Eddington touches every third-rail issue of the last five years.

Teddy Kim on Ari Aster's neo-Western black comedy turned conspiracy thriller.

Good morning everyone.

There are a few more spots available for Feed Me’s book party with Natasha Stagg tonight in New York. There will be drinks and books and copies of her new novel, Grand Rapids, fresh off the press. You can RSVP here.

I saw Eddington by myself in July, at the Sag Harbor movie theater, on a warm Wednesday night. When I walked out, the only thing I wanted to do was talk to Teddy Kim about it. We texted about it that night, and again on July 28th after the midtown shooting, and again a little over a month later when Charlie Kirk was killed. For those who haven’t seen the film, the overwhelming theme is modern political violence.

Yesterday, Teddy was at the New York Film Festival and bumped into Ari Aster, the director of Eddington. Perhaps today’s Stay Tuned column will end up on his desk at some point today.

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Stay Tuned is a guest column on Feed Me written by

Teddy Kim

. In this column, Teddy writes about when entertainment comes in contact with tech — and the implications of that. You can read his last column, which debates whether our kids will watch any of this year’s movies, here.

This post contains spoilers.

If you drew up a wishlist of what you wanted from contemporary American cinema, you might come up with the following: Fewer superhero movies. More original stories. Less of the soulless IP studio rehash. Our most talented directors and writers exploring contemporary life a bit more and hiding out in the nostalgic past a bit less. And if it’s not too much to ask, make it entertaining.

Thank God, then, for Ari Aster’s Eddington. Love it or hate it—and I haven’t met anyone yet who thought it was “just fine”— it feels alive, jagged, and essential, delivering everything you could ask for from the movies right now. For me, it was both the best film of the year so far and the best film about the last five years. It’s also been eerily prescient about this year; on the same day as Charlie Kirk;s assassination, OpenAI announced a $300 billion data center deal.

There’s so much going on in Eddington that it’s difficult to know where to start. The film is a neo-Western black comedy that evolves into a conspiracy thriller. The core of it revolves around the small-town conflict between a slick party-line mayor (Pedro Pascal) and an impotent libertarian sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) who decides to start his own campaign, railing against the town’s mask mandates and, later, the giant datacenter that a cabal of powerful corporate and political interests is trying to force into town.

The sheriff’s truck is a great visual gag and one of the stickers, “Don’t Let Eddington, NM Turn into Facebook, NM” captures a core theme. (A24)

Somehow Eddington tap dances on every single third-rail issue of the last five years—COVID, BLM, AI, QAnon—without standing still long enough to get zapped or bore you with preaching. To map Eddington onto the national political discourse, though, is to miss the point entirely, something more than a few critics seem to have done in condemning the film (and the filmmaker) for failing to deliver the catharsis they wanted. In its satire, the film doesn’t say the act of self-examination is bad. It asks why, so often, it’s performative. Why are the loudest declarations of moral clarity so often tied up with personal ambition, horniness, or tribal allegiance?

The film isn’t about a particular side being right or wrong, nor is it a centrist skewering of “both sides.” The deeper drama is about how the local reality of the town, Eddington, unravels when it comes into contact with larger outside forces. State politics, national media, and big tech interests algorithmically infect the characters until they’re each living in their own feverish superreality. By the end, neighborly disagreements mutate into something more violent and sinister. The vector through which all that happens isn’t airborne so much as digital, something the story and cinematography of the movie constantly reinforces.

Throughout the movie, Phoenix’s sheriff fails to communicate with his wife played by Emma Stone. This shot of his wife watching a Facebook video he posts, with her face neatly locked in a box next to his, might be the most intimate interaction they have. (A24)

Aster signals all of this from the very first frames. The film opens with a homeless man ranting what sounds like an incoherent thematic overture. On the way into town, he passes by a sign for the proposed datacenter site, stamped with the name of the tech company, Solidgoldmagikarp. That’s a winking reference to an anomalous text input that would make early versions of OpenAI’s GPT models go haywire, much like what happens to the denizens of Eddington in the movie.

