In the first episode of Charlie Booker’s dystopian sci-fi anthology Black Mirror, the Prime Minister of the U.K. is put in an impossible situation. I won’t spell it out because it’s gross, and most people reading this probably already know what happens. The PM is forced to do something grotesque on live television, and Parliament rushes a bill saying that it’s illegal to record or distribute images of it.
Lo and behold — a year later? No one wants to watch this video. It’s not the subject of lurid fascination by the public. Everyone wants to act like it never happened.
Once Trump became president in 2017, I immediately felt that — when this is over, if it’s ever over — people are going to want to go back to “normal” and memory-hole the entire fiasco. That was Joe Biden’s historic mission, at which he failed spectacularly. I felt the same way once our collective trauma of COVID got under way. This experience is so jarring and alienating that we will just try not to think of it if we ever get back to non-emergency times.
I think I was mostly right about that. Few people have truly processed the psychic shock of 2020-2022, and we’re all so relieved to be going to coffee shops and bars again and not wearing masks that it’s fine if we excise that window of time from our memories.
But just like the grinning executioner showing up at your birthday party, Ari Aster has to come along and ruin everything. The director’s new film, Eddington, rips off the scab of everything from COVID to BLM to Qanon and digs its nasty little fingers in there. It’s a sprawling, unwieldy film starring, primarily, Joaquin Phoenix as a Tea Party-ish local sheriff and Pedro Pascal as the slick mayor in a tiny town during May 2020. I won’t go into detail about the actual plot, but it is very combustible stuff to be messing with just a few years after U.S. society appeared to be rapidly unraveling. In the film just about everyone’s ox gets gored, from leftist teenagers to cops too stupid to live and conspiracy theorists and malevolent tech companies and so on and on.
What struck me the most, though, is that Eddington is a big crazy mess, but it’s our big crazy mess. Alex Garland’s hit film of 2024, Civil War, tried to depict the U.S. torn asunder by partisan divisions while pretending that there were no actual politics involved. (California and Texas team up to overthrow the federal government, if that gives you any idea how utterly moronic this film was.) Eddington doesn’t flinch. The politics are all there, even though they’re as weird and confusing and contradictory as real American life is. Love it or hate it — and God knows Aster gives people plenty of reasons for both — you have to admire artists who are willing to go to the places we least want to think about.
In any case, here are some reading recs for this week from our editors:
- Kate Shannon Jenkins on the maternal gaze (Pioneer Works)
- The Sea of Memory and Forgetfulness: Inherent Vice and the Figurations of Fossil Capital (The Wasted World)
- The story of the most commonly performed surgery, and what goes wrong with it – terribly wrong – 100,000 times a year in the United States (This American Life)
- Jean Paul Gaultier in film (Minnie Muse)
- George Sanchez on the Siege of Los Angeles (ToM)
- Inside America’s Oldest Party Thriving in the Deep South (VICE)
- Chinese American Bear, SAULT, Aterciopelados, Neutral Milk Hotel and much more in an epic playlist by Naima: Be the Fomo You Want to See in the World
- Gregor Formanke stood guard in Sachsenhausen. Jerzy Zawadzki was nine years old, and a prisoner. When Formanek is indicted at age 99, their lives intersect once more (Die Zeit)
- This nearly 100-year-old ballad tells the story of mass deportations. Is history repeating itself? (LAist)
- Preserving Basque cuisine and culture at Centro Basco (Good Food)
- AI and Semantic Pareidolia: When We See Consciousness Where There Is None (SSRN)
- Sex, Ducks, and the Founding Feud (Radiolab)
- De-aged stars, cloned voices, resuscitated dead icons: AI is changing the art and business of acting (LA Times)
- King Hannah live on KEXP
- Rivers of Galaxies: What is the shape of the Universe? The answer might be found in the most unassuming places here on Earth (Aeon)
- The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick (NYRB)
- Friend-of-the-blog David Austin Walsh on Zohran: Will Democrats Learn from the Establishment’s Loss? (Boston Review)
- In ‘The Hunting Wives,’ All The Women Have Guns and Sex With Each Other (Autostraddle)