Reading, Watching, Listening 7/25/2025

A few words about ways forward

Jul 25, 2025

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I’ve been thinking a lot about Eddington. I wrote about Ari Aster’s new film last week for The New Republic, and when I did, I will admit I maintained a slight ambivalence about the film. I thought it was very good, as you might be able to tell from my quite even-tempered review. I was even tossing in my mind whether it’s a great movie. It felt a little long, though, and unweildy in spots, and these minor flaws kept me from feeling I could fully embrace it. But the movie wasn’t leaving my mind, so I headed out to the Scotiabank theatre to see it again, and ended up bumping into my buddy Alex Acton-Jones, there to see it as well, and a little apprehensive after not much caring for Midsommar or Beau is Afraid. Alex came out loving it. I still felt a stick up my ass, despite showering it with nothing but praise in our post-movie chat on the corner of Richmond and John. Still, it didn’t leave my mind.

In the week since, I read more about the film, and listened to more interviews, and those helped solidify my positive feelings. There was something else happening, though. It’s one thing to watch a film and think it’s good—or great!—and it’s also well and good to be thinking about a movie, its themes, its construction, all that good stuff. Slowly, though, as the days went on, I found myself taking seriously the movie’s depiction of the early days of the pandemic, and the sociopolitical madness that took hold, which we continue to live through. Not merely satire, I realized Aster had put forth a very sincere diagnosis of our present condition: Our civilization is being torn apart by an inability to communicate. This fraying is not some surface-level issue, nor is it as simple as blaming social media (though there is plenty of blame to be shouldered there). Rather, it is down to a mode of engagement we’ve descended to, one in which technological mediation has allowed us to shield ourselves from each other while still being so affected by the world around us. It is a madness born of powerlessness. A powerlessness we eagerly sought for all the conveniences the modern world would supply in return. What power we had, we gave up to the corporate overlords of our day. As my friend Sam Fragoso told me, there can’t be a revolution in the streets so long as Netflix exists.

Now, perhaps this is all very obvious, but the thing that’s stuck for me in Aster’s presentation is the agency it implies we still hold. Perhaps we don’t directly control the levers of power, but we can still choose to engage with each other differently, more seriously, more generously. It’s hard to think that way when fascism is rising and evil seems to be spreading, but there’s value, as Eddington perversely demonstrates by omission, in recognizing the humanity we share. “There’s a way to treat people,” says Joaquin Phoenix’s Joe Cross, though he hardly lives up to that statement throughout his descent into conspiracy and violence. Yet, he’s right. There’s a way to treat people, and the more and more I’ve pondered the film, the more I think that statement is a bright, neon sign pointing the way forward. Or at least, the beginnings of a way forward.

Aster was on Sam’s show, Talk Easy, this week, and it’s a fantastic conversation, in which the director shares his pessimism about the world, but in that way, illuminates the heart we stand to lose if we allow that pessimism to infect our interactions with the people around us. Take a listen, and go see Eddington.