Warning: This piece contains major spoilers for the ending of Eddington.
Ari Aster is no stranger to making movies that get people’s attention. His debut feature, Hereditary, and his sophomore effort, Midsommar, were huge successes for distributor A24 and helped spark conversation about “elevated horror.” Aster kept audiences guessing with his wildly ambitious Beau is Afraid, a three-hour comedy-horror starring Joaquin Phoenix that wasn’t successful at the box office, but certainly generated plenty of conversation among those who saw it.
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Eddington, his fourth feature, is his most divisive yet. It takes place in May 2020 in the fictional small town of Eddington, New Mexico, as the heat of the COVID-19 pandemic meets the urgency of the Black Lives Matter movement. It follows Joe Cross (Phoenix), Eddington’s sheriff, who lives with his wife, Louise (Emma Stone), and mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), the latter of whom regularly espouses conspiracy theories. Joe, who has asthma, strongly opposes the implementation of mask mandates that Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) is keen to enforce. Furious over the perceived infringement on his and his neighbors’ freedom, Joe decides on a whim to challenge Ted in the upcoming election. Things escalate completely out of control from there.
“The film is about a bunch of people who care about the world and know that something is wrong,” says Aster, who wrote and directed Eddington, of its take on that recent era’s brewing distrust. “They feel very clearly that something is wrong, but they’re all living in different realities, and they disagree about what that thing is that’s wrong.” While the townspeople debate the building of a giant new data center which will bring jobs and industry but drain natural resources, its citizens confront the conflict between police and Black Lives Matter protestors, anger and frustration over masks, and the rampant conspiracy theories increasingly finding a foothold among citizens living much of their lives on the internet.
We sat down with Aster to discuss the film’s explosive ending and what he’s trying to say through all the violence, twists, and 11th-hour gags.
Everything falls apart for Joe
While Joe’s campaign for mayor gains steam, things at home are crumbling. Louise is furious that he entered the race without discussing it with her, but when he makes a video claiming that Ted is a sexual predator who took advantage of Louise when she was underage, things take a turn for the worse. Louise makes a video in response stating that Joe’s claims are utterly false, leading Joe’s credibility to falter. She leaves Joe for Vernon (Austin Butler), a cult leader whose belief in a powerful ring of pedophiles Louise hops on board with.
After a heated public interaction with Ted, who brutally slaps Joe (in an altercation set ironically to Katy Perry’s “Firework”), Joe is left completely defeated. He does the unthinkable, killing both Ted and their son in their home at long range from the desert, sniper style. Joe then sprays “No Justice, No Peace” on Ted’s wall, attempting to pin the murders on Antifa, which has been gaining attention via viral videos. When a police officer from the nearby Pueblo tribe (William Belleau) gets involved with the investigation, citing sovereignty over the land from which the bullets were fired, and quickly becomes suspicious of Joe, the sheriff begins to spiral.
Suddenly, in the middle of the night, a group of masked extremists descends, luring Joe to the outskirts of town where they plan to wreak havoc. They detonate explosives that kill one of Joe’s fellow police officers and severely wounds the other, Michael (Micheal Ward), who has been hoping he might fill Joe’s shoes if Joe wins the election, while also being pressured to join the BLM protests as one of the town’s small number of Black residents. Joe finds himself in a firefight for his life on the streets of Eddington, arming himself at a gun shop and dodging bullets through the empty town in a lengthy Western-style shootout.
Multiple interpretations of who the shooters might be
Eddington is a movie of screens. They dictate the way the people of Eddington live, as real to them as the world outside. Characters are constantly on their phones or computers, scrolling social media, watching YouTube, and going down various rabbit holes about government conspiracies, mask-wearing, and whatever else reinforces their worldviews. “Every character is paranoid, and they’re all very certain of what they feel is happening,” says Aster. That sense of paranoia infects every frame of Eddington. And just as characters are consumed by their screens, “the film becomes possessed by the worldview of these characters,” Aster says.
But once the pivotal shootout happens, screens are almost nowhere to be found. The sudden disappearance is almost enough to make you think Joe is undergoing some horrifying COVID-induced fever dream. Aster confirmed that shifting from omnipresent electronic devices to none at all was purposeful. “In the climactic sequence, there’s no longer any need for screens. They’ve done their job,” he says, suggesting that paranoia has well and truly taken over in Eddington.
Joe finds himself roaming Eddington, shooting at anyone and everyone attacking him, including not-so-accidentally killing the Pueblo officer who found evidence to connect Joe to Ted’s murder. Shots cut through the air, and bullets hail from every direction as Joe tries to stay alive. “You have those anonymous shooters emerging from the dark,” says Aster. “That feels like an interesting metaphor for how the internet tends to work. It grants us anonymity in a way that I think does not bring out our better selves.”
