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Ari Aster’s “Eddington” is such a superb social satire about contemporary America that I want to bury it in the desert for 20 years. More distance will make it easier to laugh.

It’s a modern western set in New Mexico — Aster’s home state — where trash blows like tumbleweeds as Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) stalks across the street to confront Eddington’s mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), whom he is campaigning to unseat. It’s May of 2020, that hot and twitchy early stretch of the COVID pandemic when reality seemed to disintegrate, and Joe is ticked off about the new mask mandate. He has asthma, and he can’t understand anyone who has their mouth covered.

Joe and Ted have old bad blood between them that’s flowed down from Joe’s fragile wife Louise, a.k.a. Rabbit (Emma Stone), a stunted woman-child who stubbornly paints creepy dolls, and his mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), a raving conspiracist who believes the Titanic sinking was no accident. Dawn is jazzed to decode the cause of this global shutdown; there’s comfort in believing everything happens for a reason. Her mania proves contagious.

Bad things are happening in Eddington and have been for decades, not just broken shop windows. Joe wears a white hat and clearly considers himself the story’s hero, although he’s not up to the job. If you squint real hard, you can see his perspective that he’s a champion for the underdog. Joe gets his guts in a twist when a maskless elder is kicked out of the local grocery store as the other shoppers applaud. “Public shaming,” Joe spits.

“There’s no COVID in Eddington,” Joe claims in his candidacy announcement video, urging his fellow citizens that “we need to free our hearts.” His earnestness is comic and sweet and dangerous. You can hear every fact he’s leaving out. His rival’s commercials promote a fantastical utopia where Ted is playing piano on the sidewalk and elbow-bumping more Black people in 15 seconds than we see in the rest of the movie. Ted also swears that permitting a tech behemoth named SolidGoldMagikarp to build a controversial giant data center on the outskirts of the county won’t suck precious resources — it’ll transform this nowheresville into a hub for jobs. Elections are a measure of public opinion: Which fibber would you trust?

Danger is coming and like in “High Noon,” this uneasy town will tear itself apart before it arrives. Aster is so good at scrupulously capturing the tiny, fearful COVID behaviors we’ve done our best to forget that it’s a shame (and a relief) that the script isn’t really about the epidemic. Another disease has infected Eddington: Social media has made everyone brain sick.

The film is teeming with viral headlines — serious, frivolous or false — jumbled together on computer screens screaming for attention in the same all-caps font. (Remember the collective decision that no one had the bandwidth to care about murder hornets?) Influencers and phonies and maybe even the occasional real journalist prattle on in the backgrounds of scenes telling people what to think and do, often making things worse. Joe loves his wife dearly. We see him privately watching a YouTuber explain how he can convince droopy Louise to have children. Alas, he spends his nights in their marital bed chastely doomscrolling.

Every character in “Eddington” is lonely and looking for connection. One person’s humiliating nadir comes during a painful tracking shot at an outdoor party where they’re shunned like they have the plague. Phones dominate their interactions: The camera is always there in somebody’s hand, live streaming or recording, flattening life into a reality show and every conversation into a performance.

The script expands to include Joe’s deputies, aggro Guy (Luke Grimes) and Bitcoin-obsessed Michael (Micheal Ward), plus a cop from the neighboring tribal reservation, Officer Butterfly Jimenez (William Belleau) and a handful of bored, identity-seeking teens. They’ll all wind up at odds even though they’re united by the shared need to be correct, to have purpose, to belong. When George Floyd is killed six states away, these young do-gooders rush into the streets, excited to have a reason to get together and yell. The protesters aren’t insincere about the cause. But it’s head-scrambling to watch blonde Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle) lecture her ex-boyfriend Michael, who is Black and a cop, about how he should feel. Meanwhile Brian (Cameron Mann), who is white and one of the most fascinating characters to track, is so desperate for Sarah’s attention that he delivers a hilarious slogan-addled meltdown: “My job is to sit down and listen! As soon as I finish this speech! Which I have no right to make!”

