‘It's only right it should be polarising': Ari Aster on his bonkers COVID film
The fourth feature from wunder(no-longer-a-)kind Ari Aster has been taken by some critics as further evidence of his unique vision, and by others as proof that the promise he showed with his horror debut, Hereditary, and the Swedish folk-nightmare, Midsommar, has now been completely squandered, via the baffling Oedipal fantasy of Beau is Afraid (2023) and now this baffling, inflammatory and potentially traumatising take on the early days of COVID.
For some filmmakers, that would be worrying. But for the famously contrarian 39-year-old, Aster, it's as it should be.
'This is a movie about polarisation, and it's only right that the response should be polarised,' he says. 'It feels to me like it's doing what it's designed to do.'
Eddington is a sprawling modern-day Western, set in the New Mexico town of the title during the early days of the pandemic. But what exactly were you aiming for with this twisted, funny, and ultimately hyper-violent movie about a conservative sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) and a progressive mayor (Pedro Pascal) whose opposing views escalate into outright hostility during the dog days of lockdown?
'Well, I wanted to make a film about what the world feels like right now, and specifically what America feels like to me,' Aster says. 'That's where I'm living and where the film is set, but it does feel like it's something that is happening all over the world.'
The small town of Eddington, New Mexico – the state in which New York-based Aster grew up – functions as a microcosm of everything that's gone wrong with the world in terms of our seeming inability to seek or to find common ground. And that unwillingness to admit the validity of views other than our own is fed, heightened and reinforced by the media – social and antisocial – that we consume.
'We all know we're in our own echo chambers because we're trapped in a system based on feedback,' says Aster. 'The problem is that people can't remember that they know that. Eddington is about what happens when feedback ramps up beyond control and the bubbles collide.'
It's not just Phoenix's Joe Cross and Pascal's Ted Garcia who are swept up in the drama. All around them, people seem locked into their own takes on what is going on, what is true, what is a conspiracy, what can be believed and what demands you 'do your research'. There are cults, there are protests, there is a wild profusion of guns. Above all, there is anger and chaos.
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It is, says Aster, 'a movie about a bunch of people who are living in different realities, and they're all very upset about what's happening in the world. They can tell that something is very, very wrong, but none of them agrees on what that thing is. And it's about what happens when those people start to bump up against each other.'
As sheriff, Joe is tasked with enforcing the law. But what happens when he thinks the law is an ass, or that it doesn't apply to him? And while Ted is tasked with managing the town, he seems to have benefited more from its move into renewables and high-tech data storage facilities than the average burgher. Does that make him smart or lucky, or simply prove he is corrupt?
Doubt and suspicion and a murkiness of motive are the forces that animate Eddington. 'It's a film about a bunch of paranoid people,' says Aster. 'And the film itself becomes paranoid.'
There are street protests, spurred by the killing of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, and confrontations over whether to wear masks or not. But the tension reaches its zenith when a heavily armed militia, dressed in black and wearing balaclavas, drops into Eddington and starts shooting – with both weapons and phone cameras.
The film positions these interlopers as Antifa (anti-fascists), or at least as pretending to be Antifa. But it also shows them flying into Eddington aboard a luxury private jet. And for some viewers (me included), this is the most problematic moment in the movie, the moment when it tips from presenting conspiracies as the product of subjective world views to offering it up as an objective reality.
It is also, says Aster, 'the moment where the film announces itself as satire, very clearly'. And the scene on the plane, he adds, 'should function as something of a Rorschach test'.
But what do you think people might see in that Rorschach test?
'Somebody might see Antifa's super soldiers being sent in by George Soros,' he says, referring to the billionaire investor and backer of liberal causes who some conspiracists on the right imagine to be a shadowy puppet-master. 'Or somebody might see crisis actors being sent in to pretend to be Antifa. What we know is that those people, once they land, are filming everything they're doing, so they're putting on a production. I'll leave it at that.
'But I will say that I recognised, while I was making it – we all did – that this is the moment at which we're inviting misinterpretations,' he adds. 'But that's sort of the point.'
Given that deliberate sowing of confusion, albeit as a reflection of the confusion that currently besets the US and perhaps many of the other liberal democracies in the world, one might be curious about where Aster's own sympathies lie. If that's not too mundane a question to ask.
'You're asking if I'm left or right,' he says. 'I'm left, but part of the project is about turning a mirror on myself and trying to see the humanity in people who hold beliefs that I see as being against mine, or trying to see the humanity in people we might abhor.'
