🎥︎ MOFIES
I still don’t like Eddington
The following, unfortunately, has nothing to do with Austin Butler. I wrote it after listening to this episode of “It Could Happen Here.”
July 29th, 2025
To summarize my whole take on Eddington, which I will admit I enjoyed watching yet somehow pretty much hated, I think that Ari Aster, in his whole farcical anxiety-crafting thing, overconcerns himself with A) the most juvenile interpretations of certain concepts in the zeitgeist―or relies on them and parallel audience ignorance/exhaustion for laffs, tension etc.―and B) fantastical exaggeration which takes us into an imaginary version of the territory; I simply feel that there must be more skillful ways to handle that.
Ultimately, this comes across as “these are things that stupid kids talk about.” I don’t know if that’s genuinely his impression of all those things, probably not, but I don’t feel like he’s trying very hard to encourage the deeper read.
With (A), is it funny that a kid would google Angela Davis on his phone in order to impress a girl? Yes, sure. Would that happen? Absolutely. Do I care about this constant refrain of the perspective of panicking teens on the subject of race and whiteness? Not really. Maybe if it was a movie more about the kids’ world and what all that means socially amongst themselves. But it’s not, it’s aiming elsewhere. Even accepting that the movie is about the anxiety of the time (and acknowledging that kids shoulder a colossal amount of that anxiety) why is it then a movie about adults where the kids are a troop of jesters waving these things around like their silly and annoying little fads?
Concrete example: the very short scene of that boy’s dinner with his parents, where he talks about abolition of whiteness. I honestly found it very funny, and I laughed at the discomfort and taboo of it... until his dad says “are you fucking r*tarded,” and then everyone in the theater laughed way harder at that punch-line. That’s spooky, man. I just think that sucks, especially amongst the litany of other scenes where the kids are handling all that stuff with superficiality or unhinged confessionalism etc.
As for (B), the exaggerated bits underlining the anxieties, I would point to the very first scene (after the vagrant guy’s opening), the scene where some cops are aggressively telling another cop to wear a mask while he’s eating alone and inside his own car out in the desert. This is preposterous from every direction. It’s obviously not a masking expectation anyone ever had, and it’s especially not something you would hear from cops, who were famously bad at masking. It’s weird because it’s not yet supposed to be farce at that point, but it’s still a wild exaggeration. We’re supposed to just accept it. I don’t point this out as a movie “goof.” It seems representative, to me, of Aster’s carefree approach to delineating what’s a sharp picture of America and what’s an absurd dream. It would be okay for it to be vibes, if it weren’t delivered as an emotional premise for the character and as the first and most simple and viscerally relatable event to ground us before we launch off into a more farcical view of the time period. And it’s just ...off. The result is this scene where the mask demand is totally unreasonable.
*I understand that the Pueblo police simply don’t like him and don’t want him on their land anyway, but it was played as them really genuinely wanting him to wear a mask. We could get into a Knives-Out-esque white guilt factor here wrt the Pueblo cops being some of the only reasonable characters in the story, the only capable crime scene investigators, one of whom almost solves the whole thing and saves the day, thus easier to interpret things they do/say as more genuine or reasonable or whatever. Anyway, that’s mostly beside the point.
My issue with all this is that you don’t need to do these things in order to create that anxiety, and it isn’t representative of what is/was actually going on in reality, so does it really work? Conversely, if you succeed in creating a picture of the anxiety via these counterfeit routes, then what’s the point? If he’d been embedded in any one of these things (land back, anti-whiteness, abolition), he could probably write something more specific and really interesting about the contradictions and anxieties therein. Instead, I think he reached neither that nor his own broader goal, but rather a quick fix to soothe viewers’ anxiety, loosen them up, and give them permission to finally turn and laugh and break through into a reactionary posture, which we’ve watched happen again and again in stupider circles. The exhaustion settles into “yeah, this is all pretty cringe, actually,” and everything gets liquidated into ferment for the next round of reaction, panic, and opportunism.
I don’t think Aster is trying to encourage reactionary viewing. I think he might be encouraging “audience reaction,” and he might have trouble telling the difference. In any case, that’s the vibe I get from watching the film. The wisdom of “movies don’t need to reiterate back to you what you already believe” is telling me this is a movie about the chaos and anxiety of our time; the pure reading of its events is only with regards to that anxiety as the subject matter in and of itself. But when it comes down to execution, if the movie functionally is mirroring and igniting people’s reactionary inclinations, then ...that’s what it does. I could be wrong; I guess we’ll see. Or not. It surely does not matter that much. Regardless, I feel it’s a misapplication or a poorly handled application of this particular farcical tact.
That post-exhaustion reaction, that cringe-poisoned attitude, seems of a piece with Ari Aster’s whole thing, or my read of him, anyhow: kind of mean-spirited and superior! Here I must explain and confess that I haven’t seen any of his other feature-length films. I watched a few of his student short films in 2018, trying to decide if I wanted to go see Hereditary, and I flat-out loathed them, so here we are.
Why is everything like this now? Why is so much of our story-telling, joke-telling, critique and discussion therof, trapped within the frame of “We shouldn’t be afraid to say this,” “You should be allowed to laugh at this,” “The left needs to own this,” etc.? Are we babies? Scared baby people? I thought we were having a conversation about what is true or false, but it turns out we’re debating lists of things we are or aren’t supposed to say? This is pathetic, and when it needs to be said about a movie, even a worthy movie, I’m sorry but that’s also a pathetic conversation.