'Eddington' (left) and 'One Battle After Another.' Richard Foreman/A24/Courtesy Everett Collection; Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett Collection Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment In the immediate aftermath of conservative activist Charlie Kirk's murder, one of the most vexing things occluding the facts of what happened was a general illiteracy regarding the online culture that had engulfed the alleged killer - its memes and codes and ideologies. Reading about it all, I wondered why most of us don't know enough about this stuff, and why this significant aspect of culture seems so siloed off from everything else. This summer, A24's prickly COVID comedy Eddington, from writer-director Ari Aster, failed to catch fire at the box office. Perhaps the film's fate was sealed when it premiered to mixed reception at the Cannes Film Festival two months prior. Or Eddington was doomed even before that. It is, after all, a political film, one that tangles with Trumpism, extremism and the steadily mounting distrust that Americans feel toward one another. Aster's film is Very Online, which was perhaps an unappealing prospect for potential moviegoers. Related Stories TV Jimmy Kimmel Did Not Say Exactly What You Think He Said News Trump Claims Kimmel Was "Fired" for "Lack of Talent" After ABC Late Night Show Pulled Maybe Eddington was simply ahead of its time; perhaps in another five years audiences will feel ready to examine what we're currently living through, when it (hopefully) no longer has such a bitter sting of relevance. Or the public's general distaste for being confronted with tetchy societal issues will still prevail; doom-scrolling should be done on one's phone at home, not out in the world among other people. Such atomization is a metastasizing problem. A gap is ever widening, with traditional artforms on one side and the vast jumble of internet ephemera on the other. That stark distinction used to make more sense, back when whatever happened online stayed there and everything else in culture was, we determined, what really held a mirror up to life. But so much more of our time is spent online now that it's become disingenuous and out-of-touch to insist, in film, that internet usage is merely an isolated distraction - especially at a time when violent action so often germinates online. Eddington is about the awful collision of the virtual and the actual, depicting a horror scenario in which the whole of the internet descends on one small town in a matter of days. It's a messy movie, but at least Aster is trying to describe the double consciousness of the modern era, the disorientation of tangible reality becoming affected by the stuff that is supposed to live safely inside our computers. And yet nobody wanted to go see it, perhaps discouraging other filmmakers from trying to do the same. Which puts the artform on a (hopefully slow, but who knows these days) course toward obsolescence. Movies have tried in recent years to bring tech into film: texts popping up on screen, the Searching films, AI villains stalking the Mission: Impossible and M3gan crews, indie darlings like We're All Going to the World's Fair risking tedium by showing us the eerie stasis of online life. But the medium needs more than just a handful of attempts to capture this enormous, burgeoning facet of 21st century living. If part of film's job is to illuminate the breadth of human experience, then it is failing in a crucial way. I am about as eager to watch 4chan: The Motion Picture as anyone else, but what comes out of those dark recesses is certainly worth dramatizing and, grim as it may be to do so, understanding. Much of that responsibility must first fall to journalists, those brave enough to traverse the internet wilds and report back their findings, to help interpret, say, meme language etched onto bullets. But art ought to tangle with this stuff more thoroughly, too, in order to help us finally accept that the offline and the online have so completely blurred together. The recently Emmy-bedecked smash Adolescence, among Netflix's most-watched shows ever, dealt with the fallout of a young man's online radicalization into misogyny, but we only get to know him offline, after something terrible has happened. The upcoming Apple show The Savant, starring Jessica Chastain as a woman who monitors and engages with white supremacists online, tries to address these difficult matters too. It will be interesting to see if its creators are willing to show the true depravity lurking in frighteningly accessible corners of the internet, or if they will - like so many others - sand things down just enough to make it all more palatable. The Savant is only about one kind of internet extreme. Kirk's alleged killer is not, it seems, of that same ilk. But he is one of many thousands, if n