So What Really Was the Conspiracy in Eddington?

Warning: As you may be able to tell from the headline, this post spoils the ending of Eddington.

Ari Aster’s first feature kicked off with the accidental decapitation of a child, and each subsequent film has only gotten more depressing from there. His latest, Eddington, might also be the most provocative: It’s a return to late May of 2020, a chyron that hits like a jump scare. We’re at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the days of mask wars, moral panic, and so much doomscrolling. Our anti-hero is Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), the sheriff of a small town in New Mexico, who spins his opposition to mask mandates and a proposed data center into a populist crusade against the sitting mayor (Pedro Pascal). As a filmmaker, Aster delights in tap-dancing on the third rail, and the quarantine era gives him almost too many targets: right-wing paranoia, performative radicalism, and liberal smarm (represented here by Katy Perry’s “Firework”). Reviewers are mixed on how effectively he pulls it off — a divide that’s embodied by one twist that comes late in the film.

Much of the critical ill will Eddington engenders boils down to the sense that Aster is stacking the deck. The town of Eddington has zero COVID cases, the better to mock the absurdity of public-health measures, and very few actual Black residents, the better to write off the summer’s racial reckoning as superficial virtue signaling. Which is, of course, the director’s prerogative.

But for the film’s first two acts, Aster is at least operating in some sense of recognizable reality. A vulnerable woman falling under the sway of an internet cult leader, a politician baselessly accusing his opponent of being a pedophile, a white college student lecturing her Black ex about his obligation to stand up to oppression the precise way she demands — these may be heightened versions of events from the long hot summer of 2020, but at least they resemble things that did happen.

Then the film takes a turn. As events in Eddington rise to national prominence, Aster cuts to a private jet full of antifa goons — the infamous outside agitators — being flown into the town by some malign puppet master. Suddenly, it appears we have left the real world and arrived in Looney Tunes Land. Aster is no longer offering a twist on things that really took place but on fantasies that occurred only in the imaginations of right-wing kooks. The film, which had been drawing tighter and tighter around Joe’s personal descent into madness and murder, now explodes into an orgy of violence. The antifa mercenaries function as a diabolical deus ex machina, orchestrating an elaborate bomb plot and laying waste to the town with military-grade weaponry. (In their defense, the sheriff causes his own fair share of property damage as well.) By the end of the film, they’ve unintentionally solved most of Joe’s problems for him: killing Native detective Jiminez Butterfly (William Belleau), who was close to pinning him for murder, and making Joe into a right-wing martyr. Though their attack leaves him diminished and disabled, he becomes the hero he has always wanted to be, the “good guy with a gun” who saved a small town from radical, leftist terrorists.

It’s a tonal shift that has confounded and infuriated critics in equal measure. At Cannes, The New Yorker’s Justin Chang dinged the film’s descent “into sniggering superiority, cartoonish violence, and generally stultifying tedium.” In The Reveal, Keith Phipps calls the third act “puzzling and unsatisfying.” Time’s Stephanie Zacharek admits, “I have almost no clue what the ending means.”

What — beyond Aster’s evident desire to tweak both sides of the political spectrum — might be going on here? Look deeper and you’ll find the answer was hiding in plain sight.

If Aster has a thesis in Eddington, it’s the way the pandemic shredded the last vestiges of a shared sense of reality. Isolated from one another, and experiencing the world through a mediated reality algorithmically attuned to our own preferred narratives, we became perfect marks for manipulators of all stripes. Thus, on one level, Aster is illustrating the leap we all made: As Joe becomes ever more detached from reality, so too does the movie around him escape the boundaries of what “really” happened in 2020 and become a lurid right-wing fever dream.

But on another level, the third act of Eddington continues the director’s preference for ending his films on dark cosmic jokes. As Slate’s Sam Adams notes, “All of Aster’s protagonists are conspiracy nuts who turn out to be right.” In Hereditary, Toni Collette’s Annie really is being manipulated by an infernal scheme cooked up by her late mother. In Beau Is Afraid, our hero’s persecution complex proves justified once he winds up literally on trial after standing up to his overbearing mom. (You may notice another recurring Aster theme here.) This is true in Eddington as well. Joe is correct: The town really is the victim of a sinister conspiracy of elites. It’s just not the one he thought he was up against.

After the violence settles, a brief coda reveals where everyone in Eddington ended up. In the film’s best gag, the white teen who once spoke of dismantling whiteness has now moved to Florida and gone full MAGA. Joe wins the mayoral election, but he’s nothing more than a figurehead, a paraplegic trotted out as a mascot for public events. The data center did indeed get built, and its corporate overlord is now one of Joe’s patrons.

All of this plays out in the margins, and it’s easy to miss on first viewing. But as Joe’s conspiracy-addled mother-in-law might say, it’s all connected. Though Aster never spells it out directly, it seems clear that the data-center bigwigs have been controlling events behind the scenes the whole time. They are the ones who flew in the antifa soldiers, playing both sides off each other in order to take advantage of the chaos. Despite Joe’s protestations about standing up for the little guy, he ends the film as a pawn of big tech.

For a director who enjoys playing with fire, the antifa subplot might be the film’s most incendiary material. (I’ll admit, as a basic normie lib, I rolled my eyes at what seemed like a too-easy attempt at provocation.) It “more or less begs those who aren’t paying attention — or who have knives out for Aster — to read the film the wrong way,” writes The Ringer’s Adam Nayman. But once you get the joke, you see he’s aiming at the right place. Aster’s ultimate punch line is that an era of widespread institutional distrust turned out to only further empower the bad actors among us. Ironically, the easiest people to manipulate are those who see manipulation everywhere.