American microcosm, Ari Aster’s new film is now in cinemas

Eddington, New Mexico, 2.345 Abittanti. Not exactly the beating heart of America. Or maybe yes. Because whether it is the large metropolitan areas, or the deepest rural province, there are now gods common, universal, transversal traits, propagated like a contagion not by Covid virions but by mobile phone screens on which the same reels pass, the same messages, the same stories that all repeat the same watchwords. And from this point of view, then, from the point of view of a film that also talks about battles and culture wars, and that talks about the United States todaywhat he did Ari Aster in his new film it’s not that different from what he did Luca Guadagnino in After the Huntset in a location opposite to the film’s Eddington, an Ivy League university that is clearly Yale. And in its most disruptive explosions, in broadening its gaze to include life-or-death battles and conspiratorial dynamics, Eddington it also has much in common with the splendid One battle after another Of Paul Thomas Anderson.
But let’s go step by step.
In Eddington, 2,345 inhabitants, everyone knows each other, and everyone knows the two prominent figures of the community: Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) and Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). The relationship between the two is not very simple, due to old disagreements concerning Louise (Emma Stone), Joe’s wife and (perhaps) Ted’s ex, and tensions worsen due to the opposing attitudes that the two have towards the rules regarding distancing and masks imposed by Covid: Joe is loose and pragmatic, while Ted is rigid and prudent. In short, it ends up that right on the eve of the new elections for the mayor, where Ted would like to be reconfirmed and approve the construction of a new, enormous data center on the outskirts of the city, Joe decides to take the field and challenge him in an electoral campaign that will initially be fought with social media barrages and then become something even more violent. In the meantime, put under pressure by the pandemic, and even more incited by the respective echo chambers coming from their phones, the rest of the citizens of Eddington will become increasingly polarized around issues that do not only concern the election for the mayor, but a series of youth protests in the name (badly copied, again by social media) of the metropolitan ones of the movement Black Lives Matterfor example; and Louise, however, will be seduced by the ambiguous leader (Austin Butler) of a para-Christian sect that seems to have taken a lot from the chats of QAnon.

Eddington: il trailer

Initially told, and not without reason, as a contemporary western in which instead of guns there are telephones, Eddington it is an open and magmatic film that not only transcends all gender boundariesbut tries to include in his story all those tensions and oppositional forces that have transformed the United States (but are also transforming many, too many Western societies) into places torn by conflicts that almost seem to lead to the threshold of a civil war for reasons that have to do with a politics no longer understood only in a traditional and partisan sense, but above all with the cultural wars of today and the ideological oppositions that are taken to extremes and imitated due to their primary existence in the virtual world. “We are trapped in a feedback-based system,” he said in this regard Ari Aster. “The problem is that people don’t remember knowing that. Eddington talks about what happens when the feedback balloons and bubbles collideA dynamic that we all experience day after day, especially in a period as complex and hot as the one we are experiencing, surrounded by wars and political battles.
In Aster’s hands, this dense and incandescent matter ends up taking on various forms, including, inevitably, that of satirical comedysince as the director recalls “The insidious thing about our culture is that it is scary, dangerous, and catastrophic, but also ridiculous, stupid, and impossible to take seriously”. The fundamental point is that we live in a world where there is no longer agreement on the part of anyone on the concept of “real”, and where conspiracy theory (a conspiracy theory in film and in reality which today is above all right-wing, but which somehow has its roots in certain paranoid distortions of the left of the Seventies), is the basis of the thinking of too many.
But Aster doesn’t want to turn against anyone. His is not a biased film. With Eddington what he is interested in doing is telling, describing, reflecting. Doing so through a dynamic, surprising and compelling film from a cinematographic point of view but which is also able to show its audience the disturbing snapshot of what we have become, perhaps to be able to correct our course. “I wanted to make a film that reflected the country we live in, without necessarily demonizing or glorifying anyone,” he said. “I hope it is democratic, in the sense that it gives equal weight to all the instruments of this cacophony. And in the end, whatever our differences of opinion, we need to find a way to start interacting with each other again. The power of technology and finance has kept us frozen and isolated in our individual silos, but we’re all in this together. We all know that something is very seriously wrong”.