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BONUS: Eddington
🕑 Added 2025-08-07 16:52:28 +0000 UTCMore new movie talk as we take on the most divisive film of the summer, Ari Aster's COVID-era neo-western Eddington.
More new movie talk as we take on the most divisive film of the summer, Ari Aster's COVID-era neo-western Eddington. The film follows Joaquin Phoenix as Joe Cross, the sheriff of Eddington, NM who - frustrated by the state's mask mandates in early 2020 - decides to run for mayor to depose the incumbent Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), a boilerplate liberal looking to move the town into the future by granting subsidies to a tech company attempting to build a data center at the edge of town. The film also traces the various conflicts that erupts as the era's wave of Black Lives Matter protests (following the murder of George Floyd) run up against the sheriff's department and the competing ideologies of the townsfolk, all emboldened by the hypermediated, isolated existences that defined the pandemic.
We beging by addressing the film's politics, rejecting criticisms of the film as "centrist" or evincing a "both sides are bad" mentality, instead revealing the fundamental retreat of material politics as the defining order of the 2020s. Then, we discuss the film as western, how it embraces the lineage of John Ford, and how its world of localized, independent vacuums of internet-fed ideology suggest a collapse of the dialectic. Finally, we look at what the movie has to say about Big Tech, the victims of capitalism, and its (quite cynical) read on where America all headed.
Read Alex on Eddington at More Like Shit Stack
Read Ed Berger on Eddington at Reciprocal Contradicton 2.0
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Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish
Comments
Hit Factory
Thank you so much, Jolene. You always have such kind words for and about us. We appreaciate your support so much.
Hit Factory
Had this to say about it on Twitter: "It's practically de rigueur at this point to accept the film's last act as an obvious false flag, shadow elites tying up loose ends. I find this read wholly supported by the text, yet unsatisfactorily curtailing of some thornier propositions." -- I still stand by this. I think that your read is absolutely a valid one, and one I've seen echoed elsewhere, but I personally just enjoy what opens up in the text if I choose to believe that it isn't a clean 1:1
Jolene Bresney
speaking of art that does the heavy lifting hit factory always takes films to places the viewer might not actually go on their own. connecting so called “bad guys” to their late stage cap alienation and the externalization of that pain on to chosen scapegoats is always an incredible feat they pull off. i love the naming of american political parties as materially feckless, nearly all political theatre to divide and conquer the downtrodden- 90%. no ones lives are being improved drastically. the billionaire class is being served- both sides—same coin. ideology without material change that meets the needs of actual people is gamesmanship. it’s shallow carceral team mentality- puppets for capital. we end up performing our impotent subjectivity for each other as collective distraction from geno, greed, surveillance, neoliberal corruption. you are amazing.
Dark Alliance
Disagree that the spec ops group at the end are Antifa or that Ari Aster entertained a right wing conspiracy theory. Though the logo on their private jet and the one of the data company in the film are different, they are similar enough that it's likely Aster or inteded it so that we put two and two together that these are Blackwater types being paid by the data company ala the Pinkertons to stir things up.
