When Covid Broke Reality – Gage Klipper

Throughout his nascent film career, director Ari Aster has already shown he’s a one-trick pony—but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. 

Aster’s 2018 debut, Hereditary, instantly made him the golden boy of the horror genre, depicting an affluent family terrorized by supernatural forces within their own bloodline that they try and fail to repress. His 2019 follow-up, Midsommar, shows a grief-stricken American woman at a Swedish folk festival who eventually comes to revel in the pagan sacrifice of her city-slick friends. The long-awaited Beau Is Afraid (2023) departed from the traditional horror vein, but nevertheless follows a man wading through psychological terrors to reach his haughty mother’s funeral, only to discover that everything he believed about his family life was a lie. 

In each case, we see a fairly mundane and rational world collapsing in on itself, destroying the personal identities of those who cling to what they think they know as the surreal comes to capture and define their world. Aster is obsessed, almost pathologically so, with the dissection of pretenses; once nudged by shock or trauma, the patina of genteel respectability gives way to reveal much darker truths. So it was natural his fourth film should focus on the Covid-19 pandemic—a surreal phenomenon we would hardly believe happened except for the fact that we all lived through it. And like all of Aster’s protagonists, we’re now stuck living in the identity crash it manifested. 

Aster’s Eddington is the first real Covid movie, in that it uses the pandemic not merely as a background plot device, but as the basis of a thematic exploration of human nature. Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal, basically playing himself) is the sleazy liberal mayor of the small titular town in New Mexico. Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) is his adversary and the protagonist of the story, a hot-headed, somewhat unsophisticated county sheriff who decides to launch his own mayoral bid. They first clash in May 2020 over—what else?—wearing masks in the supermarket. 

Garcia is a phony, obviously. He maintains his own moral superiority even as that means having an unmasked old man dragged out of the supermarket. He deflects scrutiny with pandering condescension, appealing to mandates above his pay grade while bludgeoning opponents with platitudes about “safety” and “community”—indignities we all had to suffer through. Of course, Garcia flouts his own mandates and happily pulls down his mask when he’s away from the spotlight; his feigned empathy is mere pretense, a weapon of control to maintain incumbency. 

Aster seems to have a little more belief in Cross’s sincerity. He stutters through Facebook live streams trying to explain how he’s not the bad guy, how he actually believes he’s a “better person” than Garcia, how the mandates are both illegal and morally wrong, and “not worth” the price of savagely dividing the small community. The viewer is inclined to believe him; while Garcia simply wants to look like he cares, Cross wants the town to know he cares. His flustered dialogue captures how we all felt impotently trying to explain the contradictions of the Covid era to friends and family who took the word of MSNBC as gospel. You might be right, but it’s not so easy to hold your ground when the other side’s story is so emotionally simple—and backed up by hefty institutional weight.

Cross might actually be a better person than Garcia, whose only real goal is selling out the town to build a nebulous data center. But principles, even core, self-defining ones, crumble under consistent nudging, and Aster perfectly captures the feeling of personal suffocation that so many experienced within the collective trauma of Covid. 

Cross is a tough guy, sure, but he also proves remarkably impotent. He can’t win widespread support from the townspeople, who mostly go along to get along. He can’t stop the local teens from taking out their lockdown frustration in BLM protests, and is even less effective at stemming the violent riots that result. He can’t keep his wife (Emma Stone, as a frizzy-haired MAHA hippie) from running off with a QAnon-style guru (Austin Butler, raving wildly about child sex cults). He can’t even get Garcia to turn the music down at a campaign event that’s in clear violation of his own mandates. Each character’s behavior is driven by a fragmented sense of reality—and a once-clear-eyed Cross finally snaps. 

A boilerplate story of small-town Covid drama explodes with a murder plot, out-of-town paramilitary agitators, and good old-fashioned desert shootouts, blurring the genre lines, as Aster so aptly does, between horror, farce, and a very modern Western. We’re shown masked agitators flying in on a luxurious private plane, guns and lefty signage in tow, to take advantage of the surreal chaos in Eddington. But do we really know whose side they’re on—who’s funding them, to what end? Maybe it really is a Leftist plot, or maybe it’s the Right or some nebulous business or foreign interests. All these possibilities seem open, but while truth remains elusive, the blood in the street is real. 

