“Eddington” and the Death of Civility

“Eddington” and the Death of Civility
by Randall Bock at Brownstone Institute

On the recommendation of Jeffrey Tucker at Brownstone.org, I saw Eddington at a local ‘indie’ theater. Eddington is the first film (of those I’ve seen) that truly dares to portray the dystopia of masking and lockdowns – not as backdrop, but as the original fracture in the civil body, the point where civilization begins to unspool.

At the risk of making Dr. Fauci’s ego (unwarrantedly) even larger, his is the“unseen hand” of Eddington: “deus ex machina”– but inverted: initial harbinger of ill; no ultimate salvation.

At the center is Sheriff Joe Cross, a quiet man of decency (a man of the cross?) trying to hold a fraying town together. He resists mandates that make no sense – masking outdoors in a rural county with no cases – issued not by reasoned authority, but remotely via gubernatorial diktat. Sheriff Cross stands for sanity, for context, for community – but that isn’t enough in a 2020 gone wild.

Before the events’ dramatic crucible, he’s not an ideologue; rather, simply trying to keep the peace– but peace is both unkept and unkempt under the mass absurdities of Covid mandates for the masses, which turn neighbor against neighbor, empowering the petty tyrannies of petty bureaucrats. Then, a force majeure in George Floyd- (copycat) riots implodes hierarchical-, and explodes physical- edifices. The BLM industrial grievance complex – funded by some diabolus ex machina – complete with jets, glossy placards, and revolutionary theater’s fiery props and pops – malingers and foments. Outside slogans flood this town (a thousand miles from the fallen fentanyl felon’s misfortune). Struggle sessions begin.

Kids recite Maoist self-flagellatory oaths of racist antiracism (sic). A Black officer, a lifelong member of the community, is suddenly forced to “choose a side.” It’s cultural imperialism by proxy.

Cross’s own home is barren. He and his wife are childless, adrift. She’s emotionally shuttered, trapped in a private trauma that’s never fully revealed – some implication of abuse or false memory, murky and unresolved, the kind of victimhood that now confers status in a culture drunk on grievance. Rather than heal, she retreats – falling into the orbit of a sleazy televangelist whose blend of charisma, manipulation, and “spiritual warfare” offers her a false exit. She runs off with him, vanishing mid-film, ultimately (and found out only on video-feed) pregnant.

Cross doesn’t rage (at first…but wait). Smartphones play an omnipresently oracular role – and her face is on his: a sign of love. He simply absorbs her physical absence much as he did her emotional one – another wound, another insult.

But then the film pivots. Joe Cross, man of principle, [hugely provoked] breaks. His humbling, embarrassment, and grief turn to fixation: not of saving the town, but avenging personal betrayals suffered. He compromises himself; covers up; manipulates. He begins to lose what he once stood for, and in doing so, he fractures his own department. [While editing, the ironic realization occurs: Cross is ‘doppelgänging’ up on Dr. Fauci, who did much the same, only magnified worldwide.] The sheriff’s office – once the last functioning pillar of local authority – becomes a house divided.

Eddington doesn’t give us clean villains or heroes; but something worse: a world where good men are corrupted not by ambition, but by exhaustion, betrayal, and the slow evaporation of meaning. Joe Cross doesn’t sell out per se {et tu, Fauci}, but he does become the kind of man he once had tried to stop.

In its final act – without giving too much away – the film descends into a chaotic, hellish unraveling. Violence erupts. Messaging overtakes meaning. Competing outside factions, each claiming moral supremacy, tear the town apart. Cross is pursued, hunted, undone. And no one – not even the man I chatted with after the film – could quite explain what he had just seen. But that’s the point.

This isn’t just about Eddington. It’s about all of us. When civility disappears, when God is forgotten, when personal morality gives way to mass messaging and digital spectacle – along with solipsistic self-victimhood worship, we lose not just our mooring, but then our communities. When we lose agency, we become actors in someone else’s script; speaking slogans not our own; building someone else’s babbling to tower over you. That tower of babble infallibly fails and falls.

Republished from the author’s Substack

“Eddington” and the Death of Civility
by Randall Bock at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society