The words come fast and furious and flummoxing. Aster has crowded more pointed zingers and visual gags into each scene than our eyes can take in. His dialogue is laden with vile innuendos — “deep state,” “sexual predator,” “antifa” — and can feel like getting pummeled. When a smooth-talking guru named Vernon (Austin Butler) slithers into the plot, he regales Joe’s family with an incredulous tale of persecution that, as he admits, “sounds insane just to hear coming out of my mouth.” Well, yeah. Aster wants us to feel exhausted sorting fact from fiction.

The verbal barrage builds to a scene in which Joe and Dawn sputter nonsense at each other in a cross-talking non-conversation where both sound like they’re high on cocaine. They are, quite literally, internet junkies.

This is the bleakest of black humor. There’s even an actual dumpster fire. Aster’s breakout debut, “Hereditary,” gave him an overnight pedigree as the princeling of highbrow horror films about trauma. But really, he’s a cringe comedian who exaggerates his anxieties like a tragic clown. Even in “Midsommar,” Aster’s most coherent film, his star Florence Pugh doesn’t merely cry — she howls like she could swallow the earth. It wouldn’t be surprising to hear that when Aster catches himself getting maudlin, he forces himself to actively wallow in self-pity until it feels like a joke. Making the tragic ridiculous is a useful tool. (I once got through a breakup by watching “The Notebook” on repeat.)

With “Beau Is Afraid,” Aster’s previous film with Phoenix, focusing that approach on one man felt too punishing. “Eddington” is hysterical group therapy. I suspect that Aster knows that if we read a news article about a guy like Joe, we wouldn’t have any sympathy for him at all. Instead, Aster essentially handcuffs us to Joe’s point of view and sends us off on this tangled and bitterly funny adventure, in which rattling snakes spice up a humming, whining score by the Haxan Cloak and Daniel Pemberton.

Not every plot twist works. Joe’s sharpest pivot is so inward and incomprehensible that the film feels compelled to signpost it by having a passing driver yell, “You’re going the wrong way!” By the toxic finale, we’re certain only that Phoenix plays pathetic better than anyone these days. From “Her” to “Joker” to “Napoleon” to “Inherent Vice,” he’s constantly finding new wrinkles in his sad sacks. “Eddington’s” design teams have taken care to fill Joe’s home with dreary clutter and outfit him in sagging jeans. By contrast, Pascal’s wealthier Ted is the strutting embodiment of cowboy chic. He’s even selfishly hoarded toilet paper in his fancy adobe estate.

It’s humanistic when “Eddington” notes that everyone in town is a bit of a sinner. The problem is that they’re all eager to throw stones and point out what the others are doing wrong to get a quick fix of moral superiority. So many yellow cards get stacked up against everyone that you come to accept that we’re all flawed, but most of us are doing our best.

Joe isn’t going to make Eddington great again. He never has a handle on any of the conspiracies, and when he grabs a machine gun, he’s got no aim. Aster’s feistiest move is that he refuses to reveal the truth. When you step back at the end to take in the full landscape, you can put most of the story together. (Watch “Eddington” once, talk it out over margaritas and then watch it again.) Aster makes the viewer say their theories out loud afterwards, and when you do, you sound just as unhinged as everyone else in the movie. I dig that kind of culpability: a film that doesn’t point sanctimonious fingers but insists we’re all to blame.

But there are winners and losers and winners who feel like losers and schemers who get away with their misdeeds scot-free. Five years after the events of this movie, we’re still standing in the ashes of the aggrieved. But at least if we’re cackling at ourselves together in the theater, we’re less alone.

The Global Story, a daily podcast from the BBC, launches this September with former NPR White House correspondent Asma Khalid and former international reporter at Al Jazeera, Tristan Redman, as hosts.

With Asma in Washington DC and Tristan in London, the podcast will tell the intertwined story of America and the world — how each shapes the other daily.

The world order is shifting. Old alliances are fraying, autocrats are on the rise, and global trade is in turmoil. Some of this turbulence can be traced to decisions made in the United States, but the US isn’t just a cause of upheaval abroad — its politics are also a symptom of it.

“The Global Story” from the BBC World Service and BBC Studios tackles the news at this intersection: where the world and the United States meet.

