Eddington Ending Explained

This article contains major spoilers for Ari Aster’s Eddington.

People are finally treating Joaquin Phoenix‘s Sheriff Joe Cross with the kindness, and more importantly the respect, he thinks he deserves. “We need to find each other’s hearts,” he previously pleaded in that Facebook video which became a surprise announcement for his mayoral candidacy. Well, a year or two later—and after finding enough space in his heart to murder a political rival and a child—Joe’s gotten what he wished.

He is now mayor of Eddington, New Mexico, the community he loves so much that he attempted to protect it from anyone he deemed undesirable. Also in the final scenes of Ari Aster’s COVID epic, he’s left virtually incapacitated after receiving a blade injury in his brain. Wheelchair-bound and unable to speak following a showdown with what we’re told was an Antifa terrorist, Mayor Cross has been given a clearly token position in a town that has found its new leader (and god?) in the ominously titled tech company, “Solidgoldmagikarp.” Joe is thus little more than a figurehead. Hell, he can’t even turn his head. So he sits, puppeted by his handlers at the grand opening of Solidgoldmagikarp’s data center—it’s apparently intended for deep-learning generative AI or something like that, we’re told.

After the event, the mayor is sent home to be coddled by Dawn (Deidre O’Connell), the once loathed mother-in-law of his estranged wife Louise (Emma Stone). Nowadays though, Dawn goes so far as to share the marriage bed with Joe, albeit the husbandly duties are carried out by Joe’s abusive caretaker while our mayor lays helplessly to the side. He’s a man forgotten in the shadows. Meanwhile the light of Eddington’s future shines brightly, and ominously, out the window at that aforementioned data center.

It’s brutal, cynical, mean-spirited, and a tad esoteric. But Aster is clearly attempting to say something scathing about America and the men like Joe who populate it. So join us as we unpack the real intent of Eddington once you get past the culture war noise that brought Joe and Dawn together for that bitterest of endings.

The Lie of “Both Sides”

At a special screening of Eddington that I attended, Aster was on hand to answer questions, including a surprisingly candid, if guarded, explanation of the film’s depiction of modern American tribalism. “On one side you have people who might annoy you,” Aster mused, “but on the other are those who terrify you.” Such is the truth of America’s false equivalency. And unsurprisingly, Aster interrogates it like a sadist staring at a car wreck.

At first Eddington appears to be a sober-eyed and deliberately uncomfortable recreation of events that occurred only half a decade ago. That isn’t so much time, but the daily miseries of COVID have been so collectively memory-holed that I personally felt a shiver of trauma while watching Joe Cross get his nasal cavities scrubbed at a drive-thru test site. Other aspects of those terrible days have never left us, however, including the cultural divide embodied by Joe and Eddington’s smarmy mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal).

The pair make a striking divide: Joe in his cowboy hat, Garcia in his N95 mask even while standing outside. Admittedly, these sequences take place in the summer of 2020, back before we realized it was highly unlikely for COVID to be spread in an outdoor space. With a certain degree of hindsight, both Joe and Ted make what are in retrospect valid points in some scenes, and supercilious ones in others. As it turns out, COVID probably did begin in a Wuhan lab. Still, the wealthy countries that practiced stricter social distancing saw fewer per capita deaths from the virus than the notoriously divided U.S.

As is Aster’s wont, we find humanity and frustration in both men, such as the fact that Joe is treated like a monster by his neighbors for being asthmatic and not wearing a mask in public, yet also then glibly (and wrongly) claiming online that “COVID isn’t here.” Meanwhile Ted is trying to explain the verifiable science of the day to a sheriff who chooses to be willfully ignorant, but the mayor is also throwing parties where folks take off their masks to drink booze and eat food. Ted’s even not above using his wife leaving him as political capital in campaign ads, despite it clearly hurting his teenage son.

The movie’s first act carefully sets the table for many similar cultural fault lines that allow you to feel frustration with “both sides.” There are for example, the local high schoolers who get swept up in the antiracist “reckoning” of the summer of protests, some of which because their hearts are in the right place like Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle), and some because it gives them social popularity, a la Brian (Cameron Mann). The latter has such a crush on the former that he repeats her tumblr-transcribed talking points at his parents’ dinner table, clearly parroting but not understanding what he means by “eradicating whiteness.” Sarah and Brian are of course both white, and both determined to speak on behalf of (and over) the marginalized and oppressed communities they claim to champion.

There is a dark satirical humor at their attention-seeking, and yet percolating underneath it is the fact that “the other side” is nursing much darker flaws, such as the vocally white racist deputy Guy (Luke Grimes), who sides with the police officers who murdered George Floyd in cold blood and on camera, and is constantly giving his Black colleague Michael (Michael Ward) suspicious glances.

For the first act, the film could be mistaken as a simple portrait of acrimony that asks “why can’t we all just get along?” But then the actual penny drops, and Aster’s more subversive intent comes into view.

The Full Picture of Joe’s “Forgotten Man”

When Phoenix’s put-upon sheriff first decides to run for mayor, we have exclusively seen this story from his point of view. Teens in the street call him an oppressor while screaming atop broken glass from a nearby store; neighbors at the grocery store glare at him like he’s a devil-worshipper; and the nice-guy mayor who talks down to him, we are told, sexually assaulted his wife Louise when she was only a teenager.

However, the seeds are planted that we are being offered only a narrow prism through which to view his story. For starters, Ted not only denies abusing Stone’s troubled housewife but also points out that Joe Cross has apparently been a lousy sheriff who lost employees and manpower due to his own mismanagement.

He also is visibly a bad husband, as we learn after he’s declared his candidacy that Louise was told by her doctor not to take on any undue stress. The more we observe him, the more “poor Joe’s” problems turn out to be of his own making. While Louise’s spiral into COVID conspiracy theory thinking is triggered by her mother Dawn, who shares with her daughter a steady stream of internet drivel and introduces Louise to a clearcut cult leader in the making, Vernon (Austin Butler), Stone’s character doesn’t flee the house until Joe exploits Louise’s memories of being raped by Ted Garcia for a political attack ad. This sends her running into Vernon’s arms.

It’s striking that only after Joe spreads what turns out to be a lie manufactured to disguise an even uglier truth—it wasn’t Ted who raped Louise as a teenager, but her own father and Dawn’s husband—that Dawn finally spares a nice word for her shit-kicking son-in-law. “That’s the first good thing you’ve done for that girl, even if she doesn’t see it,” Dawn praises.

But it is of course Dawn who refuses to see reality. There are plenty of reasons for Joe and the audience to doubt Vernon’s outrageous story about being abused as a child and then hunted like a character out of The Most Dangerous Game by D.C. “elites.” He even gilds the lily by saying after he escaped, it caused his father to be murdered in a faked suicide as if this was a character in Eyes Wide Shut. However, Vernon is preying on people who have real pain and suppressed traumas that those in authority—like Joe and his father-in-law before him—turned a blind eye toward. Hell, they might have even been the perpetrators. For it is Joe’s predecessor, and Louise’s own father, who raped her as a child. And it was Dawn who on some level knowingly covered it up with a willful self-deception that placed the blame on someone else. On Ted Garcia. That ambitious Latino man living in their town.

Only when Joe fully embraces the lie for political advantage and expediency does he win Dawn’s approval and support. But it is also at the expense of someone feeling real pain: his own wife. It drives Joe and Dawn closer together until, like a political demagogue and their most fanatical fans, they are literally in bed together, living under the same obvious delusion rather than facing reality. But it still also puts Joe on the path to nominal power… after we learn the true measure of the man.

Unable to face his own failings and responsibilities, Joe gives into his hate and bends the messy ugliness of this world with violence and lies, twisting it until it resembles the dishonest and racist simplicity of his preferred alternate reality. This begins with Joe discovering that the man who likely broke downtown windows overnight—which was then blamed on the protesting high school kids—was actually the homeless gent everyone ignores. It’s also the same man Joe was previously vilified for abusing thanks to a misleadingly edited Instagram reel. Well, now he does abuse the unhoused drinker. Joe executes the poor bastard, using him as a conduit for all his feelings of professional frustration and domestic inadequacy. 

Joe doesn’t stop there either. He continues reaching for violent absolution when on the same night he murders Ted Garcia and Ted’s teenage son (Matt Gomez Hidaka)—the boy who edited the disingenuous IG video about him. Afterward the sheriff initially attempts to frame Antifa, a fringe left-wing anti-fascist political movement that became the Fox News boogeyman du jour of 2020, for his crimes. Later he also seizes the opportunity to find an easier fall guy when he frames his own deputy Michael, knowing it will stick with the only other law enforcement in Eddington (racist deputy Guy). After all, Michael is Black.

Joe is perpetuating the status quo and racial hegemony through extreme violence, duplicity, and the scapegoating of minorities. And he does so with the usual incompetency and shortsightedness he’s displayed throughout the rest of the film. Hence leaving himself open to be discovered by an Indigenous detective from the nearby Native American community (William Belleau). It turns out Joe is too dim to know where his jurisdiction ends.

This is not a “both sides” are bad diatribe. It is a parable where all sides are contributing to an American collapse, but only one is intentionally courting it with violence, gunfire, and deliberate misinformation. Well… almost only one side.

The Cop Who Cried Wolf?

Which brings us back to Eddington’s ending. For much of the film’s first and especially second act, Aster seems to covertly be making a post-COVID Taxi Driver. We have a movie about a self-pitying, and self-aggrandizing, white guy who is furious at the very real social inadequacies he sees out the window, but who personally remains a ticking time bomb waiting to go off.

