Eddington And What's Making Us Happy

Eddington plunges us back into that familiarly distressing time of the early days of the pandemic. Directed by Ari Aster (Hereditary and Midsommar) Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal star as political rivals in a small southwest town. Their conflict collides with the news of George Floyd's murder, which brings tensions to a full-on boil for the whole community. Follow Pop Culture Happy Hour on Letterboxd at letterboxd.com/nprpopculture https://letterboxd.com/nprpopculture/ See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:19Aisha Harris?

  Ari Aster is the kind of filmmaker who loves to make the viewer squirm and cringe. He's done it with "Hereditary," "Midsummer," and now there's "Eddington," which plunges us back into that familiarly distressing time of the early days of the pandemic.

• 0:34Speaker 02

  It stars Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal as political rivals in a small southwest town. And it's set during a period when many of us were social distancing and under lockdown or something like it, as they face off a national news story sends the town's eclectic residents into a tailspin. I'm Glen Weldon.

• 0:50Aisha Harris?

  And I'm Aisha Harris. And today, we're talking about "Eddington." I'm Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. Joining us today is Walter Chow. He's a writer, critic, and film instructor at the University of Colorado. Welcome back, Walter.

• 1:02Speaker 03

  How sad to be here.

• 1:06Aisha Harris?

  Yes, this is a sad, strange, as I've already said, distressing movie. But let's just get into it. So it's May 2020 in Eddington, New Mexico. Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe Cross, the town's prickly sheriff, and Pedro Pascal is Ted Garcia, the stern mayor who's up for reelection. Now, Joe's not a fan of the masking mandate, and one day Ted shames him in public for not wearing a mask. Naturally, this radicalizes Joe, who decides to run against Ted in the mayoral race. The men also have some personal beef dating back many years. But their conflict collides with the news of George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis. And the weight of both events, plus the pandemic, obviously, brings tensions to a full-on boil for the whole community.

• 1:50Aisha Harris?

  "Eddington" is in theaters now. Walter, I'm going to start with you. I could barely even kind of scratch the surface here because there's a lot going on. I'm curious to hear your initial, just like... Off the dome thoughts on this.

• 2:03Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I think it answers the question of how you satire a period that it's unsatirizable in a way. You know, this was some of my favorite things like Veep, that Julie Louis-Dreyfus show had to end because they could no longer be as awful as reality was. That's really the challenge of satire, I think, is to, how do you exceed the atrocity? How do you exceed the absurdity of our day to day consistently? Eddington answers really well, I think, how difficult that is and why there aren't more of them.

• 2:37Aisha Harris?

  Yeah.

• 2:37Speaker 03

  Because of its lack of total success, I guess I would say, and the feeling of frustration that I left the film with. And yet I also left feeling like I admired the attempt. I mean, there's so little pandemic movies that actually try to address these little bubbles of conspiracy, if you will. And, you know, I would say that it does try to say, the extremes of both sides seem to be consumed with these conspiracies. So why don't we make a science fiction movie in which all of them are right? Hmm. In which every conspiracy theory is actually correct. Now, let's see what happens. And let's let it boil over and perhaps predict what we're headed towards. Um, boy, I wouldn't

• 3:20Speaker 03

  have dipped my toe into this. I'm kind of admiring of an artist that does that.

• 3:27Aisha Harris?

  Yeah, that's the thing, right? Is that the pandemic seems both too close and yet not far enough in the distance to cover. So I echo a lot of your sentiment there, Walter. Glenn, tell me, bud, how are we feeling?

