“Beef,” “The Drama,” and the New Marriage Plot

19:38Alexandra Schwartz:So I want to say this thing about her laugh. Do you know how it's kind of like, it's very cute, but it's also kind of like.

19:50Alexandra Schwartz:Repulsive even. Yeah. Okay.

19:52Vinson Cunningham:And then if she laughs, I can point it out. And then, very close to their wedding, they go out to dinner at their wedding venue to do a final tasting with their two best friends. And these best friends, who seem like freaks to me, decide that what they most want to do is talk about the worst thing that they did because they did that before they got married. And it only bonded them further together.

20:16Alexandra Schwartz:What's the worst thing you ever did in your life?

20:18Vinson Cunningham:Exactly. And even though that was an intimate exercise between the two of them that they agreed never to share, they somehow are sharing the worst things they ever did in their life. And the conversation is passed around until we get to Zendaya. Everyone else has done something, and I really hope we return to this, that really sucks. Like, I don't like what those other people did at all. I'm just going to editorialize in here. They bullied other people. I have stuff to say about it. They locked mentally disabled children in closets. They cyber bullied. They used someone as a human shield in front of a mad dog.

20:49Vinson Cunningham:They just, they did horrible, selfish things. And then Zendaya admits that she planned but did not execute a school shooting when she was 15. Boop. The tenor changes. Everybody freaks out. Alana Haim, who plays Rachel, the best friend, really freaks out. And everything becomes a complete disaster. Charlie starts to think, who is this woman? I actually know nothing about her. I thought it was so cute that she's deaf in one ear and I love to whisper sweet nothings and see if she can hear any of them. Oh, damn. Actually, she blew out her eardrum while firing her father's rifle in the swamps of Louisiana to prepare to commit mass murder.

21:27Vinson Cunningham:And yet I somehow inconceivably am going to go through with this wedding. And meanwhile, Zendaya is all is very flummoxed. She's just flummoxed. Here I am. I thought my life was going one way. Now this thing from the past has come out to haunt me. It's escaped. what goes on. And so all of this culminates in a classic wedding from hell. Masterful, Alex. That's what I got from it. And I have much more to say. Okay. What did we think? Alex, I'm getting the sense that you might not have liked this movie.

21:58Alexandra Schwartz:But maybe, maybe let's go to Vincent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a really interesting film. It's got a playful texture, right? I think one of the things to point out is that the The editing is full of all these red herrings, almost counterfactual stems that you can see one character ideating how they wish something that they said was received and it's actually received in a different way. All these flashes backwards and forwards to moments in the relationship that might have been tells. First of all, I have questions. First of all, okay. Okay. No one, no matter how drunk, would ever tell anybody this.

22:37Alexandra Schwartz:Number one. Number two, what about it's the best thing I did? What about I stopped a mass shooting? Correct. I stopped a mass shooting in its tracks. By not doing it? Yes. Well, what if I don't have to put that clause in there? What if I just convinced somebody, myself, not to shoot up a school? Alana Haim, who I love. I love her music. I think she's a pretty good actress. she's the one who admits to putting a kid in a... She's the worst. She's the one who put the person in the closet and left them there seemingly overnight, locked in a closet, not telling a single adult what she has done. Okay, Alana Haim, get off of your high horse, number one.

23:19Alexandra Schwartz:And then we have the brooding figure of Pattinson sort of looking not unlike a vampire trying not to eat his beloved. You know, he's got the same kind of, I don't know, clenched body posture as he does in the, what's the name of that series? Twilight. In the Twilight series. What's the name of that series? He pretends. Come on, Vincent. He pretends not to. We know. Nonetheless, I do, I will see this movie again, and I kind of enjoyed it. This is what I like about it. Okay. We are entering the absolutely white-hot prime of Zendaya's career. And here's the thing. She is always, she is very often in a situation just like this one.

