By The ghost of Charlie Kirk crawled out deep beneath miles of minerals and asphalt to suck me off in my sleep last night. I know it sounds hard to believe, but take the hickeys on my ballsack as proof (you’ll have to come see them in person, or at least subscribe to the Merry-Go-Round Patreon). And the boy could suck, goddamn. Groggy, I peered down at his wet gums and said, “Hey man, I think you’re going to get me arrested,” and he grinned with that signature sneer that best resembled a row of chiclets jammed into a watermelon wedge, and assured me, “Don’t worry, I’m a husband and father to a daughter.”
It is likely you’ve had equivalent visions, too, as Republican pundits dominate the airwaves with Kirk’s memory (though, notably, dispersing very few actual quotes from the man) and enlightened centrists litter op-ed sections with whitewashed hagiographies of a truly sick little freak. Every breath you take, and every move you make, every bond you break, every step you take, Charlie Kirk’s been watching you. As conservatives seethe in a pool of their own bloodlust cum, we have seen Liberals attempt to intellectualize Charlie Kirk and the American GOP’s fervent misogyny and racism—in large part, these sympathies are embellished so doofuses like Ezra Klein can cast a bulletproof spell around themselves from psycho Alabama vigilantes, but there is a legitimate political alignment that lends to a confounding, albeit genuine sorrow from Democratic talking heads. The meal we’re being served is that if decorum requires a fascist grip, then so be it.
To Kirk’s credit, he was not some marginal Republican mascot—effectively a direct White House media representative (a regime propagandist, if we want to call a spade a spade), the Turning Point USA founder has dominated social media through ragebait and SJW-ownage for most of the past nightmare decade, basically reinventing the manner in which conservatives young and old treat domestic political discourse (read: debating with petulant malice, parroting cherry-picked data points, and against inexperienced opponents). If you just learned about him this week, which many people were forced to, then I’m sorry to say that it’s actually your fault that this “great replacement” theory-spewing weasel had been able to operate with impunity under your noses for so long. It’s alright, we all have our gaping blind spots: I’ve never seen an episode of LOST. Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan are podcasters; as an architect of the donor class’ river of funds with over 800 TPUSA college chapters, Charlie Kirk was a mover, shaker, and an organizer. Ta-Nehisi Coates has, unsurprisingly, written the only last word needed to summarize Charlie Kirk’s political legacy, so I’ll leave it to a master to beat the dead horse. Kirk’s far less graceful foreign policy candor can be distilled to his comments at a “Bold Men United Night” at Generation Church in November 2023: “You know, it’s funny, I used to say that, ‘Hey, if you as a gay person would go to Gaza, they’d throw you off of tall buildings,’ right? Now they don’t have any tall buildings left, so… Is that too soon? I’m sorry, maybe you shouldn’t kill Jews, stupid Muslims.” In the zealous defense of civility, we are expected to suffer the advice of an elite class that seeks to paint white supremacy as just another shade of acceptable personal politics.
Before I go on, you may believe that the introductory paragraph of this piece was not only vulgar, but delivered in such outrageously bad taste that I should be deplatformed from what measly platform I’m currently writing to you from. If you feel so strongly about my ruination, then by all means, I encourage you to email the Merry-Go-Round Magazine editor-in-chief and get me fired from my post. You can find the contact right here on our site. I disagree with your decision, however, for this speech, though potentially offensive, is within my right to express, and because of the constitutional protections of my vulgarities, shouldn’t you, a devout constitutionalist patriot, just learn to suck it up like Charlie’s ghost did last night? Prove me wrong!