• 3:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. I did not like this movie. And I was angry that I didn't like it because I thought I knew Ari Aster's deal. I thought I had cracked his code. And I never considered myself a Ari Aster apologist, but maybe a defender. Because I thought, here's a guy who makes horror films that are only horror films the first time you see them. Next time you watch them, they transform into hilarious comedies. Now, they're dark comedies, of course, but once you know the destination of his films, you can appreciate how he leads you to it and you can all. So appreciate how it for example, in a hereditary, oh scary, scary, scary. But the steps you take to get there, including but not limited to little diva head come off.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  It's kind of funny. It's kind of silly. Also, Midsommar, those dudes are absurdly toxic. They deserve everything they get. And in Bo is afraid, his most recent film, the transformation of everyday anxiety into nightmare. It's unsettling while you watch it, but when you wake up from it, you can kind of sort of marvel at how every anxiety gets turned up to a level. He taps into collective anxieties and catastrophizes them. And that's a lot like when a friend or a therapist points out to you that you've just turned like a minor teeny tiny obstacle into the worst thing in the world. But when it's pointed out to you, or when you see reflected on the big screen, it can be kind of comforting and you can kind of think to yourself, maybe I should settle down. The difference here is that this destination is not worth this journey. This attempt at satire, I disagree with it, Walter, in a big way.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  I think this is really toothless. This is really lazy. All it does is it comes up with the most hack observations about both sides. White liberals made speeches about how they shouldn't be the one to make the speeches. Okay. And we've been saying that for 20, we've been saying that for five years. People on the right, they make these frothing at the mouth Facebook posts. And when they write, you're being misled, they use the wrong your. Okay. Is that all you got? I mean, I have left Ari Aster films before feeling all kinds of ways, but I always felt that he was in control of his narrative, that he knew exactly what he was stirring up in his audience, that everything on screen was there for a reason. And as this movie goes on and on and on, two and a half hours,

• 5:51Speaker 02

  you can feel his hands slipping off the steering wheel. All he stirred up in me was frustration and disappointment and a little anger. And but at the end of the day, boredom and boring is something I never thought I'd get from this guy.

• 6:06Aisha Harris?

  Oh, yeah, that's so interesting because I've found the other two movies that I've seen of his quite boring.

• 6:12Aisha Harris?

  I'm not on the Ari Aster team and I haven't been. And now I come to this, I think, kind of in between both you, Walter and Glenn, in that what this film does successfully is it dramatizes a very familiar experience that we all had to deal with in some way or another. I think of the scene in the grocery store where another unmasked person is asked by the manager to leave and then everyone starts clapping. I vividly remember seeing videos of that happening. I remember what it felt like to be restless and be like, why are, I hate that I can't see my friends contemplating, do I want to go and like hang out in the woods with other people in social distance even though we're technically not supposed to?

• 6:55Aisha Harris?

  I understand that and I think it's like important to an extent that we have a filmmaker, especially a filmmaker of Ari Aster's prominence, trying to reckon with that in some way. But I do agree with you, Glenn, that what it ultimately does is just give us the obvious and land us in the obvious point, even if I didn't actually know where, like it kind of, it does go off the rails and it turns into something like very, very different from I think what it starts as. Ultimately, I understood what the sentiment was going to be, especially when you throw in George Floyd on top of it, setting this in May 2020. So he filters all of that through Michael, who's played by Michael Ward. He is a colleague of the Joaquin Phoenix character.

• 7:39Aisha Harris?

  He's one of the officers in the town and he's the sole black character in this movie. It felt like Ari Aster had a better grip on just like recapturing the feeling and the sort of unease and tension, more so than he had a good grip on the actual political dynamics and an understanding of like how to turn that into actual like drama and art.

• 8:05Speaker 03

  You know, I think I share a lot of your frustrations, both of yours, about the lack of real insight in this. And I didn't see it as a negative necessarily, more like I felt kind of aligned with them about not having a lot of insight about this stuff and that it just felt like a kind of accurate portrayal about the sort of uniform lack of insight that we're bringing to this conversation. Not this conversation, but the conversation. This conversation is packed with insight. The thought that neither, no, nobody in the movie. Actually has any grasp of reality. It's all been kind of been muddled and confused. And Glenn, you sort of bespoke, you said 25 years and then you corrected yourself and said five years.

• 8:48Speaker 03

  I think that's actually accurate. It's like 125 years. It feels like a mirror to my own confusion. I don't think I'll ever watch it again. But it did remind me of exactly how I felt five years ago. And it kind of by the end of it reminds me of how I feel now. I don't know that that's an exercise that's entirely without.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Well, you know, we talk a lot about the how intention doesn't matter. What you made matters. We know the intent here. The Slate critic Sam Adams said that at a post screening Q and A, Esther said that what he wanted, the film to feel like was like being on the internet. Well, mission accomplished, bro.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  It is a dumb and pointless mission that wasn't worth two and a half hours of my time, but you did it. You nailed it. I kept thinking, why am I not reacting to this? Like as a social commentary, that's one thing, but as a film, I think everything here is being flatly asserted. Maybe an attempt not to villainize anybody, but when you flatly assert everything, you're not asserting anything. And if I, if this film had the style of the Coens or John Dahl back in the day, or of a Jim Thompson novel, or of an Elmore Leonard novel, then the evil in it would be compelling. It would be, you know, kind of sinister. There'd be an element of fun to it. People would still be doing horrible things to each other, but as a piece of art, as a movie,

