'Eddington': Death, Taxes, and Freedom

Your being, manipulated

Eddington is a film that’s home to my three favourites cryptids:

• Ari Aster

• Joaquin Phoenix

• Politics

Let it first be known that the rumours are true; I am one of those people who buys the conspiracy theories surrounding the existence of Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix. Many are quick to point out how convenient it is that every Phoenix sighting is captured on obtusely grainy footage, and those same people seem to think that Aster can’t be real since that one alleged photograph of him from 1935 turned out to be a clay sculpture attached to a toy submarine submerged in a bathtub. But make no mistake, readers; Phoenix and Aster walk among us.

But politics? No, not a chance. I’ll concede that they may have existed in the past and have simply gone extinct, and I’d even humour the possibility of a mokèlé-mbèmbé situation where they’ve been isolated to the point of indefinite severance from human knowledge. It remains, however, that I’ve seen no proof of real, living politics for quite some time.

I do, however, routinely see people talk about partisanship while trying — if unintentionally, and then, often in good faith — to pass it off as politics, and I find the influx of such hoaxes to be alarming.

As such, today we’re going to talk about actual politics, and the partisan poison that so often masquerades as politics. Helping me out will be my very good friend Eddington, whose grasp of this distinction may be one of the most important things put to screen this decade.

Now, obviously there are certain… patterns, we’ll say, regarding the things that either side of the partisan divide tend to adopt and champion. Those who read me regularly know what I’m about, hence why I’m trusting you to trust that the ambiguity I’ll be using here will lead to a much more pointed crescendo than frigid both-sidesing.

First principles: in Eddington, there is just one instance where the words “left,” “right,” “liberal,” or “conservative” pop up in any of the film’s dialogue, and that’s when Sarah is being interrogated by Joe and Guy about the murder of Ted and Eric, wherein she denies being associated with any violent arm (rioting, etc.) of the Black Lives Matter movement, and further insists that the rioters were planted by the right to sow chaos and paint the movement in a negative light.

Sarah is, of course, being interrogated because Joe — the actual murderer of Ted and Eric — planted Black Lives Matter-coded vandalism at the scene of the crime, having spraypainted the walls with “No Justice No Peace,” and is now trying to cover his tracks.

Now, we’ll circle back to the deeper significance of this later on, but for now I want to focus on the relative lack of direct acknowledgement of partisanship here. You can pretty easily infer which characters would adopt the words “left,” “right,” “liberal,” or “conservative,” certainly, and so neglecting to use these words might seem to be nothing more than economical writing on Aster’s part.

But it’s much more strategic than that. Consider the meaning of those words prior to any of the issues or stances we associate with them today — what do “liberal” and “conservative” even mean? What makes something liberal? What makes something conservative? If a new issue enters the ring, how is it decided which side it belongs to?

Dried leaf ft. my thumb

Let me ask you this: Is this leaf liberal, or conservative? Conservative, or liberal?

Well, since our system is predicated on partisanship instead of politics, it’s a matter of adoption and reaction. One side will somehow end up identifying with the leaf, and the other side will accuse them of grooming vegetarians, with both sides ultimately participating in the arbitrary prescriptiveness that more-or-less defines partisanship.

If we lived under actual politics, however, we could start by simply taking a look at the literal, political definitions of the words “liberal” and “conservative”:

• Liberal: Freedom at the cost of order.

• Conservative: Order at the cost of freedom.

That’s it. That’s all those words actually mean. Even if one were to just honestly reflect on the very etymology of “liberal” and “conservative,” they would arrive at a similar revelation.

Because all politics is, at the end of the day, is figuring out how to live with each other, which comes down to the balance between personal freedom and collaborative order.

From here on out, if I say “liberal” or “conservative,” then I’m speaking in terms of their political definitions (i.e. x at the cost of y).

Meanwhile, partisanship — where the affiliation precedes the opinion and/or principle (the principle might be disregarded entirely) — will be denoted by phrases like “left-wing” and “right-wing,” or “the left” and “the right.” Pretty much anything other than “liberal” or “conservative.”

And here’s the thing; if we examine the current manifestation of partisanship through the lens of actual politics, it becomes apparent that most people — left-identified and right-identified — are liberal, because freedom is regularly claimed as a value by both sides.

