The First Great Covid Movie May Also Be the Last

On Ari Aster’s ‘Eddington’

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In early 2022, I wrote for a now-defunct publication about the absence from television and film of representations of the daily reality of the pandemic, especially in blue states where restrictions remained in force. Even as the same sorts of people who consumed prestige TV were insisting on the need for ongoing mandates and periodic returns to lockdown, they evidently preferred for their entertainment to take place in a nebulous pre- or post-Covid world in which the measures they advocated weren’t in force, such that they didn’t have to see the characters presenting their vaccine papers to gain entrance to restaurants or theatrically donning masks between the table and the bathroom once inside. I concluded: “This divergence between the real world and its televised simulacrum hints at a disavowed discomfort with the transformations of social life imposed in the past two years.”

In other words, even as many in my urban liberal milieu continued to insist that there was nothing abnormal about having to mask in public, take rapid tests before social gatherings, or get state-mandated boosters with every new variant, their unwillingness to see those realities reflected back at them on screen suggested they weren’t being honest with themselves. For one thing, as I said, “the preference for unmasked entertainment is a tacit admission of a point often denied by advocates of strict Covid measures: the concealment of the human face carries a cost.” It was hard to imagine anyone could honestly claim nothing would be lost if their favorite actors appeared on screen with their faces behind N-95s—which surely suggested something similar was also true about in-person interactions with other people.

All these thoughts came back to me while watching Ari Aster’s Eddington, which has been described as a “Covid neo-Western.” Aster made his name with the supernatural horror of Hereditary, which he followed up with the aestheticized folk horror of Midsommar and surrealist tragicomedy of Beau Is Afraid; Eddington, in contrast, gains its force from the cringe-inducing realism of its depictions of the awkwardness of pandemic-era life. The early sequences alternate between the two dismal poles of collective existence in 2020: public spaces, with their alienating rituals of outdoor masking and six-foot distancing, and the private realm, in which infinite social-media feeds absorbed our stifled social impulses and curdled them into rancor.

The film opens with a bathetic riff on an archetypal Western scene: a showdown between rival lawmen. Sevilla County, New Mexico sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) is watching YouTube videos alone in his truck on the side of the road when two tribal cops from the neighboring Pueblo pull up and demand that he don a surgical mask (again, alone, inside his truck); one of them, for good measure, is wearing his own mask below the nose. Masking drama continues to trigger conflict in other early scenes, with Cross’s rival, Eddington mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) demanding the enforcement of the state mandate even as Cross claims the mandate is illegitimate and refuses to mask, saying his asthma makes breathing difficult. As it happened, I saw Eddington in a movie theater in which, around the time I wrote the article quoted above, my girlfriend and I were harassed by an usher during a screening for failing to put our masks up between mouthfuls of popcorn.

It was uncomfortable, if occasionally hilarious, to be reminded of the ubiquity of masking squabbles and related silliness during those months and years, and you can tell from some liberal critics’ response that Aster’s lampooning of Covid hygiene theater hit a nerve. One scolds the fictional protagonist for not realizing “that his asthmatic lungs have more to fear from Covid than from an N95,” while another condemns him as “willfully ignorant—to national news and a lethal pandemic.” There are some scenes that can be read as mocking Cross’s obliviousness to the risk of the virus, but as a recalcitrant anti-masker I read most of it as confirming my priors. And that’s part of the point as well: As a number of critics have observed, Eddington seems to offer ample fodder for both sides of the Covid partisan divide, making the film into a sort of political Rorschach test. (A number of left-wing critics have attacked Aster on these grounds, accusing him of “playing both sides,” which, as one pontificates, “just aren’t equally worth mocking … the foibles of one side lead to cringe moments, while the other might lead to death and disaster.”)