Modern American fascism is fucking lame, conducted over petty cultural grievances and unfettered narcissism. An inept, 19-year-old DOGE staffer getting jumped in D.C. becomes the flashpoint for military deployment in our city streets. George Floyd didn’t break the country wide open: Elon Musk’s hand-picked Edward “Big Balls” Coristine did. We are owned by billionaires, through and through. Take, for example, sunken-browed failson David Ellison—last seen in a loincloth at a natural history museum exhibit spearing a wild boar—who took his father’s blood money to merge Skydance (the illustrious home of SNAKE EYES, BAYWATCH, and THE OLD GUARD 2) with Paramount Pictures (THE GODFATHER) and then immediately folded Bari Weiss (who up until this very Google search I didn’t realize was a different little monster than Eve Fartlow) into the foundations of CBS News in an effort to slant the network into whining harder about Israel than anyone has ever whined about Israel ever before. It takes a sharp mind to pay Bari Weiss upwards of $120 million for an online magazine that struggles to generate 120 likes on any given post. In a pursuit to monopolize the country’s total media outreach, Ellison has submitted an upfront cash bid for Warner Discovery, effectively giving him ownership over CNN, HBO, and the Warner Brothers legacy. And everyone thought I was being dramatic about the impending death of cinema. I was undershooting.
Additionally, Lord Larry Ellison himself is in the process of purchasing an 80% stake in TikTok through Oracle alongside Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz, and given the Trump admin’s hand-in-hand relationship with the country’s technocrats, the cash flow will lead you to an ecosystem of majority state-operated media. Yes, American media has always more or less acted in accordance to the whims of the government, but they used to play it up like whispered espionage. This is shockingly blatant monopolization. Like, say, the feds selling the story that alleged shooter Tyler Robinson killed Charlie Kirk as a doting, DOG DAY AFTERNOON-inflected act of gender affirmation for his lover; we are experiencing a total right-wing overhaul of neoliberal institutions by the Ellisons to cater to Israel’s irrecoverably cratered public perception—these are doomed love stories that we must all suffer the blowback from for some cosmic, unknown reason. These billionaires pre-grease their assholes for the Trump administration—the source of an eternal golden shower they could once only hope from Ronald Reagan—because they know getting publicly fingered is a bargain for the service of decreeing “being mean to us” as a federal crime. And in the grand scheme of the pulverizing of our civil liberties, honestly, consider this: the Ellisons are small potatoes. Like an Anime Expo hotel after-party, you look around and see nothing but the children of tomorrow getting violated by an unending galley of grown men who get off on knowing better.
It feels like a whirlwind with no handle bars, and time crashes onward with no emergency exit latches in sight. The pace of oppression outstrips our ability to understand it, and that is the real trick of the Imperial thought machine: It’s easier to hide behind 40 atrocities than a single incident. That’s not naturally written prose, that is a quote from season one of Tony Gilroy’s ANDOR. That is a beautiful television program, but let it be known that we, as a people, fucking suck. Americans don’t default to historical reference; instead, we gaze back to a record we regard with higher esteem in both its position in our everyday life and in the veracity of the lived experience… The gosh-darn cinema. In accordance with Ari Aster’s greatest untold wish (I can only assume, A24 has wisely blocked me off from ever interviewing him), we now live in a post-political-assassination-after-EDDINGTON-came-out world. We’re barely two months out from this movie dropping and the references to it a la, “Whoa, this is just like EDDINGTON!” are straight up incomprehensible, now more than ever. I read people trying to equate the film to the current state of the world and the message I get from those sentiments is “EDDINGTON is a movie where things happened!” It’s a shallow book report on a few dozen podcasters’ timelines that I haven’t found myself thinking about once, but I keep seeing the movie floated around as a heraldic contemporary touchstone that captures our daily mania with a bullet. Ceaseless references, yet nary a direct quote; what few people who actually saw EDDINGTON struck by the rudimentary sardonicism of a movie that takes place in a time we still remember starring caricatures of people sort of recall. Forcibly, I returned to New Mexico.
