One Paul Thomas Anderson Film After Another

16:51Naomi Fry:It's funny. It's et cetera. But that seemed to me relevant to politics right now. and like an answer to something that is like, you know, actually happening.

17:01Alexandra Schwartz:One of my favorite things about this movie is like someone from that group is dispatched to do a job. We won't talk too much about it because it might be a little spoilery. But as he does this job, he's in a car, he's driving a car real fast, which is great. As aforementioned. He is wearing a bright red Lacoste shirt. For those that don't know the brand Lacoste, it's like sort of a preppy brand that made a sort of version of the polo shirt, except it's got an alligator on it. But it was like bright red thing that sort of melds preppy heritage America with the kitsch of contemporary fascism. It was like a genteel MAGA hat.

17:44Alexandra Schwartz:And I was like, this filmmaker did not make that mistake. That's a reference. This guy is wearing a MAGA hat, but he's also descended from the Mayflower. And something about that is one of the other absurdities of our moment. The sort of garish extremities to which a formerly sort of genteel elite have sort of bended themselves toward in fealty to Trump. I'm like, that's about fucking Trump, okay? I'm sorry. And I liked the way some of these jokes had a sort of far out valence, but were also right on the nose. I felt that shirt was one of the better jokes in the movie, I thought.

18:21Vinson Cunningham:I hear you. And I had many of the same feelings. I think our present reality has far outstripped most depictions of it. And we're in a place that's very, very, very extreme. But is putting a version, a weird, twisted, very cinematic version of it, slipping it into this kind of caper, is that delivering us to somewhere that, you know, gets people to think or to look or to feel? Like, this is a question I have. There's a great character I love in this movie, played by Benicio del Toro, called Sensei, who runs the martial arts studio where teenage Willa studies. And he's just fantastic. And he's doing a, he calls it a kind of Latino Harriet Tubman thing with a bunch of undocumented people.

19:03Vinson Cunningham:He's hiding them in this apartment complex where he lives and has a kind of route to get them in and out. So I was like, please, I would like to know more about you and watch that.

19:11Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah. But I do want to say about this revolutionary violence, one of the benefits of working on the broad level of like libido and archetype is sometimes you catch the present very much in your net. And the whole time I was watching this movie, I was thinking about the fact that last week, Assata Shakur died, who was a member of the Black Liberation Army, which was inspired like the French 75 in part by the Algerian independence movement. At one point, Leo's watching the movie, The Battle of Outdoors. And I don't know if PTA was thinking about Asada, but the Tiana Taylor character, I mean, there are some big similarities.

19:55Alexandra Schwartz:The BLA, you know, they bombed government facilities. They did bank robberies. They did all this kind of stuff. Asada was convicted for the murder of a New Jersey state trooper, I believe. Went to prison, escaped from prison with the help of the BLA and other organizations. and left and went to Cuba and was, you know, died free. I mean, in a certain way, the Tiana Taylor character is kind of like an unserious Assata Shakur.

20:25Vinson Cunningham:In a minute, how does one battle after another fit into Paul Thomas Anderson's filmography? This is Critics at Large from The New Yorker. Don't go away.

20:44Vinson Cunningham:Hi, I'm Nicole Phelps, the Global Fashion News and Features Director and co-host of Vogue's podcast, The Run Through. Each week on the show, our listeners get an all-access pass to the world of Vogue with the latest fashion news and the most exciting voices in the industry. On Tuesdays, join me to hear interviews with influential leaders in the industry like Calvin Klein, Daniel Roseberry, and Jonathan Anderson. On Thursdays, join Head of Editorial Content at Vogue, Chloe Mal, and Head of Editorial Content at British Vogue, Chomenadi, as they explore style and culture through the lens of fashion with guests like Martha Stewart, Kamala Harris, and Tracee Ellis Ross.

21:22Vinson Cunningham:The Run Through with Vogue, new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

21:38Vinson Cunningham:Listeners, we've got to ask you something. Actually, two things.

21:42Alexandra Schwartz:First, we're still looking for your cultural questions to answer on an upcoming I Need a Critic.

21:48Naomi Fry:But also, it's now October. Spooky season to some. And we're plotting an episode about horror.

