I end this month of movie-related columns, which included appearances by Superman and the Fantastic Four, in the year 2020, or rather, in the fictionalized 2020 depicted in this month’s drama Eddington by writer/director Ari Aster.
Strange cultural moments come and go so frequently now that I sometimes sit around worrying no one will find time to turn those moments into good films and novels, which I admit isn’t the best way to turn my sense of urgency into artistic or philosophical productivity. As Aster plainly understands, numerous threads of political and cultural madness intersected in 2020. 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.
In its depiction of a New Mexico town sheriff (played by Joaquin Phoenix) driven mad by petty anti-plague rules, the pressures of running for mayor, and multiple personal problems, the film may ultimately depict right-wingers as the most dangerous of the madmen around us, but even admitting, in Pynchon-like fashion, that the left is part of the problem, part of the kaleidoscope of unreason, is a bold enough anti-left move by Hollywood standards to count for something.
The sheriff may be emotionally unstable, but the very young, very white Antifa/BLM protestors depicted (fairly) in the film are ridiculous, screaming in the middle of an otherwise quiet rural intersection about how they should have no right to speak because they’re on land stolen from Native-Americans. One young man’s mumbling lecture to his family at the dinner table about all of them being white oppressors is met after a pause with Dad’s apt, “Are you fucking kidding me?” A Kyle Rittenhouse analogue saves the day toward the end, though we’re left unsure that he should.
Precisely because postmodernist, meandering, chaotic art sometimes provides the necessary cover under which to admit the left is nuts, humorless Marxists and party-line Democrats have had a grudge against postmodernism for decades now. Like stand-up comedians, postmodernists can’t be trusted to get with the program.
Jewish filmmakers who are themselves Conservative or Orthodox, or raised around those who were, might also feel moored to something deeper than the rigid yet trendy political orthodoxies of their fully secular peers. It’s easier to point out the absurdity of the establishment if you’re loyal to something beyond it than if you’re merely, say, a producer for Stephen Colbert helping to organize his next vaccine-praising singalong.
Traditional-yet-ironic Jewishness may also help explain how Aster’s trippy psychodrama Beau Is Afraid ended up bogging down in the protracted revelation that Beau’s real problem is excessive mothering, and for that matter, despite superficial environmentalist tropes, may help explain how Darren Aronofsky ended up making the cannibal cult film Mother!—not to mention Aronofsky’s Gnostic reimagining of the Noah story or, back at the start of his career, the Kabbalah-meets-stock-market conspiracy film Pi.
The traditionalist streak in postmodernism allows for politically discordant notes such as that struck in the best of Aster’s four films, Midsommar, in which the spookiness of an insular, traditionalistic yet neopagan Swedish cult, combined with the naivete and amorality of U.S. students of sociology and anthropology, leads inexorably to Manson-family-like fatal consequences. It’s textbook “folk horror,” like so many stories about the out-of-towners gradually learning that the folkways of the small town they’ve wandered into are not so sweet and are likely to end with a large, burning Wicker Man or, in the case of Eli Roth’s brutal Green Inferno, with young environmentalists being turned into a meal for the savage locals.
The downside of some pretentious postmodernist films, more so than humble little folk horror fables, is that they meander—and may do so for about three hours. Eddington feels a bit long at two and a half hours. By the time we get to the end, we may not even remember whether the outbursts of gun violence on Eddington’s streets were the work of Antifa or the local industrial complex’s expansion planners. I noticed at least one online summary of the film undergoing edits due to uncertainty on that point, but the ambiguity was intentional, so perhaps the shifting Wiki edits are apt: BLM-associated gunmen flying private jets into Eddington to sew chaos are a fitting symbol of our times whether they were hired by rich left-liberals, corrupt industrialists, or government security-state schemers. They all deserve to be mocked in surreal films.
The Pynchon-based Inherent Vice, which also starred Joaquin Phoenix and was directed by the often self-indulgent Paul Thomas Anderson, clocked in at two and a half hours. David Robert Mitchell’s Los Angeles paranoia odyssey Under the Silver Lake—a few months prior to the plague lockdowns but well-suited to the trippy, streaming-service-bingeing, slow-burn year that was to follow—was only two hours and 20 minutes but must’ve felt longer to some people, since half the small crowd where I saw it walked out early looking exhausted, and I later learned my libertarian comedian friend Lou Perez did as well (but I liked it).
Love them or hate them, there was a time, namely the late-20th century, when meandering surrealist works like these would be recognized for the acts of intellectual exploration and subversion that they are. By 2020, the occupant of the White House notwithstanding, the left-liberal orthodoxy had become so firmly ensconced that postmodern art could usually be assumed to be just a harmless decoration on a Democratic Party-dominated edifice. Be it schizophrenia or punk, most moods evoked by late-20th-century and early-21st-century art could be assumed to reaffirm the big-government, morally-relativist, neurosis-celebrating assumptions of the left-liberals.
Yet precisely because the establishment came to seem so unshakeable, it’s fragile and frightened. It doesn’t take a would-be dictator like Trump to rattle it. We live in an era so left-paranoid that some are likening an ad with Sydney Sweeney in it to Nazi eugenics propaganda merely because the word “jeans” sounds like the word “genes,” her leftist critics apparently either denying the existence of genetics altogether or inadvertently handing fascists a monopoly on basic science.
Postmodernism, like folk horror and the Trump-era right, is often the return of the repressed. The left-liberals feign serene rationality while living in constant fear that it would take nothing more than another global case of the sniffles—or the fictional teenage girls’ soccer team in the TV series Yellowjackets getting stuck in the Canadian woods for a year—to make it all turn into a violent nightmare. Better to keep asking skeptical questions even if it sometimes leads to dark places than to smile and dance mindlessly to Colbert’s tune.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey.