Eddington, not the bear Paddington.
Warning, you might need to have watched Paddington 2 (2017) and Eddington (2025) before reading this.
I only watched Paddington 2 and then subsequently the prequel because of a strangely funny meta scene in movie The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. Tears in their eyes, Pedro Pascal and Nicholas Cage sit down to watch Paddington 2 at the end of a fun but well and truly shark jumping movie. What did Nicholas Cage and Pedro Pascal know that I didn’t?
Fast forward to now and the current pop culture discourse has gone post woke with movies like Ari Aster’s Eddington currently centered in the discourse. Yet every time I hear the word Eddington, my brain short-circuits and I briefly think people are referring to Paddington. Now bear with me as I break a cardinal sin in writing and immediately date this piece slash give myself a somewhat achievable deadline to finish it.
This morning Charlie Kirk was assassinated or publicly executed or just killed in public because killing popular individuals and CEO’s tends to be the only way to cut through the noise of weekly school shootings in the US. An environment created in large part by Charlie Kirk's own world view and platforms. Popular individuals and CEO’s tend to be right leaning, far right leaning in the current moment and the shooters so far have been liberals or right leaning themselves or occasionally part of the True Crime community. Not the scary ANTIFA and ultra lefties that the powers that be seem so scared of.
A couple weeks ago in so called Australia, creepy Nazis organised and led a mass demonstration across so called Australian cities. Culminating in an attack on Camp Sovereignty in Naarm or so called Melbourne. Camp Sovereignty was first set up in 2006, on the former site of protests held against the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne and as an extension of the ‘Black GST’ movement. Bunjileenee Robbie Thorpe, reestablished the camp on Invasion Day Friday 26 January 2024. Since its established its self as an important site and space not only for First Nations activism but also radical joy.
Police say they had no ‘intelligence’ of a pending attack on Camp Sovereignty by Nazis, after their ego boosting parade through so called Melbourne. Regardless of which, instead of ensuring the remaining Nazi had left the area post march they were allowed to continue gathering even after police had started to knock off for the day. Camp Sovereignty was defended by First Nations individuals and the handful of counter protesters who received word of the attack. Keeping the fire burning for another day.
Just days before the Nazi rallies, two police officers were killed in regional so called Victoria by an alleged Sov-Cit who was now on the run in remote bushland. Roughly, only a year since a similar incident occurred in regional so called Queensland. Nazi organisations in so called Australia have opportunistically leveraged the fragmented ‘Sov-Cit’ movement and a long history of the ‘Crunchy to Alt-Right’ pipeline in a post COVID world.
The impulse though, is to constantly blame the COVID pandemic and its subsequent State responses for the mess we are currently in. But school shootings and random acts of violence, especially from the right, were already entering a more entrenched upward trend prior to 2020. In so called Australia we had already had the Cronulla riots in 2005. Then in 2019, so called Australian Brenton Tarrant, livestreamed a shooting massacre in a Mosque in so called Christchurch, New Zealand. Tarrant was allegedly motivated by the MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) ideology. Which is not a uniform ideology or organised group but an often used acronym by individuals who share an open and often violent disdain for women and see Muslims as invaders, sometimes edging toward Great Replacement Theory.
It is in this climate with which we entered the COVID pandemic of 2020. So called Australia has regularly punched above its weight in exporting far right ideology. With Tarrant since becoming a martyr and important figure in both the accelerationist Saint Culture community and the True Crime Communities.
My confusion of hearing Paddington every time Eddington is mentioned is a constant reminder of how fast our sociopolitical climate has shifted since Paddington 2’s release. A dying fable of a world view that still saw the good guys prevail despite how high the odds had been stacked against them. A movie, that took the fantastical story of a bear living in London to have a conversation about how migrants actually make our communities better. A movie that poked a big stick at the entitlement of men.
The True Crime Community (TCC) continues to venerate the mass shooters of old and inspire new ones in a no lives matter world view that crosses political lefts and rights. It’s the same world that Sov-Cit’s see themselves in, the same world the Zizian’s saw themselves in and it's the same world in which the Neo Nazi’s are now leveraging.
In this world the conservative neighbor that racially profiles Paddington bear as the source for all crime, has now become a Sov-Cit or a unwitting neo-nazi worried about immigration. Hugh Grant’s character has leveraged this to ensure his crimes are never discovered, blaming immigrants not just from crime but the housing crisis and bike lanes. It's also a world where Hugh Grant's character would probably end up at risk of being shot at public speaking slot, as he pandered racist rhetoric for an ever growing pile of cash and proximity to power.
Charlie Kirk was shot today in part, because even the horrendous alternative ending to Paddington 2 above has become irrelevant. We are very much entering a period much like the ‘Years of lead’ in Italy. The Years of Lead saw political violence in Italy from 1968 through to the late 1980’s. Beginning with the 'Sessantotto' and Hot Autumn Strikes right up until the assassination of the communist left Senator Roberto Ruffilli by the Red Brigade.
Eddington (the 2025 movie by Ari Aster) could be seen as the blueprint for this current political environment. In Eddington the threat of violence is blamed on the ‘naive’ and young Black Lives Matters protestors and the looming threat of ANTIFA super soldiers. Yet the only violence ever carried out is by those aligned with the right or by those with power. Again though, the violence is largely driven by the entitlement of men. Men who grow increasingly disgruntled at their own inability to live up to their fantastical ideas and instead begin to cling to right wing ideas as a form of grievance politics. The town's Sheriff shoots and kills a homeless man, before murdering his political opponent all really because he refuses to listen to his own wife. Those with real power, the unnamed capitalists trying to build a data center in town, leverage the political and violent chaos to build a data center, unimpeded.
The past couple of years have seen increasingly violent attacks by the far right in the US. This is not an exhaustive list but there was the home invasion and assault of Nancy Polisi’s husband (2022), the Trump shooting (2024), the assassination of the United Health CEO (2025), the shooting at the NFL offices in New York (2025), the shooting at a Texas ICE detention centre (2025), the assassination of Democratic Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband (2025) and now Charlie Kirk.
It feels safe to speculate that Neo Nazi organisers in so called Australia have no doubt watched this evolving escalation of right wing violence in the US and so called Australia’s outsized influence on the accelerationist culture driving it. It potentially plays into their approach of committing violent crimes and be arrested to garner press attention. It's why mainstream medias reporting of Nazis in so called Australia has largely aligned with the Nazi's goals.
It's in part what motivated them to attack Camp Sovereignty in broad daylight, a win for them in expressing their overt racist views and getting some press. Escalated violent crimes often see right wing individuals becoming revered heroes of the white power movement long after their own deaths, usually at their own hands.
Regardless of Kirk's murderer's political views, it won’t be the last of this style of violence and is another mark in the ever increasing likelihood that similar acts of violence will be seen here as well. I think I’ve beaten the Paddington and Eddington analogy to death but these two movies, for myself anyway, act as markers and create a strange through line from 2017 to now.
Time only exists if and when you point at it. Pop culture and art, when its done well, marks our societies and cultural moments. By acknowledging this isn't the same world as 2017 or 2020 or even 2021 we can maybe respond and stop a complete descent into the years of lead.
