Eddington is a film about the Republican Party, and why it is such a shit show today. It’s also an incredibly important film to the cultural ecosystem.
Eddington is arguably the zeitgeist film of 2025. A film that is both an account of recent history and a reflection of our current political chaos, Eddington is a profile of our current national insanity that may not have begun in 2020, but was supercharged into out-and-out domestic schizophrenia by the pandemic.
It is also a conservative film. And that is a good thing.
Now, I find it important to first explain what I mean when I say “conservative”. I use the term “conservative” under its commonly understood meaning, pre-2016; the personal and political ideal of conserving certain traditional values. These were the type of Republicans I grew up around, as my family were classic dyed-in-the-wool Reaganites. They believed in small government, free enterprise, and less taxes. Their social politics erred on the right, but they were pro-immigration and deeply believed in personal liberty.
When using “conservative”, I am not referring to religious fanaticism, debunked racial “scientists”, anti-vaxxers, alt-right reactionaries, or any other putrid ideology that has hitched its wagon to the MAGA movement. That movement is still very present in Eddington, but is portrayed for the malignant political cancer that it is).
Eddington is a western; it says so on the tin. But, Eddington is not about a lone cowboy strolling into a town up to no good, or the County Marshall facing down corrupt landowners. Eddington is about the “World’s Last Cowboy”, Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), who, instead of dealing with the changing landscape of the West through the oncoming industrialization of the 1900’s, is a 20th Century lawman stuck in the quickly deteriorating 21st Century. He is, at the start, a classical conservative man; his understanding of the world is centered on the small town he enforces the law of. He is a man who believes in helping his neighbors, and has a deep distrust of the federal government, and in connection, the outside world.
He is also a man alone. He finds himself surrounded by a dwindling police force, as men fall away due to scandal or relocation, neither of which he seems to be able to have any control over. His boss, liberal mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), is a man he deeply despises, for both his politics, specifically his connections to the federal government, and his history with Cross’s wife. His wife, Louise (Emma Stone), is distant, clearly dealing with a deep trauma he doesn’t know how to navigate, while his mother-in-law, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell) acts as a paranoid sound machine, parroting extreme conspiracy theories, whose presence, and influence, in the house seems to grow by the day.
Joe is a man who doesn’t understand why the world has become what it’s become. Seemingly overnight, everything changed. He is now expected to wear a mask everywhere he goes, expected to keep distance from anyone he converses with, and to enforce these laws he neither understands nor agrees with. All for a disease that hasn’t even reached his small town, he rationalizes.
Joe, as portrayed, is a man we can understand. He has a semi-broken home life, and is stuck in a seemingly dead end job. He wants what is best for his friends and family, and doesn’t understand why the world became callous and cruel right before his eyes. Even his reasoning, that all these extra security procedures and expectations doesn’t make sense for a small town like their’s, makes sense (in a vacuum). Joe is what conservatism used to be, just a different political viewpoint that still wanted the same outcome; for life to be better for you and yours.
But, that wasn’t 2020. Joe, caught in a battle that he’s losing, tries to regain control, tries to re-tighten his grip on an ever changing world. He does so by running for mayor, looking to dethrone a man he views as cruel. His early campaign slogans, “we need to free each other’s hearts”, show this initial empathetic approach, even if the perspective is skewed (the “dead, masked communist” yard signs being a clear indication to that confused world view). Joe isn’t willfully ignorant; just ignorant.
Slowly though, the real world, and the chaos it brings, start to descend on Joe. The first canary in the coal mine is a sickly, mentally unwell vagabond that blows into town, bringing with him disease and a slowly spreading insanity; the initial sign of a town teetering on the brink. Then, spurned on by a group of naive but well intentioned youths, violent protests begin to pop up around town. The Gen Z kids of Eddington are like the modern equivalent of the ‘80s high school bully, except the wedgies and purple nurples have been replaced with trigger words and #cancellations. On the surface they fight the right fights, but the underbelly is filled with inauthentic attempts at attention and a narcissistic need to be on the “right side of history”, and their need to be a part of “the movement” brings violence and destruction to Eddington.
So, Joe, who starts as a well meaning man trying to keep his life together, begins to unwind, letting in other forces he doesn’t fully understand. He begins to fall into the paranoid world his mother-in-law has quietly been building in the background. He thinks he can harness these delusions for his own advantages, first as an attack angle towards Garcia, but then, after he completely snaps and begins a killing spree, he believes he can use the vague threat of “ANTIFA” to keep his hopes and dreams alive; to gain the power he so desperately seeks so that he can put everything back into order. He goes from “we need to free each other’s hearts” to “you are being manipulated”; he sees the power of fear, and thinks it’s a quick solution to all his problems.
