This story contains spoilers about ‘Eddington,’ ‘Midsommar’ and ‘Hereditary.’
Ari Aster’s new film Eddington is a political satire set in a small American town, where a feud between Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) and Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) begins with disagreement over pandemic policy, but quickly escalates into a chaotic, paranoid power struggle. What starts as a clash of ego spirals into increasingly violent and absurd confrontations.
In the film’s closing minutes, Joe is abruptly stabbed in the head by someone described as “anti-fascist terrorist” after an extended shootout. He survives, and the next time we see him he’s a quadriplegic wheelchair user and non-verbal.
By the end, Joe has been appointed mayor, either by default or out of public pity. The last shot leaves him as the town’s figurehead alongside a giant AI data centre in the desert: a monument to the forces that now shape human life, governance and identity.
It’s brutal, cynical, mean-spirited and a tad esoteric. But Aster seems to be offering a scathing portrait of American politics and the men like Joe who populate it: stubborn, self-righteous, vaguely libertarian; men clinging to authority, even as the world moves on without them.
There’s irony in the film’s portrayal of anarchic protesters, live-streamers and the failed machismo of Joe’s character arc. But when the laughter of the climax fades, what remains is something all too familiar: disability as the poetic consequence of bad behaviour. Not as an ongoing human experience, but as karmic spectacle.
Disability as consequence, not condition
Joe’s fate follows a centuries-old narrative pattern in which disability is framed as punishment, poetic justice or moral revelation. From medieval Christian theology to contemporary satire, bodily difference has long been used to symbolize inner failing. Impairment stands in for sin, ego, corruption or spiritual deficiency.
Enlightenment rationalism and eugenics-era pseudoscience cemented this association, casting disabled bodies as physically manifest proof of social and moral inferiority.
Cinema inherited these tropes, and still leans on them. As disability studies scholars David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder argue, disability is often introduced not to explore a character’s complexity, but to serve as a metaphorical crutch or shortcut to meaning.
The disabled body often appears when something needs to be revealed, resolved or punished. In Eddington, Joe’s fate is exactly that.
Disability arrives not as an opening to new experience but as closure: a visual and symbolic transformation from dangerous man to inner object. Joe is no longer speaking, acting or choosing.
The film seems to punish him, not for a single action, but for what he represents: a particular kind of white male authority figure that is combative, self-righteous and increasingly out of touch.
While Joe does oppose the mayor’s early pandemic policies, including mask mandates, his real “crime” in the film is his stubbornness and inflated self-control. He doubles down on personal power, even as systems collapse around him. His disability, then, functions as justice: a final, ironic version of the control he fought so hard to maintain.
He has become a site for meaning-making — a silent figure whose stillness now says everything about the futility of power, the absurdity of authority, the fall of the American sheriff, the political centrist.
Familiar patterns in Aster’s work
Ari Aster’s earlier films follow similar patterns. In Hereditary (2018) Charlie’s facial difference and neurodivergence signal otherness and fragility; her death becomes the hinge on which the horror turns.
In Midsommar (2019), Ruben, a disabled oracle, is portrayed as both holy and someone without personal agency: a vessel for prophecy rather than a fully developed character.
Across Aster’s filmography, disability tends to show up not as life, but as a symbol; as curse, as mysticism, as moral sign. Eddington takes that formula and strips it down even further: Joe becomes disabled at the moment the movie decides he’s no longer needed. It’s efficient, final and familiar.
Disability as visual rhetoric
As disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes, disabled bodies are often positioned as visual rhetoric. They are something to be interpreted, not inhabited.
Joe’s silence and stillness as a result of him becoming disabled don’t invite audiences to understand his experience; they invite us to read him, as if his body were a sentence the director had written.
We do see a glimpse of care: Joe appears to be tended to by a man who is now also his mother-in-law’s partner. But even this is played for laughs.
There’s no reckoning with long-term adaptation, no real engagement with the material realities of disability. The body remains an object, not a subject, and once it serves a rhetorical function, the camera moves on.
The real pandemic disabled millions
The symbolic use of disability hits differently given the film’s setting. Eddington is a pandemic movie — a chaotic satire of COVID-era paranoia, misinformation and isolation.
But COVID-19 hasn’t just destabilized governments, upended social norms and exacerbated online political turmoil — it has disabled people.
Millions globally now live with long COVID, facing chronic pain, fatigue, cognitive impairment and dramatic changes to their work, social lives and health-care access.
The pandemic is a mass disabling event, not a metaphor. And yet, Eddington engages with disability only as a punchline. It becomes an ironic punishment for a man too arrogant to admit his limits. The joke lands harder when it treats disability as poetic justice instead of ongoing reality.
Toward fuller representation
Disability studies invites us to consider disability not as a narrative end point, but as a relational and continuous experience shaped by care networks, access barriers, evolving identities and collective adaptation.
What if Eddington had stayed with Joe after his injury? What if it explored his new position not through silence or shame, but through the messy human realities of interdependence?
What if the satire had gone further, asking not just what happens to a sheriff when he’s taken down, but what happens to power when it must rely on care? What if Joe had died and his mother-in-law had become mayor as a serious disruption of legacy politics?
Absurdism and dark comedy about the body aren’t the problem. But the symbolic shorthand of disability as justice carries weight, especially when disabled people continue to be marginalized, disbelieved and erased in the very real world that Eddington pretends to parody.
A sharper satire would engage with disability as part of the social fabric that challenges the audience to reckon with embodiment, dependence and mutual obligation. It could surprise audiences by refusing the easy exit of moral symbolism. It could be more rewarding, radical — and frankly, more intellectual — than another joke equating impairment with comeuppance.
The portrayal of disability in Eddington is not malicious, but it is predictable. It continues a long tradition of using disability to signal judgement, irony or narrative finality.
But real life doesn’t offer such clean punctuation. Disability is not the end of a story, but the start of a more complex, embodied and political one. Until cinema catches up, satires like Eddington will continue to undermine what they claim to critique.
Billie Anderson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