24:07Alexandra Schwartz:What do you mean? In the middle of some sort of either erotic or romantic entanglement that makes her character more a kind of symbol or signifier than a real person. Yes. But weirdly, in an interesting way. Think about Challengers, how she's just in the middle of that, the two rival, friend rivals, united not only by their love of tennis, but by their love of this same woman. Think of the 2021 Sam Levinson film, Malcolm and Marie. She and John David Washington are the couple in that. He's a filmmaker. She's upset that he won an award but didn't thank her because his movie is about this young addict that is found by another character.

24:48Alexandra Schwartz:Turns out that was she was an addict before they got together and she was like rehabilitated through the form of their relationship. She's always someone who's in a romantic situation and her position in that relationship becomes like us up cat all caps symbol for a larger social thing. She's a really talented actor in that she can kind of play these screens. In this film, we get a sense of how this is really tearing everyone else apart, but really we see her so much from the outside, which I think might be a demerit toward the film. But it is totally, I think, I was watching Zendaya the whole time being like, I'm glad to be watching this because I can't take my eyes off her character whenever she's there, even though she's a total cipher.

25:39Vinson Cunningham:This is a fascinating take because I agree with everything you're saying and I just conclude I want so much more for her. I want her to be able to play a fully embodied person who is real. I want so much more than what the drama could give us. Okay, arguably, this is not a movie about fully embodied characters. I actually thought, you know, Zendaya, perhaps the most beautiful woman right now that we have in the world. We have. I mean, not that I've seen every single person in the world. If you would like to contest this, send your headshot to the mail at newyorker.com.

26:17Alexandra Schwartz:Subject line, hotter than Zendaya. Exactly. An absolute, I don't know what she is. She pops off the screen, it's true. She pops off the screen. She is absolutely gorgeous. She is likable. I actually don't think her performance in this movie is that great. But maybe, again, it is the fault of the role. I actually thought Pattinson was good. I really liked him. but in general when we're talking about embodiment and depth and kind of like you want more for her you know this is not the movie in which that will happen and I think that's okay like I enjoyed this movie I thought it was a slight and fun and funny and very good looking exercise you know When I say exercise, I don't mean even to undercut it, but it's almost like a game or like a kind of a diagram of like, here is like what if.

27:10Here is like a situation. What if this happens? Wouldn't that be crazy? And then like how would people react? Like let's take this as far as it might go. And on that level, I thought it was successful and enjoyable. I am not looking for answers or I think we shouldn't or we can't look for answers about like what does it mean to be married right now? I mean, it is an example of like, oh, I actually know nothing about this person that I'm about to marry. You know, I know I don't know even because, of course, when she does tell him that she planned this, you know, mass murder, she tells him like I was a reject.

28:00And indeed, there are flashbacks to her past in high school. And it's like, oh, he knows nothing about her. Like, imagine if this was one's origin story, not even even barring the killing part of it. It's almost like a parable, right? It's not like a realistic engagement with an actual relationship.

28:23Vinson Cunningham:I mean, my issue with it, I had a great time at the theater. I think this is not a good film. And that's sometimes my favorite viewing experiences are those where I'm like hooting and hollering. And then I'm like, nope, actually, I think it's very bad for these reasons. Nomi, I think the big point for me about this movie, as far as marriage goes, is what you're bringing up. The lack of knowledge. The total lack of knowledge between two people who are theoretically prepared to commit the rest of their lives to one another. Who seem to have no knowledge of one another's families, one another's backgrounds, even high school photos.

28:55Vinson Cunningham:Things like this. But I think a big part of marriage and marriage depiction is about change. And it's about how much can you stand to change and how much can you tolerate change in someone whose life you've hitched yours to. And when those changes come over time, maybe it's great. When they come boom all at once, it can rock the whole boat. And that's what I see going on in the drama. I don't think it's explored in an interesting way particularly. But I also see it going on all over the culture. Right. So let's maybe let's turn now from the drama and this topic of kind of like zero to one, like, you know, black and white kind of change of like, oh, who is this person that I've hitched my my wagon to this total stranger?

