I AM LISTENING! SHUT UP!

Grace Byron endures Ari Aster’s “Eddington.”

By Grace ByronJuly 19, 2025

• Film

• Politics

TWO VODKA SODAS into Eddington (2025), I wished I had another. The knee-jerk liberal reaction to Ari Aster’s new movie will likely be to shut down. It’s a farce, making almost as much fun of Black Lives Matter protesters as it does of dirty cops. By setting his film around the summer of 2020, Aster tries to create a menagerie of viewpoints on contemporary politics: sheriffs, mayoral candidates, data center employees, and conspiracy theorists duke it out in a small New Mexico town. The backlash to liberal democracy may well have come about in 2020, when the paranoia of living online made us all cynical citizens, ready to jump down one another’s throats, through the rabbit hole, the portal, the twilight zone.

During a Q and A after the New York premiere, Aster said he hoped it was clear what side of the political divide he was on. “I’m, you know, annoyed and frustrated by one side, and terrified of the other,” he quipped. The political debate is endless. Monotonous. We’ve heard it all before. But we go to the movies about our unprecedented times anyway, hoping for something insightful. “I am listening. Shut up!” one cop yells at another during the opening scene of his new film. Eddington is Do the Right Thing (1989) for the post-woke internet addict.

Aster’s filmography runs the gamut from shock and awe (The Strange Thing About the Johnsons, 2011) to gory masterpieces (Hereditary, 2018; Midsommar, 2019) to overwrought psychoanalytic flops (Beau Is Afraid, 2023). Psychosis remains firmly a family affair throughout his oeuvre. But recently, he has been more interested in exploring beyond the genre while still claiming its antecedents. “Evil is sentimental,” Austin Butler prophesies as cult leader Vernon Peak in Eddington; so is liberal hysteria. Sentimentality is a near cousin of pity, a useless and saccharine emotion that too easily gets in the way of conviction.

Eddington traces summer 2020 in that small town as a heated mayoral race is underway. Across the bright desert and amber-lit bedrooms and neon-lit bars, the villagers scroll and scroll and scroll. Aster’s goal, he says, was to recreate a world where everyone was on the internet; it’s a Western about technology and claustrophobia. As Sheriff Joe Cross’s (Joaquin Phoenix) and Mayor Ted Garcia’s (Pedro Pascal) smear campaigns heat up, Chekhov’s guns begin to pile up. Cross’s wife (Emma Stone) develops a conspiracy theory fetish, suspecting everyone of being a pedophile. Younger kids fight over the hot anti-racist woman who loves Angela Davis. Others do TikTok dances to recommend Giovanni’s Room. During a socially distanced party, teens try to make sense of “social justice shit” and land acknowledgments. It could be fascinating. It’s not; it’s a beautifully shot but vacant stab at the film-as-think-piece. There is one Black character, Michael (a stunning Micheal Ward), who is brutalized in the vicious denouement; he is, it must be noted, a cop. The film also features a Pueblo cop, Officer Butterfly Jimenez (William Belleau), who’s investigating a series of linked murders. He is not just brutalized but murdered. Deus ex antifa. Recognition and representation are not inherently transcendent. Instead of pushing beyond mere chronology, Eddington settles for slouchy humor. Remember? Remember when? Remember when we all thought this?

Rarely is art with such a project profound. All too often it replicates the chaos of the moment it depicts without, or even at the expense of, having anything incisive to say about it. My ambivalence toward Eddington doesn’t stem from the fact that it makes fun of “my side” of the political divide. It’s because it relies on lazy clichés of the pandemic genre. “Six feet,” multiple characters chant again and again. Numerous white people “check their privilege” while “speaking anyway.” Skewering the narcissism of white liberals is fine—great material, even—but in Aster’s script, it’s just another jab. There’s a dull bothsidesism to his take on “antifa” and rotten cops. While trying to humanize cops, Aster ends up producing neither copaganda nor an indictment, just hoarse throat-clearing. The number of times someone asks someone else to put on a mask is nauseating—and not only because we lived it, but also because Aster doesn’t elevate such quotidian remarks to mean something. Replicating a time period does not equate to perception even if you have a big, beautiful special effects budget.

Aster has not created the worst movie of his career. That would be the nearly unwatchable Beau Is Afraid. But Eddington, like Beau, goes for shock rather than nuance. In a year of big banner horror films (Bring Her Back, Weapons, Sinners), it takes a lot to stand out from the cacophony. My boyfriend puts it best: “Really good horror uses the genre to say something deeper about a theme.” The same would go, it follows, for a Western. Modern cowboys on the internet is a theme, not a thesis.

The violence that takes over Eddington by the end of the film comes as a relief. Finally. The boiling point. Unfortunately, Eddington continues, giving in to inane ideas about disability-as-punishment. The real people behind the masking “debate” or Black Lives Matter are props for a comedy of manners gone haywire. To Aster, masking—like illness—is a metaphor. Instead of deepening our understanding of such issues, he steamrolls them, undercutting any insight with a clichéd chuckle.

Eddington is not exactly reactionary, though it encourages the viewer to be. Whether or not Aster wants us to take a side, the narrow vehemence it regurgitates has a numbing effect. Films do not have to show us a way out—they can instead be warning signs. Eddington feels like the internet, as Aster hoped it would. (He says he wanted to include Pornhub video clips as interludes—not unlike Idiocracy (2006). At least that movie had a point, didactic and superfluous as it was.) But in setting out to chronicle the “age of total obscenity,” he ends up giving into the apocalyptic urge to blow everything up. It’s not an entirely useless film—it’s also claustrophobic, taut, and vicious. At least it’s trying to do something, even if the film never quite decides on a clear vision. It’s worth seeing for the debate it will no doubt engender. But the echo chamber of the internet is not the place for such discussion. There are real mayoral candidates we should be looking to.

Actually hearing each other may be nearly impossible during such “polarized times.” But as Eddington reminds viewers, not everyone has something to say. Sometimes it’s better to shut up and listen.