Like a lot of us, Ari Aster spent the summer of 2020 trapped inside and scrolling on social media. Also like a lot of us, the experience left him feeling pretty bad.
“I was living on Twitter,” Aster tells WIRED, “and it was really agitating me.”
But unlike most people, the director of Hereditary, Midsommar, and Beau is Afraid wasn’t just doomscrolling on Twitter to pass the time. He was doing research. That summer, Aster wrote the script for his latest film, Eddington, a modern western set in a small southwest American town during the height of both the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. In theaters on July 18, the film deftly explores how social media and the internet in general have fractured modern society, placing us all in our own personally tailored worlds—and then descends into violence when those worlds collide.
Aster depicts this twisted vision of modern society by regularly pointing his camera straight at the Facebook and Twitter feeds of his main characters, giving the audience a look into the conspiracy theories and memes influencing their every decision. To create a realistic approximation of social media, Aster went straight to the source.
“I started making a collection of things from my timeline to remember when I made the film,” he says. “I also cultivated different algorithms to see what somebody else might be receiving. I started different accounts and created an archive. That was very helpful in making the film, even in post, when we were deciding what tweets to show on certain phones.”
These glimpses into the interior lives of Eddington’s characters—the movie stars Joaquin Phoenix as a populist sheriff who runs for mayor against a corrupt, liberal incumbent played by Pedro Pascal—help ground a story that pivots wildly at times from cryptic political commentary to heightened carnage. Aster takes the classic American western and transforms it into something new: a messy thriller on the frontier of technological progress. In an interview with WIRED, the director unpacks the many meanings and inspirations behind his provocative new project.
The Tech Revolution Is “Dehumanizing”
Aster traces our current dystopian moment back to the rise of the smartphone.
“Society has been atomized and fractured over the last however many years,” he says. “I guess this all began once we started living in the internet—when we could carry the internet on our person.”
Eddington takes this theory and makes it a baseline reality, exploring a world where no two characters seem to be living in the same reality or even speaking the same language, whether that divide is political or generational. In one scene, a teenage boy sits at the dinner table and explains why he needs to reject his own whiteness. His parents’ response is a mix of shock and confusion.
“This is a movie about people living in different realities who are unreachable to each other,” Aster says, musing that the modern internet has changed humanity in ways we likely still don’t fully understand. “I do think the technological revolution is a mostly dehumanizing one,” he adds.