21:56Vinson Cunningham:Indeed. So if you're a lover of horror, we'd love to know why. What are some of your favorites in the genre? And what keeps you coming back?

22:04Alexandra Schwartz:Or maybe a year ahead of her. If so, same deal. Tell us why. Or if you have a question about horror, hit us up.

22:12Naomi Fry:We'll take both cultural questions and horror takes at themail at newyorker.com. Hope to hear from you soon.

22:23Vinson Cunningham:So we've been talking about one battle after another. And I think there's still a lot more to say about it and to digest there. But I do want to turn us to some other PTA films that we've loved because this man casts a long shadow. Nomi, I'm going right to you. I know that you love Boogie Nights, which is PTA's second feature, certainly his breakout. Tell us all about it.

22:48Naomi Fry:To me, Boogie Nights is a perfect movie. For me, like, he's never reached the heights that he reached in Boogie Nights. And just as a synopsis, this is about Paul Thomas Anderson's home environment. It's about the San Fernando Valley in the 1970s. Eddie Adams, a young dishwasher at a kind of a club, a disco club in the valley in the late 70s, is discovered by this porn director and producer played by Burt Reynolds because he hears that Eddie has an especially large member. Eddie turns into Dirk Diggler, his nom de plume, nom de dick, yes, and rises in the porn industry, which is kind of like at the point at which the movie begins, a kind of like still filmed rather than videotaped, is kind of like still enjoys the kind of like free love kind of fun in the sun.

23:50Naomi Fry:on communal, I guess, ethos of the 60s. And Dirk Diggler becomes a big star in more ways than one.

24:00Alexandra Schwartz:I just want a name. I want it so we can cut glass, you know, like razor sharp. Razor sharp, right. Yeah, well, when I close my eyes, I see this thing. It's like this big sign. And the name is in like bright blue neon lights with like purple outline. And this name is just so bright and so sharp that the sign, it just blows up because the name is just so powerful.

24:24Naomi Fry:And the movie is kind of like split in two. There's like the first half of it is about the rise of Eddie and is a kind of like sunny, optimistic, progressive vision. And then the second half of the movie is the 80s where things begin to go dark. And it's about the fall of Dirk with a kind of like optimistic, slight rise at the end, potentially. And this movie is so perfect to me because everything is exactly calibrated scale-wise. It has a large ensemble cast. It's long. It's quite plot-heavy. But it doesn't forget about character and about relationships. And the scale of it is calibrated exactly for kind of like coherence, satisfaction, and enjoyment.

25:17Naomi Fry:The performances are amazing. It's a very satisfying movie. And it's a movie that makes a statement about culture, about America, about society, about a certain point in American life. And in that sense, it's political. I mean, not political with a small P, I guess, not large P.

25:39Alexandra Schwartz:I think it's Stark Taylor who has a large P. Yes, it's true.

25:42Naomi Fry:He does. That's the large P of the movie. But it's also about people. And I don't think any side of this equation between kind of like a larger statement and relationships, say, or characters, none of these sides is a loser in the equation. Perfectly calibrated.

26:03Alexandra Schwartz:I think I like Billion Nights also because it really inaugurates the thing that I think is undersung about PTA is that like he's also a very silly comedian. All the moments when, you know, Dirk drops his pants and it looks like the Holy Grail has arrived.

26:19Naomi Fry:Dad is an enormous cock.

26:22Alexandra Schwartz:In one battle after another, somebody says, you know, I believe she was a sperm thief. And another guy says, a semen demon. A semen demon. I think about that all day today. He likes silly jokes but grounds them in this way that I think you're totally – like he's got like a high school boy in him but uses it to sort of get us closer and closer to understanding character and plot and situation. And I think Boogie Nights is like the example par excellence of that impulse.

26:47Vinson Cunningham:Well, Vincent, is there a Paul Thomas Anderson movie that you particularly like?

26:51Alexandra Schwartz:I love The Master.

26:52Vinson Cunningham:Ooh, me too. I like The Master, too.