He sees a lot of himself in the young activists who call for the defunding of the police and bemoan the ethical ravages of white privilege. But the film holds them up to the same satirical scrutiny as anyone else.
His aim throughout was to tell a story about 'a community of people who aren't really a community at all'. And its writing was informed by travelling around New Mexico, meeting and talking to a lot of people, some of whom were the polar opposite of Aster, ideologically speaking.
'Meeting a lot of these people really helped the movie get away from me in a very useful way,' he says. 'I'm trying to pull back as far as I can, and I'm trying to honour – at least to a point – as many voices in the cacophony as possible. The most uninteresting thing I could do would be to condescend to or totally dismiss the point of view of any of these people.'
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Sydney Morning Herald
12 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Is it a thriller, satire or nightmare? Eddington will keep you guessing
EDDINGTON ★★★½ (MA) 150 minutes Ari Aster may still be best known as a horror filmmaker, but by now it's clear his real bent is for satire, to whatever degree there's a difference. Eddington, his fourth feature as writer-director, launches his kindred spirit Joaquin Phoenix on another odyssey through a nightmare America, following their earlier collaboration Beau Is Afraid. The difference is that where the hapless Beau stayed trapped in his head, Eddington aims to capture something of the collective reality Americans have been living through over the last few years, or at least the reflection of that reality in the distorted mirror of social media. We're in May 2020, with the pandemic well under way, the January 6 riots in the immediate past and the summer of Black Lives Matter on the horizon. But only a portion of this impinges directly on the isolated town of Eddington, New Mexico, where the stalwart local sheriff Joe Cross (Phoenix) insists the virus has yet to spread. Visually, Eddington is every inch a Western, the desert vistas offering the same scope for deep-focus staging as the grassy plains surrounding the Swedish commune in Aster's Midsommar. The gag is the contrast with the small screens the terminally online characters keep peering at, implying that the American ideal of rugged self-reliance may have reached its use-by date. Still, Joe wears a white 10-gallon hat along with his faintly emasculating glasses, and confronts the town's smooth-talking Hispanic mayor (Pedro Pascal) in the middle of main street as if anticipating a showdown at high noon. One immediate issue is the demand that citizens mask up, which Joe, as an asthmatic, has more reason to resist than most.
The Age
12 hours ago
- The Age
Is it a thriller, satire or nightmare? Eddington will keep you guessing
EDDINGTON ★★★½ (MA) 150 minutes Ari Aster may still be best known as a horror filmmaker, but by now it's clear his real bent is for satire, to whatever degree there's a difference. Eddington, his fourth feature as writer-director, launches his kindred spirit Joaquin Phoenix on another odyssey through a nightmare America, following their earlier collaboration Beau Is Afraid. The difference is that where the hapless Beau stayed trapped in his head, Eddington aims to capture something of the collective reality Americans have been living through over the last few years, or at least the reflection of that reality in the distorted mirror of social media. We're in May 2020, with the pandemic well under way, the January 6 riots in the immediate past and the summer of Black Lives Matter on the horizon. But only a portion of this impinges directly on the isolated town of Eddington, New Mexico, where the stalwart local sheriff Joe Cross (Phoenix) insists the virus has yet to spread. Visually, Eddington is every inch a Western, the desert vistas offering the same scope for deep-focus staging as the grassy plains surrounding the Swedish commune in Aster's Midsommar. The gag is the contrast with the small screens the terminally online characters keep peering at, implying that the American ideal of rugged self-reliance may have reached its use-by date. Still, Joe wears a white 10-gallon hat along with his faintly emasculating glasses, and confronts the town's smooth-talking Hispanic mayor (Pedro Pascal) in the middle of main street as if anticipating a showdown at high noon. One immediate issue is the demand that citizens mask up, which Joe, as an asthmatic, has more reason to resist than most.
