Technology—especially social media—plays a crucial role in Eddington, wherein every character spends much of their lives reacting to the society in their pocket. Joe is no different. As he does his daily rounds, he brings the world as he sees it with him. He sees COVID numbers on his phone, but that’s a “there” problem. There is no COVID in Eddington, so he bravely defends a maskless old man from grocers following the mask mandate, getting a selfie for his troubles. Joe has bigger issues, though, like his rival Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), the slimy liberal mayor whose smarmy sheen belies his connections to Solidgoldmagikarp. Offering a slicker and more optimistic version of a public official, Ted welcomes the data center as the cornerstone of his campaign to bring Eddington into the future. However, he’s compromised too, prioritizing the water-guzzling Solidgoldmagikarp’s investment over the concerns of citizens, city council members, and nearby Native American reservations whose land the data center will inevitably encroach upon.
Even though he can’t see it clearly, this data center sums up Joe’s problem: He believes there’s a bubble around his town, even though it’s more of a reality distortion field. Joe can’t see that, like COVID, Big Tech is already a “here” problem. Echo chambers drive the townspeople, each their own main character in a quest to find the bastards who did this to them. Joe’s bedridden wife, Louise (Emma Stone), falls in with a QAnon-adjacent cult leader (Austin Butler), who assures her that her “pain is not a coincidence.” Joe’s mother-in-law, Dawn (Dierdre O’Connell), starts every day printing out the latest “Plandemic” research to guide Louise further down the rabbit hole. Around town, the resident activist Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle) launches a Black Lives Matter protest over the murder of George Floyd, while yelling at the town’s Black deputy Michael (Micheal Ward) to get off the fence and join her side. In each case, these people are reacting to and repeating algorithmically curated ideas that only they seem to understand and are intensely loyal to. These ideas are all seeds planted by their feeds.
As the townspeople’s respective timelines manifest in the streets, so does Joe’s brain fog, brought on by a bout with COVID he’s desperate to ignore, and the sheriff begins confirming everyone’s biases. After trying one final time to show his dominance over Ted—and receiving a few slaps in the face for his trouble—Joe snipes Ted and his son (Matt Gomez Hidaka). But a few moves into pinning the murder on Michael, a private jet full of outside agitators, presumably paid for by Solidgoldmagickarp, descends on the town. Posing as the antifa bogeyman of Joe’s Newsmax nightmares, the insurgents stage a violent Western standoff between Michael, Deputy Guy (Luke Grimes), Joe, and newly woke local teen Brian (Cameron Mann). It all ends up with a knife in Joe’s head, and Brian going full first-person shooter on his assailant. The result catapults the politically flexible Brian to Kyle Rittenhouse-esque fame, and leaves Joe as the permanently disabled mayor of Eddington.
And what’s better for Solidgoldmagikarp than a mayor who can’t speak or move? The town successfully divided and outraged, the tech company can now cut the ribbon on its server farm and manipulate the community further, feeding off their data and poisoning their environment. All the blood spilled in Eddington can be traced back to the individual timelines of the perpetrators, which shelter them from the realities of their neighbors. Big Tech is more than happy to fill the vacuum. Aster ends his film with a reflection of the opening shot. Replacing the town, which stood center frame earlier, is Solidgoldmagikarp’s shining desert data farm, calmly humming away and polluting Eddington physically and mentally.
