In Ari Aster’s fourth feature length film Eddington, the plot takes an unexpected turn a little over halfway through when Joaquin Phoenix’s character, a burdened mumblecore “Gen X adoptive son of Sheriff Joe Arpaio”  type, finally breaks beneath the weight of his failing marriage, recurrent humiliation rituals broadcast across the Interweb, his boiling rivalry with incumbent Mayor Ted Garcia, and the creeping undeniable sense of a lack of control in the face of the claustrophobia-inducing pandemic/bioweapon and the accompanying mask mandates passed down from on high that the asthmatic Sheriff bucks against, playing on that constant MAGA refrain of yore. Minor spoilers, but whereas the first hour or so unfolds as a Nashville esque ensemble comedy cum Coen Brothers Covid Western with masking and social distancing standoffs in supermarkets to boot, once Sheriff Joe Cross reaches an apex of fasciculations following an open-handed slap from Pedro Pascal’s Mayor character at a fundraiser and then decides to exact brutal vengeance for the public debasement, the narrative departs from what had been a relatively grounded story studiously saturated with the period particulars of that equally hermetic and explosive summer of 2020 and it veers off into the explicitly noided. More specifically, it takes flight.

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This is the moment in the plot that most mainstream critics struggle to stomach or else mistake for crypto-MAGA chicanery, when in actuality, I think it’s probably the key to deciphering the rest of the knotted narrative. Once Phoenix’s character pursues his course of personal frontier injustice, we cut to an interlude in which a business jet—you know, some luxurious sky vessel like the Lolita Express or Love Air—wafts through the late afternoon above the New Mexican desert, a blue globe partitioned with latitudinal and longitudinal lines akin to the globo emoji is painted on its tail fin. You’ve probably glimpsed said emoji in so many liberal and NAFO posters’ bios. The globe is gripped by a hand, almost as if it’s being palmed like a basketball, and Aster is clearly toying with that particular strain of RW conspiracy theory that holds up Soros as the big globalism bad, the ringleader of a Trotskyite Liberal Octopus, as further underlined by one or two allusions made to George Soros in the film’s dialogue.

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Inside the sumptuous cabin, 3-4 men in plainclothes lounge in the passenger seats, legs splayed into the aisle. We never see their faces clearly, but in the few snatched seconds of this sequence, I got the distinctive feeling that they were older men purposefully disguised in the urban wear of Gen Z and young millennials (judging from their veiny hands, cigarette smoking, build, so on). They are literally masked with balaclavas, IIRC, and are loading assault rifles or else watching BLM protest news coverage on a flat screen affixed to the cabin partition as we, the camera, dolly past over the course of the brief tracking shot. Next to their Kevlar vests draped across the seats are hoodies and jackets stitched w/ black power fists, FCK NZS, and the three arrows of the Iron Front / German Socialist Party which denotes opposition to Nazism. These are performative accoutrements, a slapdash disguise. As we soon discover, these masked men jetting in are doubtlessly private military contractors and Black Rifle Boogaloo types masquerading as BLM protesters so as to sow chaos and wreak havoc over the course of Eddington’s own miniature false flag shootout and with a particular, nefarious objective in mind…

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There have been more than a few lib, deboonker-brained analyses of this scene that chalk up the arrival of the “Antifa” PMCs as some kind of manifestation of the QAnon conspiracy fever dream that Joe Cross and his family have been increasingly buying & feeding into, as if the online doomscroll discourse taken corporeal form in some collective hallucination, or else that it is sheer allegorical artifice… I’ll attempt to explain why I think these readings are insufficient and fall short. There is an internal structural coherence to the narrative that indicates that what occurs in the climactic second act prior to the coda is in fact the arrival of nationwide political, material, and economic realities at the micro Eddington level. The masked men are neither figment nor red herring.

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Furthermore, in the real world, the federal authorities’ use of informants to inorganically push Black Lives Matter protests towards violent catharsis in 2020 has actually been well-documented, the recurrent running of an FBI dirty trick playbook that has dictated counterinsurgent strategy dating back to the Civil Rights and anti-war campus protest movements of the ‘60s and even before. The villainous role of these faux-Antifa in the plot made me think of the Denver field office’s recruitment of Mickey Windecker, a violent felon with a sexual assault conviction who they sheepdipped so as to infiltrate the local BLM movement. The Bureau paid Mickey tens of thousands of dollars to try and sheepdog unsuspecting protesters into engaging in the kind of violent insurrection they were woefully unprepared for so that law enforcement could then bring the full brunt of the law down upon them. According to the podcast Alphabet Boys and its creator Trevor Aaronson and quoting Denver racial justice activist Zebbodios Hall, Windecker would drive a silver hearse packed with AR-15s around to protests and brag openly about how he had served in the French Foreign Legion and fought against ISIS with the Kurdish Peshmerga in Syria, attempting to entice his targets into adventurist violence with his war stories.