There’s no real political message to the film, no cryptic meaning. Aster isn’t a converted right-winger seeking atonement, as some of his dumber leftist critics have claimed. Neither is he a true believer in the establishment’s official narrative, despite some equally tiresome conservative gripes over equivocation between fringe QAnon conspiracies and whole-of-government Covid abuses. 

Say what you want about the Covid era—who was right, who was wrong—but the fact remains that it was wholly surreal. Who could imagine global lockdowns, mass riots, and friends and family turning on each other—until we all aided and abetted it happening? Admittedly, I was skeptical heading into Eddington. Aster’s ire towards pretense has previously been reserved mostly for the comfortably bourgeois sensibilities that our cultural arbiters, since at least Bergman, love to hate. But the film goes beyond this narrow, ideological focus; despite the politically charged backdrop, Eddington is not a political film at all, but a deep dive into the human condition. 

In-group/out-group conflicts have always existed, no matter the contemporary circumstances. “Who says organization, says oligarchy,” wrote German-Italian sociologist Robert Michel at the turn of the twentieth century, one of the earlier and more accurate prognosticators of what the age of nascent mass democracy would soon become. Any group big enough to need a leader will end up ruled by one. The very act of organizing demands a hierarchy, and with it comes a ruling class whose first priority is no longer the mission, but its own survival. Control of resources, messaging, and process hardens into self-preservation; dissent is brushed aside with the same high-handed methods the rulers once condemned when they were clawing from below. Eddington plays out with the same cruel precision. (Caution: mild spoilers ahead). Cross may start as the principled underdog, but once the smoke clears and he’s seated in Garcia’s chair, he wields the same tools of power, smoothes over the same hypocrisies, and even greenlights the very data center that he once denounced.

Theorists dwell on the political fallout, but it’s the artist who sees the human toll. 

Eddington treats Covid as a breakdown of reality itself, fomented and then once again solidified by the breakdown of our own identities. The political cycle churns on endlessly, one group on top, then the next, and the next. But it’s humans within each cycle who inevitably get ruined. The believers in the True and the Good thrive within their own cohesive paradigm as Garcia does at first, but as that paradigm begins to fall away, it’s adapt or die. What else is there to do but jockey for a new identity within some new paradigm? 

Technology only potentiates the problem, as Aster so aptly captures. Each character doomscrolls endlessly, bouncing between protest footage, conspiracy live streams, and fawning local news profiles, all narrating the same events with corresponding sets of “undeniable” facts. With constant self-selected immersion, this manifests in a boilerplate understanding of the world around them, as they come to mirror the algorithm in their own thoughts and behaviors. Of course, The Science is good and true—or—of course, Antifa is behind every sinister plot. How could it be any other way? The algorithm doesn’t reflect reality but redefines it, changing how we interact with the world around us, which in turn redefines our own self-conception. Garcia’s nebulous data center becomes an ominous metaphor for the algorithmic sense of human interaction that dominated pandemic life. It’s as surreal as the demons of Hereditary or the cultic worship of Midsommar, but look around you—and it’s undeniably real. 

The pre-Covid world of genteel liberal propriety is dead, and Garcia passes along with it. Cross, in the end, quite literally a shell of a man after his brush with “Antifa,” sits atop the same machine with different political characteristics. And many others continue to search rudderlessly for identity in little eccentric worlds ranging from QAnon to Antifa, all fundamentally the same in that they seek a new reality now that the old one has been finitely destroyed. Aster leaves us with no resolution, only replacement, and the community acceptance of a “new normal” as if the old one never existed. The latent horror of Eddington isn’t that these contradictions exist, but how quickly we learn to live with them. 

The viewer is left wondering whether it’s the spectacle that’s surreal, or its normalization. We can all admit that a paramilitary takeover of a small American town leans heavily on metaphorical license. But what would we have made of such an event if it were to have happened in the summer of 2020? Far from incredulity or principled outrage, reality, for millions, would have depended on their social media feeds. 

Eddington leaves us with little hope for a post-Covid revival. Yes, leaders will always conform to some finite rules of power, and we discovered some nasty truths about ourselves as the world shut down—but the world can still change for the better, even if Aster himself is too cynical to admit it. We all have the propensity to be cruel, weak, and self-serving hypocrites, but that does not mean all our noble sentiments are phony and meaningless. The upside of social flux is that the stifled good in us has just as much opportunity to break through as the repressed bad.