Think about it: Free Palestine, Freedom Convoy, Free Love, Freedom of Speech. Common to causes and ideas claimed by both sides is a partiality to freedom — if not actual freedom, then the idea of freedom.¹ We have absolutely no trouble agreeing that freedom (liberalism, per political definition) is a good thing.

But that doesn’t mean order (conservatism) is a bad thing; in fact, order is actually our most important tool for enabling freedom.

Indeed, order is how we organize rallies and non-profit initiatives. Order is how we come to mutual, logistical understandings in the name of collaboration. Order is having an action plan when disaster strikes. Order is how we come together to make certain works of art, like movies. Order, at the end of the day, is incredibly important for collaborative actualization. Order begets elevated freedom.

So, while politics does involve a give-and-take between order and freedom — since one necessarily stifles the other — the most accurate definition one can give to politics is “The way we leverage order in service of the greatest possible freedom.” Order is the tool, freedom is the goal.

But, like any tool, there’s a dark side to order.

Elementally speaking, order is born of caution and suspicion. Every pursuit of order is made with the understanding and/or assumption that not everyone or everything is going to act/work in the exact way you want them to, or the anticipation that something is/will go wrong. Order — that is, conservatism — is the act of pessimistic pre-empting. On paper, there is nothing morally wrong with this; caution, after all, implies reflection, preservation, and restraint. These are helpful things.

In practice, order/conservatism means things like limited investments of the federal budget towards an unproven, non-critical initiative, just in case said initiative doesn’t deliver on its promises. That is a conservative policy, and a mostly agreeable one; debate would probably come from how little would be too little for the initiative to have the means to prove itself.

It can mean strict laws and harsh punishments to deter certain behaviours. This is also a conservative policy, but a much more morally and logistically complex one whose implementation — if it ever gets to that point — would require many more dimensions of debate:

• What are the behaviours? Are those behaviours directly harmful to other human beings and their capacity to experience life? If not, what are we even talking about?

• But if so, what are the laws? Will there be knock-on effects for anyone who doesn’t exhibit the behaviour that the law is targeting? Is the behaviour horrible enough that it’s worth the additional freedom cost that a more draconian law (order) will demand from the citizenry?

• And what are the punishments? Do they seek to rehabilitate, or do they seek to make an example out of the rulebreaker by causing harm? If it’s the latter, how can we be sure that will deter the behaviour? Given how unthinkably severe the freedom cost of the latter would be, we’re better off combing the systemic or circumstantial “whys” of the behaviour, and focus on addressing those things rather than the compartmentalized instance of the behaviour.

  • The threat of cratering someone’s freedom — that is, the freedom with which they can exercise/access the full scope of their humanity — with dehumanization is an empty threat if their systemic circumstances already do a version of that, so it wouldn’t be much of a behavioural deterrence.

  • Plus, if you dehumanize someone, you’re necessarily trying to sever empathy between the punishee and the citizens, which means the citizens won’t see themselves in the punishee. Go figure.

It can mean killing people who are different from you. This is a conservative policy — a fascist one, more accurately — and one that I have no trouble declaring as off the table in its entirety. Not just because killing someone is the ultimate form of taking away someone’s freedom, but also because, once “different people” run out, fascists will find new differences in those who remain, and make to kill them, too. We’ll talk more about this later.

All this to say that if one defines their outlook on life as “conservative,” what that means — per the literal, political definition of the word — is that your beliefs are primarily predicated upon the idea that people cannot be trusted, and so must be anticipated, managed, feared, or removed, depending on how conservative you are.

Oh, hi Joe Cross.

Eddington is a film that validates a conservative view of life in the sense that, with Joe Cross as our protagonist, most every other major character — by way of them being a person — is exactly as shitty as Joe would suspect them to be.

• Ted Garcia is a dishonest career politician who cozies up to big government/tech and responds to Joe with hostility, ranging from aloof sarcasm to biting venom to physical violence.

• Eric’s sole character trait is antagonization.

• Brian co-opts Black Lives Matter purely as a means to get with Sarah, who herself is participating performatively and mathematically.