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In Seattle, the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP / CHAZ) came to an ignominious end with the murder of 16 year old Antonio Mays Jr. and the critical wounding of 14 year old Robert West, who were gunned down while driving a Jeep in the encampment. A farcical sequence of events and the likely studious neglect on the part of Emergency Personnel condemned the teenagers to their fate and the imbroglio certainly played into the city & mayor’s hands, as the occupation was painted as a den of violent criminality in one fell swoop and the pretext for its dispersal after 3 weeks was solidified. The internal CHOP security were initially blamed for the shootings, but questions remain, as 5 years on, the murder case remains unsolved and open, despite the fact that a protester allegedly passed a picture and name of the shooter to a city employee at one point. There are also allegations / insinuations that evidence was intentionally lost or compromised during the round up of protesters, with one anecdote of a shell casing being discovered in a protester’s cargo pocket in a paddy wagon which was placed in the Policeman driver’s care, who coincidentally misplaced what could have been crucial evidence. And wouldn’t you know it, the SPD and the FBI Field Office had somewhere between 1-3+ informants infiltrating the Zone between them, not to mention a number of agents surveilling the premises. The one CI definitively confirmed by the documentary record recovered through FOIAs was sent walking through the encampment with a wire and camera at one point and even remarked that they could join the CHOP security, which carries quite the conspiratorial Eddington-like implications. Point being that the denouement in Aster’s film isn’t just fantastical flight of fancy—it’s actually holding a mirror up to confirmed law enforcement practices and the plenitude of mini-conspiracies in this country’s recent history in which federal informants have hacked terroristic violence and used it against the protest movements or urban guerilla groups they were infiltrating.

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From my POV, Eddington is profoundly of this moment just as much as it is an assiduous time capsule of the helter skelter of early pandemic and the civic life deteriorating effects of interior atomization through social media. I think it says as much about our current societal and political circumstances as it manages to pathologize the Q brainrot and wokespeak of that hot pandemic summer. In short, I feel that it is one of the first major AmerIsraeli Years of Lead films, and thus my decision to discuss it, as its themes slot seamlessly into our ongoing series on Thiel, Palantir, Yarvin, Deadly Exchange, and the technocratic deployment of domestic strategy of tension. You can think of this as a single ep intermission from our Curtis Yarvin deep dive.

I’m unsure how much of this made it on screen, but in the OG script, when Joe dons his Sheriff’s regalia to respond to the first BLM “riots” in Eddington, he puts on a vest with an assortment of pins affixed to its lapel showing the US Flag, the “Thin Blue Line” symbol, a 9/11 commemorative insignia, Blue Knights Law Enforcement Motorcycle Club badge, and, most importantly, an Israeli Civil Guard pin.

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I would not be shocked if Len Blavatnik, the Zionist industrialist & philanthropist who sadly executive produced Eddington by way of his Access Entertainment, shot down the inclusion of those touches if they didn’t make it in. For those unaware, Blavatnik is a friend of Harvey Weinstein’s who bought Warner Music from Edgar Bronfman Jr. in 2011 and who was an early investor in Diddy-buddy Brett Ratner and Steve Mnuchin’s RatPac Entertainment—Ratner has been sexiled to Israel in recent years due to his MeTooing. In 2023, Blavatnik paused his donations to Harvard after “antisemitism hearings” in solidarity with Epstein associate billionaires like Bill Ackman, Kraft, etc. The Soviet Ukraine born Jew Blavatnik is also the second wealthiest citizen of Britain and he faced protests at Tate Modern recently over his catering to Bibi’s whims by canceling critical shows at Israel’s Channel 13, of which he is majority owner. Anyways, while there’s no skirting around that unfortunate financial link, Aster at least gets points for trying to leave a little clue re the closeness of American law enforcement and the Zio•nist apartheid complex.

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Bigger spoiler warnings, though, and honestly, listener, let me just go ahead and make a disclaimer: seeing as this is a conspiracy companion to Eddington and an effort to decode some of the film’s subtext contrary to a review, I won’t be bothering myself much with trying to tip toe around spoilers from here on out because I want my analysis to be liberated from the constraints of whether or not you’ve seen it. So if you HAVE NOT yet, perhaps proceed with caution or forestall completing this reading experience until you have been able to visit the cineplex or else plunk you tush down in your couch if it has in fact already reached streaming.

