'Eddington' Director Ari Aster Couldn't Stand ‘Living in the Internet.' So He Made a Movie About It

WIRED

18-07-2025

Jul 18, 2025 7:00 AM Ari Aster tells WIRED he wrote Eddington during the height of the pandemic and BLM protests. The Western depicts the explosive consequences of his characters' conspiracy-fueled social media diets. Still from Eddington. Photograph: Richard Foreman/A24
Like a lot of us, Ari Aster spent the summer of 2020 trapped inside and scrolling on social media. Also like a lot of us, the experience left him feeling pretty bad.
'I was living on Twitter,' Aster tells WIRED, 'and it was really agitating me.'
But unlike most people, the director of Hereditary , Midsommar , and Beau is Afraid wasn't just doomscrolling on Twitter to pass the time. He was doing research. That summer, Aster wrote the script for his latest film, Eddington , a modern western set in a small southwest American town during the height of both the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. In theaters on July 18, the film deftly explores how social media and the internet in general have fractured modern society, placing us all in our own personally tailored worlds—and then descends into violence when those worlds collide.
Aster depicts this twisted vision of modern society by regularly pointing his camera straight at the Facebook and Twitter feeds of his main characters, giving the audience a look into the conspiracy theories and memes influencing their every decision. To create a realistic approximation of social media, Aster went straight to the source.
'I started making a collection of things from my timeline to remember when I made the film,' he says. 'I also cultivated different algorithms to see what somebody else might be receiving. I started different accounts and created an archive. That was very helpful in making the film, even in post, when we were deciding what tweets to show on certain phones.'
These glimpses into the interior lives of Eddington 's characters—the movie stars Joaquin Phoenix as a populist sheriff who runs for mayor against a corrupt, liberal incumbent played by Pedro Pascal—help ground a story that pivots wildly at times from cryptic political commentary to heightened carnage. Aster takes the classic American western and transforms it into something new: a messy thriller on the frontier of technological progress. In an interview with WIRED, the director unpacks the many meanings and inspirations behind his provocative new project. The Tech Revolution Is 'Dehumanizing'
Aster traces our current dystopian moment back to the rise of the smartphone.
'Society has been atomized and fractured over the last however many years,' he says. 'I guess this all began once we started living in the internet—when we could carry the internet on our person.'
Eddington takes this theory and makes it a baseline reality, exploring a world where no two characters seem to be living in the same reality or even speaking the same language, whether that divide is political or generational. In one scene, a teenage boy sits at the dinner table and explains why he needs to reject his own whiteness. His parents' response is a mix of shock and confusion.
'This is a movie about people living in different realities who are unreachable to each other,' Aster says, musing that the modern internet has changed humanity in ways we likely still don't fully understand. 'I do think the technological revolution is a mostly dehumanizing one,' he adds.
Eddington also explores conspiracy theories and the podcasters and YouTubers who spread them online in exchange for influence and profit. Phoenix's character will often return home to hear some disembodied voice spouting baseless claims through the speakers of an abandoned laptop. Later, his wife (Emma Stone) or mother-in-law (Deirdre O'Connell) will regurgitate those fringe theories over breakfast.
Again, Aster built this dark corner of his world out of real-life source material.
'One thing was inspired by somebody I heard on the street in New York with a microphone,' he says. 'I wrote that down for later. Others were pulled from different corners of the internet.'
Aster's overall goal with Eddington was to convey the overwhelming feeling of being online today, while still making a compelling movie.
'It was important to get as many voices in the cacophony and represent as many corners of the internet as possible—to make a coherent story about the incoherent miasma we are living in,' he says. 'I wish we could have shown more, but we did as much as we could without it becoming distracting or no longer supporting the story.' AI Is Creating An 'Era of Total Distrust'
Eddington may primarily be a movie about how social media is breaking our brains, but there's another technological innovation Aster was careful to represent in his movie: artificial intelligence. The film begins with a plan to build an AI-training data center on the edge of town, a plot point that resurfaces several times throughout the story (including in the election plotline, with Phoenix's character campaigning against the shady business interests behind the new facility).
'It is mostly peripheral,' Aster says, 'but for me, it's the heart of the film. This is a movie about people living through Covid, navigating a crisis. Meanwhile, just outside of town, another crisis is being cooked up.'
In a recent interview with Letterboxd, the director opined that it's 'obviously already too late' to stop AI. But when pressed about the pros and cons of artificial intelligence, Aster describes it with a mix of wonder and fear.
'I'm in awe of what it can do, but I'm also very disturbed by it,' he tells me. 'We're living in an era of total distrust. This kind of imagery could lead to the end of video or audio evidence.'
As a director, he worries the ability to create transcendent art is being 'flattened' by generative AI tools, while at the same time admitting that it's opening up the film industry to more people than ever. 'It's been democratized in an exciting way,' he says. 'There are more possibilities now, but something's also going away.'
In his own very Ari Aster way, the twisted mind behind some of the most disturbing visuals of the 21st Century (from the unexpected decapitation that kicks off Hereditary to the literal penis monster in Beau Is Afraid ) already misses the era of more uncanny AI imagery.
'In the beginning, when these systems were hallucinating and creating weird imagery — 12 fingers, bizarre stuff—that was more interesting to me,' he says. 'The more polished it gets, the less exciting and more alarming it becomes.' About That Ending …
Warning: Spoilers ahead for the end of Eddington.
Despite sometimes feeling like a Coen Brothers western on amphetamines, Eddington is impressively grounded throughout its nearly two-and-a-half-hour runtime—until the final act. After Phoenix's character kills Pascal's and then frames the local BLM protesters for the murder, a plane full of actual anti-fascist terrorists flies into town and starts blowing everything up.
Reality quickly gives way to video game logic as Phoenix sprints through the town under the cover of darkness, firing machine guns into the night as he's pursued by faceless Antifa soldiers.
'At the end, he gets to live in his own action movie,' Aster says. 'I definitely wanted the movie to start feeling like Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto.'
While Aster leaves the meaning of this sequence up for interpretation, there's one clear way to understand Eddington 's finale. The film is taking those unhinged conspiracy theories and Facebook posts and transforming them into reality. The result feels like watching an alt-right fever dream in which the woke terrorists we all know never existed suddenly show up on your doorstep with guns and explosives.
'The film is about paranoid people,' Aster concurs, 'and by the end, it becomes paranoid. It becomes gripped by their worldview. Depending on your beliefs or your algorithm, that's where it becomes either satire or a movie about what was really happening.'
That's about as far as the director will get to explaining the ultimate meaning behind his movie. While he admits to having a 'very strong political stance' that he hopes is obvious by the time the credits roll, he's wary of making a film that intentionally alienates anyone. After all, the point of Eddington isn't that one side is necessarily right while the other is wrong, it's that social media has broken all of our brains. The only way to repair our shattered worldview is to come together across the divisions the internet and its algorithms are only making more pronounced.
'I wanted to give as broad a picture of the environment as I could without being dismissive or condescending,' Aster says. 'I see all these characters as people who care about the world and know something's wrong. They're just seeing it through different, distorted windows.'