I did myself no favors by checking to see what critics are saying about Ari Aster’s new film, Eddington, a movie that could go down as something like our generation’s Network or even Dr. Strangelove. “Eddington is so solemnly goofy that its vision of polarized America might as well not be a satire,” says Armond White of the National Review. On the other side of the politico-literary spectrum, a critic from the New Yorker frets about how director Aster tries to “score points off mask-wearers, young progressives, anti-racists, and other targets beloved of reactionaries.”

Then there are those further on the Left who — after watching a movie where (spoiler alert) a small-town sheriff machine guns a cop’s leg off only to get stabbed in the skull by an Antifa supersoldier — complain that it’s dull. A quick round up of takes on Letterboxd and social media confirm that countless progressives are now griping about just how uninteresting the whole thing is — which is really just zillennial code for “we don’t want you to see this movie because it has a perspective that makes me uncomfortable.”

That’s unfortunate. Because Eddington is not only a great film but an uncompromising reflection of all the ways — funny, embarrassing, shameful, and horrifying — that America put the pedal to the metal on social breakdown in 2020. And it’s a message that anyone who purports to care about improving the social condition (i.e., socialists) needs to hear.