But to bring the Years of Lead contention to bear, we can reverse engineer the logic of this analysis by examining the chain reaction flowing from the climactic shootout where Sheriff Joe Cross ends up pursued by the false Antifa goons after he survives a live-streamed IED bombing that they have concocted and which is blamed on “Antifa terrorists” in domestic GLADIO fashion.

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If you haven’t seen the film, in order to track this, you have to understand the economic and industrial forces contained in and alluded to in tableaus that bookend the film, both visual signifiers of the unseen background machinery of digital and ideological control. The film begins by honing in on the untouched dirt of the Solidgoldmagikarp Proposed Hyperscale Data Center development plot of land and it ends with the Data Center’s ribbon cutting. Everything that has occurred throughout the narrative’s midsection has either failed to throw the development scheme off course or else actively altered events so as to ensure its brick and mortar erection, the latter being the false flag principally.

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In the opening sequence, we see a sunbaked, unkempt, unhoused schizophrenic shuffling through the desert. If I remember correctly, he is holding a dead bird of some kind and he is mumbling a chorus about “wicked boxes” (presumably cell phones), gnashing at his invisible but accurately perceived tormentors. I interpreted this character as a kind of Homeric oracle in the plot, a harbinger of what’s to come who is tapped into a deeper layer of reality or else saddled with visions of unseen forces.

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While this film of Aster’s mines a more realist vibe that’s a far cry from the entwinement of the spiritual and material realms in David Lynch’s oeuvre, where it often feels like the setting and environment are inhabited by spirits, Aster is certainly a student of Lynch’s and was deeply affected by his passing as mentioned in an A24 podcast conversation with Bill Hader, and there are shades of Lynch to be found in his preoccupation with the occult and esotericism in his first two features in particular… But although Eddington adopts almost more of a docufiction approach to its handling of 2020, the first character we see onscreen feels a little reminiscent of Mike aka the One Armed Man, the spirit Bob’s former Black Lodge consort. In Twin Peaks, Mike’s human host Phillip Michael Gerard gave up their life of murderous ritual crime with Bob after a religious epiphany and tried to fit into society as a shoe salesmen, taking regular doses of haloperidol aka haldol, a schizophrenia drug, so as to suppress Mike’s influence. But in Eddington, contrary to Mike being buffeted by the spirits of the Black Lodge, we have Lodge who is pestered by Ahrimanic visions of the inception of the new dystopian AI age.

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Besides the homeless man, the other mediumistic character in Eddington is Sheriff Joe Cross’s deeply traumatized wife, an artist who stitches together these absurdist effigy dolls that seem intimately connected to the subconscious residue of her childhood abuse, likely perpetrated by her deceased Sheriff father Richmond Bodkin who was Phoenix’s antihero’s predecessor and mentor, and she too is prescribed haldol like Mike the One Armed Man. In fact, the supermarket masking showdown between Sheriff Cross and Mayor Garcia is triggered by Joe’s trip to the pharmacy to pick up her haldol refill. Funnily enough, I caught one throwaway visual gag when Cross stumbles into their stucco home following the arrival of the Antifa goons that almost seems to insinuate that she possesses some sort of farsightedness: in the darkened hallway, you can see the silhouette of one of her pieces on a bureau or shelf that foreshadows the wound that renders Joe Cross into his ultimate handicapped state… But that’s an aside.

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Returning to the transient channeler that we see in the beginning, it’s soon established that he is self-medicating with alcohol to try and numb his visions. But before that, while he’s still shuffling thru the badlands in the prologue, we watch as he mutters a schizo chorus, denouncing the technological means of control, the “wicked boxes” that are erected around our thoughts, our movements, and our lives, beamed into the devices that accompany us everywhere from satellites and cell towers. Allow me to quote a few lines from Eddington’s proto-script to you as textual evidence supporting my take of what’s going on in this spittle-flecked dialogue:

LODGE

Ever’body and their little box. And I

know who set ‘em there. They think it's

theirs and they did it, like ever’thin

here is from them and theirs to keep.

This is the sign--

He CLAPS suddenly/fiercely, as if to seize our attention.

LODGE (CONT’D)

(quickly)

This is the sign and the damnation and

in three years I own every little box!

You don't believe me? Come work for me

and see! I WILL MAKE YOU FIFTY MILLION

DOLLARS AND I WILL OWN EVERY BOX!

