Do We Need Saints?

0:00Hi, I'm Arden Fanning Andrews, Vogue's beauty editor at large. My husband and I talk a lot of eBay strategy together because it is something that we have bonded over since the beginning of our relationship. We've known each other for 20 years, and we've been using eBay for even longer than that, both of us. He's very proud of his five-star review, which I have the same. We're pretty popular. We have a really good reputation on eBay.

0:27This is Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Alex Schwartz. I'm Nomi Fry. I'm Vincent Cunningham. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. What's up, guys? Hello. Hello. How's it going? Going great. It's a new year. It's a new year. I got a new step. A new step? A new pep in that step. Both a new step and new pep. Really great. We are back. It's a new year. And as usual, over the holidays, prestige film offerings have been raining down upon us like so many flakes of snow. And we're going to be hitting some of them today.

1:12One of them, though, before we go further, involves our very own Nomi Fry. Could you give us a report from the red carpet, Nomi? Oh, my God. Explain yourself a little bit. So to our listeners, I have like a line or two maybe in Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme. I am suddenly an actor. The movie of the moment. I know. And yeah, I play a very, it's a bit of a blink and you miss it situation. But nobody's gonna blink. But hopefully nobody blinks. It'll be a clockwork orange style situation up there in that theater. Thrilling. Can you tell us one thing that you learned about what it's like to go to a Hollywood premiere and be on the red carpet?

1:58What did you learn that you did not know? I learned that it's over before you know it. And I learned that you interact with the photographers in ways which I wasn't. Some of them heckled me a little bit to get a smile. Wow. Oh. A mean heckling? No, not a mean, but just like, hey, you know, where's that smile? I mean, nobody knew who I was, so that added to the confusion, but there was some interaction. Did you smile? At the very end, I smiled. You look amazing in those photos. Thank you so much, you guys. You really do. Thank you so much. I mean, it was really a night to remember and generally an experience to remember.

2:41And I hope those of our listeners who haven't seen Marty Supreme, I am, of course, a little bit biased, but I think it's a very good movie. I am not a hater. as far as this movie goes for once. No, not only do you comment on the culture, you now make the culture. You are the culture. I mean, we all make the culture. We all make the culture. Well, that's beautiful. May this star turn beget many others. Thank you. Another holiday movie that we're going to talk about today is The Testament of Anne Lee. A rhythmic, intense, totally, in my experience, It's totally immersive film about the story of the titular Anne Lee, the woman who founded and led the Shaker movement.

3:24The time is near at hand. I know it. Do not be frightened.

3:37How would you categorize this? I have a very specific way to categorize it. What would you say, like, genre-wise it is? I mean, it is a biopic. I think it's divided into either three or four parts of Anlie's life, and it basically goes from cradle to grave, showing her as she grows up, as she gets her revelations, as she moves to America. But it's a spiritual pic? Spirit, spiritual pic? A bit of a hagiography? That's exactly what I was going to say. It is like almost classically the form of like, let me tell you this person's life and you're going to glean lessons from it as we go. And this aspect of the film, this sort of hagiography actually led us to our topic for today.

4:21Saints. The more we thought about it, we felt like there was this broader interest going on in the divine kind of humming beneath the surface of a lot of culture right now. So one example that's happening right now that I was not aware of, but apparently is very popular, is the show about saints that Martin Scorsese has been producing and hosting on Fox Nation. Do you believe you were sent by God? Yes. It is what I was born for. That's a saint thing. Rosalia's latest album, Lux, is a saint's album.

5:07I think each song is inspired by a different saint on this album. So saints are all over that thing. That's right. And there's that and so much more. So today we're talking Anne Lee and the Shakers. We'll talk about our favorite art about saints. and we're talking about what's driving this interest in sainthood and divinity right now and what it reveals about our culture and our politics today. That's today on Critics at Large. Do we still need saints?

5:47All right, let's start with the testament of Anne Leib. This is a new film directed by Mona Fastfold, co-written with her partner, Brady Corbet, who she also worked with writing The Brutalist. It stars Amanda Seyfried in the titular role, and it came out over the holidays. It's going into wider release in mid-January. Who would like to give the gist of this, I must say, very strange, very affecting film? I can try. Please. Okay. So this, as we said, is the story cradle to grave of Anne Lee, who was born in Manchester in 1736, the very simple daughter of a very simple blacksmith. Many children, a hard working class life, begins at a very early age to have these religious visions and kind of becomes associated with this sect in Manchester of the shaking Quakers, who, as they pray and as a way to get closer to God, are kind of impelled to shake and pound their breasts and writhe around.