Beyond the multivalent social satire, Aster is also getting at something deeper which, I think, troubles the account of the era settled on by many of my fellow Covid heretics. Many who continue to rail against the indignities of pandemic-era rules tend to portray them as a totalitarian regime imposed from the highest levels of global power. What Eddington gives us is, in my view, a much more accurate picture of how things really unfolded, at least in the United States: by way of a patchwork of jurisdictions with questionable authority to impose the rules in question—a point made by Cross in his confrontations with Garcia—combined with emergent horizontal social pressure enacted through shaming and scapegoating. The tyranny, in other words, was mostly local and homespun—hence the appropriateness of the Wild West backdrop, evoking a world in which each man makes his own law.

In this respect, the pandemic offers an occasion for Aster to continue exploring the crisis of authority that is also the core theme of his prior films. As Sohrab Ahmari argued in a 2020 appreciation of Hereditary and Midsommar, the director’s driving obsession is with “the fall of the father figure, his emasculation, domination, and erasure at the hands of an overbearing or distorted femininity.” (Sohrab wrote this before Beau Is Afraid, which makes the concerns he highlighted about as explicit as possible.)

In Eddington, we face a confrontation between two failed figures of paternal authority in Cross and Garcia—who serve as stand-ins for red and blue America, respectively. Cross seems principled and well-intentioned, if hapless, at first, but is also erratic, ineffectual, and eventually unhinged and murderous; Garcia, meanwhile, speaks the language of social justice while working behind the scenes to advance the schemes of a Big Tech company seeking to build a data center. After seeming to come out on top of his conflict with his rival, Garcia’s soft-power mode of rule proves inadequate to the raw force of violence, to which Cross turns in a shocking way around halfway in, setting the stage for a total breakdown of law and order.

The film ends not with the triumph of one or the other of the masculine claimants to power but with the emergence of another figure representing, as Ahmari puts it, “strange gods and dark queens, witches’ covens and female fertility cults, satanic matriliny”—as in all Aster’s films. In Eddington, that figure is Cross’s mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), who initially seems like a QAnon-addled shut-in but somehow—as we learn in the film’s final sequence—seizes the opportunity left by the unseating of the two antagonists to assert a sort of neo-matriarchal rule over the town, albeit one aligned with the Big Tech company building the data center, hinting at a symbiosis of maternal and technological power arising to fill the vacuum left by the obliteration of the paternal principle. (Not an entirely novel idea—recall that the AI controlling the spaceship Nostromo in Alien goes by the name “Mother.”)

Also as with Aster’s prior filmography, the conspiracy theorists are ultimately proven right as the film slowly and inexorably adopts their perspective—as if once the father is vanquished, a phantasmagoric ersatz hierarchy fills the void. Hereditary and Midsommar both conclude by confirming the reality of an occult gynocratic conspiracy; in Beau Is Afraid, a similar ending is presented in near-explicit Freudian terms as the realization of the protagonist’s deepest inner terrors of his mother’s all-enveloping power. The nature of the conspiracy that emerges in the final part of Eddington, which subsumes and overwhelms Cross’s violent conspiracy against Garcia, remains murkier, but its end result is the same: the reemergence of Mutterrecht.

Eddington includes plenty of satirical digs at 2020-era social justice politics, especially when George Floyd-inspired riots overtake the dusty town of 2,000 residents, which seemingly has only one black resident who happens to be a cop. (His eventual fate adds a further twist to the story, somewhat complicating the film’s politics.) But I took the implications of the film’s closing sequence, set a year after the film’s main events, to be just as relevant to 2025 as to 2020. It begins with the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the AI data center, which Garcia had been trying to get approved over the objections of both paranoid right-wingers and environmentalists. But it is Dawn, previously a fervent member of the first of those camps, who has closed the deal. Perhaps the real power operating behind the scenes has realized that a conspiracy theorist can offer just as useful a political front for achieving its aims as a soft-spoken progressive. Sound familiar?

I believe Aster is right to say we are “still living through” 2020—not least because up to now art has failed to offer us any means of making sense of it. But if the original pandemic moment remains bafflingly difficult to process, the era it has birthed is if anything even stranger. Partly for that reason, I suspect Eddington may be the last great Covid film as well as the first.

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