“Eddington” ending explained: What's with the data center in Ari Aster’s controversial dark comedy?

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Key Points

Eddington, the latest film from Hereditary director Ari Aster, is a dark comedy about COVID-fueled chaos in a fictional New Mexico town.

The film wades into hot-button topics regarding police brutality, the Black Lives Matter movement, AI investment, and mask mandates, among others.

Eddington is now playing in theaters.

Ari Aster is asking for trouble with Eddington.

It's the fourth feature from the 39-year-old filmmaker, who delivered two of this century's most provocative horror films with Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019) before fully embracing dark comedy with the distressing Beau Is Afraid (2023).

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Aster's films inevitably stir up debate, but Eddington's bug-eyed, flame-spitting approach to some of today's most contentious cultural topics is bound to divide audiences.

Set in May 2020 amid COVID-19 lockdowns, Eddington immerses itself in heated debates about masking, the Black Lives Matter movement, police brutality, online radicalization, conspiracy theories, and weaponized allegations of impropriety, to name just a few.

The chaotic third act cranks up the tension and violence, building to a gnarly climax that's equal parts disturbing, hilarious, and curious. Below, we explain Eddington's ending, from the fate of Joaquin Phoenix's Joe Cross to what, exactly, is going on with that data center.

What is Eddington about?

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Joaquin Phoenix as Joe Cross and Pedro Pascal as Ted in 'Eddington'

Eddington centers on Joe Cross (Phoenix), a small-town, mealy-mouthed sheriff who bristles at being asked to wear a mask — he has asthma — while patrolling his sleepy New Mexico county. It's May 2020, and Joe, like many of his fellow citizens in Eddington, spends his nights doom-scrolling social media, internalizing a swamp of contradictory, conspiratorial information about the ongoing pandemic.

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He shares a home with his glassy-eyed wife, Louise (Emma Stone), who is disinterested in having children and shies from his touch (possibly due to childhood sexual abuse she later alludes to). They live with Louise's mother, Dawn (Deirdre O'Connell), a loudmouth who's never read a conspiracy theory she didn't instantly embrace.

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Emma Stone as Louise and Deirdre O'Connell as Dawn in 'Eddington'

Joe's nemesis is Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), Eddington's prosperous, left-leaning mayor, who advocates for upholding mask mandates and aiding the creation of a massive data center, part of his desire for technological advancement.

As Joe and Ted argue over lockdown protocols, an incensed Joe impulsively decides to run for mayor against Ted. He gussies up his police cruiser with conspiratorial messaging about the pandemic that paints Ted as a tool of deep state operatives.

"Your being manipulated," reads one slogan (and, no, that's not our typo).

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Meanwhile, the youth of Eddington begin staging protests against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis. This further exacerbates Joe's measly sheriff's office, consisting of two deputies who now double as his bumbling campaign staff.

But while Joe and Ted butt heads politically, their feud, like all the feuds in the film, is truly motivated by personal resentments. Joe, who's deeply insecure about his relationship with Louise, is still bitter over the fact that Louise dated Ted before marrying Joe. Later, Joe is particularly enraged when Ted's son, Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka), taunts him by mentioning how his dad "dumped your wife."

Amid the chaos, Joe conducts a press conference in which he recklessly claims that Ted got Louise pregnant at 16 and forced her to abort the baby. Though the age difference between Ted and Louise is never specified, Joe characterizes the incident as statutory rape and calls Ted a sexual predator.

This blows up in his face when Louise posts a video online denying Joe's allegations.

How does the town of Eddington descend into chaos?

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Michael Ward as Michael, Joaquin Phoenix as Joe, and Luke Grimes as Guy in 'Eddington'

After his attack on Ted backfires and Louise leaves him to follow a budding cult leader, Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler), Joe begins to spiral. He confronts Ted at a campaign event, and Ted slaps him in front of the attendees. Humiliated, Joe storms back into town, where he stumbles upon a drifter looting the local bar. In his anger, Joe kills the drifter and disposes of the body.

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With blood on his hands, Joe doubles down and seeks retribution for his hurt pride. Using a sniper rifle, he shoots and kills Ted and Eric in their home, then spray-paints "No justice, no peace" on the wall to frame local left-wing activists for the murders.

In a vicious and deeply cynical move, Joe frames Michael (Michael Ward), a Black deputy in his employ, for the murders by planting Ted's pocket watch in his car. They cite an Instagram DM Michael received of his ex kissing Eric as a possible (if extremely circumstantial) motive. “He looked like he could kill somebody,” says his other deputy, Guy (Luke Grimes). “Blacks hate Hispanics, too.” A confused Michael is locked up in the police station. Meanwhile, a Native cop from the neighboring Pueblo County correctly suspects Joe is the killer.

And that's when everything gets really crazy. Briefly, we see a small jet flying to town filled with masked men and protest signs, one of which reads, "The white man is the virus; Here comes the cure." Chaos erupts in the streets of Eddington. Dumpsters are set on fire.

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Michael Ward in 'Eddington'

Michael is freed from prison, and Joe and Guy later find him in a desert field, where it appears as if he's being held hostage. "If I talk, they're gonna shoot me," Michael says through gritted teeth.