7:02Anneli becomes a kind of preacher associated with this sect, much persecuted by the authorities and by the Anglican church, and decides also along the way, thanks to a vision that comes to her when she is imprisoned, that no sex should be had if you want to be godly. No one should do it, okay? If you want to be a true person of God, her husband doesn't like that, and nor do the authorities, and she decides along with her acolytes to sail off to the New World in 1774 across the ocean.

7:50and establish and lead the new sect of the Shakers. In the movie, very interestingly, this is figured, this kind of gets, like, transfigured into sequences of dance and song.

8:08Alex, what did you think of it? Into it, into Anne Lee, shake and quake me, raise my hands to the heaven, you know. Pound my breast. Boom, boom, boom. Yeah, I've been running around singing all the songs. Wait, really? Yeah, they got stuck in my head. Oh, my God. They got stuck in my head. There's some good ones. Doing the dances. Because the music, the music which is composed by... Daniel Bloomberg, who also composed and received an Oscar for The Brutalist. Exactly. The music is based on actual Shaker tunes. And yes, there's a bit of a modern spin on them. But yeah, this movie, oh, wow, what did I think of it?

8:45So, yes, I did like, I liked it. I liked it. I liked it. You're not coming to this movie, let's be very clear, for irony. You're not coming to this movie to see the dark inner workings of a religious organization. And it all seems wonderful. But actually, underneath, there's a hunger for power. And it's not Conclave. And as we all know, I happen to also love Conclave. You were a bit of a Conclave girly, if I recall. I did in 2024 personally identify as a Conclave girly. That's fine. So this is a very sincere story trying to really present viewers with this vision of Anne Lee, which is a really anti-modern vision and trying in some ways just in terms of this personal religious experience and trying to really take it at face value and depict this experience.

9:35And in other ways, it is a very modern vision because, of course, the thing about the Shakers was that they believed in total equality of the sexes, of the races. There is something that is very modern and very egalitarian and very American in the good sense about this movement. And I think with this movie, I think it's probably best viewed by really trying to submit to it. Maybe— You have to kind of submit. It's like just a train, right? Yeah, yeah. Like you're not, again, like if you go in looking for that kind of spark of irony that I think most audiences are very used to when dealing with this kind of spiritual discussion, you're not going to get it.

10:18But if you go in trying to just bask in the presence of this both very earthly and otherworldly person, I thought Amanda Seyfried was great. You know, is it my favorite movie of all time? No, but I'm into it. Yeah. Naomi, you synopsized, but did you also enjoy? I did synopsize. You guys, I'm too Jewish for this movie. Yeah. I mean, I really am. I agree with, you know, Alex, I see the wisdom of your words. I also thought Amanda Seyfried is great. I think she's a really good actress. I felt really I really wanted to support it because I really think like I would love to see more experiments such as these you know it's like why don't we just like suddenly inexplicably burst into dance to suggest the fervor streaming from our spiritual fervor let us also suddenly like be like Bacheva or something on stage and kind of start dancing in tandem.

11:26with each other but i just and this is why i'm saying i'm too jewish like i kind of didn't see the point i was like i could see an externalization of her fervor but somehow i couldn't totally relate to it and that might be my fault okay yeah because i don't experience that sort of thing in my life or haven't yeah and i felt like the movie somehow except for in its again externalized forms of like okay i'm writhing around on the floor i'm like you know beating my breast i'm like you know huffing and puffing i didn't understand it i felt like i could relate you know there were some moments where you know she is grieving the death of her children she is experiencing the horrible pains of labor.

12:23She is repelled by her husband's kind of domineering sexual need for her. So these things that are closer to the body and closer to kind of like, I guess, a kind of a universal women's experience. I'm scared to say universal because who knows what people are feeling. But you know what I mean. I was like, oh, okay, yeah. I can understand some of the roots of her rejection of sex, of her, but the religious component of it. And again, this might be my, I might just not be the audience for it. I was like, I don't get it. And it's dragging on for me for 17 ,000 hours. And I just can't relate to it.

13:07Yeah. It's interesting. I can, I almost like maybe over-identify with it because, you know, the Shakers are a lot like Pentecostals. And I grew up in a place where like, okay, we're, you know, we're doing this, we're doing that. We're welcoming a guest. There's a preacher. But all of a sudden, there's 30 minutes where people are running around and dancing. And there is like a sort of ecstasy in the air that doesn't conform to any sort of like plot line or timeline. It's like a different form of— Right. It's like extra liturgical. It's out there somewhere that creates a narrative of togetherness and a narrative of shared experience between the people involved that is not easily communicable.