It’s telling that Aster uses the word “anonymous,” despite an earlier scene clearly establishing men geared up and donning Antifa insignia coming into Eddington via plane. “The film is meant to function as something of a Rorschach test. That is the moment at which the film either announces itself as satire, or announces itself as a way that’s really getting at what’s happening—more conspiracy-minded people,” says Aster.
Just because Eddington presents the shooters as Antifa doesn’t mean that’s necessarily who they are. “Everything that’s there would tell us that those people are Antifa, whether that means that they’re being sent in by the GOP to make it look like Antifa is dangerous, or whether you’re on the other side and you believe that George Soros is sending them in.” But Aster won’t say which he believes it to be: “It felt important and maybe a little impish to leave that to the viewer,” he says.
A third alternative beyond an assault secretly organized by the left or right? Perhaps the killers have been hired by the powers that want to build the data center in Eddington. The data center is on the periphery of the film, but it’s clear that very wealthy and powerful people are invested in the development of the center, and a town already engulfed in a national media circus is hardly a suitable place for its installation. Is all the violence and division just a distraction from the real problem? Perhaps they posed as Antifa and brought violence to the town to destabilize it so they could come into that power vacuum, offering jobs and stability, just what a torn-up Eddington would desperately need.
The unlikely rise of Brian and Dawn
The brutal shootout ends thanks to Brian (Cameron Mann), a teenager who has been an active member of the Black Lives Matter protests, though only to impress a girl he likes. Brian guns down an assailant, but not before the latter stabs Joe in the head. The moment is captured on film (bringing screens back to Eddington), and we flash forward one year. The video has gone viral on TikTok, leading the opportunistic Brian to become a sudden icon of the right wing. That includes a hilarious moment where Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene herself demands that Brian receive a Congressional Medal of Honor. Aster says that Kyle Rittenhouse served as the model for Brian’s sudden rise.
“Brian is a very interesting and important character in the film, because he is somebody who’s not ideologically driven. He’s a normal kid looking for community and wants a girlfriend. He joins the left-wing movement for pretty disingenuous reasons. In the end, he’ll go where he’s wanted. It’s a consequence of this hyper-individualistic society that we live in,” says Aster.
After the shootout, Joe is left braindead and in a wheelchair. He’s technically serving as mayor, but his conspiracy-pilled mother-in-law, Dawn, has taken over, marking her new role with some fancier pantsuits. The town celebrates the opening of the data center. Joe has accomplished his mission to bring the town together, and got everything he wanted—except the love of his life, who left him for Vernon and is now pregnant with his child. But he’s left virtually functionless, forced to live out the rest of his days without any agency. His nurse is sleeping with his mother-in-law, and they all share a bed. “There’s an element of karmic punishment there,” Aster says. “But it’s more of a success story for Dawn. She’s somebody who is loaded with convictions, and was looking for a platform, and she ultimately is the mayor at the end.”
The data center at the center of it all
The final shot is not of Joe, Dawn, or any other person. Instead, book-ending the film’s opening on the proposed site of the new development, it’s of solidgoldmagikarp, the now-completed giant data center, looming in the middle of the New Mexico desert on the outskirts of Eddington. (The name of the data center doesn’t reference the Pokémon Magikarp, but rather an AI token that causes disruption or erratic behaviour in AI)..“There are many winners and losers at the end of the film, but there’s only one unequivocal winner, and that’s the data center,” says Aster.
“It’s a peripheral detail in the film, but it’s absolutely central to the film’s point. It’s a hyper-scale data center, which is tied to AI. We begin with the promise of it coming, and we end with it being achieved. There’s a way of looking at the film and saying all of those stories and all of these characters are now just training data. The movie itself is training data,” Aster says.
The ending of Eddington remains wide open to interpretation, but that’s how Aster sees it. “It’s a movie that’s about a bunch of people navigating a crisis while another crisis incubates,” Aster says. That other crisis is the surging of AI. “AI, at this point, seems too big to fail. It feels like we’re in an arms race. The people who are warning us about this are the ones who are ushering it in, and they think that that is relieving them of responsibility. I think the dominant feeling of this moment is one of powerlessness and dread.”
Aster knows that’s bleak, but he doesn’t see Eddington as nihilistic. “I think there’s hope in the fact that the film is a period piece,” Aster says. “I hope it can give people the opportunity to look back at how we were and maybe in that experience, see a little bit more clearly how we are on the path that we’re on and maybe ask the question: Do we want to stay on this path?”