In 1890, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that something fundamental changed in US society with the closing of the frontier. By this, he meant the end of westward expansion and the disappearance of regions inhabited by fewer than two people per square mile. The consequences, to his mind, were the loss of American individualism and the foreclosure of the dream that one could escape industrial society by “going West”.
Henceforth, life in the West would be circumscribed by the same patterns of development that had characterised the more densely populated East: once-independent yeomen and craftsmen losing their land and their tools to become asset-less employees of large industrial concerns; massive inequalities belying the ideal of a competent, modestly propertied republican citizenry; the diminution of local power and Jeffersonian agency.
Yet the old West endured into the following century — not in real life, of course, but on the silver screen. In the Hollywood Western, Americans could project themselves into pre-industrial idylls, characterised by sharp moral contrasts, libertarian equality, and generally uniform plots: the dénouement could, as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno noted, “invariably be predicted at the start — who will be rewarded, punished, forgotten”.
This remained true of the Western in the early years of the 21st century. True, the stories became more outré. The West could now be populated by queer cowboys (2005’s Brokeback Mountain). The violence quotient could be turned up (the Coen Brothers’ 2007 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men) or down (2020’s First Cow). And so on. Through it all, however, the West remained a zone of freedom, untrammeled by industrial conformity.
That is, until Eddington, the new film by the youngish director Ari Aster. Aster has made the first Western that takes into account what Turner documented all the way back in the late 19th century: Eddington is what the Western looks like after the closing of the West. Along the way, Aster powerfully diagnoses where America has been in recent years, and where it might be going in years to come.
“Eddington is what the Western looks like after the closing of the West.”
The film is set in the fictional New Mexico town of Eddington — once prosperous thanks to mining, now suffering the familiar symptoms of industrial decay. More importantly, Eddington takes place against the backdrop of the literally and figuratively febrile year 2020. That was when lockdown-induced isolation collided with managerial-class race politics to trigger a popular revolt against elite institutions, one that reverberates to this day.
The protagonist is the town’s sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix at his mumbling best), who’s fed up with Covid masking, in part because he suffers from asthma, rendering the medical hijab painful, even dangerous. At the opening, he’s surfing the web alone in his squad car, when fellow law enforcers from the next town over — an Indian settlement he’s wandered into — roll up to him, demanding that he put on a mask on pain of arrest. Faced with similar mask-nagging at the local grocery store, Joe resolves to unseat the incumbent mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal, in a subtly virtuoso turn).
Ted is a perfect specimen of the so-called hick lib: small-town progressives who typically reside in red or purple areas but who take their cultural and political cues from blue metropoles. He represents the upwardly mobile segment of Eddington’s population, which looks forward to having a Big Tech firm install an energy-draining data centre nearby. Ted is Hispanic, talks about “equity” and “moving forward”, religiously masks (for the camera, at least), and greets people by touching elbows (remember that ritual?).
Thus we get the fundamental contest at the heart of the plot. On one side are the professionals led by Ted, ascendant and capable of forcing their will not just politically, but culturally. The other side — older, whiter, put-upon, and unfashionable — quietly seethes. People like the sheriff’s mother in law, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), who’s hooked on online cranks and compulsively shares stories about researchers simulating pandemic responses long before the novel coronavirus, which of course must mean that Covid was a plandemic.
Joe, though, simply wants to restore Eddington to its former decency. His campaign message is more spiritual than policy-based: can’t we see each other’s faces again? Can’t we treat each other like fellow Americans and human beings? At his best, he’s the Aristotelian political animal, the creature who can’t help but be social and do things with his fellows, crushed by the insensible logic of technocracy, which reigns even in Eddington — even in the West.
As if masking and lockdown weren’t bad enough, soon Black Lives Matter-style protests and riots descend upon Eddington. This, even though the town is seemingly home to a single black person, who happens to be a cop. Here, Aster extracts wicked, delicious humour from 2020-era progressivism’s hypocrisies.
I watched the film in a packed Manhattan theatre. At first, the jokes targeting the pandemic Left only elicited small chuckles, as if the audience were asking itself: Are we allowed to laugh at this now? But the group roared with laughter by the time one character says of another: “He was born a person of colour but became a person of power!” At another point, a high schooler — who’s recently educated himself on Angela Davis and structural racism, mainly to get into bed with a pretty, woke classmate — lectures his working-class white family on the need for “white abolition”. The theatre howled at the father’s response: “Are you a fucking retard? You’re white.”
Though he certainly skewers 2020 woke-ism, Aster is politically and culturally astute enough not to rest content with a too-easy anti-woke posture. Instead, he uncovers deeper psychic dysfunctions roiling beneath both sets of politics: Ted’s woke managerial liberalism and the Cross family’s podunk intifada. Both, he seems to suggest, are characterised by the failure of the paternal function in its strictly Freudian sense: of the father as the figure who inducts the family into the symbolic order — law, rationality, authority.
All of Aster’s previous films concern the failure of the paternal function and depict subjects who, deprived of it, are left at the mercy of an overbearing feminine principle: whether a witch’s coven (Hereditary), a matriarchal pagan cult (Midsommar), or a castrating Jewish mother (Beau Is Afraid). Something similar holds in Eddington: Joe’s wife, Louise (Emma Stone), suffers from a mental illness vaguely linked to her broken relationship with her father. Joe himself fails to become a father, because Louise can’t bear a male touch and refuses to have sex with him.
Across the political divide, meanwhile, Ted’s wife has long ago left the family, with rumours swirling of cheating or abuse. Ted struggles mightily — and ultimately fails — to discipline his obnoxiously woke son. The kid repeatedly breaks lockdown to party with his shit-eating friends, risking his father’s political career (Ted, after all, has put the rest of the community under lockdown).
Time and again, these interior dysfunctions are shown to lie at the heart of political irrationality — whether it’s the fanatical race politics of the town’s Left or the kooky, Bill-Gates-wants-to-poison-us worldview of the Right. Aster isn’t a conservative — though the accusation is flying around in the industry right now — except in the narrowly psychoanalytic sense epitomised by Jacques Lacan’s formula: The Father . . . or worse.
I won’t spoil the details, but in the clash between the two, it is the Right that wins out — or appears to. As the film progresses, the humour quotient diminishes, and the horrific violence escalates, until angry anti-woke conspiracism triumphs over its political enemy. But there is a wrinkle: the ultimate winner is the Big Tech company that has its sights on the town. The firm had a perfectly copacetic relationship with Ted’s woke, managerial regime — and, it turns out, it’s also perfectly happy to work with Dawn, the crackpot anti-woke mother in law, who takes charge as Ted falls.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is exactly what has transpired in American politics over the past 12 or so months, as the likes of Twitter (now X), Amazon, and Meta went from championing BLM and DEI (and thereby legitimating their market power) to backing Donald Trump (ditto). It’s a bleak message, but it’s consonant with Aster’s other films, in which characters are trapped in structures which know them better than they know themselves, and which they cannot escape. In Eddington’s case, the structure is the Western mythos itself. In the new West, the cowboys are no less in thrall to corporate power than the Indians.
