Ari Aster

Like many Westerns, Eddington, Ari Aster’s latest feature, unfolds with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. It’s late May 2020 – the height of Covid. The ominous opening shot shows the construction site of an artificial-intelligence data center, which threatens the scarce water resources of the titular New Mexico town. A bird drops dead from the sky; a sick homeless man, coughing and rambling incoherently like a mad prophet, slouches toward the town, the dead bird clutched like an omen in his fist. From the outset, we already know the town is doomed. It’s not a question of if, but how. The Western genre and Greek-tragedy framing shape the exploration of this era’s still-disputed history, transforming the recent past into something mythic.

The monkey is an organ-grinder’s monkey toy. Wind up the key jutting out of its back, and its lips will part to reveal two rows of yellow grimacing teeth. Then its clockwork arms will wheel up and down, banging a little drum as fairground music plays. And then someone nearby dies in an extremely gory freak accident. Maybe their head will be sliced off in a knife-twirling incident at a teppanyaki restaurant and slide gently on to the grill. Maybe they’ll fall through the stairs and into a box of fishhooks and then set their head on fire over a gas hob, and then run outside and impale themselves on a wooden spike. Maybe some huge Rube Goldberg arrangement of faulty wiring and loose roofing tiles will cause their body to explode in a shower of soft crimson globs.