29:45We can talk about some other texts where this happens. And one of them is actually titled Strangers by Bell Burden, which came out a couple months ago. and it's a memoir based on a modern love column that was published in the Times in 2023. And it has become a phenomenal success, bestselling. We have just learned that it's going to become a movie. Gwyneth Paltrow is going to play the author and the protagonist, Belle Burden. And let's talk a little bit about this book because really so many people, and especially women, with my cohort I've found that have read it.

30:30Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, Strangers is the kind of book that, of course, men, it would be great if men read, but women will read it by the drove, and we have and we are. Essentially, it's Belle Burden writes about being a young woman swept up in a fast-moving, sweep-you-off-your-feet kind of romance when she was a young professional woman working at a law firm in New York City, gets married in very short order, and they have a great marriage that goes on for many, many years, produces three children, pandemic hits. They decamp from their lovely Tribeca apartment to their lovely home in Martha's Vineyard. And within a week of quarantine, it is revealed that the husband has, in fact, been having an affair.

31:18Vinson Cunningham:And after initially seeming to be contrite and concerned about this, the husband says, in fact, I'm just going to leave you. And I'm going to leave not only you, but our whole family. Don't want to do it anymore. Don't want to be a husband anymore. Don't want to be a dad anymore. I'm out. It's a sense of, who are you? I don't know you. You have built this family with me. You have taken the kids on these activities. You have enjoyed them. You have provided for them. You've done the same for me. And you can just walk away, and I'll never know why. I think the big preoccupation of this book is not knowing why.

31:53And that is, I really think that's getting to the heart of where our culture is at.

31:59Vinson Cunningham:This question of why, who are you, and what if I can't know. It's the same thing with the drama. I'm thinking of it also with, I'm sorry, I'm going to bring up something very dark here, but with the Gisele Pellico story. Yeah, absolutely. Gisele Pellico, of course, this French woman who was discovered had been serially raped by her husband and by other anonymous men who he had found on the internet and recruited to rape her while she was asleep because he had drugged her, who had a very, very well-covered public, notably public trial in France, was very, very visible as the victim in this case, and as the heroine of this case, and who's just come out with this book, A Hymn to Life, Shame Has to Change Sides, the most horrific form of not knowing.

32:42Vinson Cunningham:And I think just to think of her case as a cultural lightning rod, which it certainly was in France, And I think to an extent was in the United States, too. There's this question of how could it have happened to her? Could it happen to me, to anyone? That's the horror story aspect, the fear aspect. Vincent, have you followed any of that case?

33:00Alexandra Schwartz:I've just followed the case. And I think for me, the aspect of revelation when it comes to marriage, therefore, is twofold, right? It's you as a participant of the marriage, one of the members of the marriage, can figure out much too late that your spouse is, in the case of probably an absolute sociopathic monster. But also there's the aspect of revelation that happens publicly because marriages, it seems to me, I mean, I guess just philosophically, there are these strangely very public things. This is why we inaugurate them in front of other people. The whole spectacle of them, as far as other people are concerned, is how we look and comport ourselves and treat ourselves and treat each other, that is, in public.

33:46Alexandra Schwartz:But there is such—and this is why marriages can become—not only can become prisons, but historically were prisons for generations and generations of women. And so much of it is still conducted in private that when, in this case, a horrifying aspect of the marriage comes out, it so radically changes and threatens our notions not just of this marriage, but of marriage in general.

34:15When we're back, is the culture totally disenchanted with married life? And if so, what else is there? Critics at large from The New Yorker will be right back.

34:42Vinson Cunningham:Vincent, you got me thinking when you were talking just now about the pre-assumptions of marriage, like the old ways of marriage, about woman as property to man, which was the condition for a very long time. And it got me thinking about how we even got to our current ideas of romantic partnership and marriage. And I credit slash blame the 19th century. Shout out 19th century. Shout out to the long 19th century for this idea that marriage is not just a pact between two families, a mutually advantageous decision made to further the line, but also that people are supposed to find love and romance and sexual fulfillment all wrapped up into this economic bundle with marriage.

35:34Vinson Cunningham:And as my support, I have on my lap two of my favorite friends, Madame Bovary by Gustave LaBear and Parallel Lives, Phyllis Rose's wonderful study of five Victorian marriages. Have you guys read this book? Parallel Lives? Yes. Yes. My dear critics, friends.

