The Buzzmeter: How Eddington and Weapons Speak to Right Now

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It was the week Taylor Swift broke the Internet with the announcement of her forthcoming album, with the podcast hitting 12 million views in a day:

The usual tyrants on TikTok were carping over Swift’s happiness and celebration of music in their typically dark and dystopian ways.

And if that weren’t enough, the trailer for Marty Supreme hit the internet, and when it was revealed that Kevin O’Leary stars in the film, a chorus of truly irritating scolds began whining, “I wish he weren’t in this movie.” They actually did a deep dive on Josh Safdie to see if he was “Right-Wing.” Who can stand these people? Why do they think anyone would want to have anything to do with them?

You know what gives most Americans the “ick”? These people. It was bad enough that they lost their minds over Sydney Sweeney, and no, the New York Times attempting damage control for the Left can’t unring the bell. Their excuse that they can justify shunning and dehumanizing because of their “values” is such a weird place for anyone on the Left to land. Artists should not be under the thumb of puritanism like that. And yet, here we are.

Marty Supreme looks great, and casting Kevin O’Leary is hilarious. If it upsets people, all the better. I would hope neither of the Safdies would ever feel pressure to virtue signal their absolution.  I get the feeling Timothee Chalamet is also kind of cool and chill and not a puritanical fanatic about whom he associates with. Either way, O’Leary says the movie is good.

Eddington Looks Back at 2020 with a Critical Eye

For my money, Ari Aster’s Eddington is one of the two best films of the year, with Sinners at the top of the list. Eddington is so much better than I thought it would be, given the disastrous critics and audience score. It’s not often they agree and in the negative direction.

That’s because Aster manages to deeply offend “both sides” of our political divide. The last scene of a Kyle Rittenhouse figure hanging with Marjorie Taylor-Greene hits MAGA hard, and mocking the performative activism on the Left likewise hits them hard. The film is too truthful in some ways, not necessarily because what happens in it is true to what happened in real life (I don’t agree with the Rittenhouse conclusion) but because it’s true to what our lives were like in 2020 and how, in many ways, we haven’t shaken ourselves out of it.

I didn’t think I could even see a movie this good, this daring and confrontational in the suffocating climate of fear Hollywood has become. I thought there was very little chance anyone would ever make a movie like this again, given the fragility of people who can’t even handle Kevin O’Leary in a movie.

But Aster did, and this is, I think, his best film by a long way. There probably is not another person on the planet who would agree with me, but I have newfound respect for the man and his incredibly versatile body of work. I know I’m late to the party, but I saw it as pure genius. A western where cell phones and the dimension of the internet are always at the ready to make or break a person’s life. What’s more frightening, a gun or a ring light? The film’s tagline, “hindsight is 2020,” is also brilliant.

I’m so grateful there was an artist out there who understood that we just lived through one of the most transformative years in American history. That he dared to mock the mask tyrants, the COVID tests, and the wearing of masks outside is, again, something I never thought I’d see in an American film.

That it devolves into a hail of gunfire where no one knows who is who and everyone is pulled in different directions is exactly what happened in the fog of 2020. I didn’t think it was as hard on each side as I imagined it would be. It should make viewers think about that year and about how an actual Civil War was being fought on the streets.

No one really talks about 2020 much, with each side choosing their own adventure – the protests and riots over the Summer or January 6th. Because we live in a country with two completely separate realities, it’s not easy to tell a story about the bigger picture. Each side wants the film to take a side and to be a weapon against the other side. Aster didn’t seem interested in doing that much, though it’s clear he leans Left.

Eddington should absolutely be in the conversation for all of the major awards. It won’t be, but it should be. I predict it will be the one movie people are still talking about 20 years from now.

I saw in Eddington the best kind of deadpan humor we don’t often see in movies now, and that kind of humor has been abandoned by, say, the Coen Brothers. Maybe Josh Safdie will bring it back in Marty Supreme. Aster manages to make all participants in the film look just a little ridiculous because they’re trying so hard and failing so hard.

Eddington sits nicely alongside Spree, a film from a while back that I fell hard for, wherein a livestream depicted a guy going on a killing spree. Both films capture the sociopathic desire for clout and online fame through real-world events. And mostly, how we can be different people in real life vs. online.

Weapons is About Cancel Culture

After I saw Weapons, I considered it a decent movie and kind of forgot about it. But in the middle of the night, as my mind ruminated on various things in our culture, I realized what the film is really about. It’s about our modern era. Just as Aster points out how cell phones and online hive minds can destroy people’s lives, Weapons seems like a film that comments on how minds can be captured by social media and turn people into weapons.

I don’t if Zach Cregger intended that to be the message of the movie, probably not, but it occurs to me that we’ve just lived through an era where an external force, or an algorithm, made people online behave as though they were in a trance. When one person is targeted, the “weapons” swarm them and destroy them.

I thought about that as I watched a few voices on social media erupt in outrage over Taylor Swift and Kevin O’Leary. It wasn’t a full-blown massive attack, but it was nonetheless a reminder of how we’ve all been turned into weapons, and we go to war on each other in one way or another every day.

Eddington and Weapons are two of the best films of the year.