And if they’re not disagreeably shitty, then they’re the version of themselves that Joe fears the most, which of course renders the fear valid.

• Vernon Jefferson Peak is young, hot, charismatic and is psychologically gooey (free) in a way that Joe can’t even comprehend. He can engage intimately and empathetically with Louise and hold space for her in a way that Joe cannot. Joe’s paranoia about Vernon comes from worrying that Louise is going to leave him for Vernon, which she does.

• Antifa is literally plotting to murder him.

• Butterfly Jiminez — constantly challenging Joe and his department over what constitutes Pueblo cases and Eddington cases (an apt parable for challenging the pseudo-sovereignty of Joe’s perspective) — takes it upon himself to investigate the fishiness of the Garcia murder case, and is implied to have connected the dots before he’s killed.

And if they’re not shitty or someone to be feared, then they become dehumanized tools that Joe uses to his benefit.

• Michael is framed by Joe for the murder of the Garcias.

• Guy’s once-latent, now not-so-latent racism is leveraged by Joe to frame/control Michael. Important to note is that Guy’s racism obviously clocks him as shitty to us viewers, but for Joe, it’s helpful before it’s shitty, assuming he believes it to be shitty at all.

• Lodge, the homeless man who Joe murders just to see if he’s capable of murdering/body-hiding/all the rest of it.

Louise, meanwhile, is the character that most potently contextualizes Joe’s deepest, most emotional layer of his conservatism — order as a basis for relating to others. He relentlessly pressures Louise to have dinner with him out of a desperation to fix his relationship with her, not realizing that he’s quantifying her pain as some inconvenience that he has to manage/fix, rather than a part of her that must be empathized with.

More pertinently, he publicly frames her as a statutory rape victim of Ted Garcia, not only to convince himself that he’s noble for protecting her, but to more firmly square this suspicion-first reality that he’s created for himself — the worse Ted is, the more validated Joe’s reality is.

Louise’s public rebuffing of Joe’s accusations against Ted, then, is akin to ego death for Joe. This is Joe’s point of no return — it’s true that getting slapped by Ted was the last thing to happen before Joe’s murdering of Lodge, but if one pays attention to Joe’s body language and behaviour following Louise’s video, it’s clear that that last push by Ted was exactly what Joe was fishing for.

Then there’s the more infrastructural, human-to-world layer of Joe’s conservatism. When Ted confronts a maskless Joe in a supermarket, Joe pontificates on how he would be okay with mandatory masking if it were brought into law via the proper legislative channels, but since it’s only policy, he’ll ignore it if he so pleases, and he’ll certainly have something to say to anyone who tries to physically enforce masking.

Joe’s problem, then, doesn’t seem to be with the masking itself, but with the fact that it isn’t validated by what he understands to be the relevant legitimization bodies, or so we’ll call them.

In other words, Joe is not dreaming beyond the institution that props up the order that he relies on to square his reality. His beliefs belong to a system, rather than him; to order, rather than freedom.

But here’s what makes Joe’s and Ted’s supermarket exchange especially juicy:

Masking is, philosophically, a conservative policy, and yet it was adopted by the left.

Remember, “conservative” constitutes anything that implements or otherwise encourages order at the cost of freedom. Masking — which, in isolation, involves following an enforced rule — would fall under this, regardless of whatever subsequent freedom this order seeks to be in service of.

A flipside example would be something like the right to bear arms — a philosophically liberal policy that was nevertheless adopted by the right. Guns, of course, are key to Joe’s political and guerilla escapades — he uses guns to kill Lodge, Ted, and Eric; he warns Antifa that the people of Eddington like to use guns; and he arms himself to the teeth with guns so as to go barrel-to-barrel with the Antifa members that end up targeting him, Michael, and Guy.

So, to recap, Joe is demonstrably coded/blatantly written as right-wing, and yet his primary grievance — the match that lit this whole firework — is with a philosophically conservative policy (masking) that just happened to be adopted by left-wingers, while the limited salvation he managed to realize for himself came at the behest of a philosophically liberal policy (freedom of guns) that just happened to be adopted by right-wingers.