13:50There's so many times in this in the sort of there are scenes of kind of evangelism in this movie where they're like, hey, and we believe this and explaining the shaker theology. this happens by rote a lot of times but it's basically like you got to come back and see mother ann and you got to be with us trust me you'll understand when you get there you have to be there it has to be sort of embodied and that's what i admired about the movie uh was its um sort of fealty to experience and to embodiment the the logic the strategy of the the music is very similar It's like, it's not the kind of musical where someone's thinking and then they burst into song to tell you more of what they're thinking.

14:35Or the song is not, as some musical songs do, pushing the plot for it. No, it's just about a sort of expressionism. You know, it's just about like painting a feeling on like flat on a canvas or something like that. In a way that it's just rare to see in film and that I thought was really like stylish and beautiful. but also, to me, confirmed an experience that I have very much at. Yeah, I think, you know, Nomi, when you were talking about your feeling about the movie, you kept saying relatable, like you don't find it relatable. Well, naturally, you know, like this is an experience of this kind of zealotry is one word that comes to mind, and also just faith, conviction.

15:17It's a very solitary experience. I mean, I think a lot of what the movie is about, and many things in it that I found beautiful have to do with how isolating an experience it is to have this level of conviction. But what I like about this experience of watching something like The Testament of Anne Lee is precisely how alien it is and to try to reckon with the extremity of life like that. You know, I'm thinking about this scene early because Anne joins this shaker group, the Shaking Quakers, in Manchester and pretty soon comes to see herself as the second birth of God and is hailed as the second coming of God by her small community.

16:06And one pivotal moment is when she goes to jail. She's jailed for running into someone else's church and starting, much like Rosalia, to speak in a bunch of different languages all at once. And to preach that she's the mother of God. And, like, frankly, if you do that, like, you're going to jail, Anne. People don't like that. Like, they don't like it. She knows she's going to jail. And she refuses food and drink when she's in jail and starts to kind of waste away and then has her visions and sings this song where she says, I hunger and thirst after true righteousness. I hunger and thirst. I hunger and thirst.

16:50After true righteousness. It's this very beautiful moment to watch someone hunger and thirst after this true righteousness. You know, maybe someone will see this movie and connect to that experience, or maybe, like, you know, us know me, there's no connecting to it. But to me, there is a fascination with that kind of extremity of the human condition, this desire to transcend it. I hunger and thirst

17:23An ocean I see without bottom or shore Feed me, I'm hungry, enrich me, I'm poor I cry unto God I'll never cease In a minute, saints in art. Critics at large from The New Yorker will be right back.

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19:46For me, the Testament of Anne Lee got me thinking about saints because it's one way to pose a proposition that says, if something about the world irks you, if there is some incomplete thing in the world, and all of us in this room couldn't think of one, right? How far are you willing to go on your principle to not change it, but to announce yourself as someone who says no? You know, the sort of determination to go to any lengths, to cross a great big ocean on a ship pointed at nothing to go to a brand new land and see your friends die, et cetera, just because of belief is, I think, something that plucks at chords in all of us.

20:33So, of course, this opens up to a whole world of works of art about saints. What are some of your favorites? And what are the maybe some of the themes in those favorites that connected you to to old Mother Anne? Okay, well. Old no fucking Mother Anne. Yeah, Mother Anne. I mean, the saints to me are about, they are art because I have no personal or religious connection to Christianity other than living in a Christian world. So there is, they came to me through art, like paintings, going to museums, going into churches, looking and observing and seeing this entire world and system built on the idea of kind of the exceptionalism of certain individuals and also their great, great suffering.

21:27So I have a couple works I'd like to share that I particularly enjoy. One is this absolutely wonderful painting by a guy you may have heard of, Michelangelo, The Temptation of St. Anthony. So the thing about this painting is that, first of all, it's a copy of another thing, a copy of an engraving. And Michelangelo did it when he was but a lad of 12 or 13. And we also don't know if it's by Michelangelo. So with all that in mind, gather around, my friends. Please. Of course, the visual arts are not the best medium for a podcast, but let's just say what we see. There's one very unperturbed man floating in the sky, a little halo around his head.

22:13He's got a long beard and a yellow cherubic face. But, not but, but and, he is being pecked at and otherwise molested by a phalanx of, let's call it like we see it, goblins? Little demons. Demons? Devils! Little demon devils. Devils. Yep. If you came across this today, you know, you might, this painting, say, if you were scrolling through a social media feed of some kind, you know, you might be tempted to repost this with the caption, it me, and leave it at that. Because who is not this St. Anthony just trying to go about his business in his nice black dress? And instead, like the demons and the devils, I mean, one has a little ass face here and a normal face face.

