The Empty Provocations of Eddington

In the dusky light of the waning sun, an indigent man called Lodge (Clifton Collins Jr.) wanders barefoot down an empty highway, muttering feverishly as he descends into a small desert town cradled by jagged bluffs. The camera lingers on his matted gray beard, slick with sweat and spittle, before a distant shot captures his lonesome silhouette dwarfed by the steel carapace of a data center perched upon secluded mountains. With that, Ari Aster’s Eddington plunges us into that socially distanced spring some five years past, staging the Covid crisis as a decadent western. Roundly despised and regarded as a nuisance by the locals, the mercurial, drunken Lodge emerges here as a rueful harbinger of the delirium soon to overtake the titular town (and perhaps America more broadly).