Sydney Morning Herald
2 days ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘It's only right it should be polarising': Ari Aster on his bonkers COVID film
To say that Eddington has had mixed reviews would be an understatement. The fourth feature from wunder(no-longer-a-)kind Ari Aster has been taken by some critics as further evidence of his unique vision, and by others as proof that the promise he showed with his horror debut, Hereditary, and the Swedish folk-nightmare, Midsommar, has now been completely squandered, via the baffling Oedipal fantasy of Beau is Afraid (2023) and now this baffling, inflammatory and potentially traumatising take on the early days of COVID. For some filmmakers, that would be worrying. But for the famously contrarian 39-year-old, Aster, it's as it should be. 'This is a movie about polarisation, and it's only right that the response should be polarised,' he says. 'It feels to me like it's doing what it's designed to do.' Eddington is a sprawling modern-day Western, set in the New Mexico town of the title during the early days of the pandemic. But what exactly were you aiming for with this twisted, funny, and ultimately hyper-violent movie about a conservative sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) and a progressive mayor (Pedro Pascal) whose opposing views escalate into outright hostility during the dog days of lockdown? 'Well, I wanted to make a film about what the world feels like right now, and specifically what America feels like to me,' Aster says. 'That's where I'm living and where the film is set, but it does feel like it's something that is happening all over the world.' The small town of Eddington, New Mexico – the state in which New York-based Aster grew up – functions as a microcosm of everything that's gone wrong with the world in terms of our seeming inability to seek or to find common ground. And that unwillingness to admit the validity of views other than our own is fed, heightened and reinforced by the media – social and antisocial – that we consume. 'We all know we're in our own echo chambers because we're trapped in a system based on feedback,' says Aster. 'The problem is that people can't remember that they know that. Eddington is about what happens when feedback ramps up beyond control and the bubbles collide.' It's not just Phoenix's Joe Cross and Pascal's Ted Garcia who are swept up in the drama. All around them, people seem locked into their own takes on what is going on, what is true, what is a conspiracy, what can be believed and what demands you 'do your research'. There are cults, there are protests, there is a wild profusion of guns. Above all, there is anger and chaos. Loading It is, says Aster, 'a movie about a bunch of people who are living in different realities, and they're all very upset about what's happening in the world. They can tell that something is very, very wrong, but none of them agrees on what that thing is. And it's about what happens when those people start to bump up against each other.' As sheriff, Joe is tasked with enforcing the law. But what happens when he thinks the law is an ass, or that it doesn't apply to him? And while Ted is tasked with managing the town, he seems to have benefited more from its move into renewables and high-tech data storage facilities than the average burgher. Does that make him smart or lucky, or simply prove he is corrupt? Doubt and suspicion and a murkiness of motive are the forces that animate Eddington. 'It's a film about a bunch of paranoid people,' says Aster. 'And the film itself becomes paranoid.' There are street protests, spurred by the killing of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, and confrontations over whether to wear masks or not. But the tension reaches its zenith when a heavily armed militia, dressed in black and wearing balaclavas, drops into Eddington and starts shooting – with both weapons and phone cameras. The film positions these interlopers as Antifa (anti-fascists), or at least as pretending to be Antifa. But it also shows them flying into Eddington aboard a luxury private jet. And for some viewers (me included), this is the most problematic moment in the movie, the moment when it tips from presenting conspiracies as the product of subjective world views to offering it up as an objective reality. It is also, says Aster, 'the moment where the film announces itself as satire, very clearly'. And the scene on the plane, he adds, 'should function as something of a Rorschach test'. But what do you think people might see in that Rorschach test? 'Somebody might see Antifa's super soldiers being sent in by George Soros,' he says, referring to the billionaire investor and backer of liberal causes who some conspiracists on the right imagine to be a shadowy puppet-master. 'Or somebody might see crisis actors being sent in to pretend to be Antifa. What we know is that those people, once they land, are filming everything they're doing, so they're putting on a production. I'll leave it at that. 'But I will say that I recognised, while I was making it – we all did – that this is the moment at which we're inviting misinterpretations,' he adds. 'But that's sort of the point.' Given that deliberate sowing of confusion, albeit as a reflection of the confusion that currently besets the US and perhaps many of the other liberal democracies in the world, one might be curious about where Aster's own sympathies lie. If that's not too mundane a question to ask. 'You're asking if I'm left or right,' he says. 'I'm left, but part of the project is about turning a mirror on myself and trying to see the humanity in people who hold beliefs that I see as being against mine, or trying to see the humanity in people we might abhor.' He sees a lot of himself in the young activists who call for the defunding of the police and bemoan the ethical ravages of white privilege. But the film holds them up to the same satirical scrutiny as anyone else. His aim throughout was to tell a story about 'a community of people who aren't really a community at all'. And its writing was informed by travelling around New Mexico, meeting and talking to a lot of people, some of whom were the polar opposite of Aster, ideologically speaking. 'Meeting a lot of these people really helped the movie get away from me in a very useful way,' he says. 'I'm trying to pull back as far as I can, and I'm trying to honour – at least to a point – as many voices in the cacophony as possible. The most uninteresting thing I could do would be to condescend to or totally dismiss the point of view of any of these people.'
