Eddington · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the geometry the film keeps offering and then ruining. A sheriff stands at the edge of his town, the New Mexico horizon doing what horizons do in a Western — drawing a clean line between a man and the thing he has to face. Joaquin Phoenix's Joe Cross has the posture for it: the lawman against the open country, asthmatic, mask dangling, jaw set. Khondji shoots him exactly the way Roger Deakins shot the desert in No Country for Old Men, all sun-bleached width and long sightlines. But the thing Joe has to face isn't out on that horizon. It's in his hand, glowing, refreshing. And that small relocation — from the land to the screen — is the whole film.

The Western runs on what Deleuze called the action-image: a character perceives a situation, and acts to change it. Threat, response, new equilibrium. The lawman's authority is that circuit working — he sees the danger, he draws, the town is saved. Deleuze had a name for what happens when the circuit jams: the crisis of the action-image. The character still perceives, often with terrible clarity, but the bridge from seeing to doing has rotted out. He can no longer react adequately to what is in front of him, because what is in front of him no longer behaves like a situation an act could resolve. This is the precise hinge Eddington sits on, and it inherits it straight from No Country — a lawman outpaced by a violence he cannot comprehend, the genre's confidence about cause and effect quietly withdrawn. Joe keeps reaching for the old gestures. He decides to run for mayor, stages confrontations, plays sheriff. None of it lands on anything solid. The faster he acts, the less he changes.

Why does the town stop behaving like a situation? Because Eddington is built as a dispersive situation — Deleuze's term, drawn partly from Altman, for a world of many characters held together by weak links instead of a single converging line. The debt to Nashville is exact: an ensemble mosaic of one American community, minor figures overlapping, grudges and campaigns and household quarrels that never quite resolve into a plot you could call the plot. Causality is slackened. The grocery store becomes a front in the mask war; a kitchen table becomes a radicalization chamber; the data center going up at the town's margin sits there as a reminder of forces no local act can touch. Everyone is reacting, and the reactions don't add up to a story with a hero at its center.

What fills the vacuum where action used to be is the powers of the false. This is Deleuze's most useful gift to anyone watching this film. Once truth and falsity stop being decidable — once a staged provocation, a real protest, a conspiracy theory and a livestream all circulate in the same feed at the same weight — the false stops being a lie someone tells and becomes the medium everyone lives in. Joe doesn't move from misinformation toward the truth. He composes a reality and acts inside it, and so does everyone he's fighting. Network's old prophecy about rhetoric as contagion is the structural ancestor here, but Aster updates the engine: it's no longer a TV studio, it's the phone. The film stages the smartphone and the feed not as objects characters use but as the connective tissue of the world, the thing that decides what is real.

Which is why the screens have to be read rather than simply seen. Deleuze would call them lectosigns — images that have lost their sensory-motor obviousness and now ask to be deciphered. When the image was an action-image, you knew what to do with it: a gun means draw, a road means drive. A phone screen means nothing until you interpret it, and your interpretation is already partisan. Khondji encodes this as a split in the light itself — the flat desert glare of the physical town against the artificial glow of interiors and devices — so the film keeps two realities visibly layered, the one you can stand in and the one you have to read. And the characters know they're being read, too. They perform. That's consciousness of clichés — Deleuze's note that modern characters move knowingly among ready-made images. The Western archetype hangs over Joe as ironic counterpoint, a costume he and the film both know is a costume, the standoff's mythic geometry preserved precisely so it can fail to mean what it used to.

Underneath the satire, the form Aster is really after is crystal-decomposition — an ordered, closed little world rotting from within. The town small enough that everyone can surveil everyone becomes an airtight crystal, and the film's slow build (Lucian Johnston's patient accumulation, Wild Bunch stillness pulled taut) is the sound of that crystal cracking until it detonates into multi-angle violence.

So what did Eddington do? It turned the apparatus Aster built for Hereditary's dread directly onto the unmetabolized present — May 2020, with the paint still wet. The divisiveness on release is the achievement and the risk fused: a film arguing that the crisis of the action-image is no longer a film-theory fine point but the daily American condition, where everyone perceives furiously and no act resolves anything. Watch it again for the moment the genre's promise of a man who can fix things curdles into a man who can only post. That curdle is the film. Deleuze just hands you the word for it.