CW: Spoilers for Eddington and discussions of cinematic violence and sexual abuse.

The film writer Del Winters joins me from Philadelphia for a deep dive into Ari Aster’s contemporary Neo-Western/Comedy/Horror hybrid Eddington, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal and Emma Stone.

Set in a fictional small town in New Mexico during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Eddington depicts a showdown between the liberal mayor Ted Garcia (Pascal) who takes public health measures seriously and the town’s conservative sheriff Joe Cross (Phoenix) who resents the mask mandates and warps an existing personal grudge against Garcia into a campaign to defeat him in the upcoming election, spewing internet-borne conspiracy theories that pit neighbour against neighbour in an escalating situation that may threaten the planned construction of a new data centre.

Eddington has divided audiences along political lines, mirroring what the film has to say about how the pandemic exacerbated already existing problems in how we communicate with each other, how online communities have people now preferring to live in their own realities that reinforce their own beliefs, and the shadowy corporations that shape these divides through the use of technology and social media towards their own purposes.

Del and I discuss how Eddington has been mistaken by some as an “equal opportunity satire" or one with a centrist or even MAGA agenda, the skill in which Aster blends various genres of filmmaking and how it moves from reality to hyperreality, and our responses to some of the most provocative ideas Aster puts forward in this pitch-black satire about modern, broken America.

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Follow Del Winters on Bluesky and Twitter.

More of Del’s film writing can be found at MovieJawn and the Absolute Reality blog.

Trailer #1 for Eddington (Ari Aster, 2025)