Co-host Asma Khalid most recently served as White House Correspondent for NPR, where she covered US politics for the last decade, and was co-host of the popular “NPR Politics Podcast”. Co-host Tristan Redman has two decades of global international reporting experience with Al Jazeera. He has reported on major stories from around the world from the war in Ukraine to the Arab Spring, the Hong Kong protests to papal conclaves, and more. Additionally, Redman hosted the smash hit narrative podcast series “Ghost Story”, a #1 Apple Podcast in both the US and the UK.

Also joining “The Global Story” team will be executive editor Annie Brown, former senior producer for New York Times’ “The Daily”.

The podcast will be published every weekday morning.

BBC News remains the most trusted news provider internationally and last year grew its global audience to reach 418 million people around the world each week

Asma Khalid said: “It’s a rare privilege in a journalist’s career to have an opportunity to help build a show from the ground up. And I’m thrilled to be joining the BBC — such a storied institution — to do just that. I’ve spent years covering American politics and I’m more convinced than ever that we need a show like this — that dives into news, narrative and global issues — with the goal of connecting the dots in our strange political times.”

Tristan Redman said: “As a British-American journalist, I couldn’t be more excited to tell stories about the interplay between America and the world. From my career in the field, I’ve seen firsthand that US actions have global consequences. Asma and I will be making sense of all this— backed by the finest newsroom in the business.”

Jon Zilkha, Controller of BBC World Service English, said: “The Global Story is a podcast which showcases the very best of the BBC’s analysis and storytelling from our correspondents around the world. Audiences trust the BBC for accurate, insightful journalism. The perspective provided by The Global Story, and its hosts Asma and Tristan, is much needed in the fast-changing political landscape we are living in. I am excited that we can share it with listeners this September.”

Richard Knight, Director of Audio, BBC Studios, said: “The world is changing quickly and the causes and consequences of that change are visible in many places. That’s the global story we are all living through. I’m excited to welcome Asma and Tristan to the BBC to host the essential daily podcast for listeners who want to see the whole picture.”

“The Global Story” podcast reflects the BBC’s ongoing commitment to growing its international audience.

The Global Story begins Wednesday 3 September and will be available in the UK on BBC Sounds and outside of the UK on BBC.com, the BBC app, and wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

Episodes will be released every morning, five days per week, from Monday-Friday.

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When the Chilean photographer Paz Errázuriz showed her first photobook to a well-known society photographer of the day, he told her “look, a housewife will never be a photographer”.

“That’s what he said!” she laughs. “Imagine … that was my beginning.” Today, aged 81, her work documenting life on the fringes of Chilean society sits in the collections of Tate Modern and MoMA in New York and in 2015 she represented Chile at the Venice Biennale.

Between 1982 and 1987, Errázuriz spent time photographing life in the brothels of Santiago, as trans sex workers fixed their hair, shifted their stockings, refined their makeup and killed time waiting for male clients. It was, she says, a “beautiful” experience. “We talked or we’d have a glass of wine or a coffee. They trusted me.”

Such was her empathetic bond with her subjects, that she even developed a friendship with the mother of two brothers working in one of the brothels. “I dedicated the series to her.” She titled the project Adam’s Apple, and it characterised a career defined by an enduring love of outsiders.

Works from the series can now be seen in her first major solo UK exhibition, Paz Errázuriz: Dare to Look – Hidden Realities of Chile at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. Other subjects of the 171 photographs on show include psychiatric patients, circus performers, boxers, political activists and the homeless, highlighting the humanity of those living under duress during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Talking to me over Zoom from her home in Santiago, Errázuriz admits to being nervous about the interview. But she remains an energising presence, even on screen: a huge smile and rippling laugh, spiky hair, she beams through my laptop like a grandmotherly punk.

“My idea is not to shock,” she states. But shock she did. “I was censored for such a long time. For instance, there was a small group exhibition at a museum during the dictatorship and my photograph was taken out. It was a reflection of a naked man in a mirror.” It was artistic, she laughs again, not obscene. “You couldn’t see anything specific.”