But, like the man who thinks he can tame a wild beast, Joe’s plans are quickly thrown into complete chaos. His push to try and smear the mayor loses him his wife, and his attempts at framing his murders on a “terrorist organization” quickly manifests in an actual team of killers showing up, leading to Joe’s complete and utter incapacitation.
Joe, deeply sick with a disease he thought would never come to Eddington, and suffering from several knife wounds to the head, finds his monkey’s paw wish come true; he’s mayor, a seemingly beloved one at that. But, he has lost everything; his wife, his friends, his ability to move. He is a husk, now only a prop to his psychotic mother-in-law, who uses him to enrich herself, and spread her insane theories to all who will listen. The people of Eddington aren’t in much better shape; its youth are either dead, disillusioned or moved on to the newest political grift, the police department is left in shambles, and a data center outside of town now sucks the town dry. Life is worse in Eddington, a town whose main street seems to be built out of good intentions, leading to the hell that is Solidgoldmagikarp.
Before I dig deeper here, I think it is important to discuss why it is important to have conservative films.
So, why is it important that there are conservative films? For the health of the cultural ecosystem. For every action, there must be a counter-action, for every push, a pull, a ying to a yang. In a cultural sense, it is important that both sides of the coin get their chance at the sun. With art especially, the ability to illustrate virtues and ideologies through art allows for not only the humanizing of different opinions and thoughts, but introspection for the artist. In creating art, the artist must descend into themselves, and in doing so, look deeper into not only their creative processes, but their own morals and viewpoints. There is a reason that some of our most popular conservative filmmakers (Eastwood, Mamet, Milius) are not stark raving mad, but instead make nuanced films that may lean right, but also come from a place of empathy.
This type of health ecosystem does not include extremist art, though. You’ll notice that extremist art, from both ends, is usual shit, outside of a few outsider examples where the sheer lunacy on display creates a bit of a looking glass character study of the artist (cough Gibson cough). The reason why is that art built out of sheer ideology is always surface level; if all you can do is see your opponent as 2D cutout villains and your world as a binary good/evil scale, your art will reflect that shallow perspective.
If anything, extremist art is a reflection of an unhealthy balance in the art ecosystem, where one ideology has taken hold of the zeitgeist for a prolonged period, and the other side, feeling they are no longer represented culturally, explode out in anger, an anger that is very present in Eddington; an anger that leads to a terminal diagnosis for those who allow it to fester and grow.
In Eddington, and in Joe specifically, director Ari Aster has created an analogy for the Republican party, and the rot that hollowed it out, starting in 2016 and continuing through to the modern day. Eddington is the story of how the Republican party, looking to seize control again, allowed its worst reactionaries to take over, and lose complete control of their party.
Joe is the typical Republican, or at least the version that existed in a pre-Trump world. He’s a bit lunkheaded, enjoys being a pedantic prick when he can be, and is steadfast in his belief that they can “take care of their own”, and don’t need any sort of oversight. Joe is a bit of a prickly customer, but he is presented as a man who loves his family and his neighbors, and is at least understandable, if not reasonable, in his early reaction to the pandemic shutdown.
Putting into perspective what May 2020 was like, where we had no real idea where the pandemic was actually heading, Joe is dumbfounded why everything not only changed overnight, but the enforcement over it became so militant, with people being thrown out of stores for not having a mask and Joe being threatened by tribal police for not wearing his. It’s a reasoning, “why are we doing this if the disease isn’t even here?”, that, while not being a sound argument, is at least something one could wrap their head around. Joe is an old school conservative, with a strong belief in small government, who all of a sudden is facing something that looks terrifying on the surface (full federal government control).
Joe is also facing his own battles at home, not unlike the Republican base over the last decade. Just like Dawn’s insane ramblings, the conspiracy minded part of the Republican party started as background noise that quickly grew into an uncontrollable roar. Joe first finds Dawn’s ramblings annoying, something he only has to put up with for a little bit before she goes home, but as his campaign begins to spiral out of control, he begins to look at Dawn’s conspiracies as a helpful tool. Republicans essentially did the same with Qanon, allowing the fringe movement to act as a battering ram against the Democratic establishment, while also adding the conspiracy theorists into their ranks.