In other words, Joe is a conservative who hates conservative policies and actively partakes in/encourages liberal policies.²

Remember “No Justice No Peace?” Well, justice — on paper, intervention and correction — is a categorically conservative philosophy, and yet it was adopted here by the left. Bringing justice to racist police would be to get them under control; under order(!).

So, in the case of Sarah’s interrogation, Joe is using the leftist adoption of a conservative philosophy to cover his tracks in the Garcia murder case. The great irony is that it would have been useless to him had that leftist adoption not occurred.

A leftist adoption of a conservative philosophy that was planted by a right-winger to frame a left-winger (and the left more broadly). What was that Sarah said about plants by the right?

And so I ask again, what the hell does it even mean to be liberal or conservative anymore? Why identify as conservative if you’re against gun control, which is — as a policy that favours order at the cost of freedom — categorically conservative? Why identify as liberal if you’re in favour of masking?

Could it be that “liberal” and “conservative” are actually unhelpful as identifiers for people, despite what the spectre of partisanship wants you to believe? Perhaps we ought to reserve it for labeling policies instead.

Except, that’s not very helpful, either, because — if we lived under true politics —every policy would be an attempt to realize the most nutritious, beneficial freedom by using order to create the framework for that freedom to flourish.

The friction that freedom experiences at the behest of order is the foremost conduit of the freedom’s growth and maturity.

So, it’s not a question of “is this more liberal or conservative?” It’s “We need to use conservatism (order) to find the best version of liberalism (freedom); how are we going to do that?”

That, of course, requires us to consider what the best version of freedom looks like, which is a political question all its own. Every life is an expression of emotional truth that wants to be externalized and accepted, and every life deserves a place where that can be done without fear. A place where:

• Order comes not by way of being controlled, but of conscious collaboration, and where…

• Freedom comes not by way of impulse and indulgence, but of empowered, self-sufficient self-actualization.

In other words, freedom — true freedom — involves freedom for expressions of life that aren’t the same as yours.

This can mean women.³ This can mean immigrants.⁴ This can mean trans people.⁵

While we’re at it, this can also mean advocating for queer education in schools; not to encourage transition, but to demystify the possibilities inherent to human expression so as to foster empathy, and subsequently equip trans students to recognize that transition exists, and — just as importantly — also help non-trans students recognize that transition will not help them.

This would have saved me, a trans person, years of psychological torment, and it would help similarly-ravaged youth channel their desperation into the right solution, whether that involves transition or not.⁶

It is not possible to protect/enable the freedom of trans youth without protecting/enabling the freedom of non-trans youth. Such is the goal of education — to empower with knowledge, rather than frighten with propaganda/strategic omission. Education is freedom.

Of course, without unhappy detransitioners, certain congress members have one less tool with which to ramp up support for the legislative carpet-bombing of all trans people.⁷

And, yes, this can mean boys and men, who have to contend with the psychological whiplash of being seen as a little boy one day, and as a potential predator the next. To acknowledge this is not to downplay the fears and realities that women must navigate and be believed about, but — per the definition of privilege — non-men are nevertheless liable to underestimate the pain that this whiplash can inflict on a person; that pain is not selfish, and deserves empathy.

I don’t believe in any of those things on behalf of any political aisle; to do so would be a result of partisanship. No, I believe in these things as a result of my belief in freedom — that everyone deserves an environment in which to access and express their humanity and purpose, and that we ought to help each other do that.

And if you’re bothered by the idea of any of these people being able to live freely, maybe your most elemental value isn’t actually freedom. Maybe it’s fear and suspicion of expressions of life that don’t overlap with your own, and so you set out to control those lives in a way that’s congruent with the way you experience the world, whether that means erasing them from sight or encouraging a blanket perception of these individuals by enforcing/consuming narratives that do that.

That isn’t freedom; that’s order that just doesn’t put a strain on the existential paranoia that you refuse to liberate yourself from. And when you predicate a society on an order demanded by paranoia at the cost of the freedom of people who are different from you, your tolerance for differences will decrease, meaning the number of people you subject to your strain of order will increase, ultimately devolving into anarchical, paranoid cannibalization.

