Eddington, Ari Aster’s latest film, has generated a lot of buzz. That high level of excitement was the result of its debut at the Cannes Film Festival back in May. The star-studded film includes highly-acclaimed actors Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, and Austin Butler. It’s a nuanced portrait of a small town impacted by the Covid crisis that we all face. Aster’s experience growing up in New Mexico and navigating that landscape as an adolescent haunted their work. He’s long dreamt of producing a documentary feature film that portrays his life growing up in the state.
In a recent interview at the 2017 London Design Biennale, Aster further explained the philosophical underpinnings of his work with documentarian Adam Curtis. Their conversation shed new light on how Aster’s own harrowing, personal history shapes and inspires his filmmaking journey. Aster described this as sending his characters in Eddington to live in “other movies.” This perfectly captures the incredibly different perceptions of reality that Americans cling to in the current cultural moment.
Aster’s film artfully combines elements of current-day political turmoil with the all-encompassing impact of technology on our daily lives. The imaginary scene in this painting is inspired by one hyperscale data center going up in the middle of one small town. It represents the historical, radical changes in how we as a society think around the United States. The narrative pits Phoenix and Pascal against each other as they represent contrasting viewpoints on navigating their community through unprecedented times.
The filmmaker expressed his interest in tracing the ways people turn inward during times of crisis and chaos. And hearing Aster say, oh, it’s because this happened to me, this is how, you know, the personal experiences that have formed his storytelling. This grounding in personal experience and history becomes the lens through which he focuses on the macro societal failures.
Just like the characters in Eddington, we can’t run from our pasts. The film bravely interrogates accountability and pushes back against the impulse to blame history for our current plight. This theme feels incredibly relevant in a time when many people are struggling to cope with the overwhelming pressures of the world and their own minds.
Curtis was a wealth of inspiration during their conversation, particularly setting forth on the challenge that today’s storytellers are met with “The most difficult thing to do, especially in our time, is make the recent past unfamiliar. It’s almost impossible,” he remarked, highlighting the complexity of capturing the zeitgeist of an era marked by rapid change and confusion.
Ari Aster’s Eddington is a surreal artistic assertion of his singularly strange genius. Beyond that, it stands as an incisive indictment of the America we live in today. The movie’s purpose, as Bond puts it, is to express how uncertainty has been made a fundamental part of our modern realism. As audiences engage with the narrative, they may find themselves reflecting on their own experiences and perspectives within an increasingly fragmented reality.