The irony of Taxi Driver is the bomb inside Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle finally goes off in an ostensibly good direction: He saves little Jodie Foster from a lifetime of sexual abuse and exploitation when he murders her lecherous pimp (Harvey Keitel). But this only occurs after Travis failed at using the same anger in a more obviously unhinged and socially reprehensible way (he attempted to assassinate a presidential candidate). Conversely, Joe succeeds at using his anger and jealousy to execute a political murder, and it’s to his own personal advantage, no less.

But Aster doesn’t stop there, nor does he carry the narrative to what might be its most authentic and satisfying conclusion, which in my mind would be Belleau’s Officer Butterfly finding irrefutable proof that Joe murdered Ted and it not making a bit of difference since Joe faces no repercussions for his sins.

We still kind of get that last bit, but only after Eddington descends into Coen-esque farce. As it seemingly turns out, Antifa or Antifa-like radicals are every bit as murderous and violent as Fox News suggests, and one of them flies on a private jet that must implicitly be paid for by some fiendish, leftist billionaire. This mysterious radical is also headed straight to Eddington after seeing the fake message Joe Cross spraypainted on Ted’s living room wall.

Joe did that to blame the radical left for his crimes, but in reality he invited the predator into his hen house, making Joe the cop who cried wolf. The Antifa-like terrorist arrives in town and has a “Pig BBQ” by blowing up Guy, nearly torching Michael to death as well, and finally hunting Joe with an assault weapon. In the end, Joe gets to be what he dreams of: a hero keeping his community safe from outside agitators and subversive forces, but it comes at a steep cost since he loses all motor functions and the power of speech.

It’s a fate worthy of a Coen knucklehead… and yet, I think there is something more mischievous at play going on.

A Metaphor About the Delusional American

To return to the Taxi Driver comparison, Eddington shares one more thing in common with Martin Scorsese’s 1976 masterpiece: the concrete reality of the ending is suspect since we are watching it from the point of view of an unreliable narrator.

As aforementioned, Joe lives in a world where he’s a nice guy who just wants everyone in his town to get along. This fantasy vision of Eddington, and perhaps America, is only punctured when a reality too stark intrudes. For many Americans, that was COVID (at least at first); for Joe it was the day his wife released an internet video that completely undermined his own self-image. Louise rejects the lie Joe and Dawn tell themselves, and the whole world sees them as fools.

It is only then that Joe turns to murder and racist scapegoating. This is a metaphor for how Aster views many godfearing Americans falling into line with a snake-oil charlatan who is fairly un-Christ-like when he blames America’s problems all on immigrants and Black protestors. The truth is that the protestors didn’t break any barroom’s glass, nor were there violent riots in the local streets, though Joe chooses to embrace the lie that there were.

This is a parable about modern America. But it also invites us to second-guess everything else we see in the finale. Even during the climax, Joe begins hallucinating pre-brain injury that Dawn is his wife Louise come home. He also, notably, admits to Dawn in this scene that he murdered Ted, which she doesn’t seem to mind at all since (as we later see) it presents the opportunity for her to assert what she perceives as power over her world. And it definitely makes her richer.

… But was Joe really stabbed in the head, or like some readings of Travis Bickle, are we living inside his own fevered fantasies where he gets to protect his town from the scariest monster Rupert Murdoch could ever conjure for rural heartlanders terrified of the big cities?

This reading seems possible since the ending of Eddington crosses over into full-on allegory. Whether Joe really dueled to the death with a billionaire-backed terrorist out to murder cops, or just imagined it while doing what he wants again (like murdering the Native American cop close on his trail), this story still ends with Joe’s sense of self, and his sense of Eddington and America at large, compromised.

While other folks definitely seemed to prosper from Joe’s “protection,”—including the white kid who constantly says he is going to “stop speaking” on behalf of minorities, and yet kept talking until he became a social media influencer with a house and wife, living the Gen-Z dream—Joe is left helpless from the rising tides of history and society.

If every character in this film at one point was correct about something, Joe was probably right to be wary of Ted Garcia’s support for Solidgoldmagikarp. It is a data center that represents a future far darker than being required to wear a mask for 12 or so months in public places. It represents the greater technological, commercial, and capitalistic forces that are sweeping through America in the 21st century, and leaving plenty of folks behind, including Joe.

He was so worried about Antifa that he framed them for murder, but his own future mobility and power will be subsumed by larger technological forces which render the old divisions pointless. Even the Indigenous community and Eddington’s largely white powerholders sit intermingled at the data center’s grand opening. The Old West divisions and fantasy which Joe clings to are mooted.

The reality is that everything this data center represents is sucking up America’s future until it’s the only light left in a darkened landscape. Meanwhile Joe is abandoned, enfeebled, and in bed with his one loyal supporter who remains loyal because of a set of delusions and biases they share. It’s still a cold and loveless union though, leaving Joe with nothing but despair and the lies he might tell himself to get through the night.