Aster is not a hand-holding type of filmmaker. That said, he’s not unfair, either, as his movies all tend to contain clues to unlock the answers to the film’s plot, backstory, subtext, themes, and so on. The sly trick of “Eddington” is that, given its roots in our recent history, it feels at first like a movie that doesn’t require such decoding. We’ve all become so used to seeing the unimaginable and untenable become reality that Aster doesn’t have to push so hard to make his satire apparent. If Aster’s prior movies were about a realistic character falling into an increasingly surreal world, “Eddington” rightfully acknowledges that a surreal world is already here; we’ve already been living in an Asteresque landscape since 2020 (at least).
There is indeed a clue hidden within “Eddington” in plain sight, one which helps explain the subtextual aims of the film. During the movie, both Joe and his rival for mayor, the incumbent candidate Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), disagree on the proposal by a fictional tech company, SolidGoldMagiKarp, to build a huge data center in the middle of Eddington. Joe is worried that the big business will destabilize the town and be bad for its resources and the environment, whereas Ted has positioned himself as a candidate for progress and believes the tech giant will be a boon to Eddington. It seems like SolidGoldMagiKarp is a stand-in for Big Tech and the way that it has capitalized on society’s strife to gain a foothold within just about every industry as some sort of false savior. While this is certainly true, Aster named the company after a real-life term that refers to an error in AI language models. The error “leads to unexpected or erratic outputs,” as one article explains, and these anomalies “cause models to behave unpredictably.”
Thus, the encroachment of SolidGoldMagiKarp in “Eddington” is a metaphor for the entire American model to “behave unpredictably” as it breaks down. Hence the reason why the film concludes on the data center being built, overseen by a now paraplegic and mute Joe, who has become a literal puppet for the system. The movie’s final shot, which the end credits roll over, is of the SolidGoldMagiKarp data center shining in the middle of the otherwise dark town at night, like a metastasized tumor. If “Eddington” and its depiction of a feeble, insane, hateful, manipulative, ignorant, and bigoted American town provokes or infuriates you — good, because you, like me and like all of us, could probably use some more motivation to action.
It should never be “too soon” for us to explore our realities and acknowledge our faults, because if we don’t, then it’ll be too late.