<\/p>\n
March 23, 2026<\/p>\n
Hover over red text<\/span> to see commentary.<\/i><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Ari Aster is known for making you feel uncomfortable at the movie theater. While some directors are good at communicating the thrill of action or romance, Aster excels at making audiences anxious. That\u2019s what makes \u201cEddington,\u201d his political satire set during the anxiety-ridden spring of 2020, so great. Lately, it feels like we\u2019re living in a world defined by the political fever pitch and social isolation <\/span>caused<\/a> by the pandemic. <\/span>Aster\u2019s take on the period provides creative and nuanced commentary \u2014 two things <\/span>\u201cOne \u2018Bullshit\u2019 After Another\u201d<\/a> doesn\u2019t succeed at \u2014 to do what art does best: help us understand the world we live in.<\/p>\n <\/span>One of the things \u201cEddington\u201d does that solidifies it as one of the best satires of the past few years is creatively tackling uniquely modern politics, primarily by exploring the relationship between social media, ideology and human irrationality.<\/p>\n Aster describes his motivation behind the film in a <\/span>podcast with Sam Fragoso<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI think people have lost the dimensions of the bigger world outside of themselves, and all they see are the dimensions of the smaller world that they believe in,\u201d Aster said. \u201cWith \u2018Eddington,\u2019 I wanted to make a film that was about what happens when all these people who are living in different realities start to knock against each other \u2014 and a new logic comes out of that.\u201d<\/p>\n This makes for genuinely creative commentary that hasn\u2019t yet been explored in depth through film in such an interdisciplinary way. There\u2019s Joe Cross\u2019 (Joaquin Phoenix) right-wing conspiratorial mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O\u2019Connell), who is overbearingly rigid in both ideology and personality, contrasted with Brian (Cameron Mann) and Sarah’s (Am\u00e9lie Hoeferle) performative and flimsy <\/span>white savior<\/a> social media activism. \u201cEddington\u201d explores (and blurs) the lines between performance and authenticity by blending the digital sphere with reality: Does Joe Cross actually want to run for mayor, or is he compensating for his relationship insecurity via social media validation? Does Sarah actually care about social justice, or is she just looking for social acceptance by posting a black square on Instagram? Much like our <\/span>current political situation<\/a>, it is intentionally difficult to separate the fake digital sphere from reality.<\/p>\n \u201cOne Battle After Another,\u201d though, fails critically in this area of creative commentary. It uses the tired trope of white supremacism emerging from insecurities (see the 1998 \u201cAmerican History X\u201d or even the 1972 \u201cDeliverance\u201d), depicting its weird relationship with the fetishization of minority communities, namely Black women. But, as film critic Brooke Obie puts it, by diminishing Black women to mere <\/span>plot devices<\/a>, director <\/span>Paul Thomas Anderson fails to do anything positive with the subject matter.<\/p>\n <\/span>\u201cAnderson isn\u2019t commenting on the white male fetishization of Black women, he\u2019s directly participating in it,\u201d Obie writes. \u201cHis camera leers at Taylor\u2019s body just as Lockjaw does because the audience only sees her through the lens of the white men who fetishize her.\u201d<\/p>\n And, compared to other media that explore similar themes, it just feels flat. Jordan Peele\u2019s \u201cGet Out,\u201d for example, talks about white supremacy arising from insecurity and how that relates to the co-opting and loss of Black culture. However, it explores the topic with much more nuance, covering what it means to interact with that systemically and how solidarity serves as a very real check to those forces. It also doesn\u2019t rely on diminishing Black characters to make that point. And with race being one of the more overtly political topics in \u201cOne Battle After Another,\u201d <\/span>I just can\u2019t see how people think this film is groundbreaking. <\/span>The political themes are overdone (I am less shocked by white supremacists being in power since 2017 and <\/span>more interested in how they are made) and explored worse than in other media.<\/p>\n <\/span>Another area where \u201cEddington\u201d surpasses \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d is in <\/span>delivering nuance in its characters\u2019 ideologies and motivations. <\/span>Anderson reduces most of his characters to mere caricatures: DiCaprio plays the bum single father, Teyana Taylor plays the radical revolutionary, Sean Penn plays the fetishizing white supremacist. <\/span>This makes them feel rigid, like they have little to no variation in terms of how they think or conceptualize the world around them.<\/span> Contrast that with \u201cEddington,\u201d where you see characters with more dimension: an emasculated sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) who feels increasingly alienated from his surroundings, a liberal mayor (Pedro Pascal) and corporate shill and a victim of childhood trauma, Louise (Emma Stone) who is exploited by those around her. The characters in \u201cEddington\u201d resonate deeply with audiences because they feel like people you could meet in real life, <\/span>making the dire message of \u201cEddington\u201d so much more important.<\/p>\n <\/span>Of course, there are things \u201cEddington\u201d could have done better (Joe Cross\u2019s ending arc), and there are also things which \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d did well <\/span>(Benicio del Toro\u2019s performance). <\/span>Aster\u2019s movie is <\/span>much more thought-provoking and relevant. <\/span>An interviewer <\/span>described<\/a> \u201cEddington\u201d as a \u201cWestern, with phones instead of guns.\u201d In an era where violent social media rhetoric leaks out to affect our political reality, that is symbolism we all need to reckon with.<\/span><\/span>Opinion Columnist Zhane Yamin can be reached at zhane@umich.edu.<\/span> \u2018Eddington\u2019 says what \u2018One Battle After Another\u2019 cannot by Zhane Yamin and Miles Anderson March 23, 2026 Hover over red text to see commentary. Ari Aster is known for making you feel uncomfortable at the movie theater. While some directors are good at communicating the thrill of action or romance, Aster excels at making audiences […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4924,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[390,4548],"class_list":{"0":"post-4968","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-bside","9":"tag-commentary"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4968"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4968\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4969,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4968\/revisions\/4969"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}