Is it even plucking low-hanging fruit if the bush is already picked over? Like thinking that late-night talk show hosts are the figureheads of your political dissidents, what EDDINGTON aims at isn’t just low-hanging fruit, it’s off-target in a manner that begs the question if the assailant even knows what planet they’re on. Has anyone checked if Brendan Carr is smelling burnt hair? Is anyone in a position of power ensuring that Brendan Carr isn’t wandering the streets and currently molesting a stray dog? Will someone please remove Brendan Carr’s testicles from that canine’s jaw? Nevertheless, EDDINGTON is less so an honest picaresque of modern Americana and instead an endlessly incurious series of cultural signifiers, a chronic indoor kid alluding to every Twitter main character of yesteryear to lampoon the America he made up in his head. No offense, but if you identify a resonant point ringing throughout the entirety of EDDINGTON, it’s time to take a pause on watching movies, touch grass, make eye contact with an unhoused person, return home, and then still maybe throw a toaster in your bathtub. Tame, unimaginative, and simply incomparable to the far weirder state of reality we find ourselves in, anyone yelping “Ari Aster is holding up a mirror to ourselves!” should give their own lived-in memory of how these past five years have actually gone down more credit.
Earlier this summer, there was a manhunt for pro-lifer Vance Luther Boelter after he staged a double assassination of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and Senator John Hoffman in their own homes while disguised as a cop and wearing one of those rubber masks from GOOD TIME. Hortman and her spouse died, while Hoffman survived. And we literally stopped talking about this news story as the manhunt was still underway. Did I forget to mention that Charlie Kirk was assassinated at the University of Utah while on a “Prove Me Wrong” campus tour by a crazy ass white boy who landed an arterial shot with a bullet whose casing was engraved with the furry meme “notices bulge OwO what’s this?” just as Kirk uttered his final retort (“Counting or not counting gang violence?”) to his final prompt (“Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?” asked by Hunter Kozak, a NATO-cherishing TikToker who pushed Kirk on his outrageous claim that America was onset by a wave of transgender shooters) and they couldn’t catch the killer until his own dad turned him in a few days later? Ari, brother, it’s not even fair to list one of EDDINGTON’s sub-plots after reading all of that, your whiny little ass is getting fucking lapped out here. Dream a little bigger, baby boy.
There’s a great 15-minute stretch in EDDINGTON seemingly arguing that we are too stupid for injustice to actually be systemic—it’s a living organism that roams like a cloud and roots like a fungus waiting to be eaten by the dimmest scavenger. Sometimes a local sheriff (with a firm hand always on his leather phone holster) gets cucked to the point of single-handedly Helter Skeltering his 2,345 population town: The character remains a subject of our marginal interest because his previous observation of his mayoral foe’s campaign spot shot in town also makes you wonder where all the Black women in the commercial came from. The pedestrian, Coen-biting first two acts nicely dissolve into paranoiac, Soros-funded hysteria—similar to MULHOLLAND DRIVE’s third act return to the titular hillside road, the investigation of Ted Garcia’s assassination trails off into a murky simulacrum of the world we once had a grasp of, where mass delusion overcomes the niceties of the screenplay’s prior satirical outbursts—but ends on a shootout that takes you from wishing you were watching A SERIOUS MAN to making you wish you were spending a fraction of the 148-minute runtime just rewatching NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. Two hours of heating up Eddington, NM to a boiling overflow and the eruption of violence is triggered by fantastical outside agitators. Eh, sure. I guess you get some funny pratfalls out of it, but that chase also totally undermines the POV of the whole project in favor of, “omg what if the deep state actually is hunting you?” It’s an easy card to pull in a movie assembled top-to-bottom with easy choices and, even worse, easy choices that have already been made by satire that was released mid-quarantine. Even Katy Perry’s “Firework” has already had its time in the sun as a post-ironic pop needle drop.