35:52Alexandra Schwartz:I've read the first half of it.

35:54Vinson Cunningham:Well, I read the whole thing. Well, I watched seven episodes of Beef, too. This is a great book, and it's a wonderful book. and it has shockingly a great deal to say to our condition, I think, in the 21st century. The argument that Phyllis Rose is making is that marriage is a political experience, and it's the primary political experience that most people will have. It is about balancing of power. It is, of course, about power between genders, but it's about the family and the marriage as a body politic in which two people are jockeying and negotiating, and things are frankly set up to not work more than they're set up to work.

36:30Vinson Cunningham:I think we have this kind of fantasy idea of marriage as a time where everyone knew their place. The man was the center and the woman's job was to just help the man fulfill whatever had to be done. And one thing that I love about the book Parallel Lives is that it shows us that that was really never satisfying for anyone. And I think that a lot of these ideas that we have now about freedom, personal freedom, sexual freedom, we're trying to reconcile them with marriage. And I think we're in a place where we're trying to make marriage seem more like a positive choice rather than an obvious obligation.

37:08Vinson Cunningham:That we're doing this because the love is so great, because we can envision the rest of our lives together, because it's this great mark of affirmation and faith in another person and also in yourself that you're going to be the kind of person to hold this down. And so in a way, it's a fascinating fiction that those who get married subscribe to, hoping that the fiction becomes true. Phyllis Rose has a great line about reading marriage like you can read a novel. And I think that's true in a lot of these cases, too, that life is a kind of fiction writing. You are making it up as you go along. And who you are at the start of a marriage is not going to be who you are at the middle and who you are at the end.

37:49Vinson Cunningham:And yet that keeps coming like such a rude shock to us. It's such a rude shock that we get great literature, movies, TV shows, albums from the shock of discovering that the other person is not who you thought they were and that you're not who you thought you were either.

38:02Alexandra Schwartz:One way to articulate that, you know, in this—and part of this long renegotiation that, to your point, has its early tremors in the 19th century, has some pretty big explosion in the middle of the 20th with the onset of modern feminism and still continues today. part of that trajectory is, okay, if we acknowledge that it can't just be an economic situation, a situation of bondage, really, and yet it still carries, at least in its sort of outward form, those traces. It still is a contract. But it's also supposed to be this place of personal revelation. I mean, this is sometimes the characteristic of love, especially in fiction.

38:48Alexandra Schwartz:Okay, yeah, there's public revelation, what others learn about you through the fact that you're married. There is intramarital revelation, what I learn about the other. But there's also, I love how you say marriage is a fiction because like an artwork, it has many forms that present themselves to us. And through these forms, their generality, the specificity of ourselves and the self of the other, we're supposed to learn something about ourselves too. I mean, for me, the great passage, the great moment in Madame Bovary is the opera, where, you know, Emma goes to the opera and she's like reawakened by the opera, sees Leon, the sort of romantic rival of her husband, is like, you know what?

39:33Alexandra Schwartz:I have to have an affair. You know, that romance is like art in that it has moments of cathartic learning. And if we're supposed to do that at the same time as we're in a contract, that's a lot of weight for any one institution, personal, privately, publicly, aesthetically, to bear. And this leads me to the question of, okay, what if we split the difference, right? You present an Emma Bovary who's, you know, in this unsatisfying relationship with Charles Bovary and is awakened to the possibilities that might lie outside of marriage. And of course, it's an illicit affair. There was no such thing as polyamory.

40:14There was no such thing as, you know, open marriage as a kind of like legitimate cultural choice, let's say, at least not in Emma Bovary's world. And today, of course, things are different. It's like you can't, like, leave your house without hearing of, like, someone being polyamorous or having an open marriage. You can't even stay in your house without hearing about it. Absolutely. And we come to examples, for instance, like the writer Lindy West, right, who recently published a memoir called Adult Braces, which raised a big discourse around it that had to do with what happens when you are married.

