There is an old story, I believe I heard it first in the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”, if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will immediately sense the danger and jump out to escape. If you put a frog into a pot of tepid water, and slowly bring up the temperature, the frog will sink into a languid stupor and unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death.
In preparation for this review, I looked up that story on Wikipedia to see if it was true or not. I thought it may be a good metaphor to bring up in a review of Eddington. But apparently, at least according to Wikipedia, it isn’t true. In fact, it could not be further from the truth. Instead, Wikipedia cites more modern day scientists who argue that a frog placed in tepid water that is gradually heated will notice the increase in temperature and almost certainly try to escape, whereas a frog that is placed in boiling water will very likely die immediately before it can escape.
Somehow, the fact that this widely known metaphor is completely wrong makes it an even better metaphor to bring up in a review of Eddington. I mean, I saw it first in An Inconvenient Truth wherein Al Gore used it to shame people’s supposed ignorance of the science behind global warming. You think Al Gore would have fact checked that part. And if Wikipedia is wrong and you can boil a frog by slow and steady manipulation, that too would be a good metaphor for Eddington, which is about the small rural town of Eddington, New Mexico where everybody and nobody seems to know what is going on and is very angry about it.
There is a general lag in what goes on in the world and what shows up in movies. Unlike television shows or other media that have production timelines which allow it to be topical, it takes a relatively long time for a movie to be greenlit, produced, edited, and then released. I believe Eddington would be the first movie that takes place in the time of COVID-19 (Spring and Summer 2020) and is specifically about what was happening during that time. And boy does this movie have everything, and how. Mask mandates, Black Lives Matter, bitcoin, false flag conspiracies, pedophilia conspiracies, Antifa, etc., all of which is experienced within the context of forced social isolation. Never have I seen a movie with so much social media doomscrolling.
Because of certain coincidences, COVID-19 had less of a dramatic impact on my life than the rest of the country. I had not taken a vacation in a long time and both deserved and could afford an elongated one. I had just married my wife and was literally in the honeymoon phase of the same. We did not yet have any kids that could be kept home from school. Heck, I never even worked from home. All the other companies in our shared office space evacuated, so my law firm just spaced itself out and I biked to work instead of taking the subway. I dipped into my savings, finished my last screenplay, read War and Peace, and played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons on Zoom.
Still, I had the vague sense that although the restrictions that were put into place in New York City made sense in New York City (after all, in March 2020, NYC experienced a very real surge in hospitalizations, the numbers of which inferred that hundreds of thousands of cases were going unreported), I did wonder whether it made sense to replicate those restrictions in the rest of the country. After all, why would you impose the same Spring 2020 lockdown in relatively dense New York City, which had experienced hundreds of thousands of cases, in relatively spaced-out Houston, Texas which maybe had hundreds of cases, if that.
Eddington takes place in a small town of the same name in New Mexico. In May 2020, the mayor (played by Pedro Pascal) has decided to lockdown the city, mandate masks and six feet of separation. There is not a single COVID-19 case in the entire county. This seems crazier to some people than others. The sheriff Joe Cross (played by Joaquin Phoenix) suffers from asthma and cannot breath in a mask. He openly wonders why he is being directed to wear one while he is alone in his car. There are some attempts at reasonable discussions, but these attempts are thwarted by actors on both sides recording everything on their smartphones. The practical effect of parties filming an argument/negotiation is that it removes the possibility of an engaged discussion. After all, the speaker is not interested in whether the other participant is listening. Instead, they are making a speech to their social media followers. The problem is one more removed than people not listening to each other. In effect, no one is even talking in the first place as the arguments are ranted into the social media ether. It is like the environment of Cable News has descended upon and engulfed the interactions of regular people. After a disappointing exchange with the mayor, Joe Cross decides to throw his hat in the ring for the upcoming mayoral election. He announces his candidacy on Instagram.
Then George Floyd was murdered and the idiocy of COVID-19 was amplified by galling hypocrisy. I certainly remember being informed many times about that notorious 1918 Parade in Philadelphia that kept on being cited as a prime example for why everyone should stay inside and avoid outside crowds in a pandemic. That analogy was completely forgotten in a space of day when it suddenly became okay to have large outside demonstrations. It was a huge gamble in public safety that browbeaten and timid health officials had no balls to criticize. But then we learned that it wasn’t actually a big deal. Large outside gatherings did not lead to a spike in COVID-19 cases. That was reality. So why then were the public officials who okayed the demonstrations still shaming people into staying inside and wearing masks. The lockdowns and school closings just went on forever.
