Eddington breaks COVID cinema out of quarantine

More thoughtfully than the horror films looking to make a quick buck off a trend, Jia Zhangke had spent over 20 years filming documentary-style footage for Caught By The Tides, a meditation on loneliness starring his wife and muse Zhao Tao. During lockdown, he combed through the footage (over a thousand hours) to compile the first two sections, then shot a final chapter set in the COVID-afflicted present. Qiao Qiao, the protagonist, has a tempestuous relationship with a music promoter who falls in and out of her life over the years and inspires a chase through time and across China. Lockdown is but one example of momentous country-wide change in the country, alongside the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the controversial installation of the Three Gorges Dam. For Jia, the lockdown is but one of many anthropological fascinations worth inclusion in his work—Eddington with way fewer manic breakdowns. Both films are state-of-the-nation pieces that seek to interrogate grand societal change in their respective homelands. Both are scathing in their own ways, although Aster’s vision is one with a more grotesque flair. If Jia is meditative, Aster is frantic: Caught By The Tides sees COVID as one of many bumps in the road, but for Eddington, it’s the rabbit hole we may never escape from.

Before Aster recounted this political splintering, there was Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn, a scrappy and frenetic black comedy from Romania wherein a high school teacher is put on a parent-mandated trial after her sex tape is leaked. The pandemic has only heightened the country’s simmering social issues, and these frenzied parents find comfort in having an easy victim as their punching bag. She’s certainly more simple to confront than their changing world, pushed apart by a widening political gap. Jude, brazenly and fittingly, ends the movie with a much-needed narrative middle finger, both to the hypocritical parents and to a lockdown-stifled audience in need of catharsis. 

But the person who came closest to capturing the totality of pandemic-driven mania pre-Eddington did so outside of film. Bo Burnham’s comedy musical breakdown Inside never mentions COVID by name, but it doesn’t need to. Burnham thoroughly captures the increasing surrealness of a life forcibly lived alone, unmoored and without clarity. His work frequently deals with his uncomfortable relationship with his own fame, and in Inside, he blurs the lines between “real” and “performance” until they’re barely distinguishable from one another. Burnham is not unlike an Aster protagonist: a cog stuck in a twisted machine. The difference is that Burnham, unlike Beau Wassermann, knows he’s in it. Lockdown made us all think about ourselves too much; Inside is unfettered ego death. 

As time marched on, films began showing COVID as what it had become: a mundane part of life, one where masks were used by everyone, and you could instinctively stay six feet away from every person. These signifiers became as much the stuff of historical reenactments as cravats and carriages. Hong Sang-soo’s most recent works, like The Novelist’s Film, feature characters in face masks (or carrying them around their wrists) and carefully keeping their distance from one another. It’s just one more thing to casually mention before getting on with life. What else could it be for so many of us, especially as anti-mask laws have come into force in many places, and vaccine denialism is in rule in the White House? Turning an ongoing pandemic into part of the furniture, even in our movies, is as easy as turning on the lights (although not as easy as ignoring it altogether).

With Eddington, COVID cinema reaches an all-encompassing state. While these other films preceded it and touched on elements of its scope, Eddington is the first movie to stretch its ambitions across the full spectrum of the era’s events, from anti-mask protests and QAnon conspiracies to social justice appropriated by neoliberal smarm and political malpractice. Ted Garcia’s political ads are full of him eagerly fist-bumping Black people despite representing a town with tellingly little diversity. He’s clearly less inept than Joe, but his naked, Gavin Newsom-esque ambition evokes the ineffectual bipartisan leadership that so smothered the nation during lockdown. 

Aster wants the world to remember that which it seeks to forget. For all of the more out-there moments in this story, it’s hard to claim that there’s anything here that doesn’t feel truthful to that bubble of the summer of 2020, or the ravaged world of tinfoil hats and insurrectionists it birthed. Eddington is a cruel film, something that most of its COVID cinema predecessors avoided, but there’s honesty to its cruelty. 

Aster’s prior work found success by exploring a commonly shared nightmare scenario: What if you were set up to fail from the very beginning of your life? In Hereditary, a shattered family realizes it was borne solely to facilitate a callous matriarch’s demonic worship. Midsommar revealed the curious ambivalence of a community whose foundations are rooted in bloodshed. The poor beleaguered Beau of Beau Is Afraid suffers from panic attacks that lead him to believe the world is out to get him—and it is. In Eddington, Aster’s focus goes wider, his worldview less predestined. Nothing about the ways that COVID changed us were necessarily inevitable, but the excuse to act out and hurt others was too good an opportunity to waste. The true labor of community-building proves less satisfying to Eddington’s residents than pettiness, political grandstanding, and doom-scrolling (the terrifying allure of algorithmic content, designed to addict, is acutely conveyed here). 

In her excellent book Doppelganger: A Trip Into The Mirror World, Naomi Klein writes about how conspiracy theorists are energized by a desperate search for answers to things that seem insurmountably terrible, and how all too often the solutions offered are fearmongering fantasies that create a mirror world. It becomes easy to mistake lies for reality when they offer clarity to confusion, even if the answers are as ludicrous as claiming that there are Bill Gates-mandated microchips in the COVID vaccines. For the first time, Eddington depicts that mirror world on the big screen: surreally familiar, steeped in paranoia, perennially online to the point of town-wide brain rot. Everything and everyone is screaming for attention at the same time and it devolves into an exhausting, violent group therapy session.

Aster makes a bold and direct declaration that COVID has irrevocably broken us in ways both damning and dumb as hell. We’d rather unleash the apocalypse than go to therapy (or keep wearing masks). Maybe cinema can provide us with some clarity on the matter, but as Eddington proves, there is nothing cohesive or narratively sensible about a pandemic. That might be what puts off some filmmakers—and most studios—from investing in movies that tackle the subject matter. There are no triumphant endings or teachable lessons the masses took to heart. These films will need to be furious, akin to the works made by queer filmmakers during the AIDS crisis: cries for justice against a crooked system.

It will still take many years for COVID cinema to evolve into something cohesive. After that, perhaps we’ll even get a tasteless inspirational biopic about the era, with swelling violins on the score and a grand Oscar-bait monologue at the climax. But for now, as Ari Aster knows, we’re still stuck in the middle of an edgelord shitpost.