Day: September 5, 2025

Throughout his nascent film career, director Ari Aster has already shown he’s a one-trick pony—but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. 

Aster’s 2018 debut, Hereditary, instantly made him the golden boy of the horror genre, depicting an affluent family terrorized by supernatural forces within their own bloodline that they try and fail to repress. His 2019 follow-up, Midsommar, shows a grief-stricken American woman at a Swedish folk festival who eventually comes to revel in the pagan sacrifice of her city-slick friends. The long-awaited Beau Is Afraid (2023) departed from the traditional horror vein, but nevertheless follows a man wading through psychological terrors to reach his haughty mother’s funeral, only to discover that everything he believed about his family life was a lie. 

In each case, we see a fairly mundane and rational world collapsing in on itself, destroying the personal identities of those who cling to what they think they know as the surreal comes to capture and define their world. Aster is obsessed, almost pathologically so, with the dissection of pretenses; once nudged by shock or trauma, the patina of genteel respectability gives way to reveal much darker truths. So it was natural his fourth film should focus on the Covid-19 pandemic—a surreal phenomenon we would hardly believe happened except for the fact that we all lived through it. And like all of Aster’s protagonists, we’re now stuck living in the identity crash it manifested. 

Aster’s Eddington is the first real Covid movie, in that it uses the pandemic not merely as a background plot device, but as the basis of a thematic exploration of human nature. Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal, basically playing himself) is the sleazy liberal mayor of the small titular town in New Mexico. Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) is his adversary and the protagonist of the story, a hot-headed, somewhat unsophisticated county sheriff who decides to launch his own mayoral bid. They first clash in May 2020 over—what else?—wearing masks in the supermarket. 

Garcia is a phony, obviously. He maintains his own moral superiority even as that means having an unmasked old man dragged out of the supermarket. He deflects scrutiny with pandering condescension, appealing to mandates above his pay grade while bludgeoning opponents with platitudes about “safety” and “community”—indignities we all had to suffer through. Of course, Garcia flouts his own mandates and happily pulls down his mask when he’s away from the spotlight; his feigned empathy is mere pretense, a weapon of control to maintain incumbency. 

Aster seems to have a little more belief in Cross’s sincerity. He stutters through Facebook live streams trying to explain how he’s not the bad guy, how he actually believes he’s a “better person” than Garcia, how the mandates are both illegal and morally wrong, and “not worth” the price of savagely dividing the small community. The viewer is inclined to believe him; while Garcia simply wants to look like he cares, Cross wants the town to know he cares. His flustered dialogue captures how we all felt impotently trying to explain the contradictions of the Covid era to friends and family who took the word of MSNBC as gospel. You might be right, but it’s not so easy to hold your ground when the other side’s story is so emotionally simple—and backed up by hefty institutional weight.

Cross might actually be a better person than Garcia, whose only real goal is selling out the town to build a nebulous data center. But principles, even core, self-defining ones, crumble under consistent nudging, and Aster perfectly captures the feeling of personal suffocation that so many experienced within the collective trauma of Covid. 

Cross is a tough guy, sure, but he also proves remarkably impotent. He can’t win widespread support from the townspeople, who mostly go along to get along. He can’t stop the local teens from taking out their lockdown frustration in BLM protests, and is even less effective at stemming the violent riots that result. He can’t keep his wife (Emma Stone, as a frizzy-haired MAHA hippie) from running off with a QAnon-style guru (Austin Butler, raving wildly about child sex cults). He can’t even get Garcia to turn the music down at a campaign event that’s in clear violation of his own mandates. Each character’s behavior is driven by a fragmented sense of reality—and a once-clear-eyed Cross finally snaps. 

A boilerplate story of small-town Covid drama explodes with a murder plot, out-of-town paramilitary agitators, and good old-fashioned desert shootouts, blurring the genre lines, as Aster so aptly does, between horror, farce, and a very modern Western. We’re shown masked agitators flying in on a luxurious private plane, guns and lefty signage in tow, to take advantage of the surreal chaos in Eddington. But do we really know whose side they’re on—who’s funding them, to what end? Maybe it really is a Leftist plot, or maybe it’s the Right or some nebulous business or foreign interests. All these possibilities seem open, but while truth remains elusive, the blood in the street is real. 

There’s no real political message to the film, no cryptic meaning. Aster isn’t a converted right-winger seeking atonement, as some of his dumber leftist critics have claimed. Neither is he a true believer in the establishment’s official narrative, despite some equally tiresome conservative gripes over equivocation between fringe QAnon conspiracies and whole-of-government Covid abuses. 

