Brilliant “Eddington” Plunges Viewers Right Back to 2020

Brilliant “Eddington” Plunges Viewers Right Back to 2020
by Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone Institute

Rarely has my heart raced so fast in a movie. Eddington (2025) is nuts. Brilliantly crazy. Beyond belief. Beyond words. It might be the most politically and culturally realistic film I’ve ever seen. 

It is particularly gripping because it deals with a madness that everyone tries to forget but which we dare not. It covers the strange period of the Spring and Summer of 2020, times that will go down in history. This is about as good a presentation of historical fiction as one can expect. 

It is set in a small town in New Mexico and centers on the conflict between the mayor and the county sheriff. The mayor is a cheesy version of a type of upwardly mobile politician we know all too well. He is a small-fry version of Gavin Newsom or Justin Trudeau, always media ready, deeply hypocritical, polished in presentation, and gassy with cliches about equality, safety, compliance, and science. Covid was his opportunity. 

The sheriff, in contrast, is old school and doubts all the protocols. It strikes him as tyranny based on nothing, especially since the state was mandating all sorts of insane protocols even though the virus had not reached the area. He resists at every turn and then decides to run for mayor himself. 

Though it is fiction, the town in question could be anywhere in that part of the country. A similar drama played out in every small town. These people watched on TV what was happening in New York City and figured it had nothing to do with them. But then the state and county health officials got involved and mandated extreme controls over the whole population. 

All the themes of this period make an appearance here. We have mask conflicts. One-way grocery aisles. Capacity restrictions that force people to line up outside the store. Social distancing. Hydroxychloroquine. School and business closures. Event 201. Stay-at-home orders. SSRIs, liquor, and pot. Social media everywhere. Christian nationalism. Antifa. Epstein. World Economic Forum. Fauci. Gates. A Big-Tech data center with a wind farm. 

It’s all here, a crazy mixed-up melange of insanity, paranoia, accusation, and anger. It is also a powder keg. 

The next steps everyone remembers. Attached to phones and laptops, people dug around for the real story since the fake one was so obviously ridiculous. New influencers pop up. They push wild theories that grow more extreme by the day. QAnon appears and draws in converts. Stressed and confused, everyone seems to be yelling at everyone. 

And yet, the community is far from unified in incredulity. There is a scene in the desert where the kids have escaped the home to socialize with beers, courting, and antics. But even here – and this is highly realistic – the kids are distancing themselves, maintaining six feet and wearing masks. They could not stand another day sitting on the bed at home but they were not ready to believe that the whole thing was a hoax. 

In another case, a nice man wanted to buy groceries but is not allowed in the store because he would not put on a mask. When he is kicked out, the many other compliant customers briefly clap that he is gone. 

I swear that I saw this exact scene unfold many times. It happened to me on multiple occasions. I, like most everyone, can fill up evenings with stories. 

Once while walking outside without a mask, a man screamed at me that masks are “socially recommended.” Those words continue to ring in my head partially because I don’t know what that means but actually I do know what it means: a Red Guard of Covid extremists had arisen among us. 

It gets nuttier. Just as it seems things could not be more broken, there was George Floyd, a black man killed by the police that made the headlines and inspired a new movement. The kids were desperate to get out. Angry and itching for some scapegoat, it somehow transpired that the target became “whiteness.” The kids were ready to preach the doctrine, which was all about self-hate and cultivating the desire for self-immolation. 

Thus did the protests and riots ensue. It is particularly ridiculous to see all this unfold in this tiny town of a few thousand people, for the kids had no one against whom to protest. The most prominent black man in town worked for the police. The scene in which the white girl yells at him to join their protest is particularly poignant. How odd that the “Black Lives Matter” movement would have consisted mostly of white progressives. 

Then the protests turn violent and why? Here the movie goes out on its biggest ledge, positing a shadowy and well-funded group of outside agitators – flying in on a chartered airline – who plot big explosions and even murder. It’s Antifa and they do anything to create more chaos than is already there. Here one realizes that this film is not attempting to caricature conspiracy theorists but actually amps it up beyond even what you would have read at the time. 

It all sounds fanciful and insane – if you didn’t live through it you would find the plot too circuitous – until you realize that the entire narrative is only inches removed from being nonfiction. And this is what makes the movie so disturbing. Maybe it is the cinematography or the music or the brilliant acting but the viewer is plunged right back into the most insane period of our lives, with all the grit, psychopathology, and bonkers social and political dynamics. 

The pervasive deployment of social media constantly rolling by on every phone is a reminder of the times, and a clue to the metanarrative of the film: these people are all actors playing a scripted part. Each person adopts a role and plays it out as if it is authentic. It’s not. It’s a small town mirroring a script that was written in real time. 

Something and someone else is in charge and we don’t find out until the end. I’m not providing a spoiler but will say that it ends perfectly with the revelation of a deep-state asset who uses all the language of the Covid resistance to shepherd in the technocratic meta-goal all along. There is even an invalid leader who everyone pretends is functional. 

What can one say? Perfect!

We’ve heard it said that this movie is “too soon.” That’s a phrase deployed with the presumption that a long period of time must follow genuine trauma before polite society speaks about it openly and honestly. One also suspects that the “too soon” motif is being dragged about so that we don’t talk about it at all. That is the prevailing habit in polite society. We are all just supposed to move on. 

The truth is that the Covid years are the prism through which most everything else playing out in public affairs today can be read. Truth is stranger than fiction, but this fiction works beautifully precisely because it comes so very close to telling the truth in every grim detail. 

The sheriff in the film who was the Covid “denier” – his stated view was that the virus was not there in the community – eventually tests positive, of course, which just reinforces the point that people were saying in February 2020. Credible voices were sharing at the time that everyone would get Covid and most everyone would shake it off. Interventions could only make it worse. The interventions came anyway, with catastrophic results. 

Not nearly enough public attention has been paid to these months – March through July 2020 – in terms of public discussion, investigation, and cultural honesty about what happened. Michelle Goldberg writes for the New York Times that this is “the first film I know of to really capture what it was like to be alive during the year America cracked up” – failing to mention that her paper played a central part in causing the crack-up. 

If the purpose of Eddington is to bring some honesty to the table, I doubt it will work, despite the film’s astonishing brilliance. In fact, the movie will likely fail at the box office. I cannot imagine that a posh theater in a high-end neighborhood will pick it up, precisely because the audience members themselves are the ones who stand accused of complicity in this bout of totalitarianism. People won’t pay for that. 

One can only hope that Eddington is the first of many more films along these lines. 

Postscript: there was actually another Covid movie that came out within months of lockdown. It’s called Songbird and it is also fantastic, though the reviews were awful. That was too much truth too soon. Surely five years later is not too soon. 

Brilliant “Eddington” Plunges Viewers Right Back to 2020
by Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society