40:56you as Lindy are not interested in polyamory not interested in an open marriage you want to be monogamous with your husband but your husband wants something different and you can take it or leave it and the book ends up being about the opening of a relationship to include this other partner, another girlfriend, and the cohabiting of this throuple, essentially. Why has this conversation become so heated online about this book? What a great question.

41:33Vinson Cunningham:Even as I was engaging with the heatedness of it, I also was wondering. Why? Yeah, why? I think part of it has to do with that Lindy West, for those who are listening and don't know is a very public figure, has been a kind of vocal memoirist, written a lot about the body, body identity, fatness, and feminism, and has made her life very public in the way of many female writers, especially from that period, who wrote a lot online. She was part of the early days of Jezebel and, you know, other such websites. And I think, again, it has to do with this question of revelation. The thing that everyone is picking on is this idea that the ethics, I think when people talk about the ethics of polyamory, there's all this conversation that goes into everything being consensual, everything being above board, everything being agreed upon.

42:21Vinson Cunningham:It is the contract of contracts. It's like more contractual than a marriage contract for everything to operate as it should.

42:29Alexandra Schwartz:Well, it's interesting. Obviously, like, you know, polyamory has been a discourse, you know, they were on wave, what, seven of polyamory discourse over the past decade or so. But it's interesting, here we have, to your point, Lindy West is a very public writer and a very straightforwardly political writer. And it's interesting, you mentioned Phyllis Rose's contention that all marriage is political, and in fact that is for most of us the primary political experience. And it almost seems that that observation has come full circle where what kind of romantic entanglement one enters is, at least for some segment of people, the expression par excellence of your politics.

43:15Yeah. A lot of the book excerpts are – you don't even need to read the book to see these passages.

43:23Alexandra Schwartz:You go on Twitter, go on threads, go on wherever you want. Part of the dialectic of arriving at this arrangement is the husband saying, well, you know, actually monogamy is a little bit – he's a black gentleman. It's a little bit like ownership, which, you know. You're a white woman. You own me. You want to own me. And so. Yeah. Extraordinarily, it wasn't implied that it was the woman who was the one. Right. Exactly. Yes. So, you know. Chilling. Listeners, you do it that way. You will. I'm going to. I'm exercising extreme restraint. Restraint because of. It's chilling. This being like a real person who's busy.

44:04Alexandra Schwartz:But. Yeah. Chilling argument. Right. And part of the reason that West reasons herself. And it really is. Maybe the book. Part of the book, at least. It's a road trip physically. but it's also a road trip of reasoning oneself toward an arrangement that one does not originally want to be in. Part of that reasoning is explicitly political. It's like, how can I be a progressive if I can't understand this? Not only on the level of the emotions, but on the sort of formal palate that is marriage. Which, okay, fine. But it really is interesting to see that this political dimension of marriage has migrated from a descriptive fact to a kind of prescriptive arrangement that marriage becomes a place where we show what we believe.

44:48Yeah. And also just in general, I mean, I think it bears mentioning this is not just something, obviously, that's happening on the level of culture in the sense of on the level of fiction. I mean, I know we said that actual marriages are also fiction, but these are things that statistically have been happening According to Pew, the U.S. marriage rate hit 140-year low in 2019 and has never fully rebounded. People are not looking to marriage necessarily as much as they used to as the kind of pinnacle of adult life. You know, thinking about this statistic about kind of marriage losing its luster, its kind of like capability as a solution for people in their lives, it made me think about this like, I'm off Instagram currently, but when I was still on Instagram, and I'm sure on TikTok as well, a kind of popular reel that would keep coming up for me would be like Friday night as an unmarried woman with no friends.

45:57Oh, my God. No friends? Yes. Where are the friends? I don't know where the friends are. But basically, it wasn't a get ready with me. It was like get like unready with me, right? It's like I come home from work. I like do my skincare routine. I watch my shows. I'll pull one up. I mean, the has no friends is the part I'm struggling with. Okay, POV. You're a single and child-free girl that lives alone and has no friends. So this is what your Friday night looks and sounds like. 176 ,000 likes. Okay? Let's have a little look.