EXT. STREET - NIGHT

An empty street. A STRETCH LIMO sits idle, engine humming. The back door opens and MARK ZUCKERBERG steps out, eyes glowing subtly in the dark. He holds a map and looks about, scrutinizing the potential spoils. This is the only tableau in the sequence that will NOT feature Lodge; it’s presumably from his POV.

LODGE

Just last week I saw one a the King

Demons, he was HERE, lookin at them

boxes, thinkin thinkin. He had his map

and his people and he was tellin ‘em

the boxes he wanted. I'M the one that

knows, the one that saw, with the

vision entrusted by GOD to see, and in

two years it is HIM that will buy them

from ME! Think about it!

Note the inclusion of Mark Zuckerberg in this earlier version—it seems that Aster initially planned for the Solidgoldmagikarp conspiracy to implicate the Cesar-haired, amphibious member of the PayPal Mafia’s 2nd generation, who he even characterizes as a “demon” by way of Lodge. I wonder whether legal at A24 had to talk Ari down from including Zuck’s likeness in the film.

But back to the homeless dude for a moment. To underline my Twin Peaks parallel: the transient is named “Lodge”, which seems to support my comparison and also implies that he is the connective tissue between Aster’s earlier occult-inflected work and this much more grounded Covid study. Earlier screenplay drafts included, it may not be the only Freemasonry allusion, either. It’s also a Pynchonian play on words, as the man is without LODGE-ing and seems like he’s without a home in the world, at odds with the technological age. In fact, perhaps he’s the one Luddite in the film—I don’t believe we ever see him with a phone.

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In this opening sequence, the homeless “Lodge” ambles along a highway, coughing up a Covid storm and clutching his dead pigeon. He passes a sign promoting the planned “Solidgoldmagikarp” AI hyperscale data center project that Mayor Ted Garcia is trying to railroad through Eddington city council on behalf of his liberal establishment campaign manager Warren Sandoval (a potshot at Elizabeth Warren perhaps? lol) as well as Warren’s technocratic capitalist and gov’t backers—Warren handles Ted Garcia on the behalf of the Governor. Speaking of which, the surname Sandoval is derived from the Latin by way of Spain and it actually refers to both Saltus for “a wooded area or grove” and “novalis” meaning newly cleared land, and I can’t help but think about this in the context of Warren Sandoval being the primary political operator pulling the strings for Solidgoldmagikarp on the ground in the town, seeing as they’re going to clear away the cacti and yucca to build that facility by the mesa. The offscreen governor who exerts her influence from afar with congratulatory trinkets is actually Michelle Lujan Grisham, suturing the narrative to the real world, which is as funny as it is a pragmatic choice, as she was governor during the pandemic and because the governor’s office seems to have had a hand in enabling Aster and his production team to film in Truth and Consequences, New Mexico. Frankly that’s just about the perfect vestige of the Wild West town name they could have picked for a filming locale. 

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Anyways, one of the first things we see in the film is this signage demarcating or else announcing the site of the Solidgoldmagikarp data center (I’m not super confident about Eddington’s geography). Lodge goes climbing up and then scurrying down a mesa on which there is a cell tower, if I remember correctly, and this final frame of the first sequence symbolizes the pestilential plague's descent upon the town, as the contagion is lodged in Lodge and he is its carrier. The inclusion of the cell tower made me think of David Dees and his vibe. Not because what was happening visually was evocative of his work (see illustrations archive)… More so, it just had me wondering… During his pandemic era writing process of Eddington that involved lurking on Twitter with ideologically-calibrated sock puppet accounts to try and explore the assorted siloed corners of the algorithm, had Aster come across the chemtrails, cell signal, anti-vaxxer, and 9/11 schizo conspiracy designer?

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I read an earlier version of the screenplay as part of my preparation for this, and its beginning is even more explicitly David Dees coded. In this nascent version of the plot, the first scene has Sheriff Joe Cross responding to a self-immolation at the cell tower above Eddington where he finds an incinerated paraplegic. Cross and his indigenous counterpart and a witness briefly discuss how the wheelchaired self-immolator named Mitchell is a conspiracy YouTuber who is deeply disturbed by what I would assume are the perceived digital dementia, tissue heating, or DNA damaging dangers of 5G electromagnetic fields, as they mention a video he’d released. From what I can tell, it’s implied that he kinda Unabombed himself as a warning against the dangers of unbridled tech advancement. So this storyline, you could say, is deeply David Dees coded. But for whatever reason, they decided to drop this prelude, collapsing it down into the drive-by exchange between Sheriff Cross and BIA Officer Butterfly Jimenez (great name) in which they grapple over masking in the beginning of the film.

