In May 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, in a fictional town in New Mexico, Eddington, a drama summarizes the epidemic that the United States in particular and the world in general were going through. The film of the same name depicts the tragedy and ridicule of a psychotic species like ours.
As Kafka once said to his friend Max Brod, who accused him of being a pessimist because he seemed to have no hope: “There is much hope, but not for us.”
The film “Eddington”, directed by Ari Aster, and with Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal and Emma Stone in the cast, is a psychosocial analysis of deep America crossed not only by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, but also by the tragedy that killed George Floyd and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. And all the cacophony that followed these events.
With a slight touch of satire, the film is a panorama of how people’s small acts grow to the point of plunging us into utter nonsense. One of the film’s greatest effects is to destroy belief in the meaning of many dialogues in countless scenes.
No one listens to anyone and reason seems pathetic in its attempts to make itself heard. The idiotic myth of the Enlightenment appears in all its stupidity. The film becomes a hysterical cacophony in which we are the protagonists, even if we are represented by the characters, as in Greek tragedy.
First of all, the ridiculous discussions we heard about masks, yes, masks, no, does anyone still remember that? A kind of crude liberalism did not want to recognize that a pandemic is a collective and social situation and not just individual.
The sheriff, played by Joaquín Phoenix, makes a crude liberal speech against the determination of the mayor, Pedro Pascal, to follow the government rules that established the confinement. Everything is so far away, right? How can we still believe in social memory?
I remember the horde of idiots who claimed that humanity would be different because of the pandemic, more united and humane. Others saw spiritual significance in the pandemic. We forgot about it five minutes later. And if another one arrives, the circus will repeat itself. But the chaos in Eddington is not limited to the pandemic itself.
The Black Lives Matter movement brings together a large and numerically small group of young people in the city who launch a protest and dismantle stores. Absolute cacophony. The young white people almost self-flagellated because they were walking on land “stolen” from the original peoples and which had to be returned to this population.
A lucid father draws the attention of one of these young people, his son, to how ridiculous it was for him, a white man, to say these things. In a speech later in the script, this same boy announces that white people like him should lose their right to speak. And then, he becomes a conservative influencer on the networks. How ridiculous we are, and there are still people who take us seriously.
The scenes reveal the grotesque tone of many of these demonstrations, in which young people adopt the faces, gestures and words of psychopaths alienated by a “cause”. Activism has done and still does a lot of harm to young people, in addition, of course, to doing a huge service to the laziness that torments them when they have to clean their rooms, an activity much more difficult than saving the world and following Greta Thunberg. Social and political causes corrupt the character of young people.
A young wife, the award-winning Emma Stone, completely lost, leaves her husband for a scam guru who mixes Jesus and fights pedophilia. The “great leader” keeps telling supposed stories that happened to him as a child that seem completely absurd and false to anyone with more than two brain cells. She in turn embodies the classic bored woman in search of a powerful and daring lover.
Pandemic, social movements of increasingly aggressive protests along the way, Christian sects which would leave the most radical evangelicals in crisis. A real social entropy disguised as political causes.
But the madness intensifies. Groups called “terrorists”, who fly – in jets – attack the town and the sheriff, who all he wants to do is be mayor, crowning the chaos and buffoonish political “future” of the small, unimportant town.
What everyone wants is to become famous. The city is reminiscent of Brazil, in its ridiculous desire to be relevant when in fact it is geopolitically nothing.
The film is an exercise in philosophical cynicism, taking a look at the scenario of social causes in the 21st century. America, the world’s greatest power, is drowning in the madness created in its own backyard, turning the population into a nest of snakes. The theme is social and political entropy.
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