The first truly good film I’ve seen this year is Eddington, the latest feature from Ari Aster – whose Midsommar I also really liked. Unlike more personal Midsommar, this is a dark social satire, incisively dissecting the U.S. (and by extension almost any Western society) during the pandemic and the BLM protests.

Without giving too much away, the film explores what happens to a small town when various political factions and people use social media to torment each other. It’s a world where we equally reach for our phones both to sniff out injustice and to seek validation, even social advancement, without being able to tell what we are doing ourselves. It’s slightly ironic to be critiquing social media on a blog as a social-media creator, and in a way that irony is one of the film’s pitfalls (the other being that it is overlong): it wants to deliver a sharp critique but also backs away from it.

The first act brilliantly captures the hellscape of 2020: mask mandates, petty sniping over how people wear masks (in which I too, unfortunately, often took part), and the flood of online activism. But in the second act, the film veers too far into fantasy, which cheapens its point — a weakness noted by many like Red Scare and Jack from The Perfume Nationalist. The final act redeems it somewhat, especially through the lovelorn character of Brian, a high-schooler who first googles who Angela Davis is to approach a woke, hot, girl only to adopt a kind of Kyle Rittenhouse role purely to boost his social (and romantic) prospects.

The film ultimately delivers an naive anti-political message — what some call “coworker politics” — suggesting there’s always some external actor stoking tensions, among otherwise right-thinking people. While this is somewhat true, it dilutes the fact that societies have deep internal divisions, and that social media plus our current anti-political liberalism have made those divisions harder to bridge, and even incentivize pure narcissism and politics.

Still the characters and casting in Eddington are perfect and almost overcome the tepid message. Joaquin Phoenix as Joe Cross (likely chosen both for his work with Aster on Beau Is Afraid and his Joker notoriety), Pedro Pascal as the hyper-liberal, irritating mayor (likely chosen because of his ubiquitous public persona), and Emma Stone as Joe’s traumatized, sad wife. Supporting characters like Brian and Joe’s deputy, as well as his Q-addled mother in law, feel like people you actually know. The film captures the reality of ordinary people trapped in social-media politics, where everyone is forced to act as a political figure and conflicts escalate once the cameras are on.

Part of why the film resonated with me is that Serbia is now reliving many of 2020’s dynamics. Protests here began after the canopy of Novi Sad’s main train station collapsed — killing 16 — but have since devolved into the usual government vs. liberal opposition/activist battle. Social media has shaped the protests, with both sides casting themselves as victims to rack up clout. Real debate and concrete solutions — for example, to prevent such catastrophic mismanagement — are sidelined in favour of the same good-versus-evil, Manichaean spectacle, where non-political people DM each other with petty condemnations for (not) posting this or that, and of course do public call outs. The most jarring is the “Pintrestization” of politics where activism is reduced to content, often plagiarized from other protests, and shamefully rehearsed as any influencer video, while carrying “an important message”. Much of the “deeply held beliefs” are only revealed to be mimetic, made even more extreme through the easier dispersion through social media, as Rene Girard warned us.

While flawed and sometimes implausible, Eddington is a powerful reminder of what the world went through in 2020 and what many societies are still going through in the 2020s. Even without the pandemic, “Pinterest politics” – where political ideas are turned into aesthetic mood-board content for personal branding and mixed with pics of food and holidays – isn’t going anywhere. Aster might have made an even sharper point by following the small-town dynamic for five more years, showing Joe Cross ulimatelly winning an election, the Pascal’s mayor becoming a leftist influencer, and everyone else moving on — because in reality, harsh injustices and lies go unpunished and societies simply reconfigure themselves while the most capable leverage the chaos to advance their careers.