Ari Aster’s Eddington, 2025 unfolds less as a conventional narrative than as a sustained mood: tense, uncanny, and uncomfortable. Set in a small New Mexico town still dealing with the Covid pandemic, the film captures a society drifting in and out of coherence, where truth is no longer a shared foundation but a contested terrain. What Aster has crafted is, ostensibly, a black comedy — yet the laughter it provokes is nervous, almost involuntary, emerging from the gaps between absurdity and dread.
At the film’s heart is Joaquin Phoenix (Joe Cross) and his long time personal dispute with the town’s mayor played by Pedro Pascal (Ted Garcia) who is seeking reelection. Phoenix delivers a performance of remarkable fragility as his character is not a grandly tragic figure but an ordinary man, slowly unravelling under the weight of a reality too fractured to contain. His descent is at once personal and political, a mirror of a society in which conspiracy and mistrust seep into every interaction.
Amélie Hoeferle gives stirring performance as a young political radical whose idealism is both magnetic and troubling. She becomes one of the film’s pivot characters — a figure through whom we are confronted with questions of agency, resistance, and the blurred lines between radical truth-telling and reckless provocation.
Threaded through this human drama is a more sinister force: a covert team, funded by a Big Tech conglomerate, tasked with destabilising local resistance to the construction of a data centre. Aster presents this not as speculative dystopia but as a logical extension of present realities.
The imagery is relentless as the community quietly erodes into civic mistrust, underpinned by social media/misinformation, conspiracy theorists, shape shifting politicians and their corporate pay masters.
The film’s progression is one of steady accretion. Aster layers unease upon unease, withholding release until the final act, when tension gives way to outright spectacle. The climax, a violent eruption Rambo style, risks excess, but it also feels earned: a grotesque, almost satirical catharsis, underscoring the absurdity of a world in which paranoia itself has become a governing logic.
Eddington 2025 is, in the end, less about plot than about atmosphere, less about answers than about the sensation of disorientation in an age where truth is pliable and reality negotiable. It is an unsettling work, but also a vital one: a mirror held up to a moment in history where the boundaries between comedy, horror, truth and fiction have all but collapsed. Go watch.
“The Earth Died Screaming” opens Bone Machine (1992), an album that marked a new rawness in Waits’ career. While his earlier work balanced Beat-poet jazz swagger with blues and balladry, Bone Machine plunged fully into the apocalyptic and the grotesque. Recorded with clattering percussion, improvised junkyard instruments, and distorted vocals, it created a sonic world of rust, bone, and ruin.
This track sets the tone immediately: a macabre march that fuses Biblical doom, carnival grotesquerie, and the sense of a post-industrial wasteland. Released at the end of the Cold War, in a world still haunted by nuclear fears, environmental collapse, and the Gulf War, the song channels late 20th-century anxieties into a surreal end-times vision.
The lyrics string together a vision of humanity’s end in grotesque tableaux: kings and beggars alike swallowed up, lovers separated, death rendered as both terrifying and absurd. Waits doesn’t deliver this as solemn prophecy but as a dark carnival barker, laughing at the futility of human ambition.
What makes it powerful is how it refuses redemption. Unlike apocalyptic art that points to renewal or salvation, this track leaves us in the rubble. The earth doesn’t fade or fall silent — it screams, suggesting not peace but pain, rage, and unfinished business.
At its core, “The Earth Died Screaming” is a parable about the inevitability of decay. Waits sketches a vision of the apocalypse where all hierarchies collapse: presidents, beggars, thieves, lovers, and clowns all meet the same fate. It’s a leveller’s song, where death refuses to discriminate.
But there’s also satire here. The grotesque imagery suggests that humanity’s self-destruction is a carnival act, a spectacle. In other words, we’ve turned the end of the world into theatre. The grotesque laughter in the song mirrors our own absurdity in ignoring environmental collapse, endless war, and greed while we march toward ruin.
Spiritually, the track feels Old Testament — fire-and-brimstone, prophetic wrath. Yet it never gives us the consolation of a divine order behind it. Instead, it’s chaos. Waits replaces religious hope with a grim acceptance of entropy and absurdity.
The Moco Museum in London assembles an enviable roster of late-20th-century cultural heavyweights: Banksy, Warhol, Emin, Basquiat, Haring, etc.
On paper, such a line-up ought to radiate urgency, wit, and the frisson of artistic risk. In situ, however, the experience is oddly inert — less a gathering of vital provocateurs than a tableau of hustlers, lingering on a street corner long after their work has been codified, packaged, and sold.
This inertia is not rooted in the intrinsic quality of the works, or indeed the artist themselves, but within Moco’s tightly curated, boutique-style environment, the edge is blunted. Warhol’s prints, originally a calculated affront to distinctions between art and commerce, now appear as well-worn brand assets, their iconography as familiar — and as unthreatening — as the consumer products they once critiqued.
Similarly, Tracey Emin’s confessional works, initially brimming with the intensity of public vulnerability in this setting feel as a predictable as a drunk uncle retelling stories at a family gathering. Basquiat’s canvases, infused with graffiti influences and a sense of urban immediacy, are diminished to mere high-value décor, their socio-political significance overshadowed by the mitigating effects of wall text and carefully orchestrated lighting.
Banksy’s inclusion underscores the paradox. His practice depends upon context — the unmediated encounter on a city street, the intervention into public space — to function as political commentary. Here they are divorced from site and circumstance, the work shifts register: from subversive gesture to collectible commodity. The transaction becomes aestheticised rebellion, stripped of consequence.
The result is a museum experience that frames radicalism within a safe, consumable format. It invites visitors to encounter these figures not as insurgents within the cultural field, but as fixed points in a canon that has already been stabilised for mass circulation. The presentation favours recognisability over confrontation, producing an environment in which dissent has been fully domesticated.
What emerges is a broader institutional question: can works born of defiance retain their potency within the commercial and museological apparatus that ultimately validates them? Moco’s exhibition suggests that, once integrated into the art-market economy, even the most oppositional practices risk becoming part of the very system they once sought to disrupt.
If Moco’s upper floors feel like a nostalgic playlist on shuffle, the basement is a live wire. Go for that head to the basement for the Marina Abramović collection. Abramović’s work resists embalming because it was never about static images or neat objects. It is about endurance, presence, and the unmediated exchange between artist and audience. Even when translated into photographs, videos, and documentation, her performances retain a charge — the sense that something visceral, uncomfortable, and unpredictable once took place. The gaze still meets you. The tension still hums in the air. You can’t domesticate the feeling of holding another person’s gaze for minutes at a time. There is no easy reproduction, no endlessly shareable clip that captures the weight of the moment.
Standard tickets £25 with concessions for students, over 65s, etc.
Irregular Frequencies 