The film “Eddington” opens at night as Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) sits in his Chevy Tahoe on the edge of a New Mexico desert. On duty, he’s bathed in blue light, watching YouTube: a video on how to convince your spouse to want a child. More cops pull up, tribal police from the fictional Santa Lupe Pueblo, and tell him a mask mandate is active on their land. Joe pulls his mask up over his nose until they leave, then immediately yanks it down.

Set in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, “Eddington,” directed by Ari Aster, blends elements of horror, Westerns, and satire that explore how we process such an earth-shattering event half a decade later. But its subplot about the development of a massive data center nearby explores just how this volatile landscape became profitable for tech corporations, while engaging with contemporary vignettes of Native life where Indigenous communities exist along the border, haunting the town’s history and politics.

In the film, the mayor of the town of Eddington, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), plays high-powered politics to the best of his ability in a small town, including cozying up to the shadowy tech company SolidGoldMagiKarp. The company has proposed a “Hyperscale Data Center Development” and Mayor Garcia touts the idea as a boon to the local economy, creating jobs. Sheriff Cross, however, sees it differently. To him, the world and its mask mandates have infringed on his town and life. As a result, he decides to run against Garcia for Mayor. 

From here, the action is set in motion. Defying masking orders is used for social media points, while young, mostly white activists, engage in online activism by invoking the Navajo Long Walk and calling out stolen land–talking points that operate more as currency than a genuine desire to engage with their Pueblo neighbors. Eddington, at its heart, is a Western. Like other Westerns, it evokes a moment of discovery and unleashes it on the viewing public. John Ford Westerns locate the founding mythologies of what animates American identity among red buttes and stagecoaches. Even in Twin Peaks, David Lynch’s revelatory vision of the first atomic bomb detonated in the New Mexico desert offers a view of evil’s origins. In “Eddington,” alienation drives the narrative, framed through social media, Zoom meetings, and the tech infrastructure pushing the community apart in every way possible.

That infrastructure, of course, exists off screen and in our lives. Earlier this month in southern Arizona, nearly 1,000 people in Tucson turned out to a city council meeting after local reporters revealed that officials had secretly planned an Amazon Web Services facility in their community. At a public meeting, angry residents cited that the city’s pattern of droughts would not meet the data center’s surging water needs. In Tennessee, residents in a South Memphis neighborhood have reported breathing problems due to nitrogen oxide emissions from burning fossil fuels used to power Elon Musk’s xAI’s servers, to run Grok, X’s resident chatbot.

Because of the speed of AI data center development, tribes have only begun to grapple with this trend and threats to water, land, and energy capacity. The Tonawanda Seneca Nation filed a lawsuit against the construction of a data center in upstate New York earlier this month, arguing the site would impede treaty rights, including hunting and gathering. Last year, the Arizona Corporation Commission, a utility regulator, approved an 8% rate hike to meet the energy demands brought on by the state’s rising number of data centers. In a separate measure, the Commission rejected a package to expand electricity to residents on the Navajo Nation, where nearly 13,000 households lack access.    

“As these data centers are moving into their communities, people are starting to realize that there are huge physical manifestations to all of this artificial intelligence and all of this computing that we’ve come to just kind of accept in our daily lives,” said Deborah Kapiloff, a policy advisor at the Western Resource Advocates. “There is going to start being a lot more pushback from communities as they understand what this means for them in terms of changes to their communities and these data centers siting there.” 

At the end of the film, there’s an opening ceremony of the center. In the corner, next to Phoenix’s character who is now physically incapacitated, is also a Santa Lupe Pueblo leader, symbolically incapacitated. It’s revealed that the state has invested millions of dollars into clean energy projects on their land and are praised for their partnership and participation with the data center. It’s unclear if the endeavors were driven by the Pueblo, or what kind of say the nation had in the deal. As the credits roll, the center glows against the dusky blue land, almost breathing.