• 10:07Speaker 02

  there'd be a kind of, there'd be a sick thrill to it, something dangerous and intoxicating. But the evil here is also punishingly literal and obvious and familiar that you scroll through it every day. So, okay, maybe I thought, maybe that's not what he's doing is some kind of like stylistic exercise or even social comedy. Maybe all he's doing, maybe this is just one filmmaker's attempt to explain what we see every day. Maybe he's just setting out to illustrate how one unhappy, emotionally vulnerable person gets drawn into internet conspiracy theories and disinformation and gets exploited by, there's a grifter played by Austin Butler, very briefly, how they sink into delusion and despair. The only way out is violence. I probably wouldn't have wanted to see that film

• 10:52Speaker 02

  because all I would have to do is log on to my extended aunts, uncles and cousins Facebook pages. But that is a story that could be told if you could do it without. Dripping with disdain for your main character. Make no mistake, this film hates the Joaquin Phoenix character. But it wastes a lot of time pretending that it doesn't because it wants us to invest in him. It is constantly, in the early going, drawing distinctions between him and others like his more overtly racist deputy, or like his mother-in-law, who is further down the rabbit hole, who are, you know, objectively more awful people. I never bought that for a second because the movie doesn't believe it. And I'm not saying I didn't like the film because I didn't like the main character. That's another thing. I'm saying the filmmaker and the actor don't seem to like him either,

• 11:37Speaker 02

  and didn't seem interested in any kind of sincere way in creating him as a whole person with any kind of inner life, because it believes that people like him are not human beings. Which is a take, fine, but art is supposed to dig deeper to find the humanity. And I'm sure if you ask Aster or Phoenix, they're gonna say, oh, we found the humanity. That's what all his unhappy marriage and his despair and his haplessness is about. But all that is, is a setup to turn him into some, a character that's as ridiculous and pathetic as he turns out to be. Dude, if this guy is not worth your time to create a believable human being, I guarantee you it's not worth my time.

• 12:11Aisha Harris?

  Yeah, I mean, you, you mentioned like Coen Brothers and Doll. For me, the theme and the filmmaker, I kept seeing sort of pop up in this. And I don't know if it's intentional. I tried Googling, couldn't find any proof of him or yes, or talking about this directly. But I kept seeing Spike Lee and Do the Right Thing in this film. In very small ways. And I don't know if this is real, but when I think of, you know, the film opens actually with a sort of drifter, barefoot man who's muttering gibberish. He's played by Clifton Collins Jr. And he kind of reminds me of, you know, the character in Do the Right Thing, who everyone kind of like pushes to the side. He's played by Roger Guinevere Smith.

• 12:56Aisha Harris?

  He has mental health issues, but like he kind of keeps popping up over and over in the film. It's sort of like this kind of outsider, but he observes everything. And then you have a moment where like a trash can is thrown through a window of a business. And there's like, Also, just the way this all climaxes into, you know, the George Floyd of it all. I felt as though Ari Aster was trying to do something like that, where we have all these townspeople, all these eclectic people and how they all are connected in some way. But the difference between, you know, Something Like Do The Right Thing and this movie is the fact that, like, as you're saying, Glenn, Spike Lee clearly likes and cares about all those characters, even Sal, even Sal, the white Italian pizza store owner.

• 13:41Aisha Harris?

  What I think of what Ari Aster is doing here, especially with Michael, who I've already mentioned, who is, he's one of the officers who works with Joe. And he's the only black character in this movie, literally the only black character. And everything seems to happen to him and everyone seems to talk at him and say, you know, you should be more upset about this, you're a cop, like, how do you feel about being a cop? But we never actually see him, like, wrestling with that. We don't actually see him interacting with any other black people. And you can't just throw all of that onto this whole black character and say, oh, look, see, I'm addressing this, when he doesn't feel like a whole person. He doesn't, like, he's doing a different problem of racism, which is just seeing him as like a symbol

• 14:24Aisha Harris?

  or like a vessel to, you know, project all of these ideas about anti-racism through and not as like a fully realized character.