It’s a shame that Eddington hasn’t done too well at the box office, but it’s not surprising. Even Aster fans might have been scared off after the three-hour neurotic odyssey of Beau is Afraid. Eddington isn’t an art house slog; it’s wickedly funny, but the story can meander. The subplot involving the sheriff’s wife falling under the spell of QAnon-esque cult leader played by Austin Butler feels at times too loosely threaded. When the second half of the movie unfolds like a fever dream, it mirrors how 2020 actually felt like at times, but the shift is jarring. There are sequences that feel and look like some of the more thrilling action set-pieces in No Country for Old Men, which is great, but it can leave you wondering if you’re still watching the same movie you were an hour ago.

Because the movie underperformed in theaters, the majority of people who watch Eddington now are going to stream it from the cloud: as a digital file living in datacenters, much like the one in the movie. But if you can get past the irony, I do hope people give it a chance. Television and film have been trying their best to memory-hole the pandemic, and it’s incredibly meaningful that Eddington is one of the first movies to seriously grapple with what life was like during those years. It’s also not even strictly a pandemic movie so much as it’s about how a once-in-a-lifetime crisis hit a divided nation addicted to our phones and sent our underlying social sickness into overdrive.

Pandemics fade but it’s much more uncertain how we work our way back from the centrifugal forces unraveling communities and families, diverting the basic human desire for connection away from the people around us and channeling it into parasocial relationships with strangers. Eddington is far too clever of a movie to begin offering solutions, maybe because it knows any attempt would sound embarrassing: If only we were able to put our phones down and just talk to one another… Instead it offers us an absurd and ambivalent coda, in which we witness a total humiliation that’s also an invitation for radical empathy. Eddington suggests we just might have to care for those around us who can’t help themselves, even if we think they don’t deserve it, even if it means getting into bed with people we find disgusting.

What to watch

• The New York Film Festival is going on right now. . It’s a great chance to watch some movies months before they release and there are always great Q&As with the directors and cast. You can impress your friends by being the first person in the group to predict what wins Best Picture. These are the movies I have my eye on this year.

• If you’ve ever wondered if Tom Ripley is a Frank Ocean fan, check out Lurker, the feature debut written and directed by my friend Alex Russell (Beef, The Bear). It’s a well-crafted exploration of both the parasocial aspects of fame and the shifting dynamics of male friendships in general. The songs are also really catchy. On Mubi next week.

• Oh, Hi! I saw this cute romcom-gone-wrong at Tribeca back in June and it was a pleasant surprise. Logan Lerman and Molly Gordon have great chemistry. Shoutout to the girl that all but asked out Lerman during the Q&A. Available to rent.

This concludes Stay Tuned by Teddy Kim.

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“This is surprisingly good writing - feel like you attack your shit with the same fanaticism and nuance I have for my own work so can appreciate.” - Lee, paid reader

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• People are going nuts in the Hamptons. As I was scrolling through the East Hampton Star’s latest police report this morning, I read about an anonymous customer calling the cops over pumpkin bread at Schiavoni’s that didn’t have a label indicating that it contained walnuts. I’d kill to see that person’s 911 call history.

• BREAKING:

  Cake Zine
  is pivoting from dessert for their next issue. Steak Zine.

• The White House is planning to unveil a direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical sales website, dubbed TrumpRx.

• Bon Appétit is hiring an Associate Director of Food Culture and News. Anyone know how it’s going over there?

• And The New York Times is hiring critics. Opinionated and thoughtful consumers of pop music, theater, and TV, let us know if you apply and get it. Or, more likely as I’ve heard from friends re: The Times, if you apply and get ghosted.

