'Eddington': Welcome to the Internet

by Mitchel Green - July 25, 2025

| mitchelgreen34@gmail.com source: The Movie Database

I’ve sat staring at a blank page for almost a week since seeing Ari Aster’s new 2020 western-satire “Eddington.” It’s a film that made me immediately want to write something in response to it, but one I have struggled to come up with a concrete argument for or against. It’s a film that demands to be talked about, but has done most of the talking for you. How do I make sense of a film that never makes sense of itself? The film doesn’t provide much commentary or analysis of the time period that it’s exploring, it merely reflects it back through an absurdist-comic lens full of jokes that anyone who has been on social media in the last five years has seen variations on. Yet the film works for me in ways that Aster’s previous films haven’t. Despite its pointlessness, “Eddington” feels like we’re hearing Aster’s full voice after only getting hints of it in the laborious “Beau is Afraid.”

Looking at his filmography as a whole, Aster’s primary fascinations appear to be provocation and genre. Horror is his bread and butter — it’s where he started his career and elements of the genre seep into projects that aren’t necessarily built for horror elements — but what “Eddington” and brief passages of “Beau is Afraid” have made clear to me is that Aster’s talents lie mostly in comedy. He clearly has a knack for the throwaway gag, even if it is reaching for the low hanging fruit at times. It’s a type of joke that suits his provocative nature, and a style that captures the constant barrage of one-note jokes that one would see scrolling through social media. It doesn’t hurt to have great comic timing. Despite my reservations about his ability for dramatic pacing — an often slow place that he’s ripped off from Kubrick’s “The Shining” in every movie he’s made whether it suits the material or not — Aster knows the perfect moment to deliver a joke and how much time to give it to breath. “Eddington” also contains an abundance of visual and aural gags that still make me chuckle thinking about them days later.

Focusing more on comedy wouldn’t even be a significant departure from his typical formal mode. For proof of concept, look no further than one of the year’s best films, the Tim Robinson-led “buddy” comedy “Friendship.” That film plays almost as a parody of an Aster film, with its darker, offputting tone successfully making the viewer uncomfortable as it constantly punches down on its pathetic main character. “Friendship,” like a lot of Aster’s work, is absurd to the point of hilarity, but the difference is that the pacing, while deliberate, is quicker and more suited to joke telling and having more traditionally constructed jokes as opposed to using shock lines or situations to get laughs.

What we have instead of a potential comic masterpiece is a pseudo-Western that attempts to deconstruct the genre through a terminally online, post-internet lens that keeps getting distracted by non-genre specific subplots. “Eddington” posits that not only is the myth of the American West dead, but that those who still believe it in the modern day are narcissistic idiots who are worthy of mockery. The American West promises nothing. The freedom that was once the draw for many is gone thanks to technology connecting everyone everywhere and tech’s looming takeover of the isolated natural environment that those who went west were seeking. The 21st century Western “hero” has nothing to defend his home against through traditional violence. With nothing left to tame on the frontier, the modern day gunslinger needs to create his own chaos, claiming that he alone can fix the unnecessary disaster he caused. Despite this fantasy of protecting his community from something ostensibly evil, he ends up letting the actually evil corporation move in and deplete the town’s resources while physically losing all agency himself. Above all else, “Eddington” aims to be the last Western.

It’s when we move too far away from the genre deconstruction that the movie begins to falter. Almost everything with the Emma Stone character does not work. It is one provocation too many, not in the sense that the film is going too far, but that the scope of its ideas is too wide. In an already bloated film, Aster now has to half-ass some subplots because there isn’t enough time to fully explore all of them, and the Austin Butler-led religious cult mostly gets sidelined (this, for the record, is a good thing as the film grinds to a halt whenever it comes back into play, but then why even include it?). It also lessens the impact of the action-packed finale, which feels out of place because the set-up for it comes and goes so quickly that it doesn’t feel like the natural direction for the story to go.

Despite these reservations about the narrative, I’m starting to come around on “Eddington” as my favorite of Aster’s films, though that may have more to do with my lukewarm response to the rest of his work than any display of mastery in his new film. What excites me most about “Eddington” isn’t necessarily the work itself, it’s that the film charts a new, more intriguing path forward for Aster. His aesthetic and material concerns have been slowly evolving with every work, and he seems ready to break away and enter a new phase of his career. Whether he can get there with a script of his own is the big question. His major influences and interests are not evolving at the same rate, and working with another writer’s script might add much needed depth to the stories he wants to tell. At the same time, doing so risks losing the clarity of his own voice that he’s only now fully come into. Whatever he ends up doing, I just hope he retains the artistic freedom that two straight box office duds may not allow him to keep.