Aster presents it all as a reluctantly left-leaning onlooker, flustered by his alignment but forced there by proxy of his own personal code of ethics assigning him a spot amongst Greenpoint DSA members. I kept wanting to shake the man, yell in his face, “Get over it!” Say what you will about the Bernie-or-busters, but they are literally staging a populist political revolution in a New York City mayoral race right now: To insist that 2020’s questioning of structural whiteness was a frivolous lark for and by children and not a topic that even daytime talk show hosts started regularly espousing is definitely a choice. Like, bro, we had advocacy statements from Kentucky Fried Chicken. Maybe you’ve all forgotten, but we were living on a keg of TNT in summer 2020, and it was perhaps the most thrilling time to have been alive in this country since the mid-60s. It’s borderline dubious how benignly the film chooses to paint this era. Aster is growing increasingly insistent on social commentary despite fouling each one of his called shots, EDDINGTON little more than a misreading of the tea leaves by a blubbering urban transplant touting a “MAGA is wacky, but wow the COVID-19 protocols I had to follow while shooting BEAU IS AFRAID were a real pain in the ass” conduct. When John Sayles’ LONE STAR and SOUTH PARK exist, I don’t know what you’re really getting out of this outside of a great blink-and-you-miss-it Emma Stone performance and Darius Khondji freaking it on the ones and twos.
EDDINGTON concludes with Aster’s greater fascination on the husks the 2020s have hollowed out conservatives into, and how being molecularly radicalized by online snake oil salesmen is an epidemic exponentially more potent amongst the impressionably reactionary middle-aged and elderly than with children who face an irony-poisoned plague themselves, often in full awareness that they are being manipulated, but nonetheless wake-boarding through the brain rewiring to reap the social benefits. And yet, even in these revelations, EDDINGTON submits to the dangerously daft notion that our country is divided by left and right. If only it were so simple! Most Americans are bystanders of what they perceive to be a left and a right; most Americans are composed of an unbalanced amalgamation of contradictory beliefs ultimately led by a capitalist dogma. COVID awoke a political awareness in many of us, and it’s that flashpoint that Aster is taking the piss out of, but in propping up Eddington, New Mexico as a national diorama, he misses the forest for the trees and commits to Dardennes-style story contrivances that shroud systemic injustices in favor of displaying how the poor eat themselves. The final shot of a data processing plant glowing in the desert dusk serves as a punishment for Aster’s cast of kooks rather than as an indictment of the brutalizing financial powers that provided Meta, crypto-pushers, and ethno-nationalists with their nest egg investments. So much for all the Haneke name-dropping. EDDINGTON is a hiccup of simpleton protest from the halls of a boutique fortress once quaintly lambasted for distilling movie moods into candle scents currently embedded with artificial intelligence pioneers hungry to turn “Ari Aster-type scene” into a button click. Officer Michael Cooke (having barely survived his ill-fated turn as “a Black character in an Ari Aster film”) is the only Eddingtonian to have learned something from the entire saga—now, he aims for the head.
Though I can quibble about the representation of phones in EDDINGTON, there’s a bold commitment to showcasing the act of swiping through a funnel of content that I’ve rarely seen accomplished in other films. This small town really cranks out short-form video, good gravy. It’s a whole wide world trapped on a six-inch monitor, a version of our world so uncanny you’d swear it was real. The sweep of misinformation as I write this continues to stagger: Leftists wish-casted Tyler Robinson as a groyper, conservatives immediately assumed they were transgender, Kash Patel dined at Rao’s on East 114th Street the same day he incorrectly Tweeted out that the suspect was in custody (in fact, they had arrested the totally innocent Zachariah Quereshi at his apartment, a former Heritage Foundation intern who was merely present at the massively attended shooting and Brown), and the court-ordered transcript of the text exchange between Robinson and his roommate immediately after the shooting is so suspiciously encapsulating in its addressing of every smoking gun that everyone from Jennifer Welch to Matt Walsh are calling bullshit on it. The controlled killing of journalism was designed for moments such as this, to sow panic and distrust at no specific party but your own actual sense of being. The new Zapruder Film is now looping on your newsfeed next to a selection of promo stills for a new episode of the Adam Friedland Show, scenes from the Nepalese revolt, photos of Trent Reznor’s modular synth collection, and a stream clip from a Sakura Shymko stream where she’s sobbing over getting bullied by JasonTheWeen’s viewers. The deregulation of our consciousness is and has been pretty fucking extreme, so our art is going to have to do better than a teen girl dancing to the caption of “When you just finish reading James Baldwin’s GIOVANNI’S ROOM.”
