It’s no surprise that “Eddington,” the provocative new film from writer and director Ari Aster, has brought about a wide range of varied reactions following its Friday night premiere in Cannes, because the director says that the film itself is about the different realities we are living in and how far apart people are even when living right next to each other.
“We are on a dangerous road and an experiment that has gone wrong,” Aster said of current-day America at a rather chaotic press conference on Saturday alongside stars Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Michael Ward, Luke Grimes and Austin Butler. The filmmaker also said that the film was made to reflect what he was thinking about the world and how social bonds were fraying.
“I wrote this film in a state of fear and anxiety about the world,” he said. “I wanted to try and pull back and show what it feels like to live in a world where nobody can agree on what is real anymore. Over the last 20 years, we’ve fallen into this age of hyper-individualism, and that social force that used to be central in liberal mass democracies, which is an agreed-upon version of the world, that is gone now. COVID felt like the moment where that link was finally cut for good. I wanted to make a film about what America feels like to me… It feels bad. I’m very worried.”
Set during May of 2020 during the height of the COVID pandemic, “Eddington” is about a standoff between a small-town sheriff and mayor which spirals out of control as neighbors turn against each other in a small town in New Mexico. For Aster, he said he hopes people take away a need to “reengage with each other” as that’s central to helping bridge these gaps.
“The film is about people living in different realities and I think every characters’ idea of America is different in the film,” Aster said. He later said it’s about the dream of the country versus the reality, referencing the ideas of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche as being instructive.
“One thing that was really on my mind was history, American history, and how we’re all haunted by that,” Aster said. “Opening night, there was a lot of mention of Nietzsche…. It made me think about what Nietzsche said about an age oversaturated with history and how that leads to a dangerous mood of irony, how that leads to a detactached spectatorism instead of actual engagement.”
This was echoed by Pascal, who said he appreciated how the film captured the truths about our present moment that people looking from the outside in might not be able to fully appreciate.
“I love what Ari said in terms of feeling completely untethered from a collective truth,” Pascal said. “It felt like the movie I read and had to be part of as beautifully finessed as it had been between then and now. As far as lens on U.S. culture from the outside, there’s so many ways to view politics, sociology, and our very complex culture. With Ari’s movie, it felt like we had a mole, someone from the inside saying, ‘This is what’s happening.’”
Things went off of the rails from there as Pascal was asked about his character’s fate in the HBO series “The Last of Us” and a spoilery connection it shared with this film, which became a recurring joke amongst the cast when asked more serious questions. Whether the reality captured in “Eddington” will end up leading to the end of modern America remains to be seen, with Aster joking that he “doesn’t speak English” when asked if he thought civil war is on the horizon.