• 14:33Speaker 03

  You guys are really nailing what I've always disliked about Ari Aster. About Hereditary and Midsummer, the two movies that you've mentioned. He doesn't seem to like his characters ever. He treats them terribly. He gets these remarkable performances, right, in Hereditary, I get it, and whatever. But that doesn't redeem the fact that his movies are kind of jerks. When we're comparing him to other directors and stuff, the director I always think of is Billy Wilder. And, you know, you compare it to Do The Right Thing, and I see that. But I was thinking of One, Two, Three, the Billy Wilder film, Through The Course Of It, which everybody is commodified, everybody's used as a chip. There's a real cynicism about that film that mirrored 1961, the way that this, I think,

• 15:15Speaker 03

  mirrors 2025, this idea of real lack of empathy for anyone else, this solstism. But that kind of seeps through. I think the only Ari Aster movie I've liked without reservation is his last one, Bo's Afraid. Ironically, he finally successfully had a main character that he didn't despise. And I think that archness, that arrogance is what. Really has put me off of his horror films. You know, I felt like you want to make Ordinary People. You don't want to make The Exorcist. To your point, you could say you could just doom scroll for two and a half hours and have the same feeling of illness afterwards and lack of resolution. Totally true. I don't know why you would do go to see this for that.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  No, the film I kept thinking of was not Spike Lee, not Billy Wilder. It was Three Billboards Outside Evan, Missouri.

• 16:03Aisha Harris?

  Oh, God, I think I've memory holed that movie.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  That is another film that took one look at the great

• 16:14Speaker 02

  psychological, socioeconomical, cultural wound on the American psyche that is race in America. And thought, I got this. And then proceeded to deal with it in such a shallow and surface way that it showed its entire ass. I think this film is doing the same thing.

• 16:31Aisha Harris?

  I'm glad you landed there. I was, it was on the tip of my tongue. To be clear, I was not saying that do the right thing and these and this movie are at all in the same league. I'm just saying, I feel as though there's inspiration there, you know, there's even a whole scene involving getting angry about music being too loud. I was like, okay, here we go.

• 16:49Aisha Harris?

  Of course, in this case, it's Katy Perry's Firework, but like, you know, it's not, it's not Public Enemy.

• 16:55Speaker 02

  He's got a point.

• 16:57Aisha Harris?

  I mean, look, we've said a lot about, you know, what this movie is about and the themes. But like, how do we feel about the performances at least? I, you know, we haven't even mentioned Emma Stone. She's playing Joaquin Phoenix's wife and she's not a main character, but she's sort of part of the catalyst of the tension between the Pedro Pascal character and the Joaquin Phoenix character. She is who a lot of people were or turned into during the pandemic, which is I'm just gonna, you know, doom scroll and also go down this rabbit hole of conspiracy theories about COVID. And you have Austin Butler, who you've already mentioned, Glenn, who's playing that grifter.

• 17:37Aisha Harris?

  I don't know. I always find it hard to judge performances in these types of movies that I feel are complete swings and misses. I don't know. I liked seeing Austin Butler be weird.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  It just felt like an actor's workshop and a workshop of ideas. It's fine, but if you ever ask me to say, did you believe in Sheriff Joe Cross? Do you believe in Mayor Ted Garcia? No, I believe that I saw Pedro Pascal and Joaquin Phoenix working out, you know, socio-political issues on a stage shot handsomely by everybody's favorite, you know, wealthy white guy, Ari Aster. And hey, I just, I'm tired. I've seen this a lot. You know, to your point with Michael, but also there's a Native American character, this indigenous cop played by Willie Bellew, who is able to see signs and finding things that no one else can find. You know, all of these really unhelpful stereotypes that these minority characters,

• 18:30Speaker 03

  the few minority characters, including even, you know, Pedro Pascal as Ted Garcia, they're forced to carry, using, you know, Ayesha's term, the burden of their entire heritage. And I think that's troubling. I just, are you the right mouthpiece for it? Is Martin McDonagh for Three Billboards the right, exactly the right person to talk to me about race in the United States? I just, I bristle a little bit. Please be less pedantic, you know, please be less sure. I think that's what, you know, Ari Aster's always putting me off a little bit as like, why do you think you're smarter than me?

