In 1894, the French intellectual Émile Henry nursed two beers in a Parisian café as the orchestra played to a room of wealthy patrons. After paying his bill and getting up to leave, Henry removed a bomb from his overcoat pocket, lit the fuse with his cigar, and threw the bomb into the café, toward the orchestra, leaving five widows and ten orphans.
“This was the first modern terrorist act,” wrote the late historian John Merriman in his book The Dynamite Club. “It was the day that ordinary people became the targets of terrorists.”
Today, such terror has become frighteningly normal in America. In December, Luigi Mangione gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in cold blood as the husband and father of two walked down a street in Midtown Manhattan. In May, a gunman shot and killed a couple outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington. In June, two Democratic lawmakers and their spouses were shot in Minnesota (one of the couples was killed). In July, a gunman murdered four people at the National Football League headquarters. In August, a mass shooter fired 116 rounds through stained-glass windows during Mass at a Minneapolis Catholic church, killing two children and wounding more than a dozen others who were praying in the pews. And last week, a sniper assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk on a college campus in Utah.
Merriman asked of fin-de-siècle Paris: Why did these people do what they did? A better question might be: Under what conditions does a society like ours begin to break down, such that violence and murder are seen as legitimate solutions to political disagreement?
One answer was recently brought to the big screen by Ari Aster in his dark comedy “Eddington.” Set in fictional small-town New Mexico against a backdrop of COVID-19 lockdowns, Black Lives Matter protests, and the arrival of a vast new data center complex to the town, the film depicts asthmatic sheriff Joe Cross, played by Joaquin Phoenix, as he fights for the freedom to unmask against the public health dictates of the tech-friendly liberal mayor, Ted Garcia, played by Pedro Pascal.
Though it pokes fun at liberals, Eddington isn’t an anti-vax or anti-woke film. Cross comes down with COVID (we think) and becomes—spoiler alert—a deranged killer by tale’s end. Instead, Eddington mourns the collapse of community at the hands of technological encroachment—and its violent consequences. We are living in a new era of terror, the film seems to say, and it’s powered by our phones.
Eddington begins with a familiar scene. “There’s a way to treat people,” Cross admonishes after a grocery store employee pushes a maskless man out the door. “He can’t breathe in his mask. You want him to starve too?” As the sheriff walks through the store aisles without a mask, Mayor Garcia chides him in his best schoolteacher voice about the state’s mask mandate, which sends Cross into a speech about the need to pass a law at the local rather than state level—all while a silent woman with a pink iPhone films them. “You just gonna keep filming?” Cross taunts. “You gettin’ it?”
More than a libertarian defense of “freedom of choice,” Cross is making a stand for his idea of community based on neighborly kindness and individual autonomy, which he sees as under threat from the technocratic state. In fact, the incident in the store prompts him to challenge Garcia for mayor: “Is it worth it to combat a virus that isn’t even here at the cost of being at war with your neighbors and your family?” he says into his phone’s selfie camera before posting the announcement video to Facebook.
Though it doesn’t get a credit at the end, the iPhone plays a starring role in Eddington. It’s the physical portal through which the characters slice and dice their shared reality, eviscerating whatever semblance of rural community remains in the small town. A phone buzz hits like a jumpscare as Cross and other characters anxiously turn, at various points in the film, to their artificial lives on Facebook and Instagram. Vaccine skepticism turns into theories of demonic pedophile rings. The faraway police killing of a black man brings Black Lives Matter protests, a teenager lecturing his family on “dismantling whiteness,” and eventually (what appears to be) a militarized Antifa squad to Eddington, a town where ironically the only black man seems to be the sheriff’s deputy.
“It’s about a bunch of people living in different realities who are unreachable to each other,” writer-director Ari Aster told NPR. “It’s about a community that is really not a community.”
Sheriff Cross’s quest for community may have found sympathy among the anarchist revolutionaries of 19th-century France. “To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed … indoctrinated, preached at,” wrote the theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Anarchists rebelled against the modern bureaucratic nation state as the industrial revolution hollowed out the countryside and swelled cities with the unemployed. Many longed for the cooperation and liberty of primitive village life.
But rather than reform or control the state through “bourgeois” elections or socialist revolution, anarchists—then as today—sought to eradicate it entirely through disorder that they hoped would inspire the masses. As the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin put it, destruction became “a creative passion.” This justified violence, first against the government, and then, for the most radical, against the social order itself.
The social order that frames Eddington’s terror is the fourth industrial revolution—the digitization of everyday life. The film is a Western where there is no more land for capitalists or cowboys to go. The final frontier is the technology that colonizes our minds. In the face of pandemic fear and isolation, social media brings comfort. It also leads us down psychic rabbit holes. Cross lives in a secluded one-story house with his Facebook conspiracy-addled mother-in-law and his melancholic wife, played by Emma Stone, who eventually takes off with a radical cult leader.
When politics feels this personal, social media can make it killer. Only after his wife posts a Facebook video distancing herself from Cross’s mayoral campaign (he claimed Garcia once raped her; she denies this) does he descend into his violent rampage. The video of his wife—broadcast on his phone, and played prominently on a TV screen at the mayor’s birthday party—creates a digital cage from which the only escape seems to be a violent break.
It is, of course, naive to reduce modern American terror to either the ideology of nihilism or a rejection of technology. Still, terrorism is the symptom of a society that deprives people of a role and identity. This is not to justify mass shootings or anything of the sort. It’s simply to show the extremes that human beings are capable of when liberty and community are not protected.
Shortly after I wrote this essay, a sniper shot conservative activist Charlie Kirk in the neck, leaving him to bleed out on a college campus in Utah—an image that will haunt his wife and two young children forever. We do not yet know the motives of the murderer, yet agitators and opportunists are already using Kirk’s death to vilify their political opponents. In what should have been a unifying moment for America, condemning political violence across the spectrum, Donald Trump vowed to crack down on the “radical left,” leading far-right influencers to call for Democratic politicians to be locked up. The far left, meanwhile, celebrated en masse, leading numerous social media platforms like Bluesky to issue warnings.
It’s only our experience of being constantly online that could cause people to become so deranged. It is as if Eddington prophesied how modern America would react to this tragedy. Left-wing influencer Hasan Piker even posted a photo of the private jet that, in the film, brought the Antifa-esque men in black to Eddington, insinuating that the killing was an inside job. Life imitates art, and it is disgusting.
“When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence, that is when civil war happens,” Kirk once said. Eddington portrays what that bloody terror looks like—a country where there is no trust, where disagreements are viewed as existential, where people are willing to commit acts of terrorism to get what they want because they don’t see their political opponents as human. Kirk’s assassination is just the most recent reminder that we’re creeping towards that world with every passing day.
Ethan Dodd is a writer interested in populism, economics, jazz, and film. Follow him on X at @ethandasaxman.
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