Eddington: A Shiny Gold Magikarp

No one wants a shiny gold Magikarp. It’s a joke, a beautiful nothingness, not dissimilar to those fad Supreme bricks with the logo just printed atop it. They splash around, looking stupid, expensive, and useless, all in one - it’s just a bit much. For the residents of Eddington, the fake town built on the very real fears and delusions Ari Aster recognised during the COVID crisis, their shiny gold Magikarp is gradually bleeding them dry, away in the distance. They’ve been promised a red Gyarados: jobs, infrastructure, stability, and purpose, but all they can see right now is this big floppy fish mocking them, and the governor who’s running again to keep it there. Maybe Eddington isn’t moving anywhere, on purpose. Maybe Eddington is holding an Everstone.

That may seem like a few too many Pokémon references for this no-holds-barred satire, but it perfectly fits the tone of a movie as indebted to the American West as it is to TikTok dances. Ari Aster’s modern take on the final frontier sees it pithy with anarchism, blown wide open with rampant conspiracy, and slowly being taken over by men who act woke just to get laid. It’s a movie that often juts out at the closest target, regardless of what stance they take, looking at the American project as an outsider would to ask, ‘What the fuck is even happening anymore?’ It’s a Rorschach test, it’s a treatise on the horrors of social media, it’s a look at the epidemic of misinformation - Eddington is a whole lot of a lot.

Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) is the sheriff in the town of Eddington, a small place in southern New Mexico governed by Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who has just put mask mandates into place because of the COVID-19 pandemic. He’s not too happy about it, and so runs as mayor against him. Wacky hi-jinks - notably the BLM protests, scary 9/11 conspiracies, and a few murders - ensue, and Joe Cross tries to keep it all under control. At the same time, his wife, Louise (Emma Stone), gets sucked down a rabbit hole of personality lead by Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler), who is telling her stories of crazy paedophile rings and sex traffickers.

There’s lots more too. Over the course of its daunting two and a half hour runtime, the town of Eddington comes into view not as a place but as an idea, of a moment in time that’s passed but kept in stasis. These characters, an audience, did not live in Eddington but through it. Aster continues his work his disorienting work in Beau is Afraid to create a portrait of a culture and a system on the permanent edge of collapse, a collapse that both sides seemingly want but neither are committed enough to follow through on, and for refusing to demonise either outright but poke and prod, this is a town, a movie, and a moment rife with division.

Joe Cross himself is a man at odds. A rootin-tootin cowboy with a big hat and a gunslinger bravado acting as sheriff, unable to wear masks because he can’t breathe through them - aesthetically, he’s a pitch-perfect stereotype. A lesser, worse piece of satire would leave it there, but Aster gives him so much texture. Louise, his wife, is a woman in permanent struggle with her mental health, searching for meaning in the dark dinges of the internet, which he knows is a scam. Politically, he’d be a MAGA republican (the mirroring between him and Trump is so obvious it may as well be plastered on the screen), and he uses the techniques popularised by the movement to try to win over the base. He lies, he cheats, he accuses, he resorts to violence. Though, like in Beau is Afraid, Aster’s form becomes so overwhelming, especially during the protest scenes, that his freakish dotishness makes sense, not jumping so far to the camp extremes that it’d be very possible without the initial groundwork. Phoenix himself is great at internalising that freak, schizo energy that we’ve come to despise and weirdly enjoy watching on the news, always out of control, never actually bursting.

Everyone else is a one-dimensional caricature of pure comedic stereotype. There’s a white woman who goes to protests and tells a black man to be mad about the racism, inadvertently being racist herself. There’s Vernon Jefferson Peak, who is essentially a more attractive Alex Jones, ranting and raving about telephone poles giving everyone magnetised neurotoxins, and so forth. It’s that counterbalance of one genuine character in a desert of blank faces that makes the hysteria that much more earned, so when Cross is looking around he sees a bunch of Mr. Men looking back at him. The movie does overplay that hand a little, with a third act that wildly lurches into Rambo: First Blood territory for far too long, but it all pans out to one insane punchline.

The ultimate question of Eddington is, ‘Are you retarded?’ It’s not an easy one to answer when what qualifies as such changes day-to-day in a world getting stupider and more performative. The truth is, I don’t know, but from here, the American consciousness sure does look like a goddamn Magikarp.