Ari Aster’s movies aren’t known for spelling things out. In his horror films Hereditary and Midsommar, as well as his nightmare-logic dark comedy Beau Is Afraid, Aster has toyed with the uncanny and the dreamlike, often featuring his characters trapped in some kind of inexorable march toward doom, or at least some sort of reckoning. Eddington, his recent thriller with notes of both satire and modern Western, initially feels like his most grounded effort yet; it very recognizably takes place in the United States of summer 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic was making its way through the country alongside unrest based on both pandemic lockdowns and rising awareness of police brutality. In other words, Aster has wandered out of a horror nightmare and into a real-world one, his characters encountering potential powder kegs at their every turn.
Through the movie’s winding two and a half hours, Aster explores a variety of ultra-contemporary issues with a fearlessness and, occasionally, some obtuseness about what precisely he’s getting at, which has a very different effect in a (nominally) non-horror movie. The literal events of Eddington are mostly easy enough to track; it’s the motivations, and the warping of American norms alongside the characters’ psyches that can be harder to parse. In true Aster fashion, the movie arrives at an ending that’s unexpected without qualifying as a twist. So let’s unpack what happens in Eddington and, more importantly, why.
Eddington follows a series of conflicts in the titular (fictional) New Mexico town in the midst of semi-lockdown during the eventful and frightening summer of 2020. Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) bristles at the lockdown and mask mandate instituted by Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who is attempting to follow along with the governor’s orders. Garcia is also cozying up to a company hoping to build a data center in Eddington as he prepares a re-election campaign, and in a fit of pique, Cross decides to run against him.
Though the movie ultimately sticks closest to Sheriff Cross, it also explores family members of both men. Cross’s wife Louise (Emma Stone), who has some kind of past with Garcia that partially fuels Cross’s dislike, has become reclusive and unresponsive, falling into an internet rabbit-hole of conspiracy theories. Her mother Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), who is living with the couple, also seems susceptible to this stuff, while nonetheless balking at some of Louise’s more out-there wanderings. Eventually this includes consorting with Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler), a cult leader who speaks extensively (yet also vaguely) about child trafficking and recovered memories. Meanwhile, Garcia’s teenage son Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka) gets involved with Black Lives Matter protests, along with his friend Brian (Cameron Mann), who is nursing a crush on activist-minded Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle).
As Cross becomes more frustrated and radicalized (as well as, later in the movie, clearly developing a COVID-19 infection that he refuses to acknowledge), his conflict with Garcia boils over. Cross murders a homeless man who has been causing him problems, and then murders Garcia and his son, attempting to blame “Antifa” extremists and then, more specifically, his Black trainee Michael (Michael Ward). Local Pueblo policeman Butterfly Jimenez (William Belleau) starts to suspect the sheriff.
In the midst of all this, mysterious extremists do actually turn up in Eddington, freeing a jailed Michael and attacking Cross. After a lengthy chase and shoot-out, one of them stabs Cross in the head before Brian then kills the attacker. Cross survives with heavy brain damage, as we learn in the movie’s lengthy epilogue of sorts, where the film’s meanings come into focus.
Eddington Ending Explained: What Does Joe Cross’s Fate Mean?
At the very end, Eddington jumps ahead a full year. Joe Cross has been elected mayor of the town, but doesn’t seem to make many or any decisions as a result of his brain damage and paralysis, which leaves him in a wheelchair and unable to speak at length. Instead, Dawn serves as his caretaker and spokesperson, speaking from the opening of the new data center that Garcia had championed. Brian, meanwhile, has become a conservative influencer based on his shooting of the activists, while Louise appears on the news as the pregnant partner of the cult leader that so captivated her.
At first glance, these turns mostly register as nihilistic, especially given everything Joe Cross wants throughout the film. He wants his wife to love him, and for his mother-in-law to move out; instead, Louise has well and truly left him (she leaves earlier in the film, but her pregnancy confirms that she has definitively shacked up elsewhere, starting the family that Joe seemed to want) while Dawn stays. He opposes the mayor working to bring in a big-tech data center with ominous A.I. implications; the data center gets built anyway, and Cross’s desired tenure as mayor is destined to not have any real connection to his personal beliefs or policies. The mayorship, which he came to want mainly as an outlet for his variety of personal frustrations, is all he really gets in the end, a symbolic title that renders him literally impotent and immobile, registering as an ironic punishment.
Brian, meanwhile, is obviously meant to evoke famous gun-toting child Kyle Rittenhouse, who at 17 shot three men during a BLM protest, killing two of them, alleging self-defense. He was acquitted, and subsequently turned himself into a right-wing celebrity; that seems to be the sort of life Brian is enjoying, too, as the former would-be activist embraces whatever crowd will lionize him.
This could read as South Park-style all-sides-are-stupid nose-thumbing. No one comes out of the movie looking especially good; any characters who seem genuine or intelligent ultimately recede from the narrative. So Cross fights on an incoherent and vaguely right-wing platform and is both vindicated by the voters and nearly killed in the process; Dawn takes her opportunity for a bigger platform to spread her harebrained views; Louise never comes up from her internet rabbit hole; and Brian gains fame by betraying the ideals he was only ever faking to gain favor with a girl he liked. Everyone gets sucked into their own little screens and we don’t see anyone do anything of much genuine value. Even the righteousness of the anonymous attackers who take out Joe Cross seems questionable; are they genuine Antifa forces, a false-flag operation, or some other group entirely? Whoever they are, they mostly wind up dead.
There’s certainly a note nihilism in these fates. Aster himself recently noted that he doesn’t necessarily consider the ending nihilistic because its recent-past setting (the movie ends in 2021, four years ago) leaves room for course-correction. But if the glimmer of hope in Eddington is that it could help steer people away from internet rabbit holes, self-curated realities, and rancorous hypocrisy, well, that’s an awfully faint glimmer to depend on mitigating the sense of lostness.
What does keep the movie from feeling like a pure expression that nothing matters and everyone is screwed is Aster’s focus on the warping effects of technology: how it helps people manipulate each other and themselves. It’s not a cheerful conclusion, but it seems like something that genuinely matters to the movie, not least because the film’s closing shot doesn’t focus on any of its many characters.
Instead, it shows the newly built data center looming over the desert. The people of Eddington may have mixed results and clashing realities, but the corporation-favored data center, whose benefit to actual people remains murky at best and has something to do with A.I., perseveres. Its biggest supporter was killed and unable to serve as mayor, but it still got built; where another story might have included a triumph of the human spirit, Eddington offers only the triumph of big-tech corporations. It’s sort of a funhouse mirror of any supposed larger march of progress; rather than the people of Eddington being forced to move forward together, the town (and its country) can remain rancorously divided into their screen-based silos, so long as corporate interests are served. That’s the objective reality no one in the movie even seems to care enough to argue about. It may be a bleak conclusion to reach after 150 minutes of genre-mixing ensemble fretting, but it’s also pretty hard to argue with.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.