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\n Photo by Universal<\/p>\n
\n Photo by Universal<\/p>\n
What makes a western? There are composite elements on which we\u2019d all agree: guns, a frontier landscape, a battle with the law, good boots. A soundtrack that entwines itself with the action \u2013 as film theorists might say, inter-diegetically \u2013 so that gesture blends into mood. Most crucial, though, is an understanding, shared between characters, film-maker, and audience, of the rules. An agreement on meaning strong enough that, more often than not, it does not need to be conveyed in words. The click of a heel, the swing of a saloon door or an unbroken stare will do.<\/p>\n
Eddington, the latest film by the 39-year-old cult oddball director Ari Aster, has been hailed variously as a \u201cquasi-\u201d, \u201cneo-\u201d and \u201cthe first truly modern\u201d western. On the surface, it ticks all the boxes. Set in the film-maker\u2019s native New Mexico, the story follows a beleaguered sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), in his bid to bring down the oleaginous mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). There\u2019s a tussle over a woman (Louise Cross, played by Emma Stone), a barroom brawl, and a showdown on a deserted Main Street over which a prairie storm threatens to break, high winds forcing Cross to hold, quite literally, on to his hat.<\/p>\n
The problem, however, with Eddington\u2019s western classification arises from the movie\u2019s main concern: the breakdown of meaning. Set in late summer 2020, as a contentious new biopolitical order rises from the spring\u2019s panic-fuelled state of emergency, no one can agree on what is good or bad \u2013 mask mandates, cops, the younger (mostly white) generation\u2019s attempts to \u201cabolish whiteness\u201d. Over two hours and 25 minutes, covering a month in the life of the town (population: 2,435), the characters\u2019 only recourse is to a set of actions that become increasingly ugly. As the townsfolk\u2019s consensus on reality shatters, Aster, rather than letting guns do the talking, stages a cross-fire of cross-purpose dialogue that, in the film\u2019s last two acts, degenerates into a blizzard of bullets.<\/p>\n
In the circus of interviews surrounding the movie\u2019s premiere at Cannes this summer, Aster described the pandemic as an \u201cinflection point\u201d, a moment of convergence between previously distinct spheres of life brought to a crashing denouement from which we\u2019re yet to emerge. The film opens with a raving homeless man staggering barefoot down a dusty road into the town \u2013 a Tiresias whose evident lunacy immediately suggests that he might well be the only sane character we\u2019ll encounter \u2013 and a shot of a sign advertising the application to build a new data centre by a company called Solidgoldmagikarp (one of the film\u2019s many \u201cEaster egg\u201d moments: the term is a Pok\u00e9mon-themed instance of online slang that once sent large language models into a garbled tailspin). Succinctly, Aster has established the movie\u2019s main line of argument: the arrival of the internet in our world has blurred the boundary between sanity and madness, reality and fiction, morality and power \u2013 oppositions subsequently played out in the conflict between Sheriff Cross and Mayor Garcia.<\/p>\n
Cross\u2019s cross to bear, we soon gather, is how much he loves his wife, Louise, whose awkward smiling face is the background to his work tablet, and whose failing business in weird cloth dolls he supports through reimbursing his deputy for covert online purchases, and who, two decades previously, went on a couple of bad dates with Garcia. Louise suffers doubly: from an unspecified mental anguish and a tyrannical mother \u2013 the latter, it\u2019s clear, is the cause of the former \u2013 with a penchant for online conspiracy influencers. Their presence infects the household, just as Black Lives Matter protests, fuelled by Instagram hysterics, begin to break apart the town.<\/p>\n
The movie is Aster\u2019s fourth feature, all of which have been collaborations with the producer Lars Knudsen as well as projects of the voguish production company A24. He has established a core set of themes across his oeuvre: the problem of having a mother (Hereditary, 2018), the problem of being a child (Midsommar, 2019) the problem of being your mother\u2019s child (Beau Is Afraid, 2023), though Eddington makes a little more hay out of the travails and betrayals of fatherhood.<\/p>\n
He has also developed a distinctive aesthetic: his astute eye for interiors, with varying degrees of alienating domestic roominess or suffocating crampedness. A24 and Aster, together, have pioneered the use, rather than mere representation, of mobile phones as part of the toolkit of contemporary cinema (the company also produced Sean Baker\u2019s Anora, 2024, and Janicza Bravo\u2019s Zola, 2020, in which action is propelled via on-screen messaging). Eddington is the most pronounced and developed iteration of phone-led narrative in Aster\u2019s work to date: the pings of notifications working as sonic jump scares, blocked numbers standing in for arguments, and live-streaming the only point of contact with the outside world.<\/p>\n
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