Eddington is notable in that Ari Aster doesn’t appear to be putting too much of the blame on either side of the political polarization. Indeed, it does not appear that Ari Aster is interested in the politics of the period. What interests him about the COVID-19 pandemic is what interests him as a director of great horror movies (Heriditary, Midsommar, and Beau is Afraid). There is an extreme of human emotions in his films that reminds one of Scorsese and a gleefulness in purposefully triggering such emotions that reminds one of Hitchcock. Ari Aster has taken the trauma of the pandemic and has exploited it into yet another emotionally manipulative (i.e. frightening) movie. That bastard, he is arguably the best director to come onto the scene in the past 10 years.
The location of the movie is important. And to someone like me who believes that the nationalization of politics is an exceptionally bad thing, Eddington is instructive to that end. Eddington, the place, does not have a COVID-19 problem and yet the streets are locked down and masks are mandated because of what is happening in New York City. Eddington, the place, does not have a police brutality problem and yet street protests erupt which naturally morph into rioting because of what is happening in Minnesota. The citizens of Eddington have gathered on the streets to yell at each other over issues that do not affect or concern their community. What a nightmare.
About halfway through the movie, Joe Cross is visited at his home by some kind of nutty preacher (played by Austin Butler) who tells him of a story about being an orphan, getting kidnapped by a society of super-rich weirdos in Northern California (sounds like the Bohemian Grove), and being hunted down in the woods as part of some rich super-rich weirdo game. Joe’s wife (played by Amy Adams) brought this guy home for dinner and takes him seriously. You want Joe to explain to the guy that he is nuts, but how is that possible when the world is so crazy. I was thinking about that frog that gets slowly boiled to death without realizing it. Extremism on one side breeds extremism on the other. When neither side has a stable ground to make a sound argument from, it is impossible to defend reason. And no, simply arguing that you support science or scientific authorities is not a replacement for actually understanding the scientific basis of something.
I am 38 turning 39, and I look back on my youth and thank my lucky stars that there was no social media. There are next to no pictures of me in grade school and high school and those that exist cannot be found online. Facebook came to my college in my Freshman year, but more importantly, the Facebook wall wasn’t implemented until,, I think, after I graduated. That Facebook wall, it is an evil thing. It makes it seem like every last thing you have ever posted has the thought and attention paid to it as if you decided to publish it in an established newspaper. It doesn’t even allow you to slur your words so that everyone knows you were drunk when you posted. This is an important thing in real life interactions that is sorely missing in online communications.
Eddington has several teenage characters and I shudder to think that there was in actuality a generation of kids that lived through COVID-19 that went through a very important stage in their social development almost entirely online (or in gatherings on the remote edge of town where they illegally gathered to drink sad beers). At one point, one sorry boy (who reminds me of J.D. Vance for some reason) tries to explain to his parents what the goals of Anti-Racism are and why they are important. This releases the largest laugh of the movie when, after a comic pause, his father erupts: “Are you fucking retarded? What the fuck are you talking about? You’re white!” If you know a kid that went through that phase, try not to hold them to it or remind them of that period of time. They were just trying to fit in.
In Ari Aster’s last movie, Beau is Afraid, I wondered what the movie would be like if Ari Aster had tried to land the plane and not pulled up at the last second for his ending. I think it is fair to say that in Eddington, he does not pull up and that the landing is not successful. This movie crashes and burns in spectacular fashion. Playing it safe may have just resulted in Joe Cross being hospitalized and dying of COVID-19. Instead, Antifa gets involved and the streets of the town experience a hail of machine gun fire.
There is something else not really mentioned here. The movie begins and ends with a conspiracy that is just hinted at. It includes a tech giant that wants to build a large data center right outside of town, which may or may not guzzle up the town’s limited supply of water and energy. This is a local issue that actually affects the residents of Eddington. And yet, there isn’t much controversy about it as the citizens' attention spans are being focused on national problems elsewhere. Indeed, and I am just theorizing here, Mayor Garcia may have locked down the town when he did because he wanted to avoid a civic discussion that would inhibit his ability to push through the development. Is that what the community leaders were discussing in Mayor Garcia’s empty bar that one night when this whole thing started?
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