“It’s important to try and find the humanity in the people we abhor”: Ari Aster on Eddington

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and nobody feels fine. Ari Aster’s fourth feature Eddington is set in the eponymous fictional small town in New Mexico in May 2020 – the cultural context of that time goes without saying. Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), Eddington’s sheriff, is a candidate in the mayoral election against the incumbent Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). The race between the former, a right-wing libertarian with a disdain for mask-wearing, and the latter, a tech-friendly centrist well-versed in virtue signalling, becomes personal, and then soon violent. Before long, Joe’s tethers to reality have loosened and he’s sneaking around town like a special ops soldier. (Aster’s previous film, in 2023, was Beau Is Afraid: this one could be called Joe Is Paranoid.) Meanwhile, unimpeded, construction continues on an enormous data centre, named ‘SolidGoldMagikarp’. “Your [sic] being manipulated” is Joe’s campaign slogan: but by whom, and to what end?

Thomas Flew: Eddington had a mixed response when it premiered in Cannes. Are people getting out of the film what you wanted them to get out of it?

Ari Aster: The film is about polarisation, so it feels right that it would be polarising. It feels like it’s being engaged with in a healthy and exciting way now. I understand why it’s irritating certain people because it’s kind of going at people’s identities. And we have a lot invested in these things. It’s suggesting all the way through that these are things that belong to us and at the same time asking if they don’t.

What led to the creation of Eddington?

In May/June, 2020, I was working on the script for Beau Is Afraid and had become overwhelmed by what was happening in the world, by lockdown, by being on Twitter, and I wanted to talk about it. The fever reached a pitch that I hadn’t felt before. Something was in the air that I hadn’t experienced previously. And I knew in my gut that that moment, whatever was happening right then, would not cease to be relevant. I didn’t know where we were going, but I knew that moment felt distinct. I’d never before felt that everything was so close to violence. And so I wanted to try to get my hands around it and write about it.

I started creating these burner Twitter profiles and got myself into different algorithms based on the characters I was thinking of – people who would be more in a QAnon world, or more in a conservative libertarian world – and I also got myself into algorithms and then tried to get myself out, but I wasn’t able to.

When I started rewriting the script in earnest, I flew out to New Mexico and drove all around the state. I went to different counties and talked to sheriffs. I went to small towns and talked to mayors, police chiefs and public officials. And I went to pueblos [Native American settlements] and spent a good amount of time with a lot of people. That was very, very useful, partly because I met a lot of people who became interesting models for different characters, but also because it got me away from my own politics and my own inner life. It made it so I wasn’t playing with army men any more. I suddenly found that I had confused sympathies for different people who I wouldn’t have expected to be drawn towards, and I was kind of repelled by certain people that held my own politics.

What I found interesting about Eddington as a ‘Covid’ film is that it’s quite expansive in its use of locations, unlike other films that take on the subject. Was this the western inspiration taking hold? 

I wanted to make a film about people who were locked into solipsistic sovereignty, but pull back far enough that the film can take something more of a sociological stance, so that we see their situations a little bit more objectively, all together. It’s ultimately a movie about people who are living in different realities and looking at the world through different windows, and they’re all totally unreachable to each other. I didn’t want to make another movie that was just looking through one window.

Lots of classic westerns are about the construction of the myth of modern America and the ‘progress’ of moving west. This feels like a western made during a time when that project of the United States is almost disintegrating and, as a result, the film lacks that traditional, positive resolution. 

Well, it shouldn’t feel resolved. I don’t feel resolved. But it should be looking towards the future, while also being a period piece. The western felt appropriate as a genre for a film that’s contending with this moment because it feels like we’re living through the collapse of something and like we’re on the cusp of something new and alarming and deeply strange. It looks like we’re living through an experiment that failed a long time ago, and instead of anybody in power slowing it down, it feels like we’re strapping jet packs to it.

The film is very much about how these phones have changed us and how we’re hurtling towards something that’s going to be, and already is, changing us in ways we can’t even fathom. Life has become increasingly uncanny and it’s happening so quickly that it’s impossible to trace what’s happened to us. We’re being ushered towards something massive and it’s got a bunch of people who are warring on ideological ground, living in the past, living in silos, fortressed off, and they’re being constantly agitated while something happens above their heads without obstruction.

And that is what the construction of the data centre represents? 

Yeah. If the movie is about anything, it’s about building a data centre just outside a small town.

It’s impossible to speak about these things without feeling like a conspiracy theorist. 

Conspiracy theories have caught on in the culture and that’s because we all know something is wrong. We can all feel it, it’s very clear. But we have no access to power or what is really happening. And so we’re left to speculate and are being fed and weaned on whatever’s in our algorithms. It was just announced that Mark Zuckerberg plans to build a hyperscale data centre the size of Manhattan. Most people don’t even know what that means. We are all training data now.

It’s interesting to me that Eddington’s coming out in summer blockbuster season. It does things very differently to a blockbuster; it’s not resolving anything, it’s not making you feel necessarily optimistic. 

I find that there’s a real impulse in the culture and among a lot of artists to retreat into the past, whether that’s due to nostalgia or trauma. It’s about clinging to an old world that’s no longer here or mining the past for reasons for where we are now. I’ve been told that the movie is nihilistic and I really don’t think so. I think it’s nihilistic to look to the past, ignore the present and not even think about the future. The movie is saying that there’s a big problem out there, and it’s not between ourselves.

If there’s anything optimistic about the film, it’s that it’s a period piece. Which is to say, “OK, that’s over. Now maybe we can look at ourselves and see how we were. And maybe in that experience we can see a little bit more clearly how we are and the path we’re on and ask, ‘Do we want to stay on this path?’”

You see the invitation to introspection as being optimistic in itself?

Yeah. Part of this project for me was to create, as an audience surrogate, somebody I would otherwise not necessarily spend a lot of time with, because he’s just of a different world. I’m going to humanise him, turn a mirror on the people that hold my beliefs and question them, which is another way of questioning and looking at myself, especially at that time. 

It’s important to try and find the humanity in the people we abhor and take a moment to question ourselves and our own beliefs, and then ask where do they come from, really? Where do my convictions come from at this moment? How much of them are mine and how much of them are from outside of me? 

I have people in my life who are very important to me who are living in different algorithms. They are very worried about the world, just like me, but they don’t see the world in the same way. It has been impossible for them to reach me and it’s impossible for me to reach them when it comes to talking about what is happening, which is an increasingly urgent thing for all of us because we’re all very worried about what’s happening. I’m heartbroken over that and very scared about it. And I don’t know how we get off this track and re-engage with each other, but it feels urgent.