By Yulia Tulegenova
So, it’s one of those funny coincidences. The kind that doesn’t feel like a coincidence at all. Two of the most interesting filmmakers in America, Ari Aster and Paul Thomas Anderson, both release major films within weeks of each other. And both films, in their own strange, roundabout ways, are about the exact same thing: a country having a complete nervous breakdown.
One is a western, the other is an action film. One is set in the very specific, politically charged pressure cooker of May 2020, the other feels like it’s floating in some timeless, paranoid version of California. But you watch them back-to-back, and you get the distinct feeling you’re listening to two different doctors offering a diagnosis for the same sick patient.
Let’s start with Aster. His film, Eddington, is the more obvious one. The one that wears its anxieties right on its sleeve. A small town in New Mexico, simmering with resentment. A Democrat mayor, played by Pedro Pascal, trying to enforce a lockdown. A conservative sheriff, Joaquin Phoenix, who sees it all as a personal affront and a betrayal of some vague, unspoken code.
And then, predictably, all hell breaks loose.
At first, you think you know where this is going. It’s a satire on the political polarisation of America. Red vs. Blue in a dusty little town. But Aster isn’t really interested in that. He’s a horror director, remember? He’s not interested in political debate. He’s interested in decay. In the moment something curdles and goes wrong. And in Eddington, the whole damn country seems to have curdled. The pandemic, the masks, the politics - they aren’t the cause of the madness. They’re just the excuse. The final little push that sends everyone tumbling into the abyss.
It’s a bleak film. And a funny one, in that grim, Coen brothers kind of way where you’re laughing at the sheer, awful absurdity of it all. It’s like Fargo, but if everyone in it had lost their minds on social media first. Aster seems to be saying that the problem isn’t the politics. The problem is that we’ve all gone slightly insane. That the symbols and slogans we throw at each other have become a kind of curse, summoning up real-world violence. It’s a horror film disguised as a western.
But is it saying anything new? I’m not so sure. That America is a madhouse? We read that in the papers every morning. It’s a powerful, brilliantly made film, but it feels like a scream of despair. An exquisitely crafted shrug.
And then there’s Paul Thomas Anderson.
His film, One Battle After Another, has a plot that is, on the surface, even more ridiculous. Leonardo DiCaprio is an ageing, paranoid, ex-left-wing radical. He’s been hiding out, raising his daughter. But now her biological father, a completely unhinged neo-Nazi colonel played by Sean Penn, has shown up and wants to kill her to erase his past so he can join some secret society of fascists.
It sounds like a pulp thriller from the 70s. And it kind of is. But this is PTA. Nothing is ever just what it seems.
Where Aster’s film is a snapshot of a country breaking in a specific moment, Anderson’s seems to be saying that the country was broken from the very start. The rot, the violence, the racism - it’s not a new disease. It’s a congenital condition. It’s baked in. The whole history of America, he seems to suggest, is just one long, chaotic, and often very stupid battle.
It’s a much warmer film than Aster’s, which is a strange thing to say about a movie featuring a murderous neo-Nazi. But it has that late-PTA shaggy-dog quality. That sense of affection for its flawed, rambling characters. It’s been compared to The Big Lebowski, and you can see why. DiCaprio’s character is another man out of time, another relic of a failed revolution, just trying to get by while the world goes crazy around him.
The whole thing is like trying to fix a knackered old car that’s been passed down through a dysfunctional family for generations. Everyone’s been tinkering with it, bodging repairs, using the wrong parts. Now, the engine is screaming, smoke is pouring out from under the bonnet, and the wheels are about to fall off. Aster’s film is about the moment of the final, catastrophic breakdown on the motorway. Anderson’s film is about the entire, long, sad history of all the bad repairs that led to this point.
And both directors, interestingly, have reached for the same tool to deal with this: black comedy. Why? Is it because the situation is now so absurd that a straight-faced, serious political drama would just feel ridiculous?
I remember in the 90s, the big American political films felt so… earnest. Oliver Stone banging you over the head with his point. These films feel different. More exhausted. More cynical. They feel like the only sane response to an insane world is a kind of gallows humour. They’re laughing in the dark.
So what are we supposed to take away from all this? Two of America’s best filmmakers have looked at their country and have produced, respectively, a horror film about a nation’s sudden psychotic break, and a tragicomic action movie about its long, slow, inevitable decline. It’s not exactly a rosy picture.
Neither film offers any answers. They don’t have a grand political statement to make. They’re just holding up a cracked mirror. One is showing us the terrifying, frantic present. The other is showing us the long, messy, and often violent history that got us here.
It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Are these films a warning? Or are they an obituary? Are they a desperate attempt to make sense of the chaos, or just a final, weary admission that none of it makes any sense at all? I’m not sure they even know. They’re just showing us the fever dream. And leaving us to figure out if we’ll ever wake up.
