I absolutely must get off of social media. No matter how good my intentions, no matter how strong my resolve, eventually I will fall down the same path where I’m running hot all day because someone somewhere who I don’t know and will likely never even be within a mile of said something profoundly fucking stupid and now I cannot rest until they know exactly how stupid I find them to be. So I tell them, and since they’re so fucking braindead, they just dig their heels into the dirt and get stupider, louder, and more firm on their stupid opinion than they were a few minutes ago. And as a result I tell myself “well if I get louder, maybe they’ll understand.” So I do. And then they don’t understand, and now they’ve decided to attack me as a person, so it’s my responsibility as the sensible party to go fully fucking nuclear and craft an insult so powerful that it will hurt them all the way down to the stupid mitochondria in their stupid cells.
And then, after all my steam has been jettisoned, it occurs to me that I should take the higher road and just block them and be done with it. But I wait for a response first because I need to know that they saw my insult. The response comes, typically in the form of something like “I must’ve really gotten under your skin,” and even though I want to tell them that they are not under my skin, I now have the assurance I sought in rocking their world with my award-worthy insult, and I go ahead and block them.
I definitely won this exchange.
And they’ll see that I blocked them and think to themselves “I definitely won this exchange.”
Nothing will be gained, dignity will be lost, and two people who never would’ve crossed paths but for an algorithm designed by the world’s most evil people now hate each other forever, and will carry the anger they shared online into the real world.
In said real world, where the most powerful man is a comically evil clown who wouldn’t know class if it pissed all over his wrinkled, orange head, and where the loudest amongst our pundits are only principled insofar as believing the polar opposite of what “the other guy” believes, all while the world is cooking itself to death, it’s no wonder we’re all ready to bite one another’s heads off at the tiniest provocation. And with a camera in every pocket and on every corner, absolutely none of it happens in a vacuum. We’re all auditioning for one another all of the time, and doing so while walking on a floor of eggshells laid by our supposed peers. One wrongly placed word or mismanaged tone and guess what: you’re not just the enemy, but the worst version of the enemy that your now ex-peers can imagine. Don’t worry, though. Just join the other guys. They hate your former peers almost as much as you do. Scratch that, they hate them more than you do. Who cares if they’re a little looney? You get to belong.
Well, until they find out about something dumb you said when you were 8 years old. You are now irrevocably tainted by this mistake, and it’s a mistake that you absolutely must atone for, even though there is no path to forgiveness. Ever. You must prostrate yourself to your new (now former) friend group and repent with everything you have, because what you did was unacceptable. Also, that unacceptable thing you did is something that your new overlords do all the time. But it’s okay when they do it, see?
Why? Because. Duh. The fact that you even have to ask shows us exactly why you need to be better. How can you improve? It’s not our job to educate you, so you’ll just have to learn for yourself. Also, every source you could possibly learn from is tainted by the same things that tainted you into being evil down to your very core for even thinking about doing that one thing that you did when you were 8. Do better.
This is the basal state of American culture ever since we got our greasy sausage fingers onto social media and then elected a series of cartoon people to the highest offices of the land, treating their campaigns like sporting events and adopting their corporate sponsored ideas as our whole personalities. And then COVID showed up and we couldn’t help but to turn the whole thing into a circus of accusations, suspicions, and podcasts, all the while countless people were dying for no good goddamn reason.
But don’t worry, soon we’ll have robots to do all of our thinking for us.
What does this have to do with Eddington, the latest from Ari Aster? Everything. And I’m only scratching the surface.
The film exists somewhere between Repo Man, No Country for Old Men, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and South Park. It’s an absolutely brilliant satire of the way that American culture was completely warped by years of living the internet and social media, and then suddenly collided with a terrifying, intensely politicized pandemic, all in the midst of a country that steadfastly refuses to atone for its inherent racism. It’s scary and upsetting, and since it’s an Aster film, it’s cruelly hilarious. No one is safe. Not you, not me, and since there’s nothing Americans hate more than finding out they aren’t flawless, almost everyone is going to hate it.
The filmmaking is exceptional, the score is haunting, and the performances are pitch perfect, with Joaquin Phoenix, an actor who has incorrectly been regarded as a punchline for the past few years, giving what could be a career best. The film is startlingly violent, dense as fuck, and plotted masterfully.
It ruined my night and maybe my week. Loved every minute of it. No notes.
Eddington will go down in history as the definitive COVID satire, just as Dr. Strangelove did as the definitive nuclear war satire. Mark my words. Or don’t. I’m blocking your stupid ass after this anyway.
Directed by Ari Aster
Written by Ari Aster
Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Michael Ward
Rated R, 148 minutes