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That's when Joe remarks that the area smells like gas. Above them, a drone whirrs, then sets off an explosion that kills Guy and spells out "NO PEACE" in flames on the ground. Shots ring out, and masked men with guns begin chasing Joe.

Joe ducks into a gun store, emerging with a machine gun. He then marches through the streets firing his weapon, dodging shots from the masked assailants and accidentally killing the Pueblo County cop who was hot on his tail. But Joe runs out of bullets, and one of the assassins stabs him in the head. Before Joe can be finished off, though, Brian (Cameron Mann), a white teenage BLM protester, saves him by shooting and killing the masked assassin.

What happens at the end of Eddington?

In the epilogue, we see that, despite Joe being incapacitated and non-verbal in a wheelchair, he's gotten away with the murders and become Eddington's mayor by default, with Dawn speaking on his behalf. Though it was never one of his campaign promises, he's present for the opening of the data center, which turns out to be just one aspect of the region's technological advancement.

An entire political and social agenda is playing out around him as he watches helplessly, and Dawn, Eddington's most conspiratorial character to that point, is now complicit in it. Even worse? When Dawn shows Joe a recent video of Vernon preaching, they spy a smiling Louise pregnant with Vernon's baby in the background.

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As for Michael, he's a free man and still serves as a police officer. Scarred from the bombing, we last see him grimacing as he continues to practice his shot.

What does the end of Eddington mean?

Courtesy of A24

Joaquin Phoenix as Joe Cross in 'Eddington'

When asked to summarize Eddington in one sentence at a post-show Q&A at Chicago's Music Box Theatre on July 12, attended by this writer, Aster said his film is about the "building of a data center."

That may come as something of a surprise, considering the data center plays only a minor role in the narrative. It does, however, bookend the film: Eddington opens with a sign advertising the data center, and ends with a lingering shot of it glowing ominously in the desert, with the town of Eddington off in the distance.

So, what's the significance of the data center?

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First, it's important to recognize Eddington as a period piece about a particularly fraught and chaotic era in American culture. Alienated and isolated in lockdown, lonely, angry people on both ends of the political spectrum found themselves confronted with accelerationist rhetoric in online spaces that, in many cases, inflamed long-existing culture war debates around race, gender, public health, and other thorny issues. It was a time in which everything seemed to have a political edge.

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Cameron Mann as Brian in 'Eddington'

But Eddington isn't a political movie. Rather, it's one about people with incoherent politics.

On one end, you have Joe, whose sloppy and unfocused political aspirations are born primarily out of a desire to spite his enemies, impress his wife, and achieve power he so sorely lacks in lockdown. You get the sense that he doesn't really believe in anything.

On the other end, you have people like Brian, the teenager who begins to fancy himself as a white abolitionist after crushing on a girl with a passion for social justice. But when he incidentally saves Joe's life by shooting a masked attacker, he's celebrated not by the left, but the right, who characterize it as a terrorist attack perpetuated by "Antifa." And Brian leans into it, posing with far-right firebrands like Marjorie Taylor Greene and embracing life as a right-wing influencer.

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While Aster finds ample humor in this ideological hollowness, he isn't content to just sit back and laugh. Nor does he resort to prizing one side of the divide over the other. He understands that if these characters lack a coherent political ideology, it's because they live in an incoherent and absurd world that prizes capital over community.

"I wanted to make a film where everybody's alienated from each other and has lost track of a bigger world outside of themselves," Aster said in an interview with Letterboxd. "They only see the dimensions of the small world they believe in, and distrust anything that contradicts this small bubble of certainty."

He continued, "We've all been trained to see the world through certain windows, but those windows have just become stranger and stranger."

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Michael Ward, Joaquin Phoenix, and Luke Grimes in 'Eddington'

They all know something is wrong, but they're consuming so much conflicting information that no one can agree on what, exactly, it is — so they attack each other.

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"These people, despite being a community of people, are not a community," added Aster of his fictional New Mexico town. "Despite being in the same rooms as each other, they are living on totally different planes."

The gods of Eddington, however you interpret them, are indifferent to these struggles. The faceless assassins and buzzing drones that descend on the town in the final act represent the God-like finger of capital, and they have one goal in mind: the data center.

With Ted gone, an incapacitated Joe is appointed as mayor. The data center is constructed as part of a sweeping technology-driven agenda for the area. Joe, who never wanted the data center, is a mere figurehead for forces beyond him.

It's a timely message, especially as the U.S. government and prominent tech companies continue to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in building AI data centers that critics say will devastate the environment, despite polling that shows everyday Americans really don't want them.

“I have a lot of fear regarding this. It’s obviously already too late," Aster told Letterboxd about AI and the country's focus on relentless technological innovation. “We’re in a race now. It’s how the history of technological innovation has worked: If we can, we will. I have larger questions, you know? What did Marshall McLuhan say: ‘Man is the sex organ of the machine world,’ right? Is this technology an extension of us, are we extensions of this technology, or are we here to usher it into being?”