Say what you want about the Covid era—who was right, who was wrong—but the fact remains that it was wholly surreal. Who could imagine global lockdowns, mass riots, and friends and family turning on each other—until we all aided and abetted it happening? Admittedly, I was skeptical heading into Eddington. Aster’s ire towards pretense has previously been reserved mostly for the comfortably bourgeois sensibilities that our cultural arbiters, since at least Bergman, love to hate. But the film goes beyond this narrow, ideological focus; despite the politically charged backdrop, Eddington is not a political film at all, but a deep dive into the human condition. 

In-group/out-group conflicts have always existed, no matter the contemporary circumstances. “Who says organization, says oligarchy,” wrote German-Italian sociologist Robert Michel at the turn of the twentieth century, one of the earlier and more accurate prognosticators of what the age of nascent mass democracy would soon become. Any group big enough to need a leader will end up ruled by one. The very act of organizing demands a hierarchy, and with it comes a ruling class whose first priority is no longer the mission, but its own survival. Control of resources, messaging, and process hardens into self-preservation; dissent is brushed aside with the same high-handed methods the rulers once condemned when they were clawing from below. Eddington plays out with the same cruel precision. (Caution: mild spoilers ahead). Cross may start as the principled underdog, but once the smoke clears and he’s seated in Garcia’s chair, he wields the same tools of power, smoothes over the same hypocrisies, and even greenlights the very data center that he once denounced.

Theorists dwell on the political fallout, but it’s the artist who sees the human toll. 

Eddington treats Covid as a breakdown of reality itself, fomented and then once again solidified by the breakdown of our own identities. The political cycle churns on endlessly, one group on top, then the next, and the next. But it’s humans within each cycle who inevitably get ruined. The believers in the True and the Good thrive within their own cohesive paradigm as Garcia does at first, but as that paradigm begins to fall away, it’s adapt or die. What else is there to do but jockey for a new identity within some new paradigm? 

Technology only potentiates the problem, as Aster so aptly captures. Each character doomscrolls endlessly, bouncing between protest footage, conspiracy live streams, and fawning local news profiles, all narrating the same events with corresponding sets of “undeniable” facts. With constant self-selected immersion, this manifests in a boilerplate understanding of the world around them, as they come to mirror the algorithm in their own thoughts and behaviors. Of course, The Science is good and true—or—of course, Antifa is behind every sinister plot. How could it be any other way? The algorithm doesn’t reflect reality but redefines it, changing how we interact with the world around us, which in turn redefines our own self-conception. Garcia’s nebulous data center becomes an ominous metaphor for the algorithmic sense of human interaction that dominated pandemic life. It’s as surreal as the demons of Hereditary or the cultic worship of Midsommar, but look around you—and it’s undeniably real. 

The pre-Covid world of genteel liberal propriety is dead, and Garcia passes along with it. Cross, in the end, quite literally a shell of a man after his brush with “Antifa,” sits atop the same machine with different political characteristics. And many others continue to search rudderlessly for identity in little eccentric worlds ranging from QAnon to Antifa, all fundamentally the same in that they seek a new reality now that the old one has been finitely destroyed. Aster leaves us with no resolution, only replacement, and the community acceptance of a “new normal” as if the old one never existed. The latent horror of Eddington isn’t that these contradictions exist, but how quickly we learn to live with them. 

The viewer is left wondering whether it’s the spectacle that’s surreal, or its normalization. We can all admit that a paramilitary takeover of a small American town leans heavily on metaphorical license. But what would we have made of such an event if it were to have happened in the summer of 2020? Far from incredulity or principled outrage, reality, for millions, would have depended on their social media feeds. 

Eddington leaves us with little hope for a post-Covid revival. Yes, leaders will always conform to some finite rules of power, and we discovered some nasty truths about ourselves as the world shut down—but the world can still change for the better, even if Aster himself is too cynical to admit it. We all have the propensity to be cruel, weak, and self-serving hypocrites, but that does not mean all our noble sentiments are phony and meaningless. The upside of social flux is that the stifled good in us has just as much opportunity to break through as the repressed bad.

In our hyperpolitical quarrels about higher education, we gesture sometimes at the great books and the enduring greatness of their authors, such as Aristotle, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But we neglect the scholarship that helps us understand such authors better.

Eve Grace and Christopher Kelly, the editors of Letters from Rousseau, acknowledge their debt to such scholarship, particularly the 52 volumes of R. A. Leigh’s Correspondance Complète. Robert Wokler, who completed the project after Leigh died, observes that this “utterly formidable” publication required an “indulgence for the rigors of scholarship that no university or research council would be likely to extend today.”