• It’s been very entertaining to see how founders join and use this platform (Substack). The newest on my radar is Taylor Frankel, co-founder of beauty brand Nudestix, who published her second newsletter yesterday about the brand’s acquisition. Earlier this month, BoF broke the news that the brand was being acquired by an “undisclosed US firm,” which I thought was odd. It made me wonder whether Nudestix or the firm – or both – weren’t excited about the result. I am excited to see what kind of newsletter Frankel will end up building. She says it will include “behind-the-scenes looks at the industry, reflections on entrepreneurship, and honest takes on where beauty is headed.” I welcome more honest takes and reflections from founders.

• And the award for the earliest holiday gift set announcement goes to… Glossier! The beauty brand introduced their holiday sets that come in brightly colored metal buckets and Altoids-esque tins, accompanied with photos of peppermint bark and Christmas cookies (all while it’s 80 degrees in New York). I think a lot about the role packaging plays in people’s lives today, ten years after Glossier’s pink plastic bubble wrap pouches became a must-have accessory. I had classmates in college use them for pencils in the classroom, and for their phones and dorm keys in the club at night. But nowadays, a branded tin or bucket or another hat or tote bag feels… excessive. We all have so much stuff. I’m curious if this is just me or if you feel the same.

  

• Two Starbucks locations that I rarely frequented closed over the weekend: West Street and 1st and 13th St. My favorite Starbucks in the city is Penn Station and my second favorite is the one in Cobble Hill. Per Business Insider, Starbucks is offering a severance package to managers at stores that are closing, with some eligible for up to 26 weeks of severance pay.

• Nadine from

  Nadine @ The Stanza
  had some excellent Fashion Week gossip in her latest letter. “It was great running into the familiar fashion industry faces at Prada yesterday evening, but what struck me was that fashion people were more excited about the openings of Soho House and Six Senses in Milan, rather than fashion week itself.”

• From the Feed Me Tip Line: “Rumor from my architecture friends that the NYC Louis Vuitton flagship is also Frank Gehry…that’s why it’s hidden under the very clever LV trunk scaffolding cover.” We reported yesterday that Gehry is doing the new LV flagship in Beverley Hills, so this checks out.

• I see zero flaws in how this Dunkin x Urban Outfitters collab was executed.

• Last night, while attempting to get a reservation at Chateau Royale for this weekend, I noticed this funny question in their FAQs. Also, if anyone can help me get a res there….

  

• The Polo Bar is opening in London in 2028. In Mayfair, naturally. “I have always been inspired by the special charm and heritage of the British way of living. There is an effortless grace that is rooted in centuries of tradition — a blend of timeless sophistication, understated ease and natural elegance,” Ralph Lauren said in a statement.

• “How do you take a phone call from Harvey Weinstein while he’s screaming at you, riding down the highway at 70 miles an hour?” Good question. For GQ’s forthcoming November issue, Feed Me’s

  Anna Silman
  went to the Diddy trial and spend the afternoon with Weinstein’s motorcycle-riding publicist for her 8,000 word GQ feature on the dark arts of celebrity crisis PR. It’s a revealing window into how crisis PRs have embraced influencers and social media to seed narratives online. “If you want to get an opinion out there quickly, whether it’s right or wrong, you use manipulative social media practices,” Weinstein’s PR Juda Engelmayer told her. “It starts going from manufactured digital stuff to real people actually repeating it. Then at some point, you don’t even know where the story came from.” She also spoke with the owner of a service called TrollToll, which promises to “put you in charge of your own internet Troll army,” and to crisis PR rep Mitchell Jackson, whose clients include Caroline Calloway, Adam Friedland and Candace Owens.

• Diamonds are the new frontier of influencer (and stylist) collabs. Forget smoothies and sneakers. Charlotte Groeneveld, a.k.a. @thefashionguitar, just released a new collaboration with online jewelry retailer At Present, which includes a $795 collar with pear-shaped diamonds dangling from it. Apparently the four necklaces in the capsule are designed to “evoke the expansive cliffs, rolling hills, and lush moss of the Dutch landscape that shaped her.” In June, Leandra Medine Cohen released a fine jewelry collection with Aflalo that included a $12,000 diamond ring. And last year,

  Juliana Salazar
  created a lab-grown diamond bracelet with Kimai.