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Smacking of the edit that eventually made it to cinemas, the incineration investigation in that script draft features yet another iteration of the recurrent motif in Eddington where the Sheriff of Sevilla County officers square off with the Santa Lupe Pueblo tribal police on the border between the Eddington City Limits and the Reservation, butting heads over jurisdiction (a dynamic repeated during the forensics walk through of the Garcia crime scene) and in this instance, actually coming to blows, as Cross and an earlier version of Officer Butterfly Jimenez wrestle to decide who can investigate the charred remains, as well as the Santa Lupe Pueblo school uniform found in the abandoned accessible van. This seems to hint at some sort of Missing Indigenous Children subtext, which would be in keeping with Eddington’s abiding interest in the modern neocultures that surround sex trafficking, CSA and Satanic Ritual Abuse (more on that a little later in relation to Emma Stone and Austin Butler’s characters), MKULTRA and Project Monarch, and the like.

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Seeing as Ari Aster is one of our most literary and referential filmmakers working today, and I would argue probably the young director most endowed with a Pynchonian quality to his allusive visual and textual bricolage and cryptolect like dialogue, I can’t help but wonder about the possibility a couple references are woven into the name of the fictional Pueblo community. The name of the neighboring indigenous village is Santa Lupe Pueblo. Basically meaning Saint Lupe village. Now Lupe could be a nod to Our Lady of Guadalupe. And perhaps Aster just chose the name to denote the residue of Spanish colonization in the Southwest. It also had me wondering whether it might be alluding to LUPE aka La Union del Pueblo Entero, a community union in the Rio Grande founded by United Farmworker organizer and Hispanic civil rights leader Cesar Chavez and his frequent collaborator Dolores Huerta, who is a native New Mexican. This reading becomes even more compelling when you think about how Mexican Americans basically canonized Chavez posthumously as a kind of “folk saint”, so perhaps he IS the Saint of Lupe. 

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Today, LUPE serves the colonias of Hidalgo County in Texas and also provides rapid response to immigrants and asylum seekers and fights deportations along the US / Mexico border. Considering Eddington’s thematic preoccupation with borders, it might just gel. Similarly, there’s a direct through line from the kinds of strike and direct action tactics that Chavez employed during his lifetime as an organizer to those seen on the streets during the BLM protests.

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Whether Aster intended this or whether the constraints of an unwieldy story packed to the brim caused it or whether it was an oversight, the great irony of the invocations of the Navajo Long Walk and the land recognitions and the performative white guilt of characters like Sarah and Brian during the BLM protest sequences in Eddington is that they don’t appear to be working with their Pueblo neighbors and are oblivious to the impending data center danger of this technological form of colonization and resource extraction aiming to move into their backyard, threatening the biome, which could be an opportunity for the Eddington and Pueblo communities nestled along this borderland to overcome their alienation and come together. A cautionary tale.

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I also couldn’t help but notice that Santa Lupe Pueblo’s acronym is SLP, which made me think of speech-language pathologists and the ever-present theme of miscommunication and siloing in the movie, as well as the specter of LLMs or Large Language Models, the software that’s precipitating the building of these data centers, the machinery of the new Age of AI-quarius and algorithmic authoritarianism that’s looming in the background, and how Solidgoldmagikarp is actually a reference to an AI token that causes language models to behave anomalously or erratically. One might argue that the Solidgoldmagikarp phenomenon is even a kind of digital speech pathology. And judging from the implied Pueblo community’s opposition to the Solidgoldmagikarp dev project and the fact that their primary representative over the course of the screened theatrics is Butterfly Jimenez, the most competent and levelheaded character on screen, one might argue that the Pueblo people are the symbolic speech-language pathologists who, at their slight remove from Eddington society, are on hand to witness and correctly pathologize the breakdown in communication, the fracturing of consensus reality as affected by social media and Covid, and the societal decay of the hegemonic American empire moreover.

Let’s turn to Aster’s own words regarding what he views as having narrative primacy in Eddington’s events and which theme he particularly appears to want people to leave theaters ruminating on:

“I would say that the film begins and ends on a hyperscale data center being built. And if you asked me what the film is about, I might just tell you that it’s about a data center being built,” Aster said. “And all of these stories are really just data to be processed by this thing, to be turned into what? What is coming? The film is set during a crisis, and it’s about a bunch of people in crisis, but meanwhile there’s this other crisis incubating in a lab.”

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