Today, that problem remains, along with heightened skepticism about humanities scholarship and intense pressure to demonstrate its contemporary relevance. It is therefore worth thinking about Leigh’s kind of work and, also, of Grace and Kelly’s. They help deepen our understanding of Rousseau, to whose writings we attribute permanent worth.

Those who want to encounter Rousseau’s writings directly must learn French. But even scholars often first encounter texts through translations. Even when they are capable of reading in the original language, but, like me, read at a malnourished snail’s pace, they get from good translations clues about where to dig in. Kelly, a professor emeritus of political science at Boston College and the author of two books on Rousseau, co-edited the Collected Writings. Grace, the author of superb articles and chapters on Rousseau, co-edited, with Kelly, volume nine, Letter to Beaumont, Letters Written from the Mountain, and Related Writings.

Translations like Grace and Kelly’s are undervalued. The Collected Writings of Rousseau, the only English-language standard edition of Rousseau’s works, for example, is out of print. May it soon find a new publisher. Meanwhile, we should be grateful to Grace and Kelly, and to Cornell University Press’s Agora Editions, for providing the first significant collection of Rousseau’s letters in English since Charles Hendel’s 1937 Citizen of Geneva. Hendel wrote too early for Leigh’s work on the correspondence and did not, as Grace and Kelly do, always present letters in their entirety. Of the well over 2,000 extant letters Rousseau wrote, Kelly and Grace provide 181 that they consider to be “of particular importance to understanding his thought.”

Their introduction is superb concerning what the letters are and aren’t. Why, they ask, are Rousseau’s private letters of more than autobiographical interest? Rousseau told one correspondent, who broached the subject of printing their correspondence, that “a man who writes such follies does not write them to be printed, not even to be reread.”

And yet Rousseau wrote many letters, Grace and Kelly explain, “with a view to possible publication.” Among these are the “so-called ‘Moral Letters’ to Sophie d’Houdetot, the letter to Voltaire on providence, the letters to Malesherbes, the letter to Franquières, and the botanical letters to Madeleine-Catherine Delessert.” All but the last are included here.

To see what they mean, consider the “Moral Letters.” Yes, these six letters, prompted by Madame d’Houdetot’s request for “rules of morality for [her] use,” are tailored to the addressee, with whom Rousseau was infatuated. Although Rousseau says they are “not made to see the light of day,” he also suggests, in the first letter, that he would publish them if she were to consent. The letters go into matters, particularly the conscience, that are central to Rousseau’s thought, and easily meet the standard Grace and Kelly set of being important to understanding it.

So also, Rousseau’s 1756 letter to Voltaire, which, Rousseau says, “was not intended for publication.” But he circulated it to at least a few friends. When one of them wanted to publish it, he consented, on the condition that Voltaire agreed. The letter was eventually printed without the consent of either. In Leigh’s judgment, Rousseau “never gave up the intention of including it one day in an authoritative edition of his works.” Even more than the “Moral Letters,” the letter to Voltaire illuminates Rousseau’s major works. Indeed, the Rousseau scholar and translator, Victor Gourevitch, has argued that it is “Rousseau’s most authoritative discussion of religious issues,” a major work in itself.

The four autobiographical letters to Malesherbes, while they are not as important as the Confessions or Reveries, arguably deserve the lavish praise of the literary critic, Saint-Beuve: Rousseau wrote “nothing more beautiful.” Rousseau also suggests, in the Confessions, that they deserve special attention as “in some way the summary” of that work and, in any case, “perhaps the only thing I have written with ease in my whole life.” Finally, the first of the letters includes a marvelous statement of the connection between Rousseau’s “indomitable spirit of liberty” and its surprising main source, a “laziness” to which the “slightest duties of civil life are unbearable.”

Such letters are well-known, though Grace and Kelly provide faithful and readable translations. But, they explain, Rousseau wrote even less well-known letters with uncommon care. They share Rousseau’s testimony, from the Confessions, that “even writing letters on the most trivial subjects [cost him] hours of fatigue.” Leigh bears that out. “Most of Rousseau’s letters,” he says, “even the most trivial, passed through several stages before assuming the form of the text received by the addressee.” Moreover, Rousseau knew, after he became famous, that even letters he had no intention of publishing or circulating, might be published or circulated by others, or read by the police. In short, Grace and Kelly say, although the letters often deal with “personal matters” and are genuinely meant for their recipients, they “should not be regarded simply as the casual and sincere expression of whatever was on his mind.”

