Somehow They Filmed a Movie From Inside My Internet-Addled Brain

From the trailer of Eddington

Minimal spoilers

It’s been a long time since I stumbled out of a movie theater in a kind of vaguely euphoric stupor. But that’s what happened when I saw Eddington this week. I’d barely known that this movie even existed, and probably would not have made any particular effort to see it on my own volition. However, a clamor of text messages poured in, commanding me to go see it immediately, which is not something that ordinarily happens with new releases of commercial entertainment. So I went, basically with a blank slate, only the most dimly aware of its premise.

Sure enough, this was for sure one of the craziest (in a good way) moviegoing experiences I’ve ever had. Within about 30 minutes, I keep thinking, “OK, they finally figured out how to film a movie from inside my internet-addled brain.” The swirling mania of our over-saturated, over-stimulated online lives — and the increasingly blinkered manifestations IRL — was perfectly captured, in a way one might have never assumed could be possible. Somehow, director Ari Aster (who I was not familiar with at all before this) managed to accurately represent just how much godforsaken time the average schlub now spends absent-mindedly scrolling their phones — and make it both bizarrely riveting, and hilarious. I was howling throughout, at moments which may have been mildly disturbing to some fellow theater-goers. (I often do this watching movies. Like if someone gets shot in the head out of the blue or something, my tendency is to laugh. Morbid humor, I guess?)

Characters vegetate endlessly on their devices, post delusional comments on comment threads, receive push-notifications, and earnestly encounter insane memes — many of which had me roaring, in large part because the whole phenomenological landscape was so eerily realistic. Hillary is a demon reptile, some post on an older woman’s Facebook feed blares; eventually the woman ends up rambling about 9/11 controlled demolitions. Ungrammatical wall-of-text ravings about Bill Gates emblazoned on MAGA-style pickup trucks. People arguing with one another over random nuggets of incorrect information they unwittingly absorbed from an algorithmic stew they never consciously immersed themselves in, but now can’t escape.

I don’t really buy, as Serious Reviewers have apparently argued, that there’s any singular political “message” to be discerned here. Such reviewers seem to overwhelmingly hate the movie, probably because they perceive it as sympathetic to the conspiratorial Right. The main character, played by Joaquin Phoenix, certainly is a guy that could be nebulously right-coded, insofar as he’s a smalltown Sheriff who impulsively decides to run for Mayor because he doesn’t like COVID mask mandates. But the artistic portrayal of this thoroughly recognizable archetype is spot-on, and I don’t see why a spot-on portrayal of a character has to be construed as any normative endorsement of that character. You’d think this would be understood as “Fiction 101,” but the reviewers brigading Rotten Tomatoes seem to increasingly struggle with making such distinctions. And so they are “negatively reviewing” what they regard to be objectionable political and cultural trends, ancillary to the movie, rather than the movie itself. Something very similar happened with Joker in 2019, when reviewers preemptively excoriated it en masse because they were under the impression that it was supposed to be a sympathetic depiction of dangerous right-wing incels or whatever. But that movie was brilliant, I thought, and so is Eddington. Joaquin Phoenix can’t catch a break! That guy is always great in everything. (Well, he’s a famous and wealthy celebrity, so I guess he caught a break.)

I took the movie to simply be reflecting how various flavors of internet-fueled delirium now get reified into the real world, often with scattered political valences, by using the backdrop of 2020/COVID/George Floyd mania — which I would’ve found it hard to believe could ever be faithfully represented on film, but now has. There’s one scene where Social Justice BLM protesters have taken to the streets in this rural New Mexico township, and an 18-year-old white girl who’s been radicalized on social media (and whose Instagram username hilariously contains “Underscore Bernie or Bust”) starts viscerally screaming through her COVID mask at the lone black sheriff's officer in the area, demanding that he abandon his post and join the protesters — her voice trembling, like she’s about to burst into tears. I literally witnessed exact replicas of this scene, in real life, during the 2020 protests, which longtime followers may recall I spent two months on the road covering throughout the United States.

On multiple occasions I would stand there and watch as emotionally volatile white girls launched accusatory outbursts at older black cops, explaining that they were betraying their race by not abandoning their posts on the spot, while the cops stood stoically by, sometimes smirking, usually having no reaction at all. If memory serves, the black cop in the photo above was the local police chief, so the claim was that if he did not dissolve his department and surrender his career as the white girls demanded, he was enabling the racist system that murdered George Floyd. 2020 was wild. Even the fact that the movie has BLM protest/riots happening in sparsely populated New Mexico is accurate, because such events did happen in places where you’d have least expected it geographically, including across Rural/Exurban America.

It’s by pleasant synchronicity in the universe that this movie happened to come out during peak Epstein fever, because dark insinuations of a pedophilic sex-trafficking network are also featured. Maybe in five years, someone can make a movie about Summer 2025 and its improbable consumption by a fantastical resurgence of politically-charged Epstein mythology. (I’ll freely admit that I’m now also obsessed with the Epstein matter, but for slightly different reasons than most.) Harebrained memes and poorly organized websites warn Eddington residents of “pedos” on the prowl. When the Sheriff makes some light attempts to verify what sound like they could be rather outlandish allegations, it doesn’t go very well for him. But then he ends up conjuring his own allegations of sexually predatory behavior (for political reasons, of course) and the whole narrative spirals exponentially out of control, sort of like what we can observe today online with Epstein, or the 2020 meltdowns, Trump/Russia collusion theories, etc.

Maybe “instinctive omni-directional conspiracism” has always been the default epistemology of most humans on the earth, but it certainly takes on a uniquely rabid snowballing effect in our internet-addled age. Graciously and unexpectedly, this dynamic has now been memorialized with uncanny precision on the Big Screen. As such, I hereby give Eddington my Complete and Total Endorsement. See, sometimes I can like things!

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I hosted another episode this week of “System Update” for Glenn Greenwald. Producer and occasional camerawoman Meagan O’Rourke joined me to discuss Eddington. I also continued my freely admitted Epstein obsessions, with Ben Smith, the editor of Semafor.

As you can see, this article is not paywalled, but I’m going to be increasingly paywalling more stuff than I had in the past, so please consider upgrading to “paid” if you’re so inclined. All proceeds will go to taking down secret pedophile rings.

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