Joining a clutch of films speaking to a deep sense of cultural foreboding, Ari Aster’s latest film has an indifference to plot that mirrors a crisis of narrative at a societal level
In the 1970s they called them paranoid thrillers, and they were big business. New Hollywood films like All the President’s Men, Chinatown, Serpico and Klute caught the mood of a nation mired in political scandal and a deeply unpopular war, scoring box-office success along the way.
Now we don’t call them anything at all, and they’re met with a shrug by audiences. Ari Aster’s Eddington opens in UK cinemas today after tanking commercially at home in the US, joining a clutch of commercially unsuccessful films speaking to a deep sense of cultural foreboding like Under Silver Lake (2018), Inherent Vice (2014) and Aster’s own Beau Is Afraid (2022).
Their failure is less a question of artistic quality – though you could certainly make a case for that – than it is one of form and ambition. 50 years ago, films like The Parallax View and Serpico pitted idealistic protagonists against a corrupt system in which the game was rigged against them. Many ended in downbeat fashion – “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown” – but we could at least admire the tenacity and moral courage of these characters. Moreover, they played into a reassuringly adult sense that this was how the world really worked, and if the system could not be beaten, it could at least be understood.
Above all, these were slickly produced pictures that ran along broadly established genre lines. Not so now. The nu-paranoid thriller has an indifference to plot that mirrors a crisis of narrative at a societal level, where the tonal whiplash induced by excessive social media use finds its analogue in haphazard moments of comedy, horror and whatever else it fancies. Similarly, these films’ protagonists are either vain, stupid, stoned or indifferent, unable or unwilling to make sense of the madness unfolding around them.
Take Eddington’s Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), for example. A small-town sheriff in New Mexico, his decision to run for mayor in the early days of the pandemic is inspired by a long-running beef with the current incumbent (Pedro Pascal) and a fleeting sense of self-importance after refusing to wear a mask in the local supermarket. But Joe is in way over his head. A promise to bring community back to this beleaguered town soon spirals into chaos as a Black Lives Matter rally brings the culture wars to its streets, and communication gives way to indiscriminate gunfire. There is plenty to despise about Joe, yet his profound sense of bewilderment at the world is also our own.
Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (2006), a work of overweening madness that killed the once-promising indie director’s career but presaged our own age of surveillance, is a direct antecedent to this new mood of encroaching disaster. Paul Thomas Anderson took on a master of postmodern conspiracy with Inherent Vice (2014), a rambling adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel about a hippy private detective caught in the comedown from the American summer of love. Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast (2024) and Albert Serra’s Pacifiction (2022), both non-American entries into the genre, borrow liberally from David Lynch in conveying an atmosphere of veiled threat without ever quite revealing its source. And Sean Price Williams, perhaps figuring if you can’t beat them, join them, preferred to let the madness wash over him with The Sweet East (2023), finding strange beauty in a young girl’s odyssey through an American nightmare.
If today’s brand of conspiracy thriller swaps narrative coherence for a jarring mash of moods and textures, we should hardly be surprised. For all the ‘grown-up’ cynicism of the early paranoid thrillers, we might remember that Nixon resigned from the presidency following the Watergate scandal in 1974; now, a convicted felon and legally defined sexual predator can breeze back into office claiming he’s the victim of a conspiracy. What are we to make of that? Aster’s film ends on the hum of a newly installed data centre in the desert, the tragedy and farce of the preceding two and a half hours crunched up into data, the real conspirators unmasked. Forget it, Jake, it’s Eddington.
Eddington is out in UK cinemas now.