Errázuriz was born in Santiago in 1944. Her father, a lawyer, was both strict and traditional. “I never got along with him. He didn’t accept that I studied art when I finished school, so I resented that,” she recalls. A childhood snap taken during her first communion made an impression about photography’s importance as a record. Her head was partly out of the frame. “I was frustrated because friends had very formal photographs. It seemed very unfair.”

She trained as a primary school teacher, studying for a time at the Cambridge Institute of Education in the UK. While teaching in Santiago she began taking pictures, initially of children. “I enjoyed that very much because they didn’t see me. They forgot about the photographer,” she recalls. That project led to her first photobook in 1973 – Amalia, Diary of a Chicken – in which she depicted a household seen through the bird’s shin-high perspective.

She was encouraged in her early work by the book’s editor, Isabel Allende, later the bestselling author of The House of the Spirits and a niece of Salvador Allende, Chile’s president during the early 1970s. “I didn’t know other photographers. I never had the chance to see photobooks in those days. I’m self-taught.”

But everything changed on 11 September 1973 when General Pinochet took power in a coup that saw the country’s air force bomb its own presidential palace. When Pinochet’s troops stormed the building, President Allende was found dead, lying next to his rifle. Isabel Allende went into exile.

Errázuriz stayed. But the coup ended her teaching career; the junta considered her “inappropriate” for the classroom. Photography and family life took its place. She married and had two children. Meanwhile, she began photographing Chileans living on the margins of society, embracing an informal social documentary style with a humanist sensibility. “Little by little, I became more active.”

In 1981 she co-founded Asociación de Fotógrafos Independientes, which provided credentials and a membership card as she wielded her camera around town. She went on to photograph vagrants sleeping rough, elderly nudes, riot police, tango dancers, wrestlers, acrobats, dissidents and endangered ethnic groups. All are treated with respect.

Errázuriz compares looking at her old work to flicking through a diary. “It was analogue photography and so you had negatives and you made contact sheets. Film here was very difficult to find, very expensive. You had one roll of film, 36 shots, and when that contact sheet appeared there were so many things on it,” she explains. “The first six strips were of the protests in the street, where the military is doing this or that. Then came the photography of my son, a baby, and then at the end of the sheet is my grandmother’s birthday.”

In the 1980s, Errázuriz volunteered at a charitable centre for people affected by Aids. The crisis decimated the community of sex workers she had photographed. “So many people died. From my project all of them except one,” she says, adding that she remains close to that survivor. “For the past 10 years, the first call I receive in the new year is from him.”

The dictatorship was mercurial, she recalls. In 1987 she began documenting the city’s boxing community. “That, I thought was innocuous,” she says. “But when I went to the place where they trained, they said: ‘Oh no, you cannot come in because women are not allowed here.’” She won them over with “imaginative arguments”.

The last time she showed in the UK it was alongside other international luminaries such as Bruce Davidson, Diane Arbus and Larry Clark in the group show Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins at the Barbican in London. She is thrilled to be back in Britain, a nation of which she is fond, not least because, when Pinochet was placed under house arrest in a Surrey country club in 1998 on charges of human rights violations, “everyone realised, seriously, what he had done because England is such an authority,” she says. “That was the real fall of a dictator.” He told Chileans he’d be home for Christmas but was held for 16 months before, notoriously, the then homesecretary Jack Straw released him on the grounds that he was too ill to stand trial.

Errázuriz is still photographing (albeit on her smartphone, as carrying a camera on the streets of Santiago would be a magnet for muggers). There is widespread poverty, crime and yet more protests, she says, and she is not, perhaps, as primed for the latter as she once was. “You have to run fast. The teargas hurts so much, I discovered that the gas today is totally different to the one 40 years ago.”

Does she think Chile is a better place today than it was half a century ago? “We got rid of the dictatorship. That was the main thing we’ve done. That’s really important,” she says. “But it’s difficult in Chile, really. It’s not exactly what we dreamed of.” When I ask if she still gets pleasure from photographing its people, “Sí,” she says and her face lights up. “When I choose who I’m going to photograph, it’s because, somehow, I like that person. I reflect myself in them. I learn from them.”

Paz Errázuriz: Dare to Look – Hidden Realities of Chile is at MK Gallery from 19 July to 5 October