One cannot, in a review, do justice to the many ways this volume can deepen the understanding of Rousseau’s readers. I’ll mention just two.

First, the letters help us understand how to read Rousseau better. The second Letter to Malesherbes is famous—Rousseau-scholar-famous, at any rate—for claiming that his “three principal writings,” the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, and Emile, are “inseparable and together form the same whole.” That suggests one way of getting at the elusive unity of Rousseau’s paradox-packed thought. Less famous is Rousseau’s letter to his friend, Paul-Claude Moultou, which declares that the Letter to Beaumont, an open letter easy to dismiss as a polemic, is “the third and last time that I have given my profession of faith in my writings” and “the one in which I have spoken most openly.” The Letter to Beaumont—a public declaration in epistolary form—isn’t in this collection, but Rousseau directs us to attend to it more closely than one otherwise might.

Readers of Rousseau’s Emile will find much of interest in these collected letters. One correspondent had claimed that “it is impossible to make an Emile,” the eponymous subject of Rousseau’s seeming treatise on education. Rousseau denies that Emile is a “true treatise on education.” It is instead “a rather philosophic work” concerning the natural goodness of man and the origin of his vices. Yet that observation, which might lead one to believe that Rousseau had no serious ambition to reform education, should be coupled with several letters in which Rousseau offers detailed advice to correspondents. “Although Sophies and Emiles are rare,” he says in one, “a few of them are nonetheless being brought up in Europe.”

Second, and speaking of ambitions for reform, the letters illuminate Rousseau’s interest in politics beyond philosophical utopias. Rousseau despairs at times, announcing, in a 1767 letter to the Marquis de Mirabeau, that he doesn’t think that “a form of government which puts the law above man” is attainable and that “arbitrary despotism” is the only passable alternative. But just a few years prior, Rousseau had rejected a correspondent’s view that it was impossible to give “a good founding to the Corsicans.” Rousseau had been enlisted by a Corsican, who falsely claimed to represent the island’s head of state, to write a constitution, and he worked on it in earnest. Rousseau disagrees, at least in part, with his correspondent’s pessimistic estimate, denies that one should avoid “getting mixed up in human affairs,” and affirms a duty to attempt to help where there is “hope of succeeding,” though he concedes that French interference may make his efforts meaningless, as it did. Rousseau’s interest in and uncertainty about Corsica’s future occasions one of the most charming lines in the correspondence, encompassing Rousseau’s public spiritedness and solitary pleasures: “While waiting for what will happen, one must groan softly, and go collect plants.”

Although the Mirabeau letter comes after the Corsican episode, it doesn’t represent Rousseau’s final abandonment of reform. In 1771, at the behest of Polish noblemen, Rousseau completed a work on the government of Poland.

But Rousseau’s deep interest in and engagement with practical politics is most pronounced in letters to correspondents from his home city, Geneva, which eventually burnt his books and promised to arrest him if he showed his face there. In a letter to one of his supporters, Rousseau finally concludes that Geneva “will never be anything but a den of tyrants” and suggests that its remaining lovers of freedom go into exile. But his hopes to help Geneva persisted through much of his career. His willingness to live with something less than perfection, a necessary characteristic of the reformer, is evident in a previous letter to that same supporter, whom he urges to seek Voltaire’s help. Voltaire, living just outside of Geneva, was Rousseau’s bitter enemy. But Rousseau could see that, in the immediate context, Voltaire might be one of the good guys.

Geneva brings me to the sole quibble I have with this book. It is stingy with explanatory notes. Here is one example. In a 1762 letter to Marcet de Mézières, whom Grace and Kelly accurately describe as a “Genevan watchmaker and friend of Rousseau’s father,” Rousseau mentions “the Pictet affair,” which is an important part of the letter’s context. But they do not explain that affair. Pictet, one learns from Maurice Cranston’s biography of Rousseau, was a “leading citizen” of Geneva, then in hot water because he had written a widely circulated letter sharply criticizing the Genevan authorities for their actions against Rousseau. Eventually, he was “put on trial, fined, and suspended” for a year from his membership in one of Geneva’s governing bodies. This information, as well as the knowledge that Marcet de Mézières was much involved in Rousseau’s defense at the time and in the political opposition, is helpful in interpreting the letter. I assume that the editors, in a publishing environment unfriendly to 600-page academic books, had to choose between more letters and more notes. One cannot fault them for their choice, but it sometimes, as in this case, leaves readers adrift.

Despite this minor drawback, Letters from Rousseau does a major service for Rousseau scholars and for anyone who aspires to extend and deepen his encounter with one of the greatest and strangest figures in the history of Western thought.