is an endorsement), Aster’s film ironically lands on perhaps the most overtly wholesome “message” of his career, one that resonates with similar fervor as the John Ford classics, and one that is, perhaps paradoxically, his most truly terrifying. If Toni Collete’s family could not escape their past (and for that matter neither could Florence Pugh or the ever frightened Beau), Eddington can not even see it. By the time the last frame holds over rolling credits, Ari’s pseudo-moralizing is clear: we must learn to hear each other, to love our neighbors, because there is a malevolent force in the world. Though it’s probably already too late.
The spaces between the distinct, almost archetypical, citizens of Eddington, are initially less geographical as much as they are virtual. Aster frames his characters, residents of those very same vistas that once helped solidify the cinematic form, as fully trapped within the screens that run their lives. When John Wayne burst onto the silver screen with Ford’s iconic zoom in Stagecoach, it was an image that conjured the masculine myths of freedom and liberty upon which America so fiercely built its foundation. This myth remains, though when we meet Eddington’s conservative, anti-mask sheriff Joe Cross, played by the ever sturdy Joaquin Phoenix, he is entombed in his police SUV, surrounded by screens, representations, of the world around him, emasculated with the distinct unawareness that is almost a calling card of Phoenix’s performances. Yet, the reality on their phones is, as it is for us, just as real, if not more so, than anything in their actual town. This means the platitudes about coincidence and conspiracy land with far more resonance than any actual face to face contact could ever, especially as that face to face contact is covered and distanced further. This means that they like the version of themselves they see in the screen far more than anything they see in “real” life. A virtual and literal space.
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| John Wayne's introduction in Stagecoach (1939) dir. John Ford |
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| Joaquin Phoenix's introduction in Eddington |
As we begin to move through the dormant town, the images Aster conjures stir up immediate and obvious feelings of discomfort for anyone that lived through 2020 with some degree of sentience, and that Aster decided the perfect backdrop to his modern western would be the Covid pandemic and BLM protests, becomes almost inevitable. While certainly provocative to the mainstream, the Scorsese adored cinema of Ari Aster have previously always landed with just as much cheap humor as they have technical mastery, an accusation all but corroborated by accounts of his laughter on the set of Hereditary during the filming of one certain memorable decapitation. While there is no shame to admit Midsommar was unsettling, or despairing, it ought to be noted that the man behind that burning bear suit destruction was probably laughing (a subject upon which Joaquin Phoenix's phallic father figure in Beau is Afraid ought to have silenced any doubters definitively). This dark comedy should not inherently be seen as a demerit and that same Ari remains with Eddington, though with him now is a rage that I will risk calling almost a kind of maturity.
His provocations remain, certainly in the way he depicts aspects of the teenage fervor within the protests, and in the way he plants his audience's perspective firmly within that of Joe Cross. This perspective inflamed Cannes upon the film’s premiere and has caused several to call the film if not misguided liberalism, outright centrist, for empathizing with a lunatic even as it mocks the left. A “both sides” debacle. While I understand how this conclusion could be reached, accusations of the film being centrist are mistaken and amount to a bad faith reading of the film. Ari’s frames here are not only wider like the Western influences as before, but grounded in a reality closer to our own, a phenomenon thus far unique in his filmography.
Like all great westerns, Eddington is also about space. Joe Cross is socially distant against his will. He won’t wear a mask (asthma), he doesn’t want to stay six feet away, but this refusal fails to get him any closer to those near to him. His homefront is plagued by seeping trauma long ignored by his wife (Emma Stone proving again she elevates everything, this time with only a handful of scenes), mediated only by the mutual descent of her and her live-in mother (played by a devious Deirdre O’Connell) into conspiracy and an all too appealing Austin Butler led cult. While Joe is the boss of his workforce, it is a job commanding little respect and when he impulsively announces he will run for mayor, the divide between him and incumbent Ted Garcia, a perfectly cast Pedro Pascal, threatens to fall off a cliff. Joe is alone in vast virtual and literal spaces, and the film, perhaps provocatively, allows its audience to feel a degree of empathy for this figure.
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| An early altercation between Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) and Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) in the film. |
Yet, as the film progresses, or rather descends, further into Joe’s mania, linking itself completely into his delusions and madness, this empathy fades and it becomes clear that there is once more a demon lurking in the background of Aster’s frames, one far more frightening than anything a Swedish cult or hereditary curse could present. By the time the film begins to explode into brutal, and increasingly outlandish, demonstrations of violence, the divide between reality has been completely severed, and the demon has been unleashed. The bookends of the film reveal it is more than simply hate, or “misinformation,” or even violence, the general malady so many well meaning liberal endeavors condemn with little specificity, but a very real tangible threat, one we face every day, one it may be too late to stop, laughingly rendered here, in all its darkly comedic contrast, as “solidgoldmagikarp.” A warehouse data center in the middle of a vast desert.
In that image comes Aster’s “message,” the most wholesome moral of his young career, though one that he certainly believes is too late. We must learn to love those who are actually around us. In 2020, we did not, separating ever further into the space, into our own alternate realities, and while we argued, and while our animosity grew, the corporate interests and tech industries reaped immense profits not merely in tandem with, but directly from, this immense human suffering, consolidating their interest even further, and birthing technologies that only increase their power. The poison of our society is indeed systematic racism, entrenched history of whiteness, misinformation and the rise of alt-right delusions, but Eddington chillingly reminds that in all of this drivel there is a benefactor, a cynical inhuman, environmentally destructive, rot that used the pandemic to grow even stronger. Eddington, far from “both sides” peddling, ends up as not only the first film to truly utilize the western genre to capture the modern world, but with an angry, satirical plea, that echoes the films Ford made before: look what we’ve done to ourselves, and perhaps, dare I say more importantly, look what they’ve done to us.
Eddington is streaming by now probably?
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