And when everyone else is gone, you will finally have your freedom; no other expression of life to contrast with the way you experience yours. And what a miserable freedom it is; one rendered fearful and volatile after being abused — rather than nurtured — by order. Freedom by way of total subordination to your paranoia and process of elimination, rather than empowerment of your innate ability to experience life and empathize with it.

And I absolutely, wholeheartedly, positively refuse to accept that as an option for how our freedom ought to manifest, hence why I refuse to validate it as a political point of view. It is no way to live together.

With this world of Eddington honouring the conservative fantasy of order over freedom because people are bad and cannot be trusted, Joe’s ultimate existential wish — whether or not he realizes it as such — is fulfilled by the film’s end.

After suffering permanent brain/nerve damage at the hands of an Antifa member, Joe’s body — more aptly, his capacity for expression — no longer belongs to him. He’s no longer burdened by a paranoia-fuelled drive for control, because the option to try and exert that control has been taken away from him. He can now live out his days being entirely subordinate to his mother-in-law, the nurses that help him with his tasks, and the machines that hold him.

Where he first allowed his beliefs to belong to a system, the near-entirety of his expression has been outsourced to external players and forces. Freedom is gone, and therefore conservative freedom has been attained.

You see? Freedom is an inevitable human phenomenon; we have no choice over whether it manifests, but we do have a choice over how it will. We belong to freedom, but order belongs to us.

I’m not going to be so naive as to believe I can change anyone’s mind — free anyone’s heart — with this Eddington review… Except, I absolutely am going to be that naive; what’s the use in skepticism, after all, if there’s no naivete to guide towards the tomorrow it dreams of?

Now let’s stop ignoring the class war⁸ that the elites distract us from with their partisan, anti-freedom culture war, unite in pursuit of the categorically human freedom that actual politics will allow us to reach, and maybe fuck up a data centre or ten.

We are in a fight against evil, and part of that is fighting denial, and denying denial.

—

They have deprived you of your identity, and that deprivation and that slavery keeps you from being an agent of actual change, and it keeps them right where they are… We are not a coincidence.⁹

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1. There’s a difference, and we’ll get into that later.

2. Basically, liberal policies remove restrictions and specifications, while conservative policies add them. Hence freedom and order.

3. If you’re a man, this can mean not blowing a gasket and threatening women with physical and sexual violence when they say they would rather see a bear in the woods than a man, and instead reflect on what sort of life experience leads someone to saying something like that.

4. If you have birthright citizenship, this can mean advocating for the reevaluation of immigration policies, such as those that prevent immigrants from being paid for official work if they don’t have a work visa, which they can’t afford without the money they would be paid from work; money that they also need to buy food and a place to sleep. Oh, and calling for the demilitarization/restructuring of ICE and abolishing of blacksite detainment camps, while we’re at it.

5. If you’re cis or non-queer, this can mean empathizing with trans people on the basis of hormones/transition being the reason we can comprehend what it means to be fully alive and free, investing in gender-neutral equivalents of traditionally gendered spaces so as to protect everyone — cis and trans people — from bad actors, and recognizing that using a person’s chosen name and pronouns is nothing more than a sign of respect for that person’s humanity and right to expression (freedom).

6. For the record, I wouldn’t want transition to be the thing that brings peace and joy to anyone’s life — it’s expensive, emotionally intense, and can put a target on your back. Frankly, I think anyone who wants someone else to be trans is harbouring insecurity about how they inhabit their own transness or allyship; such a thing isn’t dissimilar to bigotry, actually.

But, if transition is the thing that will bring said peace and joy, then those people — youth and adult — deserve to know that it exists.

7. Obviously detransitioners make up a tiny percentage of the already tiny percentage of people who have transitioned in life, but I think frontloading that info neglects the more immediate fact that detransitioners do exist and deserve support — not in the form of trans erasure/suspicion, but calls to implement queer education so that everyone is as equipped as possible to make the choice that’s most conducive to their individual ability to express their humanity.

8. Holy fucking shit, let’s stop ignoring the class war.

9. Dismissing all of Vernon’s philosophy because it came from Vernon would be partisan behaviour. Consider instead whether your partiality to it — if you have any — comes by way of wanting humans to be free, or your fear to be satiated.