This is to say that Joe, and by extension the Republican Party, are not blameless in their own destruction. Dawn was in Joe’s house for a reason, just like why Qanon gained power within Right-Wing circles; the tension was already there. It is through his attempted manipulation of Dawn’s conspiracies that Joe crosses a line, abandoning his oath, and becoming the villain of his own story, not unlike the Republican Party shifting their party towards reactionary politics, allowing the fiery rhetoric of the Alt Right to take over their messaging, and shifting the parties conservative social views into out-and-out hate mongering.
That leaning into conspiracy, that decision to blame all his failings, from his marriage to his murders, on the “enemies at the gates”, is his downfall. No longer in control of the situation, Joe now runs from his demons, firing into the night, hoping to stave off his attackers long enough to get a full breath back in. But, it’s too late; he is struck down by the villains he created out of cloth, and with his body now vacant, the devils he bargained with for power take over.
Joe, like the Republican party that once ran a war hero like John McCain, is now a husk of his former self. He is in power, sure, but he is just a puppet, a mayor in name only. The evil he courted is now in control, as Dawn blusters about government mind control and the dangers of vaccines at the opening of a data center that’ll crater the town. Joe must now sit, incapacitated but conscious, and watch as everything he once stood for falls away, a new more insidious power taking hold.
But, in a revelation that I don’t think even Aster could’ve predicted, the paranoid, vicious center of modern Republicanism may be its own downfall. In Eddington, Dawn will believe and preach any conspiracy she hears, except for those that hit too close to home, those that affect her directly. It is clear from early on that Dawn’s daughter, Louise, was sexually abused in her youth, with the implications being that it was her own father. It is something that is obvious to those around her, but is never spoken of. Not until Louise gets in touch with Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler), an evangelist with a sermon focused on sexual violence. Dawn and Vernon aren’t all that different, each of them living in custom made worlds of vast conspiracies (Dawn’s involve chemtrails, Vernon involves child sex slavery rings), but Vernon touches on something much closer to reality, much closer to Dawn’s specific reality.
In the fall of 2025, we saw what may have been the first true chink in Trump’s armor, at least as far as his base is concerned; The Epstein Files. A conspiracy that once helped Trump paint his opponents as secret sexual deviants has now become an actual issue for the administration, as leaks have begun to show that not only is Trump allegedly a part of the Epstein files, but he appears to be one of the main focuses of it. The same group of people who helped send him to the White House not once, but twice, might also be the same group that ends up causing his ruin. Poetry in motion.
Eddington is a film that seemed to befuddle filmgoers over the summer. Coming out at a very strange time in our national political scene (one of the few stretches in Trump’s administration where conservatives seemed to have the cultural zeitgeist), it was a weird pill to swallow. It was a film that seemed to mock MAGA, but also took big swings at liberal establishments, with its biggest blows aimed at Gen Z, which Eddington portrays as either empty headed idealists or manipulative opportunists. It was a film that wasn’t easy to pin down, and at a time when people were looking for something a little more black and white (“their side bad, our side good”), it seemed, to many, like a film that couldn’t make up its mind, or one that just took cruel swings because it liked being mean (which, Eddington coming from the filmmaker who gave us the “ant-covered Charlie head”, I can understand the concern).
But, going back to the films genre, western, Eddington is not an easy to swallow moral tale like Stagecoach or Rio Bravo, where the good guys and bad guys are sketched out for us, letting us know who to root for. Hell, I wouldn’t even say Eddington is your classic revisionist Western, like The Searchers or High Plains Drifter, where we see the American ideal (or, the ideal of the “American West”) stripped down to show the stark, bleak underbelly of how this country was built.
No, what I’d compare Eddington to is The Great Silence, Sergio Corbucci’s 1968 winter set western. Eddington and The Great Silence are both about men who view themselves as valiant warriors, fighting against a broken system, thinking that their moral code will lead them to victory. In both cases, these men are led to complete and utter ruin, leaving the townspeople to deal with the villain’s wrath. Even in their post mortem, the heroes are not given mercy, both of them having something dear taken from them by their adversaries, trophies for their walls (In The Great Silence it is a set of pistols, in Eddington it is his literal paralyzed body).
Eddington is like The Great Silence as both films are about men, and institutions, that are steamrolled because of their inability to see that their ways are outdated, their methods of victory, built out of an understanding of the old world, are useless in a world that runs on amoral cruelty and blind ambition.
Eddington is about the 2020’s, and all the evils it has borne.
