Hey just up top be warned that this blog completely spoils both Eddington and Weapons - they’re still kind of new so if you haven’t seen them yet and want to go in blind (and you probably should for both), go watch them and then (importantly) come back. Cheers.
Now feels like the time for strange horror. As societal foundations long taken for granted begin to decay from neglect or shatter under the force of active destruction, surreal horror has begun to infuse day-to-day life. Things like “liminal horror” and “the backrooms” are examples of popular culture finding horror in ordinary spaces. In the omnipresent connectivity of the present the internet seems to have infected everyday life with a sinister undertone; or possibly it merely illuminated a darkness that was always there. The mundane has become surreal and poisoned, rendering the simplest interactions and objects into portals to a no-place. We’ve all been skinamarinked.
Of all the films to provoke some thought about this and evoke these feelings in me, Ari Aster’s Eddington may seem an odd choice. It’s not a horror film, but I like how it engages with the spillover of online into the real world and the way that creates feelings of mania and destabilization in people. The film depicts all the “hits” of 2020 and dunks us back into the deep end, quarantine procedures, outbreaks, protests, counter-protests, false flags by weird conservatives, conspiracy theories, and most of all strange insecure weirdos who let their pride and rock solid belief that they are the reasonable ones drag them (and us!) into ground from which there is no return. I liked it a lot.
Eddington is a film about powerful and destabilizing forces being summoned through the computer into what seems to be a quiet and ordinary small town. The forces of disease and political radicalization begin to drive Joaquin Phoenix’s Sheriff Joe Cross to a Lovecraftian mania, while his mother-In-law’s conspiracy theories (and Joe’s own actions) lead to his wife running away with a cult leader (Listen Up Liberal, My Wife Left Me). At the same time those forces reveal that the quiet and ordinary small town was already rotten in its core, for example when Joe’s attempt to use his wife’s deep hidden trauma as a political weapon backfires and reveals that his very claim to authority (becoming sheriff by marrying the daughter of the previous sheriff) is fundamentally poisoned (his wife was sexually abused by her father as a child). Finally, the ultimate boogeymen of the right wing internet, Antifa Super Soldiers, are summoned as if by sorcery to lay waste to the town, with the heavy implication that they are the ultimate false flag operation - the billionaire version of a white racist spray-painting “BLACKS RULE” on their own driveway. This is cosmic horror; capital as hyperobject, people with money being able to warp reality. These are the soldiers of the elder gods of our society, the too rich.
In the epilogue we see Joe trapped in a hellish purgatory where he is a puppet for the political machine, exactly the same as the previous mayor, and things continue on the course a far away and unassailable will has pre-ordained.
In contrast to Eddington we have Weapons, a film that I felt was working in a similar mode to Eddington for the first two thirds of its runtime, before making an abrupt turn into something I found much less interesting. The film opens with the claim that it is depicting real events that were covered up by the local authorities, then proceeds to show something that feels a bit like an urban legend, or an internet creepypasta - a class of elementary school children all waking up in the middle of the night at exactly the same moment, walking out of their houses and proceeding to Naruto run out into the night, never to be seen again. It’s a great pitch, and its immediately follow by a long stretch dealing with the repercussions of this event - trying to administratively and psychologically cope with something that is not just incredibly tragic, but unsettling and absurd. It feels like a good “SCP” story, the kind of thing that if regurgitated by an AI could drive a gullible person to madness believing it.
The movie peaks for me in a dream sequence where a character sees a giant glowing assault rifle above a house. This is obviously an invocation of school shootings, and while not subtle, it works really well. This is, in its better moments, a movie about a witch abducting 30 children with magic and the effect that has on their parents and community - while that isn’t “real”, real is a country where children are regularly massacred by easily accessible assault weapons and no concrete action can be taken to prevent it from happening for reasons that can be traced to fundamental issues at the heart of the society. That feels like cosmic horror to me! Children killed in mass shootings in America are a kind of blood sacrifice - that’s a potent metaphor!
Ultimately the film is not interested in exploiting that metaphor further, nor in really talking about the internet, conspiracy theories, etc (although they do get in a great joke about cops acting like they died because they touched fentanyl). As mentioned above, the big reveal of the film is that there’s a witch causing all the problems, she does magic in a way that is explained very clearly, helpfully removing any residue of mystery or intrigue that might have been left in the film. I’ll also throw out that she’s a witch who works very clearly within established tropes, without being aesthetically interesting or evocative. I found the whole explanation of the mystery and its resolution to be disappointing. That said, it’s not a total loss, there’s still plenty of great violence and gore effects (particularly at the end when the witch gets torn apart by the kidnapped children), I’m just left wondering what could have been.
The similarity between these two films is how they connect to the real-world miasma of unease and distrust permeating our lives. A metaphorical black cloud hangs over the communities in both films. Eddington does not try to disperse the black cloud – if anything it shows the black cloud extending to blanket the world in darkness, as the film ends with Joe trapped in an ironic punishment fit for a Greek myth and his basic understanding of the world shaken. Weapons explains that bad things happened because a witch did it, and she’s dead now. The issues in this community were caused by an external force, which has been removed. There is nothing deeper wrong here.
Hopefully you enjoyed this - I’m going to try and write regular blogs from now on. This one was supposed to be done at the end of August but I really dragged my feet trying to figure out what I wanted to say about these two movies (did I succeed? Who can say). Hoping to see you back here 3 more times in September - we’ll see how that goes.