Every now and then, a modern film arrives that feels like an echo of the past—a reminder that cinema has always been in conversation with itself. Ari Aster’s Eddington (2025) is one such film. On its surface, it’s a dark satire about paranoia, misinformation, and the fragility of human connection in a small town during a time of crisis. But if you look more closely, you see that Aster has built his story on the bones of an American classic: John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946).
Ford’s film is often considered the definitive Western of its era. Starring Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp, it takes the legendary Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and transforms it into a story of dignity, order, and the taming of chaos. My Darling Clementine is less about violence than about the building of a community. Its quiet moments—Earp watching a church being raised, or dancing on a half-finished floor under the desert sky—show Ford’s belief that civilization itself was the true triumph of the West. In Ford’s telling, Tombstone becomes a symbol of hope, a fragile settlement where law, culture, and decency might finally take root.
Now, consider Eddington. Here too we have a small town on the edge of collapse, but Aster’s Eddington, unlike Ford’s Tombstone, is not a place finding its footing—it’s a place losing it. Instead of men striving for law and order, we see neighbors spiraling into distrust. Instead of Wyatt Earp’s mythic steadiness, we’re given ordinary people pulled apart by paranoia, conspiracy, and the distortions of modern life. Aster turns the romantic Western on its head, showing us not the dream of America taking shape, but the nightmare of America unraveling.
And yet, the parallel is unmistakable. Both films use the town itself as the central character. In My Darling Clementine, the town is a beacon—a place where church bells will one day ring and where families might thrive. In Eddington, the town becomes a mirror of our current anxieties, where rumor spreads faster than truth and where the notion of community itself seems to fray at the edges.
Stylistically, the connection is also fascinating. Ford painted the West with a lyrical brush, filling his wide landscapes with beauty, grace, and a sense of destiny. Aster, by contrast, finds his poetry in the absurd and the grotesque, but like Ford, he lingers on details—the quirks of townspeople, the rhythms of their interactions, the tension that hangs in the air before chaos erupts. Both directors remind us that small human moments define the larger story.
Seen side by side, My Darling Clementine and Eddington tell us something profound about how America has imagined itself through film. In 1946, the Western could still present the country’s founding myths with clarity and hope. In 2025, those same myths are revisited with skepticism, even cynicism, reflecting a nation no longer certain of its own narrative.
And yet, in a way, the two films belong together. One reflects the America we longed to believe in. The other reflects the America we live in now. And that’s what makes Eddington such a remarkable work—it doesn’t just satirize our times; it places itself in the long tradition of American storytelling, holding a darkly funny mirror up to both the movies and the myths that shaped us.
