‘Eddington’ is full of conspiracy theories but it’s not about Jews. Or is it?
Ari Aster’s pandemic Western explores a small town that is losing its mind in misinformation
Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal face off in a new Western, Eddington, set in a fictional New Mexico town. Photo by A24
By Nora Berman July 31, 2025
Editor’s note: This story includes spoilers for the film Eddington.
There are no Jews in Eddington, the fictional small town in New Mexico and the namesake of Ari Aster’s latest film — a violent, rollicking Western set in May 2020.
There are, however, conspiracy theories. Tons of them. Lab leaks, Antifa, the deep state, Q-Anon — the citizens of Eddington are swimming in paranoia, and the common thread that connects all of their theories is antisemitic conspiracy.
To be clear, Eddington, written and directed by Aster, who is Jewish, is not an antisemitic film, and none of its characters explicitly express a hatred of Jews. It is a masterful satire about what happens when technology exploits the already frayed civic bonds of a community besieged by the pandemic, trauma and grief. But the town of Eddington is awash in conspiracy theories that draw upon antisemitic tropes.
The first half of the film lives queasily in the early days of the pandemic — a time most of us would prefer to forget. Thousands of people were dying from COVID-19, there were no vaccines available and Americans were in the streets protesting police brutality after the murder of George Floyd.
Joe Cross, played by Joaquin Phoenix, is the asthmatic and beleaguered sheriff of Eddington, who is at odds with the town’s liberal mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), over coronavirus protocols and his plan to bring a mysterious data center to the town. Ted is wealthy, woke and has a history with Joe’s wife, Louise (Emma Stone).
Joe is annoyed that the streets are empty and thinks wearing a mask makes it hard for him to breathe. There aren’t even any COVID-19 cases in Eddington, he fumes. After he refuses to wear a mask in a grocery store, defying Ted and local mask ordinances, Joe decides to run for mayor, igniting a confrontation that will engulf the town and destroy him.
Each character in the film is terminally online, unable to tear their eyes away from the algorithms that continue to feed more and more extreme ideas into their feeds. Louise is weak and distant, still coping with an unnamed childhood trauma and trying to deal with her conspiracy theory-obsessed mother, Dawn, who has been living on their couch. Louise makes creepy dolls that she sells online, and quickly falls under the sway of a charismatic internet preacher/wellness influencer/cult leader named Vernon Jefferson Peak (a perfect Austin Butler). A sheriff’s deputy who previously “didn’t see race” starts mainlining Fox News and conservative influencers, and becomes convinced that Black Lives Matter is a terrorist group coming to take over Eddington. A horny, wannabe-socially conscious teenager begins a deep dive into anti-racist ideology online in order to “devalue his own Whiteness” and get laid with the cute BLM protest leader.
The first reference to Jewishness comes from Vernon, who delivers a convoluted monologue about gematria, the Kabbalistic practice of assigning numbers to Hebrew letters. He breathlessly goes from link to link — “The government said 56% of you will get the virus, and Tom Cruise is the 56th person to get the virus, and the Wuhan Lab where the virus was created was established in 1956…” and caps it all off by describing this logic as “gematria, the ancient practice of coding numbers into words,” which, in his characterization, explains why COVID-19 isn’t real.
At another point in the film, a Twitter post alleges “Soros-funded Antifa gangs” are laying siege to American cities. But for the most part, the markers of antisemitic conspiracy are far more subtle.
The logo of a fist encircling a globe appears on the private plane of a secretive Antifa strike force, deeply reminiscent of early-20th-century antisemitic cartoons in which a Jewish hand masters and manipulates the world. In his marketing, the Christian cult influencer Vernon uses the image of a reptile with its fangs bared, which looks remarkably similar to the Lizard People, a conspiracy theory involving a race of reptilian humanoids that drink blood and whose members include most heads of state and the Rothschild family.
Most disturbing is the obsession many characters have with pedophilia and rooting out a deep state cabal of child predators, recalling the far-right antisemitic trope of Jewish pedophile rings trafficking Christian children, which is also a foundational tenet of Q-Anon.
As the paranoia and social unrest intensified for the characters in Eddington, I was reminded of the Todd Haynes film Safe, where the main character, Carol, retreats from society, convinced that she is suffering from an invisible illness that no one else can see. Nothing is visibly wrong with her, but her terror and paranoia grow. In Eddington, everyone is clearly suffering, and there might actually be a secretive, well-funded Antifa militia coming to kill them all, but no one can really see or understand the source of their fear. All they know is that a shadowy, nefarious other is in control, and often in conspiracies, that malignant force turns out to be the Jews.
Despite the fact that there are no openly Jewish characters in Eddington, I couldn’t help having the icky feeling that conspiracy theory itself had become a signifier of Jewishness as clearly as gefilte fish, a mezuzah or a character singing tunes from Fiddler on the Roof. As I watched the film, I jotted in my notebook: “Did the antisemites win because I am seeing conspiracy as inherently Jewish?”
Aster told Marc Maron in an interview that when he began writing the script for Eddington in 2020, he created multiple Twitter accounts and deliberately began following various conspiracy theory subcultures online and taking screenshots of posts. When he felt that he’d reached the apex of extremist rhetoric that his feed was showing him, he’d attempt to get out and follow new accounts in the hope that the algorithm would help turn him away from conspiracy theorists. It never worked. “Where’d you end up?” Maron asked him. “You know, neo-Nazis,” Aster replied.
Similarly, while watching Eddington, you can’t help but be immersed in antisemitic conspiracy theories. As painfully accurate as the signifiers of the early pandemic are — the face shields, the social distancing signs, the endless Purell — I was more disturbed by how much more conspiratorial our culture has become since 2020. The seeds of antisemitic conspiracy that were nurtured during the pandemic have, thanks to the algorithms and people like Elon Musk, blossomed into full ideologies with powerful believers who hold governmental positions. In some ways, I wish Aster had called out the antisemitic foundations behind his characters’ conspiracies more clearly. On the other hand, maybe he didn’t have to.
