Ari Aster Just Made The Definitive Movie About Covid, BLM, And 2020 Insanity And The Left Is Furious

Give me a home where the buffalo roam

I can’t stop thinking about Eddington.

This is about a neighborhood war, fueled by forces completely outside the neighborhood, but playing on all the animosities of neighbor on neighbor, on people who’ve known each other for decades and now view their arguments as not petty, but existential.

Ari Aster just made the definitive movie about the pandemic.

There isn’t going to be another film that comes anywhere close to capturing the absolutely nuts BLM+Antifa craziness, the online brain viruses, the pompous hypocritical authoritarian depravations of the left, the strained white knuckle libertarian desperation of the right, and the whole damn shebang now looking in retrospect like something where none of us had any control or knowledge.

But here’s the thing: Ari Aster is left-coded. Critics love, and love to debate, his work. So the simple fact that he’s just even-handed in his depiction of insanity is driving the leftist critics absolutely nuts. How dare he. How dare he!

Here’s The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis on her latest podcast (as transcribed by Matthew Schmitz):

Here’s The New Yorker’s Justin Chang, who calls it “lethally self satisfied”:

Anthony Fauci, Hillary Clinton, George Floyd, George Soros, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kyle Rittenhouse, hydroxychloroquine, Bitcoin, Antifa—“Eddington” references all these and more, as if to position Aster as a nonpartisan provocateur. Why, then, given such a range of targets, is it the conviction of the young and woke that stings him into comic rebuke? The tell comes when Brian lectures his family on what it means to dismantle whiteness, setting up his father to deliver the script’s idea of a knockout punch line: “Are you fucking retarded? What the fuck are you talking about? You’re white!” The self-flagellating nature of progressive activism may be ripe for mockery, but Aster goes further than just skewering the pieties of the left; he panders for reactionary laughs.

Well count my laughter in that number, because I was losing it throughout the showing on Saturday night, much to the irritation of some nearby swamp-dwelling seat mates at Alamo Drafthouse. He wasn’t pandering to me, Justin Chang... he was telling the story of 2020, and you just don’t fucking like it.

I’m telling you to see this movie immediately, now, because I need to talk about it with you all and there’s no way to talk about it without spoiling it. And congrats to Marjorie Taylor Greene for having a cameo in an Ari Aster movie, that’s life goal stuff.

Also the use of Katy Perry is *chef’s kiss*.

Joe Cross for Mayor.