“Are you on Team Joe or Team Ted?” asked the person at the swag table after the Truth or Consequences premier screening of the movie, Eddington on July 10, 2025. 
I picked a “Ted Garcia for Mayor” button. Given the choice, I’d have voted for him over Sheriff Joe Cross, but I was really on a third team.
If this movie were a mystery, the person solving it would have been the Pueblo cop who wasn’t minding his own business, who was encroaching on the sheriff’s territory because a crime took place on the border between Sevilla County and San Lupe Pueblo. (Both fictitious locations, FYI.) He would have been the protagonist. I was rooting for him as the person figuring it out, observing who is acting suspiciously, and what circumstances suggest that people aren’t telling the truth, but the story is not told as a mystery. He’s actually part of the Western movie tradition of conflict with Native Americans. He’s trouble for the sheriff.
Eddington is a modern dystopian Western. Or maybe an anti-Western, turning the genre on its head. It’s primarily in the points of view of the sheriff and the mayor, political rivals who have different visions for the town and its future, and they disagree about how to cope with COVID. The mayor is enforcing the strict approach to COVID taken in New Mexico in the spring of 2020: mask mandates, no large gatherings, keeping your six-foot distance, and limiting the number of customers inside stores at one time. However, the sheriff has asthma and hates wearing a mask. The trouble begins in T or C’s real grocery store, Bullock’s. Sheriff Joe Cross defies the mask mandate on behalf of an elderly man who says he can’t breathe in a mask. Cross goes into the store unmasked and buys groceries for the guy. The sheriff can get away with it. He hands him the groceries and doesn’t ask him to repay, making him both a law breaker and a compassionate guy.
When you think of the sheriff in a western he’s usually a tough guy. Sometimes corrupt, sometimes heroic, but tough. This sheriff is too, in some ways, but unlike the stereotypical version of the role, he wears glasses, needs to carry his inhaler around, and has problems in his marriage. Joaquin Phoenix is brilliant as Sheriff Joe Cross. (Perhaps getting out and about in T or C as much as he did helped him in his portrayal of the sheriff in a small New Mexico town.) Pedro Pascal’s portrayal of Mayor Ted Garcia is more restrained and equally powerful. Emma Stone plays the fragile and damaged Lou Cross, the sheriff’s wife, a new take on the Western trope of the woman with a past. Her conspiracy theorist mother is a 21st century addition to the genre cast of characters. The self-healing pseudo guru Lou and her mother follow is a new variation on the itinerant preacher and/or snake oil huckster of the old West.
Eddington also presents 21st century takes on the genre tropes of the bar fight, the stand-off, the big shootout, and the evil outsiders coming to town.
The conspiracy theory aspect of the pandemic is portrayed quite realistically, and the presence of phone and laptop screens gets appropriately oppressive. Toward the end, one of the secondary characters, a teenage boy, changes radically. His transformation is shown on a phone screen, as if the person he becomes exists only as seen through this medium.
One of the film’s themes is “you’re being manipulated.” Notably, Joe Cross can’t spell it correctly; his campaign signs say “your being manipulated.”
Ari Aster, the director, was at the El Cortez theater to speak to the crew, who made up half the audience, about how wonderful they’d been to work with, and to tell the townspeople present how much he loved working in T or C. He seemed humble and not terribly comfortable speaking in public. I didn’t get a chance to talk with him after the movie, though some friends did. I would have liked to ask him how much the town influenced the final script. Did he see our water tower with Apaches on horseback painted on it and then decide that a scene on that hill would be perfect? I also wonder if Aster was inspired by our museum. When the sheriff crashes his way through it in extreme duress in the middle of the night, he’s scrambling through exhibits of the history of this area and coming out the actual exit, which is an old miner’s cabin. Rushing through the history of the West and coming out the other side.
Other strengths of the movie are the complexities of relationships, the absurdities of the political campaigns, the corruption, the deception, and the COVID realism. (I don’t know that this detail even shows in the movie, but they had signs on Bullock’s announcing toilet paper back in stock, with limit of a certain number per customer.)
Garcia’s bar, created for the movie in an old antique store long out of business, reopened for us after the screening, serving non-alcoholic drinks. There was a drone show out over the river, hundreds of drones lighting up with the logo of the production company A24, the name of the big bad tech company in the movie, and a 3D New Mexico Zia symbol accompanying the words Eddington, New Mexico. The town we will perhaps always be, at some level. Our Geronimo Springs Museum now has an Eddington Room, a permanent exhibit. I recommend the movie. It’s thought-provoking. Ambiguous. Ambitious. And it’s ours.
*****
For a look at the town when it was a film set, see my post from last year, None of These Places Are Real.
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