This asinine notion that the annihilation of Charlie Kirk will singlehandedly accelerate prosecution of the Trump administration’s detractors ignores decades of American history in which trans women, Leftists, the homeless, immigrants, workers, minorities, women, and queer communities have been systematically targeted without doming a podcaster. Keeping these groups in the crosshairs is akin to a warm apple pie resting on a suburban windowsill: You don’t achieve the promise of the United States without it. Right-wingers are not waiting for an excuse to open death camps, come on guys, he’s not Joe Biden (who will wait for college campuses to bravely stage their own Nam-era revolts to endorse the violent quelling of the First Amendment by campus police). The Left could do nothing at all—which it is often prone to do—and conservatives would still legislate with an insatiable thirst for Commie tears. None of last week could’ve happened, shit, none of the last five years could’ve happened, and we’d still be right here. The collective response to Charlie Kirk gushing from his jugular could have been each and every American laying flat on the ground with their palms across their chests, and the ruling class would still be pointing at the very same scapegoats they are now. The Israelification of the United States is nearing completion: No longer finding justification or explanation worthy of its energy nor conducive to its aesthetics, the state will instead silence its dissenters via gangland harassment, kidnapping, imprisonment, or mysterious means of execution.
The path forward requires an opposition party that will ensure penalties on the corporations that ceded ground towards the enshittification of all major industries, constitutional rights, and ideological promises. That group does not exist. And though I fear very little, the most high-profile progressives in power have been seen kowtowing to industrial, cultural, and international pressures for little in return—Silicon Valley gets to poison neighborhood water supplies with data center run-off across the country, Gavin Newsom rushes to throw trans people under the bus in feeble attempts to reach across the aisle, and free speech protections have been habitually eroded by both Democrats and Republicans playing footsies as they submit anti-boycott legislation to Congress (thank you, progressive champion Bernie Sanders, for saying that Israel was conducting a “genocide” after more than 700 days of unchecked genocidal mayhem). At least Kamala Harris is embarking on a book tour. Now is the absolute worst time possible for concessions. I’m unsure if, realistically, I can achieve very much from where I’m standing. The anti-social naivety of believing that if you just kill somebody then everything gets fixed is a pump-fake sold to you by bad actors, federal agents, or, historically, a combination of the two. What I can do is use this independent platform to write with no restraint. And I encourage you to do so, as well. Whatever sacrifice it may bring forth, it will have been worth it.
On the Wednesday afternoon of the shooting, I cited EDDINGTON’s ending with my buddy Ryan while sources were still reporting that Kirk was in critical condition, thinking, “Okay, so he’s going be tied down to a bed while some little demon mouthpiece wheels him around for a few decades’ worth of hotel conference room photo ops,” but then, oh dear, he died. So much for that cultural lasting power. So, we’re left in a substantially more insane reality than modern American visual fiction has had the capacity to imagine. I’m starting to get that 2020 quarantine feeling again where the inessentiality of our local cinema makes the medium feel like an opiate pastime for the privileged—when all is collapsing, this core facet of our shared identity feels utterly useless. During the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, would I really fill a duffel bag with Kino Lorber 4K’s? Funnily enough, during the Eaton fire, that is precisely what I did. The strand that connects us from this plane of utter disintegration with a previous era of readily accessible treats is still holding strong. We are not tethered to a rope, but a series of tenuous fibers, but they are there, clinging, which is arguably more frustrating than if they were to snap altogether. There’s a healthy debate to be had over whether or not the collapse of American culture was due in part to how central we made the values and ideologies of The Movies to our social fabric, but one thing’s for certain, and it’s that our slate of studio-and-festival-approved artists are not up to the task of what this current moment demands from its contemporary art… I really hate dating my writing, but at the time of this publishing, I have yet to watch Paul Thomas Anderson’s ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER, a film that may very well render this entire point moot, but even if it does, in both our retaliation and support, we must discover solutions past one fucking messiah.
“I can’t stand the word ’empathy’ actually, I think empathy is a made-up new age term that does a lot of damage.” – Charlie Kirk 1993-2025
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