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More new movie talk as we take on the most divisive film of the summer, Ari Aster's COVID-era neo-western Eddington. The film follows Joaquin Phoenix as Joe Cross, the sheriff of Eddington, NM who - frustrated by the state's mask mandates in early 2020 - decides to run for mayor to depose the incumbent Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), a boilerplate liberal looking to move the town into the future by granting subsidies to a tech company attempting to build a data center at the edge of town. The film also traces the various conflicts that erupts as the era's wave of Black Lives Matter protests (following the murder of George Floyd) run up against the sheriff's department and the competing ideologies of the townsfolk, all emboldened by the hypermediated, isolated existences that defined the pandemic.

We beging by addressing the film's politics, rejecting criticisms of the film as "centrist" or evincing a "both sides are bad" mentality, instead revealing the fundamental retreat of material politics as the defining order of the 2020s. Then, we discuss the film as western, how it embraces the lineage of John Ford, and how its world of localized, independent vacuums of internet-fed ideology suggest a collapse of the dialectic. Finally, we look at what the movie has to say about Big Tech, the victims of capitalism, and its (quite cynical) read on where America all headed.

Read Alex on Eddington at More Like Shit Stack

Read Ed Berger on Eddington at Reciprocal Contradicton 2.0

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