Heated Eddington
This week in "Pop Culture That's Not for Me"
We’ve been having single-digit Fahrenheit temperatures and also heavy snow for a few days now, so I’ve largely been stuck inside except for periodic trips to clear away the berm of snow the plows keep depositing across the mouth of our driveway. Which presents a chance for me to do the Thing where I watch a little bit of something that’s taking up a lot of space in the #discourse, so I can confidently say that I don’t want to watch more. Twice, in fact:
Heated Rivalry:
This is the Gay Hockey Player Show that was generating more buzz a couple of months ago, but has remained a Thing that comes up somewhat regularly in my various social-media feeds. It’s conveniently about the right length to watch an episode while pedaling the stationary bike in the basement, so I fired it up for a ride to nowhere.
This is one of those sports stories where the actual league wouldn’t participate so everything involves fake teams in a fake league that everybody can tell is actually the NHL. It also centers on characters who are pretty clearly analogues for specific real people, though I am sufficiently ignorant of hockey that that part didn’t fully click until Kate mentioned it when we were walking the dog1. These are two young hockey players— one Canadian, the other Russian— who are drafted by Original Six teams of the not-the-NHL-wink-wink, but make a… more personal connection in secret.
So, I’ll say up front that the leads are attractive, and they play the sexual tension between them really well. The #discourse engine for the movie is that the sex scenes are remarkably explicit for a television show in wide distribution, and, yep, they sure Did That Thing. With the one caveat that it’s just screamingly obvious that extraordinary effort has been put into positioning the camera and blocking the scenes to ensure that at no point does anyone see a dick on the screen. It’s done smoothly and tastefully, but also you can’t not see the care with which they’re not showing dicks2.
That said, what struck me about this was how there’s just nothing else there. It’s the Gay Hockey Player Show That Doesn’t Have Any Hockey In It. Or, really, any actual characters— each of the leads has some token Problematic family members, who get a few lines every now and then, and they have brief interactions with some teammates, but those are kept to an absolute minimum so as to maximize the amount of screen time in which the leads are lusting after each other— even the scenes when only one of them is on screen make a point of mentioning the other so they can make faces of Repressed Longing.
I realize that this is just revealing that I am Not A Romance Reader, which, fair cop. But that also makes this show very much Not For Me. I might actually be interested in a Gay Hockey Player show that had more actual hockey in it, where their relationship was just one piece of a larger and more fleshed-out story. The actual existing show is just weirdly high-production-value soft-core porn, like an upscale gay version of the flicks that Cinemax used to play at 2am back in the 80’s. Given that the Internet exists now, I just don’t really understand the point of that.
Eddington:
When I initially saw the title for Ari Aster’s 2025 movie, I joked to somebody that Oppenheimer mania was going a little too far, but that I looked forward to seeing the 1919 eclipse in IMAX with a booming score. The actual film is named after the town in New Mexico where it’s set— see photo3— pitting Joaquin Phoenix’s county sheriff against Pedro Pascal’s smarmy mayor in the Peak COVID summer of 2020.
This came out in mid-2025, and generated some buzz among the movie critics whose columns and Substacks and podcasts I follow, with it being hailed as “provocative” and “prescient” and “perceptive” and other adjectives starting with “p.” It’s bubbled up again recently following the release of the Oscar nominations, where Sinners and One Battle After Another racked up a bunch of nominations and a number of those same critics have posted saying “Yeah, but Eddington is better than either of those…”
The set-up for the movie puts Phoenix and Pascal on opposite side of the hot-button issues of Peak COVID— masks and social distancing, etc.— while the local teens are getting caught up in social-justice causes. Meanwhile there’s a dispute brewing about the construction of some sort of data center in town, and absolutely everyone is constantly looking at phones and laptops and tablets blaring influencer videos and conspiracy-theory #content.
When this first came out, I stayed away from it because of the subject matter. Not out of an “It’s Too Soon” feeling, but because I thought it was likely to be painfully on-the-nose as satire, and I have an extremely low tolerance for that kind of thing. Between the recent re-hyping and the whole “stuck inside watching snow fall” thing, I decided to give it a shot and… I was right the first time. I made it through about 45 minutes, then said “I hate all of this,” and decided to read a book instead.
I should note that this does not mean I think it was badly made or anything— Phoenix and Pascal are both doing good work acting-wise, and it’s clearly being shot by people who know what they’re doing. It’s just crashingly unsubtle in a way that I personally find really grating. Not in an overly-didactic Making A Point way4, more a “these characters are just exaggerated Types” thing. It’s pretty clearly a high-quality version of the thing it’s doing, but that thing isn’t anything I want.
So, yeah, not a great batting average this weekend for pop culture that’s prominent in the #discourse. If for some reason you need to choose between these and only these I guess I’d go with the gay hockey players, because they’ve constructed it to save the viewer the trouble of fast-forwarding through the plot between the steamy scenes, and those are pretty good. Honestly, though, I’d probably give them both a miss and watch the Damon'/Affleck vehicle The Rip instead, because we fired that up for Movie Night on Friday and it was good fun5.
That’s a bit of Yelling At Snow, I guess, but it served to wake me up enough to face grading a bunch of student papers while the batteries for the snowblower recharge. If for some reason you want to see more of this, here’s a button:
And if you want to call me a philistine for any of these opinions, the comments will be open:
She skim-read the book it’s based on, which she said is even more obviously Real People Slash with the names changed. I had a real forehead-slap moment when she said that, because of course the leads are Crosby and Ovechkin. And that makes the whole thing more than a little icky, honestly.
At least through the first episode, anyway. Maybe it gets less Austin Powers later on, I don’t know.
The angle is different because I was just sitting on the couch watching, not biking to nowhere.
Not necessarily, anyway; maybe it becomes more didactic later in the film.
When the trailer for this was playing, SteelyKid said “Wow, Matt Damon got really old.” I replied “He’s like eight months older than me.” “Really? But he looks younger than you do.” “NO HE FUCKING DOES NOT!”