Even as it zooms out of theaters—will it play a third week in Baltimore?—people are still talking about Ari Aster’s Eddington. “Someone once said to me that what makes a great film is two sides of a good argument.” That’s Michael Cera in the Criterion Closet 10 years ago, before it was a de rigueur promotional stop for filmmakers, actors, musicians, and other public figures. I tend to agree, although I’d change “two sides” to “as many as possible.” Defending himself for naming names during the Red Scare, Elia Kazan intentionally misquoted Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game by saying “Everyone has their reasons,” when the actual line is “The terrible thing in this world is that everyone has their reasons.” Hardly a novel observation, yet Renoir’s 1939 masterpiece is no match for the semiotic juggernaut Donald Trump, a world historical figure who shapes the language and thought patterns of his opponents as much as his supporters. “Both sides” is a false premise, conflating electoral politics with the whole of morality, yet the left has run with it ever since Trump made it a loaded phrase in 2017 after Charlottesville.
Aster’s been accused of being a “centrist” and playing into “both sides-ism” because Eddington doesn’t fit neatly into any political schema. Like Robert Altman’s Nashville, the film takes the temperature of the country during a divided time; unlike Nashville, Aster’s film isn’t a masterpiece, and I agree with Alex Lei that much of the Covid etiquette satire—mask/no mask, six feet apart, “double distanced”—is broad and one-note (though not unfunny). Besides an ineffably unsettling confrontation set to Katy Perry’s “Firework,” there isn’t a single image or scene in Eddington that approaches the dizzying surrealism of Nancy Pelosi et al. kneeling in Kente cloth, or the priest baptizing a baby with a spray bottle six feet away. But, as Todd Seavey wrote, “If Hollywood were more courageous—and less homogeneously left-liberal—there could be a hundred penetrating films about that strange year, from various perspectives. At least we have his Eddington, for all its flaws.”
Eddington’s struggled at the box office because anything pandemic-related is anathema to advertisers and a distressing swath of the general public. Released on 2100+ screens, the movie has nowhere to go but down, without the time needed for word-of-mouth to reach those who might not feel so indicted by Aster’s work. Alex Lei dismissed the first half of Eddington as "so passé” and “filtered through a lens that either condenses ideas and the events of that spring and summer [2020] to the point of untruthfulness—or it just misremembers what it was like entirely.”
Lei accuses Aster of “bad faith,” a favorite liberal catchphrase ever since they lost, and kept losing, to Donald Trump (why hasn’t “the left,” if such a thing really exists in this country, split from the Democrats and formed a new party? Timidity, cowardice? Maybe it’s just easy, lazy fatalism: “Don’t you know that the world is on fire?”)
What does “bad faith” mean? Leftists use it whenever they’re losing an argument. Here’s a definition from Wikipedia: “Bad faith (Latin: mala fides) is a sustained form of deception which consists of entertaining or pretending to entertain one set of feelings while acting as if influenced by another.” What’s Aster’s deception, his hypocrisy? Lei doesn’t say.
What is “untrue” in Eddington? Once again, Lei doesn’t say, but does note that the film’s “hard to watch both because it feels so one-note, and obfuscates what else was going on that summer. This as a read on 2020 can only come from someone who searched in that year for isolation, because what I saw through the lockdowns was people longing to reconnect, extraordinary racial solidarity in the streets, and a new wave labor organizing that came as a result.” No one had to “search” for isolation in 2020—it was mandated. The idea that the protests and riots of the summer of 2020 engendered “racial solidarity” and a renewed labor movement is delusional. What has labor gained in the last five years? The Teamsters declined to endorse Kamala Harris, although most did—lot of good that did. One UPS driver said, “I wouldn’t vote for her if she was the only one running,” and he’s certainly not alone. Harris, however much of a nothing, “centrist” candidate, was expected to continue the incoherent agenda spawned that summer (what do police killings of black Americans have to do with transgender rights? What is the connection between “systemic racism” and the coronavirus?) If the unrest of summer 2020 inspired any “solidarity,” it was in ridiculing and removing the idiots that flooded the streets in the middle of a pandemic.
In “bad faith,” thousands who mocked and called for the deaths of anti-lockdown protestors (“superspreaders”) went out themselves in the beginning of June and had a party. Unburdened by any real questions (George Floyd was clearly murdered, and Officer Derek Chauvin was charged and prosecuted, “smoked” on April 20, 2021), and left without any real oppressors (what are our “racial inequities”? Are there still states where interracial marriage is illegal? Is there a non-zero number of water fountains in this country that remain “Whites Only”?), leftist protesters went wild in the streets while their liberal cheerleaders stayed home and tried to immortalize them in the pages of The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and on the airwaves of NPR and every television news station except Fox.
Last November’s election was a rebuke of that summer and the ensuing four years of un-reality, a world where Joe Biden was clearly senile and virus protocol became etiquette once those people “looking to reconnect” inadvertently proved that COVID-19 wasn’t nearly as deadly or contagious as initially thought. I was terrified of the coronavirus, heeded every guideline, and followed every precaution for those first three months, but after June, protestors risked it all in order to see their friends again under the cover of historical moral righteousness. It’s not as if Black Lives Matter was a new movement; these protests were a fact of life and a steady presence in America as early as 2014. Those protests did yield reform, namely police body cams; the 2020 protests and riots resulted in nothing except the reelection of Trump in 2024.
Lei says “right wing racism” got Trump back in office. I’m not sure Klansmen are that popular. It’s estimated that “hundreds” of Neo-Nazis and far-right sympathizers marched in Charlottesville in 2017; hundreds of thousands filled the streets in 2020 chanting “NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE,” which isn’t a demand for justice but an admission of purpose: “As long as everything’s a mess, we will make it messier.” Is that “bad faith”?
One need only look at the demographics of the 2024 presidential election to see that “white supremacy” wasn’t to blame for Trump’s success; in fact, he had a remarkably broad racial coalition for a Republican candidate. Liberals and leftists have been in traumatized denial for nearly a decade now, and faced with the historical inevitably of Trump not only winning two terms but out of order, there’s no getting away from their demonstrable ineptitude, which they celebrate, because they have nothing else in a world that doesn’t want or need them anymore. There’s a future in progressive labor politics, but until the left jettisons all of its politically-correct hangups and solutions for non-existent racial and sexual problems, Americans will not get on board, because in the summer of 2020, they saw that the left is fucking crazy—down is up, the sky is green crazy. They were right: nominal progressives and communists bit their tongues and voted for Kamala Harris, digging their heads deeper into the sand. Trump’s America is no Candyland, it’s nasty, but it’s reality. We’re living in the real world now, and however awful that is, reality will always be preferable to the comfortable lie, the delusion, happiness “in bad faith.”
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits