“Eddington” and the American Berserk

11:36Alexandra Schwartz:Really loudly. What are you laughing at? Like, it was all of a sudden, it was the laughter and the mode of ingesting the film became not aesthetic simply, but also moral. And if you do not interpret or respond to this aesthetic experience in the same way, it's almost like a doubling down on the cognitive dissonance of the time. And it was like a weird moment. It took me a while to get over. I don't like that. But it seemed to me like symbolic of what the movie wanted to do to me.

12:11Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, Vincent, I totally agree with you. That moment really stands out to me, too, because so much of Eddington itself is about interpretation. It's about how we interpret reality and how we rely on other people's interpretation of reality to inform our own. And what we got in that intense moment in person in the movie theater, this person was essentially saying, I can't conceive of how your reaction is acceptable. I think she even said, like, I can't—why are you laughing? I can't understand why you're laughing. Yeah. And that is so interesting because that is the crux of this movie, people who cannot understand one another's realities and absolutely refuse to.

12:47Naomi Fry:Yeah.

12:48Vinson Cunningham:If I may— Yes, please. —just react to some things you said before. Please. I'm, like, nodding the studio. My eyes are going wide in the studio. We had the opposite reactions to this movie. You had the exact opposite reaction, right?

12:59Alexandra Schwartz:You liked the beginning more than you liked the post-rupture. Yes. Okay.

13:03Vinson Cunningham:Because—I like the moment of rupture, I will say. I liked that. I was there. I was in it. But what initially really appealed to me about this movie is the fact that I think culturally we have kind of all decided that we don't really want to look at some of the kind of defining objects from that time. We don't want to see people on our screens with masks, period. And therefore, we don't really want to make visual art or perhaps even other kinds of art about that very condensed but enormously significant time between, let's say, March and July 2020. Like, yes, it had this huge effect. The George Floyd protests are shorthand that are constantly referenced.

13:48Vinson Cunningham:The details of the time, which came to seem, I think, quickly really banal in their absolute outlandishness, the handwashing, the masking, the six feet apart. In terms of art, I think artists, and we're in the world of movies right now, so let's just stay in the world of movies, film, television, etc., has had a very, very hard time depicting that moment because it both was so extreme and also just got assimilated very fast. That's what human beings do. We assimilate new realities and we deal with them. And so it seems almost cheesy to point to some of the things we all went through. And I liked that Ari Aster was not only depicting those things, but really putting basically as fine a point on it as you can put on it.

14:33Vinson Cunningham:Like getting into the masking conflict, the six feet apart stuff. And I found myself laughing, absolutely yes, in part because it did make me think the first part of the movie where some of these social attitudes are really atomized and satirized, I would say. It really made me think about what's changed in my own understanding of my behavior from that time. And I appreciated that. And so I felt kind of put back into that moment, not in a like, yeah, put on your mask, goddammit way, but in really having to consider how the intensities and the political intensities of the time weighed in on how we treated one another.

15:09Vinson Cunningham:And I liked that all these elements were being set up to explode. I liked the kind of self-righteousness that everyone has, the foolishness that everyone has. And then the whole thing fell apart for me. And I will just say why briefly. I think that there is a sense of wanting to deeply engage with American reality in this movie that leads to such a profound detachment from American reality. Such a I don't give a shit about reality attitude here. And I wish I could read that as an extreme form of critique. But I just read it as a total abandonment of critique in the end. And there is a moment in this movie where the forces that have been set up against one another, the kind of, you know, gun-toting, I'm going to protect this town, Western situation going on with the Joaquin Phoenix character, the sheriff, collides against the darker, shadowy forces.

16:04Vinson Cunningham:And here, this is a brief general spoiler, we're not going to say exactly what happens, but just going to let you guys know, of Antifa. And at that point, I sort of thought, I don't understand this anymore. I think Ari Aster really exploited the setup he had produced, the scenario and the characters to try to make a point about how nothing matters. Our reality is not stable and values don't exist. And that I felt was just an enormous abdication of directorial responsibility, point of view and, you know, just the movie itself. At the end of that rant, I turn to Nomi Fry. And I say, what did you make of this?

16:46Naomi Fry:Alex, I don't disagree with you about the detachment point, the sort of like, OK, I'm going to take this view from nowhere in some senses to look at this absolutely disgusting tapestry of American reality in, you know, the first half of the 2020s. But I think in some ways, and maybe I have become cynical, I felt like the movie was pretty good about mirroring my own bafflement of the current moment or of the last few years. I don't know what to do with anything anymore. I mean, I know what to do with particular cultural objects, or I don't know if I always know what to do. But, you know, I have a sense.

17:37Naomi Fry:You know how you're going to address them. I think, or I hope, or I have the desire still to engage. Like if I look at like a Trump AI ad about like rebuilding Gaza with like a whatever, like a gold statue of Trump and like beachside condos, then, yeah, I can engage with that. I can think about what it means. Things from different sides of the map I can look at and say, OK, this is what I think it means. when it comes to everything in some, you know, and even if it's like from the viewpoint of like, OK, five years on May 2020, we're looking at BLM, we're looking at the masking, we're looking at this data center, this like, OK, it's bringing progress to the town of Eddington.

18:22Naomi Fry:However, it's clearly like some front first, probably some disgusting billionaire, you know, Pizzagate stuff. We didn't address this really, but there's a lot of kind of like sexual abuse of children like that Joe Cross's wife, the Emma Stone character, Louise, is kind of becomes involved with. There's Austin Butler is this kind of like conspiracist.

18:44Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, he's a conspiracist who believes in powerful pedophile rings and.

18:48Naomi Fry:Yeah, but again, like what is happening? Was he abused? He says he was abused. How do we know? Believe victims? Everything comes into kind of like confusing contact, all of these different ideologies. And so I have to say, I felt like the movie to me was, you call it detachment. To me, it's something I feel sometimes, which is a kind of throwing up of hands of like, yeah, I don't know. I just don't know. And maybe, you know, maybe you're right. I mean, you say it's an abdication of directorial responsibility or whatever. Like, I can see how it might be seen as such, but in other ways, I kind of deeply identified with this, the kind of like attempt to map out and the utter impossibility of mapping out what the fuck is going on in America right now.

19:37Naomi Fry:And to me, you know, Vincent, I agree with you. As the movie went on, I actually became more engaged because I thought it was just like a good movie on the level of like.

19:49Alexandra Schwartz:It is really wonderful. It's good filmmaking.

19:51Naomi Fry:I felt like I was like I felt like the performances were good. I felt like the cinematography is Darius Kanji is the cinematographer. I thought it was beautiful. I thought the it was gripping. You know, I like watching violence on screen. Shoot me. You know what I mean? Like it's on the level of kind of a visceral spectatorship. So I enjoyed that as well.

20:15Vinson Cunningham:OK, but here's my question for you, which is I hear you. I see you and I hear you. but do you think like I hear what you're saying about the reflection but is that an okay thing for the artist to do to just kind of set up this whole scenario and throw up his hands and say I actually don't know what to do with this mess I've made because that's what I'm contending he kind of does I can see another way of looking at it I can see you know I brought up the Antifa thing I could see someone saying oh no that was a false flag and but this is a movie in which I do think on a very fundamental level the idea is to go in without a politics and okay I'm okay with that.

20:48Vinson Cunningham:I'm not asking for this movie to be a leftist, you know, you know, let's get the right conspiracy people. It's about how we're all in our silos. Fine. But it just kind of devolves to me into this endless shoot them up thing. And I just feel like there is a cynicism. You know, is it OK for the artist to say, I actually just don't know what to make of any of this? Or do you guys disagree that that's what's going on?

21:12Alexandra Schwartz:I kind of disagree that that's what's going on. At first I was like, oh, this is a movie, at least that indulges more in nihilism than politics, which I'm not actually, whatever. I don't think that that's necessarily a bad thing. But I think that it's actually kind of a crudely, and I don't mean crude in a bad way, a crudely materialist movie. I think it's kind of like vulgar Marxism. It's like culture is a grand blanket. It's a conspiracy thrown over the material. There is a concern that is growing in this town. It's called Solid Gold Magikarp is the name of the corporation behind the data center.

21:48Alexandra Schwartz:And every other skirmish exists to distract the citizens of a town from the real danger. Land, sovereignty are the only real things in the movie. And even deaths and even killings take place in this land of the cultural, which I think Aster is saying is a distraction, is nothing, is the land of screens that are meant to turn our heads away from real concerns. So I think I was like, oh, wait, maybe it is a very leftist movie. And that's what I took away. I think there is a throwing up of hands, but only to say these are all grand mystifications, distractions from the real event. Astor has said in his sort of press tour that the movie really is about the building of the data center, which is sort of a perverse reading of his own movie.

22:39Alexandra Schwartz:It's not part of the action of the film. But if you read it like that, I think you can discern at least his politics. Whether it works or not, expresses itself perfectly or not, I don't know. But I do think that that is discernible in the design of the film.

22:58Vinson Cunningham:Eddington is hardly the first work to tackle the complexities of a moment in American history. In a minute, The Many Faces of the American Berserk on Critics at Large from The New Yorker.

23:19Vinson Cunningham:This week on the political scene from The New Yorker, Trump's rupture in the world order.

23:26Naomi Fry:Europe caught between two adversarial great powers. That's basically dialing back the clock to not only pre-World War II, but really it's a pre-20th century view of the world. And I would say it's a world of permanent insecurity that we're looking at.

23:45Vinson Cunningham:Join me, Evan Osnos, and my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser every Friday on The Political Scene, available wherever you get your podcasts.

24:03Naomi Fry:Alex, I would like to thank you for bringing up this term that I was not familiar with. It's a term coined by Philip Roth in American Pastoral, his 1997 novel. And the term is American Berserk. It really brought into focus this type of text for me. So maybe can you tell us a little bit about it? First of all, in Roth, like what does he mean by it?

24:33Vinson Cunningham:So I have a little bit of a theory about how we got the phrase, the indigenous American berserk. Like not those literal three words, but how we got to a place where Philip Roth was just putting that on the table and saying, this is what I'm writing about here. Here's how we're doing it. Can I just lay out my slightly weird theory here? Yes, it is. All right. It has to do with American intellectuals, my friends. It has to do with the magazine culture. Basically— Wow. I know. We're going there. In 1961, Philip Roth publishes this essay, kind of surprisingly, in Commentary magazine. And the essay is called Writing American Fiction.

25:09Vinson Cunningham:And in this essay, Philip Roth contends the following. He says, The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally, it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist. So Roth is saying in this essay, I cannot write a reality or a take on reality, a fiction, that is as crazy as American reality.

25:50Vinson Cunningham:And this is 61, my friends. This is 61. And imagine now. You think back to 1961. They're looking around and being like, what is happening? This is too wild to even. We're not even in 67, 68. Oh, my God. They had no idea. And already he's saying, this is too crazy. This is too wild to try to take hold of.

26:07Naomi Fry:Nor are we in 62 or 63.

26:08Alexandra Schwartz:Indeed. Americans are bewildered people. It's part of our thing.

26:11Vinson Cunningham:It's part of our thing. So Philip Roth is basically saying, I don't know if it can be done. We can try it, but I don't know if it can be done. Then. Cut to. Cut to. 1989, a very different writer, Tom Wolfe, the man in the white suit. He writes an essay in Harper's Magazine called Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast. This is 1989. We are now 27 years in the future from Philip Roth. And basically what he says is, okay, shit got crazy in America. Reality, it was nuts. The hippie stuff, absolutely out of control. The 80s in New York City, the rich, the poor, the racial tensions, it's all bananas. I've been sitting around here waiting for a novelist to write about this stuff, but nobody was.

26:52Vinson Cunningham:People were writing nonfiction. The novelists were getting scared. They were getting small. They didn't feel they could contend with this. What happened? And then he basically is like, oh, I did it in Bonfire of the Vanities. Okay, fine. Did you, Tom Wolfe? That's a whole other question. But this just brings us to the end point of my theory, which is that in 1997, Philip Roth publishes this novel, American Pastoral, which is the first in his series of three novels about the fracturing of American life, continues with I Married a Communist and The Human Stain. And this novel is about all the things he said you couldn't write about or he couldn't write about or that fiction would defy.

27:29Vinson Cunningham:He is about to use realist fiction to go in as far as he can go and get as realist with his realist fiction as he can go. To put away all this stuff in the postmodernist toolbox, the kind of, you know, all these literary tricks that were purported to be a way to get at reality. And he just goes deep back into the heart of realism. He tells a story about this guy, Seymour the Swede Lvov, who was this—

27:51Alexandra Schwartz:It rhymes with the love.

27:53Vinson Cunningham:It rhymes with the love. That's what they say. Who is this all-American boy in New Jersey. Yes, he's Jewish, but that's okay. In the middle of the American 20th century, he's not going to let that stop him. He inherits this glove factory in Newark from his father, and he loves what he does. He makes gloves. He's an expert on it. He has a wonderful wife, not Jewish. They have a wonderful daughter. And everything goes absolutely to hell with two moments. the riots in Newark in the late 60s and the Vietnam War, which his daughter becomes passionate about when she's a teenager. Passionate about resisting.

28:29Vinson Cunningham:Certainly. And she commits a crime that then haunts this family and destroys this family. And the phrase, the American berserk, comes into this novel as the narrator of the novel, Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's kind of alter ego writer figure, takes a look at the underbelly of this American perfection that this family thought they had created. And so that, I'm just bringing all of this stuff up, as random as it may seem, because I kind of believe that Roth wrote this novel as a challenge to himself and to Tom Wolfe and to those who, like Tom Wolfe said, he himself, Roth himself had said, I don't think this can be done.

29:08Vinson Cunningham:And Tom Wolfe is saying, it hasn't been done. And here comes Roth saying, I'm going to do it. So I was curious to know if you guys Also, first of all, if you've read American Pastoral, if you like it, because I think like everybody should read it and it will offend almost undoubtedly and it will hurt. And I think it's one of the books that really everybody should read, especially at this moment. And yeah, like, do you guys have other examples of the American Berserk that come to mind for you, successful or otherwise, an attempt at wrestling with it?

29:42Naomi Fry:I was intrigued, Alex, by your take about realism because to me, the American Berserk has to do with such a heightening of realism that it crosses over almost into the surreal. I mean, many other things fit in with this lineage, I think. But to me, I was like, OK, this is kind of like Ari Aster's like Oliver Stone movie. You know, I mean, talk about like drilling down into reality to achieve a kind of like transcendent hysteria, you know, of kind of like how do we contend with this like too muchness? How do we contend with this like utter like sex and violence and resistance and oppression and, you know, all of the kind of like mishigas of like what America is in Stone's case, like later 20th century.

30:46Naomi Fry:I was thinking particularly of natural born killers from 1994, which was kind of like for those of you who remember the 90s, remember how all we could talk about was serial killers and copycat serial killers. And, you know, the remorselessness and the psychopathy of serial killers that emerges from as a kind of poison fruit or like a unlacerated boil on the ass of American society. You know, the kind of like the fever pitch of too muchness that has been simmering for decades and centuries in capitalist America has finally reached its apex in the case of natural born killers with the figure of the serial killer.

31:37Naomi Fry:Tell us a little bit about natural born killers. OK. Natural born killers, which I recently rewatched it like maybe a year ago when I was like, OK, this movie actually rocks. I was like, talk about kind of like effective, maybe somewhat exploitative, probably, but like absolutely energetic filmmaking. It's about Mickey and Mallory. Mickey is Woody Woodsy Harrelson. Mallory is Juliette Lewis, who is great in the role. They have both emerged from the kind of like abused, you know, the sort of like underclass of kind of like working class, like at the point when the movie is, you know, sort of like deadened by TV and, you know, the TikTok of back then.

32:27Naomi Fry:You know, kind of like. And the movie is a kind of collage about these two people, young people, finding each other and taking revenge on society. And the revenge is not political, crucially, which is why it kind of like I'm not saying Eddington is devoid of politics, but the idea of kind of like depicting a kind of like nihilistic space in which the only answer is a kind of like confused violence. right there is no real order to it or logic except that when they go and shoot up like a diner or whatever they always leave one survivor to tell the tale of mickey and mallory you know that the 90s bonnie and clyde but just like the texture of it is so like disgusting in a way that is like very reflective of the kind of like over muchness of kind of like 90s media culture let's say

33:28Vinson Cunningham:Vincent, how about you? Where does the American Berserk take you?

33:32Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah. It seems to me that part of the American Berserk as it presents itself today is like as specifically a strategy of the encyclopedic. A landscape that addresses itself to many issues. You know, pedophilia, violence, this, that. The kind of the litany of troubles and tries to put them all into one space and not totally synthesize them. When we first brought this up, I was thinking a lot about actually a bygone strategy. I'm thinking about the American romantics and Herman Melville, right? You think about Moby Dick and it's an opposite strategy. It's a way of trying to grab everything, but put it into one vast metaphor to unify things.

34:19Alexandra Schwartz:And the great romantic thing is like everything becomes symbolized by nature, by the landscape. the whale, the ship, those congregated on the ship, and forge a unitary metaphor. Melville's novella Benito Serino works in a very similar way. It's a meeting of two ships, one of them an American merchant's ship, a sealer, I guess, and the other a Spanish slave vessel. And unbeknownst to us, there has been a slave revolt. And just in the meeting of these two worlds, the American, the Protestant, the Sonny, the Spanish, the Catholic, the Gothic, saying something about modernity through one metaphor, right?

35:05Alexandra Schwartz:And this is what's interesting about Eddington. It is at once trying to do that, like I mentioned before, through landscape and this one sort of there is a thing being built, but also wants to do the magazine effect of everything that's going on.

35:24Naomi Fry:In the landscape. In the landscape. On the landscape.

35:27Alexandra Schwartz:At once. One of the similarities between sort of Roth's approach in American Pastoral and the prescription laid down by Tom Wolfe is, Wolfe says, this is why journalists are going to be the novelists of the future, because we are not afraid to go report. And we'll go to the courthouse and we'll go to the, you know, homeless shelter and we'll go to the DA's office, basically creating, again, an X-ray of the bonfire of the vanities, a very good and also very racist novel. and make of that repertorial process a portrait. But, weirdly, and this is what I kept thinking about with the crazily encyclopedic but also smooth texture of Melville, the great big like everywhere-ness of something like Eddington, and then American Pastoral, which is told in this one seamless way.

36:15Alexandra Schwartz:It's not hectic. Right. It's almost nostalgic. He's telling a story. He's like, I used to know this guy. You know, it's almost essayistic. I was trying to decide what I like about this kind of text when it works well. And it's something about the essayistic, that action can happen and then there can be reflection. And if I don't like Eddington, it's because there's no character who can reflect or synthesize or think.

36:40Vinson Cunningham:That's such an interesting point. And so I'm guessing, or I'm now working on the inference, that this is also what attracts you to Melville because you have so much of the essayistic in there. It's you got all the raw material, but you also get the essayistic processing of it. And this is like this brings me back a little bit to what I was trying to say about what I think goes wrong in Eddington, because I do understand what you're saying about the reflection of the overwhelm and the kind of throwing up the hands and the sense of, well, how do you make sense of a reality that is this fragmented, this crazy, this over the top, this fluorescent?

37:15Vinson Cunningham:What do you do with it. And at the same time, I also do believe it is possible for the artist to try to meld it to a purpose and to leave us with a coherent reflection, even if that unification is not uplift. It does not have to be uplift. And I think it would be a lie for it to be uplift. I think this is the thing. I think when you're dealing with the realm of the American berserk, the big risk is getting the bends or the equivalent of the bends you know and having because you're trying to describe a warping so how do you not get warped in the process and i think the answer and this is a very traditional answer but to me the answer is to stay with people because none of this matters without people and it's exciting and it's liberating and it's intellectually fulfilling and in some ways it is realistic to try to portray those enormous systems and to turn it into metaphor symbol as a way of grasping it.

38:12Vinson Cunningham:But I think when you start to get away from the people who are still going through life in the midst of all of this wildness, and when people become merely symbols, you start to lose. I think you start to lose in politics when that happens, and I definitely think you start to lose in art.

38:37Vinson Cunningham:in a minute how do you out crazy what's actually happening in america and should you this is critics at large from the new yorker don't go away

38:58Vinson Cunningham:Is Wuthering Heights really a love story? Should you be afraid of Virginia Woolf? And most importantly, is Mr Darcy handsome enough to tempt you? This is The Secret Life of Books. I'm Sophie Gee, academic and writer. And I'm Jonty Claypole, broadcaster and producer. In this podcast, we tell the story behind the story of the literary classics everybody wants to read, feels they should read, or has already read and loved. We reveal their secret histories, hidden players and big ideas behind the great books. We show how they came into being, why they matter and how they changed the world. The deeper we go, the weirder the questions.

39:34Vinson Cunningham:Is George Orwell's 1984 on some level a comedy? Is Dracula the Freddie Mercury of horror? And why do so many literary honeymoons go wrong? Whether you're a committed book nerd or just curious about the history of ideas, The Secret Life of Books is the podcast for you.

39:56Vinson Cunningham:So we've been talking about the American berserk, this idea of the craziness, the chaos, the explosiveness that is the United States of America. That if you think you were just having a wonderful lunch on the side of a mountain. Actually, that mountain is Mount Etna. It's a volcano. It's going to blow. The lava is coming right at you just when you think that everything is okay. And that's what it's like to live in the United States of America. Sometimes, question mark, all the time, question mark. And so the premise of the genre, the art genre of the American Berserk, I would say, is that reality is always going to outstrip the art that's made about it.

40:36Vinson Cunningham:So my question is, what do we think the point is if this reality is always going to outstrip depiction of trying to depict it?

40:44Naomi Fry:Well, isn't art about trying? Like, in some ways, you know what I mean? Like I think, and I was saying this to you guys before, the one thing I appreciate about Eddington and I think in general about a project that is, you know, an ambitious project that seeks to show us a slice, a sort of like the different strata of reality at a particular battled moment. Right. I don't think I'd have the balls to take on something like that, but I do appreciate the attempt, which I think is perhaps getting more and more rare as time goes on, perhaps in the filmic realm. I happened to one weekend I watched Apocalypse Now at Film Forum and the weekend after I watched Hearts of Darkness, the documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now.

41:41Naomi Fry:And so that actually kind of, I mean, Apocalypse Now is like the American Berserk par excellence. You know, I mean, it takes place in Vietnam, but of course it's about America and it's about the kind of like soul of America being increasingly poisoned by the misadventure, you know, in Vietnam. and it's famously trying to do something monstrously almost big and ambitious to the extent that it almost killed like several people involved in the production as Hearts of Darkness shows, you know? I mean, there's, the Hearts of Darkness opens with this incredible press conference where Francis Ford Coppola stands at a podium And he says, this movie isn't about Vietnam.

42:38Naomi Fry:This movie is Vietnam, which is, of course, it's over exaggerated and it's kind of grandiose and pompous. But in the sense of saying, you know, this movie ballooned to like whatever it was, how many millions of dollars over budget, like Martin Sheen having a heart attack, almost dying, you know, just like monsoons, everything, the sets getting swept away. like Coppola almost killing himself, like going insane, et cetera, et cetera. It's hard to do this sort of thing. And so I think even just the attempt to me even is, I guess, commendable. Maybe this is like a naive thing to say. I don't know.

43:22Alexandra Schwartz:No, I think I totally agree.

43:24Naomi Fry:I mean, the sort of wild ambitions of art making. Yeah, art is about trying. Yeah.

43:28Alexandra Schwartz:Among other things, but it's about that too. And I think that's right. The reach, the sort of asymptotic reach towards something that you know you will approach but never quite touch, I think, is an ideal that I share. But I do think that we're always trying. And the question is, which way do we go? Our episode in April 17th about the movie Warfare, Alex Garland. I was thinking about that too, yeah. It's a miniature. It's one thing. a thorough scraping of one experience, but trying, I think, by suggestion to achieve something not too unlike what Eddington is doing, which is to sort of juice it for metaphor, right?

44:14Alexandra Schwartz:And so I think there's this continuum of attempts. I think nobody's ever going to stop trying. I mean, many people will stop trying. Yes, that's true. There will always be people who try in various forms. Americans are too obsessed with ourselves for that not to be part of the structure of our art making.

44:37Vinson Cunningham:Do you guys think that there have been other recent examples about trying to capture our current American berserk?

44:43Naomi Fry:I was thinking when we were talking about the American berserk, I was thinking about the Boots Riley movie Sorry to Bother You from 2018, where Lakeith Stanfield plays this sort of like black telemarketer who adopts like white voice as the telemarketer and suddenly rises in this, you know, shady corporation that he works for. And I mean, it's completely surreal. There are these characters turning into animals and like, but it's just in terms of a kind of ambition to depict the craziness of capitalist, racist America at the contemporary moment. It's right there with the American berserk.

45:26Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah. Yeah. Well, that makes me think, that makes me less optimistic for the world and more optimistic for perhaps this form of artistic endeavor because, you know, Boots Riley, also a very kind of, you know, an ideological man. He's got ideas. And one way to think about this form of art making is the paranoid. And I don't mean that he's paranoid. I share lots of his politics. I just mean that like when you've got an account, do you know what I mean? the person who's got it all figured out, and now I'm going to tell you, you know, that this idea that becomes like the crank, the prophet, whatever, this kind of artwork is that kind of prophecy, you know?

46:18Alexandra Schwartz:And we live in an age of ideologies. What happens when the splintering happens in the world is that everybody gets, and this is, you know, this is where the same qualities of being that create paranoid conspiracy also create large-scale, omnidirectional works of art.

46:39Naomi Fry:That's really interesting. There's talking about this sort of prophecy or the figure of the prophet, we should say maybe, or I would like to say, that the movie opens with this kind of like muttering wild man coming down off the kind of craggy hills surrounding the town of Eddington. I was stumbling into town. It's dark. You don't really see who it is. You just see kind of a muttering mouth. And I was like, is that Joaquin Phoenix? Like, is this the hero of the movie? Is this the sheriff? And it's like, no, in fact, it's this homeless man who gets into kind of violent interactions with the mayor, with some of the other characters in the movie.

47:26Naomi Fry:He's a kind of public disturbance, right? This character who's like, looks like in some ways an Old Testament prophet stumbling into town to tell everyone what's really happening. And then what emerges is just like these mutterings of a drunken, you know, impoverished, you know, probably mentally ill person. It's kind of like, okay, this is what prophecy can look like right now. You know, this is what prophecy turns into kind of garbled conspiracy. I think those kind of like the two-sidedness of that, I think, is figured in the movie.

48:02Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, I think you're exactly right, Vincent, to put your finger on this idea of paranoia and paranoia in politics and paranoia in art. Because paranoia is all about connection making. And it's all about connecting everything to everything else.

48:15Naomi Fry:Yeah, it's like that meme of like the person.

48:17Alexandra Schwartz:It's always sunny. It's always sunny in Philadelphia. Yes. String connecting pictures. Yes, yes, yes. Exactly.

48:23Vinson Cunningham:It all makes sense. It all connects. And of course, so few things really are making sense or are connecting that I think the paranoid instinct and the art-making instinct may collide in a strange way by trying to create a kind of sense and by trying to create a kind of network to make things link up and to make things match. And it may be why art that attempts to go after the American berserk, I mean, I think some of it succeeds beautifully and some of it fails. And it's exactly in the failings, like the more Tom Wolfie, you know, let's connect all of it up. I know exactly this type of person.

49:06Vinson Cunningham:It's in a kind of knowingness that it fails, I guess I would say. because ultimately my feeling is when you're left with the reality of America, whether it's in 2025, which I think feels like the craziest time ever, but also we know now from looking back, people felt 1961 was the craziest time ever. They felt 2001 was the craziest time ever. And every other year in between, pretty much, we feel destabilized, rocked. It is the nature of the game. And I guess my last question for us is, like, do the artists have a shot? Because I don't want to sound cynical or downtrodden, but I do feel that when you're playing, you know, with the American Berserk, the house always wins.

49:53Vinson Cunningham:So do we go out and tell the artists, on you go?

49:58Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah.

49:58Vinson Cunningham:Of course we do.

49:59Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah. What are we going to do?

50:01Vinson Cunningham:That's right.

50:02Alexandra Schwartz:And they've got, you know, to extend the metaphor, they've got as much chance as that voice crying out in the wilderness does. Maybe in the long term, they win.

50:17Vinson Cunningham:This has been Critics at Large. This week's episode was produced by Michelle O 'Brien and edited by Stephanie Cariucci. Alex Barish is our consulting editor. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Conde Nast's head of global audio is Chris Bannon. Alexis Quadrato composed our theme music, and we had engineering help today from James Yost, with mixing by Mike Kutchman. You can find every episode of Critics at Large at newyorker.com slash critics.

50:54Hey, listeners.

50:55Alexandra Schwartz:This is Liz Mainz-Amanzati, the New Yorker's puzzles and games editor.

50:59Vinson Cunningham:If you're someone who likes making lists and organizing your bookshelf, we think you'll love Catalogs, our new daily game that challenges you to put things in order based on a hidden rule. You might be asked to sort peppers by spiciness, world capitals by population, or Martin Scorsese movies by release date. You can play Catalogs every day at newyorker.com slash games and in the New Yorker app for iOS or Android. it. Here's a helpful hint. The app gives you free access to our entire archive of catalogs,

51:30Alexandra Schwartz:along with our word scramble game ShuffleO and the mini crossword. So download the New Yorker app for new games to play every day.