• 19:10Speaker 03

  You very well may be, but what royals off of these pictures is a sense of superiority that I need his pictures. I'm not sure that I do.

• 19:20Aisha Harris?

  Well, there we have it. Three billboards outside of Eddington. That's what you should call it.

• 19:27Aisha Harris?

  Well, obviously, we had a lot of thoughts and there was even a lot we couldn't really get into for our fear of spoilers, but tell us what you think about this movie, Eddington. Find us on Facebook at facebook.com/PCHH and on Letterboxd at letterboxd.com/NPRPopCulture. We'll have a link to that in our episode description. And up next, what's making us happy this week?

• 19:49Speaker 04

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• 21:06Aisha Harris?

  And now it's time for our favorite segment of this week and every week what's making us happy. Walter, kick us off.

• 21:13Speaker 03

  The third season of Strange New Worlds: Star Trek. I adore this show. I've always loved Star Trek. I think some of the issues I've had with modern Star Trek is that every week is part of a longer story where the fate of the entire universe is at the brink and every decision is this giant decision. And I love, you know, there is a larger storyline in Strange New Worlds, but mostly it's a week-by-week alien of the week, planet of the week, problem of the week that I just, I love it. I love this the same way that I loved Superman. And there's a group of really capable people. I love watching this cast. You know, it's aspirational in a way that so much of our sci-fi is dystopian.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  It's just good people trying to do the right thing in hard situations. More of that, please. Here, here.

• 22:02Aisha Harris?

  All right. So that's Strange New Worlds and where can folks find that?

• 22:06Speaker 03

  Season three is streaming on Paramount Plus, the first two episodes right now.

• 22:09Aisha Harris?

  Awesome. Thank you so much, Walter. Glenn, what is making you happy?

• 22:13Speaker 02

  Florenzer by Phil Malanson is a new historical novel set in the city of Florence during the Renaissance, which was a big center for art and culture, and as is often the case, also for sex between men. The city had such a reputation for that, that the German word for men who engage in homosexual acts was a florenzer, a man from Florence. So this book focuses on a young Leonardo da Vinci as he comes to terms with his talent and what we would today call his queerness, but the author is really taking great pains to capture the history, not just the stuff you'd expect, the politics of the Medici's and the papacy and all that. But really, the thing I most love about the book so far is the physicality of it, how

• 22:56Speaker 02

  it feels to walk the streets of Florence in different sections of it, the sights and sounds and smells, the immediacy of it. I am only about a quarter of the way through this book, but I have it on very good authority that it gets, as the kids today say, pretty spicy. But right now, I'm loving the prose, the vividness of this writing, what we used to say in grad school, the availability of this place and time. That is Florenzer by Phil Malanson.

• 23:23Aisha Harris?

  Thank you so much, Glenn. Well, what is making me happy this week is that, look, Song of the Summer, it's a futile exercise, especially this summer, and we might actually be, you know, talking about Song of Summer on a future episode, but if I had to pick one right now, it would have to be Shaky to the Max Fly. It is the remix of Molly's Shake It to the Max. It is, it's just a banger. I don't really know how else to say it. It is amazing. It makes me want to be in a club shaking it to the max. And it features Jamaican rappers Shenzia and Skilabang and producer Silent Addie. Let's just have a little listen to that.

• 24:15Aisha Harris?

  You turn that up, it's great, it's fun. So that is Shake It to the Max Fly, the remix by Molly, and that is what's making me happy this week. If you want links for what we recommended, plus some more recommendations, sign up for our newsletter at npr.org/popculturenewsletter. That brings us to the end of our show. Walter Chow, Glen Weldon, thanks so much for being here. This was a pleasure, even if the movie itself was very distressing.

• 24:43Speaker 03

  Thank you. So happy to be here.

• 24:45Aisha Harris?

  This episode was produced by Liz Metzger, Carly Rubin, and Mike Katsev, and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy. Halil Khomeini provides our theme music. And thanks for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Aisha Harris. We'll see you all next week.

• 25:01Speaker 04

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