Amir GanjavieAri Aster’s Eddington is a film of immense ambition and intellectual density—so much so that it ends up collapsing under the weight of its own aspirations. Attempting to be a psychological drama, a political satire, a surreal allegory, and a Western all at once, the film winds through America’s 2020 pandemic-era traumas without ever committing to a moral or narrative framework. What results is not so much a portrait of contemporary America as it is a collage of symptoms—fractured, conflicted, and ultimately indecisive.
The story unfolds in a small New Mexico town where Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), a conservative, gun-toting, mask-mandate-defying caricature, clashes with the progressive, media-savvy Mayor Ted (Pedro Pascal). Their conflict—rooted in ideology, personal rivalry, and a shared history with Joe’s now-wife (Emma Stone)—serves as the film’s central thread. Or rather, it would, if Eddington weren’t so determined to sabotage its own coherence at every turn.
What makes the film particularly frustrating is not its chaos, but its refusal to draw any lines of consequence. It presents opposing characters, worldviews, and cultural signifiers—QAnon, BLM, digital surveillance, spiritual gurus, YouTube prophets—but offers no stable point of orientation, no sense of what’s at stake. In this regard, the film is not only politically evasive, but narratively hollow.
Here, Fredric Jameson’s famous essay “Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture” becomes a useful lens. In it, Jameson argues that one of the fundamental functions of mass narrative, particularly in cinema, is the articulation of clear antagonisms: the friend and the enemy. This binary structure, while perhaps reductive, allows viewers to navigate ideological terrain, even if the narrative subverts those binaries later on. Without that initial clarity, Jameson contends, narrative loses its affective and ideological potency.
Eddington rejects this logic entirely. It deliberately refuses to offer us a “villain” or even a coherent moral position. Everyone is flawed, everyone is wounded, everyone is trapped in their echo chambers. While this ambiguity may reflect the contemporary crisis of meaning in American society, it leaves the film in a state of paralysis. Its refusal to identify either a friend or an enemy ultimately renders its satire toothless. As Jameson might suggest, Eddington replaces the political with the aestheticized apolitical—a gesture that masquerades as critique but results in ambiguity without stakes.
This refusal is not subversive; it is evasive. Aster’s apparent goal is to diagnose the malaise of a nation unraveling under the pressure of pandemic, conspiracy, racial violence, and algorithmic fragmentation. But the film’s sprawling, postmodern structure mirrors the very disorder it pretends to critique. There is no catharsis, no dialectical progression—only images of disintegration, accompanied by a smug sense of knowingness. The film points to everything but commits to nothing.
Phoenix gives a dedicated performance, but his Sheriff Joe is more a symbol of American neurosis than a fully realized character. His motivations shift from political to personal to existential, never cohering into a compelling arc. The supporting cast—Stone’s zombified wife, Pascal’s enigmatic mayor, and Austin Butler’s charismatic internet prophet—function more as narrative devices than as human beings. Their presence suggests meaning but rarely generates it.
Some critics have defended Eddington by suggesting it belongs to the tradition of sarcasm, mock-epic, or farce—arguing that the film captures the chaotic and contradictory state of contemporary America, where we are inundated daily with conflicting news, irrational behaviors, and societal fragmentation. However, this defense feels more like a justification than a serious critical reading. Hazl, in its precise definition, is a form that employs humor, exaggeration, and apparent levity to deliver pointed critique. In true hazl, absurdity is a means—not the message itself. In Eddington, however, absurdity becomes the end. The film lacks a coherent critical structure—whether in its narrative arc, character development, or overarching vision. What remains is a jumble of references and symbols that, rather than clarifying meaning, only deepen the viewer’s sense of confusion and disorientation. Unlike authentic hazl, which ultimately stimulates awareness and reflection, Eddington retreats into an aestheticized ambivalence that reduces politics to mere surface and spectacle.
Even at the level of form, Eddington falters. Aster’s signature surrealism, so effective in Hereditary and Midsommar, becomes muddled here by an overabundance of reference and allegory. From nods to John Ford’s Westerns to YouTube-era absurdism, from George Floyd to Katy Perry, the film samples the real without transmuting it into anything new or urgent. Its cleverness becomes its own trap.
To be clear, Aster is not obligated to present a didactic narrative or to choose sides in a culture war. But as Jameson reminds us, the function of storytelling—especially in political cinema—is not merely to reflect fragmentation but to organize it into meaning. Without a narrative structure that helps us identify where power resides, and who resists it, cinema risks becoming a hall of mirrors—each reflection more disorienting than the last.
In the end, Eddington wants to be a film about America’s unraveling. But rather than confronting the ideological mechanisms that produce this unraveling, it luxuriates in the spectacle of chaos. The result is a film that calls itself political while refusing to take a political stance—a contradiction that reveals not boldness, but a crisis of imagination.
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