22:56They're just coming for him. They're coming for him. And he is just going to float about above his landscape unbothered. So I love that painting because it's so funny. Like, I get it. The saints are serious business. They're holy people and they are not letting the regular stuff of life and even the more extreme stuff of life, like being persecuted, burned at the stake, you know, twisted on some kind of horrible wheel. They're not letting it get to them. And this painting says that with a bang. And one other thing that comes to mind, especially after seeing The Testament of Anne Lee, is the movie The Flowers of St.

23:30Francis. Have you guys ever seen this movie, this Roberto Rossellini movie? No. It's very unusual. It's called The Stigmata of St. Francis? It's called The Flowers of St. Francis. Okay, no. I think if you're into The Testament of Anne Lee and if you're not, totally fine. But you might want to check this movie out. It's now, I think it's on HBO, interestingly. And what it is, is it's vignettes from the life of St. Francis of Assisi, who famously was very, very humble in the way he conducted himself and the clothes he wore. He loved animals, birds, living in poverty. and it's this movie like The Testament of Anne Lee tries to take all that at face value and just perform this radical act of imagining what such a life could have looked like.

24:29And it's a great movie. They're just a merry band of brothers who are running around building huts, not as handsome as the Shaker Huts, boiling water, dealing with persecution. Very, very interesting film. So before we move on, can I ask you though, so you said, so this idea of sainthood really arrived to you from the outside. We've been talking about this idea of like, you know, whether these ideas are sort of like indigenous to your worldview or whatever. Do these works of art make you like more amenable to the concept? Of saints? Yeah, I'm just wondering. Like more attracted to this kind of figure?

25:05To me, it's a complete, I mean, is it an attractive figure? Like, it's not something I see as worthy of emulation in my daily life. And again, because I was raised in a totally different religious tradition in which sainthood is not a concept, it's alien and familiar at the same time. And I see it most appealingly as a kind of key to a certain mythology and a mythology that I find fascinating and also interact with regularly and prefer to keep in art rather than politics. say. But yeah, the figure of the saint is a really interesting figure because again, whether or not you believe that these people are holy or not, they're very real.

25:47People who lived like this and did these things and had this intensity of conviction and often intensity of suffering, this is very real. Yeah. Yeah. I guess the first time I remember thinking about saints and this just came to me because my daughter who is now 14 has been bringing me back to madonna because she really likes 80s and 90s madonna and um one of those hits is like a Prayer came out in 1989.

26:44I remember watching the Like a Prayer video and the controversy around the Like a Prayer video in which... Famously iconoclastic. Famously iconoclastic. Madonna lost her, like, big Pepsi deal because of it. The Pope condemned her. The video, for those of us who are too young to remember, don't, or, you know, have already forgot, too old, and I've already forgot. Depicts Madonna seeing a crime, a murder committed, a woman, a white woman, murdered by a bunch of white thugs who escape and a black man rushes to the white woman's aid and of course the police the racist police you know thinks this arrest this black man as the perpetrator and madonna runs to a church you know full of kind of like shame and tumult and and there she sees a black saint who is played by the the black man that she just saw being arrested but in the form of a statue of a saint the statue is crying he is behind bars madonna clings to the saint uh it's very sexual madonna is wearing kind of like a revealing dress and a cross but the whole thing of like a black saint madonna and like a nip slippy you know dress burning crosses and i remember being like Alex is like Michelangelo I'm like so remember that Madonna video it was huge for me too I watched them pop up video years after the fact and I remember being very as a young Jewish girl I remember being very affected by it and thinking oh Catholicism what a mysterious thing but saints are kind of sexy like which was the problem with it of course as far as the Catholic Church was concerned.

28:40A little intensity Yeah. And this is something also that I think is part of the deal, right? I mean, it's obviously part of the deal. This is not a Catholic movie, the Testament of Anli, but it also is the sublimation of kind of like erotic energy into belief and worship is kind of a central part of the whole thing. Yeah. And I think some of that using the figure of the saint as a vehicle to transmit other, as you say, energies is maybe the thing that we've been talking about that's kind of coming back. One of my favorite albums of the year is Rosalia's Luke's Light. And it is a polyglot work of sort of pop opera orchestration.

29:33She's speaking in, I think, 14 languages. 14. In this really great and really cinematic album, and using female saints as the sort of the vehicles for her idea. She talks about St. Teresa of Avila, St. Teresa of Jesus, Joan of Arc, who often shows up in these kinds of narratives. She's also got, you know, songs that really go to the erotic edge of this connection. My favorite song title is Dios es un stalker. God is a stalker. And it's all about like, I know all of your inner thoughts. I know, you know, there's like the eroticism of trying to reach some connection with the all knowing or whatever.