46:32She's entering her clean, quiet, peaceful apartment for a cozy night in. She ran to the store afterward to get some ingredients for dinner. Friday night is pizza night. Oh, everything is kind of clean and cozy. She's taking out the pizza from the box, slipping it in the clean oven. People ask if I miss being more social. Honestly, I really have no interest in dating. Oh, my God. Ate dinner while watching Midwest safety body camp videos on YouTube. Okay, Alex has seen enough. I've seen enough. Everything is just so as a solitary person is basically the idea. No one can impinge on my pleasures. No one is impinging on what I want to do when I get home from work.

47:19And it can be obviously a little depressing in some ways. But in other ways, I, you know, and I look at the comments and it's like, damn, that looks good. I love, I love me some me time. Oh God, mom of three here. If only I could be, you know, you know, if only my husband could go on a vacation and I could do this, you know, or like whatever. However, the notion that you are an island to yourself and what might have once counted as like a pathetic, sad, like cat lady existence is now for some people, at least, the pinnacle of, you know, living of existence as kind of a modern person, woman, I guess.

48:04I've seen this with women. I haven't seen this with men. Okay. Well, here's what I want to say about this.

48:08Vinson Cunningham:Yes. Yes. Much like the left loves to express horror at the trad wife phenomenon, the right loves to express horror at this phenomenon. And we have these two extremes of, I don't find the childlessness unmarried thing an extreme. I find no friends, no.

48:25Alexandra Schwartz:What are you talking about?

48:26Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, like no social connection to be extreme, much as I find having 10 children and saying I want to live in submission to my husband's will to be rather extreme. So we have – if marriage – we're talking about marriage as a fiction that we make as we go along and as a political experience. Both of those things are in crisis in the culture war sense with two opposing poles, pushing and pulling. But also in the middle, you've got a lot of people who are trying to figure out a new way forward, whether that's in, you know, we got a piece of paper and there are just two of us or whether it's in an expanded polyamory situation, whatever it is.

49:06Vinson Cunningham:People are trying to reimagine this for themselves because you're only living your own experience in the larger cultural context. You have to reimagine it for yourself. And what this really makes me think of is the bravery of the imagination to imagine any kind of future for yourself at all. I love that. The bravery of the imagination. And it makes me think back to the 19th century. May I share something with you guys from one of my favorite stories in Parallel Lives? Please. Okay. So the thing that I love in this, I mean, there's so many things I love in this book. But one is the story of George Eliot, whose name was Marianne Evans, and George Henry Lewis fell in love with one another.

49:46Vinson Cunningham:But one thing that I really like about this is later Eliot marries someone else. She marries someone who's 20 years younger than she is. Oh, yes. Yes. Super unconventional. This is after Lewis had died. I think people thought this was utterly bizarre. And there is a quote here from someone about this marriage where she says, you see, I know all of love is so different than I do not see it unnatural to love in new ways. And I think that's kind of it. Love in the old ways, love in the new ways. But we've got to recenter the love part of it, maybe. I love that. Yeah.

50:30Alexandra Schwartz:And it strikes me, you know, that love, like the things that we have likened it to, art and politics, is something that is conditioned by time and lives in time. that, you know, what is beautiful to us in one age is not beautiful to us in another. And so it goes with love. And it does seem to me that, you know, love does have this correspondence with beauty, you know. And for me, like, you know, I don't want to be—all the things around polyamory, it's like too many emails, too many—it's like it doesn't— Yeah, who has the patience? I'm not saying it to put it down at all. To each his own. But my point is that it doesn't appeal to me aesthetically.

51:14Alexandra Schwartz:And one way to be asking these questions over and over is, like, what seems beautiful to me?

51:27This has been Critics at Large. Alex Barish is our consulting editor, and Rhiannon Corby is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Our show is mixed by Mike Kutchman. And we had engineering help today for Pran Bandy, with music by Alexis Quadrado. You can listen to all of our episodes anytime at newyorker.com slash critics.