26:54Alexandra Schwartz:I like the master Joaquin Phoenix as a troubled military vet who by hook and crook falls under the influence of, to me, a resplendent Philip Seymour Hoffman, who is, we're given to understand a kind of stand-in for L. Ron Hubbard. It's kind of about the sort of genesis of Scientology. And it uses the situation where, you know, the person is kind of undergoing these psychological rigors in a one-on-one session with the administer of this kind of whatever. As a kind of like dialectical exercise. It's really about these two people and a spiritual, psychological struggle of dominance and like mastership.

27:41Alexandra Schwartz:Do you often think about how inconsequential you are? Yes. Do you believe that God will save you? No. Have you ever had sex with a member of your family? Yes. Are you lying? No. Are you lying? No. Are you a liar? Yes. Have you killed anyone? Yes. Who? It's like, again, beautifully shot. Every time I think about this movie, I think about the multiple shots of them in a boat, just a picture of the turbulent wake of the boat. and in a similar way the relationship between these two men is like got a sweet edge and a totally dementedly violent edge and it's among my favorite performances of these both Phoenix and Hoffman R.I.P.

28:24Alexandra Schwartz:and I think that's a thing that happens a lot which is PTA is really good at bringing out the best in an already like superlative performer to keep bringing this back to one battle after another this is the movie that helped me realize oh yeah oh wait Leo DiCaprio has kind of always been one of my favorite actors. If I had made the list, he wouldn't have made it. But it's only because he's like water from a faucet.

28:47Vinson Cunningham:I was going to say because he's like water because you take him for granted. No.

28:50Alexandra Schwartz:He's amazing.

28:51Vinson Cunningham:He is life-giving.

28:52Alexandra Schwartz:Leo's amazing.

28:53Vinson Cunningham:I'm here for it.

28:53Alexandra Schwartz:He's an epic actor. Sometimes people talk about actors as like storytellers and sometimes they're like, whatever. But Leo actually is. When I see him, I'm like, yeah, I'll watch this movie for four hours because I know he's going to change. We're going to see him now, and then 10 years from now, his face is going to be more weathered, but we're going to see the spark of the former person, all that shit. And similarly, like, the two men and the master go on that kind of epic journey. We talk about ambition, you know, just the sort of chronology of long change over time is something that the master, to me, has in common with one battle after another, and I really appreciate it.

29:29Vinson Cunningham:Oh, you're making me when you mention Philip Seymour Hoffman. I think, you know, one of the one of the things that I love about Paul Thomas Anderson's filmography is that you can see those changes in Philip Seymour Hoffman over time because he was a performer who Paul Thomas Anderson worked with so often from the start. Yeah, you know, you talk about the humor of Paul Thomas Anderson, which is such a key, like, in a way you can kind of divide the movies up. And then I think something maybe like one battle after another is trying to combine some of these qualities that Paul Thomas Anderson has.

29:59Vinson Cunningham:Like, you have funny, like, movies where he's just letting his kind of off-kilter humor really lead. Like, Punch Drunk Love is a great example of that from 2002 with Adam Sandler. Like he went and he made an Adam Sandler movie and he like I really think that's what he wanted to do. He wanted to give us an Adam Sandler movie, but to make the Adam Sandler character as dark and sad, but also beautiful as we know Adam Sandler can be another undersung actor who is like water, who's like an American utility. So my selection to bring to our little Paul Thomas Anderson roundtable is There Will Be Blood from 2007.

30:37Vinson Cunningham:My name is Daniel Plainview. My name is Daniel Plainview. I drink your milkshake. I drink it up. There's something about There Will Be Blood. I feel like this is a movie in which PTA let himself get as far into just the visuals of filmmaking, just becoming a pure cineast, as he would ever do. He has his score. It was the first time he worked with Johnny Greenwood, which is so key to that movie and became so key to the movies after. It's worth saying that he's a filmmaker who often dips into directing music videos. And what music brings to the emotion, to the tension, to the pacing of his movies is so key.

31:17Vinson Cunningham:And There Will Be Blood is a movie about American ambition, greed, the despoilment of land. It's just about rapaciousness, all kinds of rapaciousness. We have the incredible character of Eli Sunday, played by Paul Dano with his just like beautiful peeled potato face. Oh, my God. Going against that, like the pointed grizzle of Daniel Day-Lewis.

31:42Alexandra Schwartz:Louder, Daniel. I am a sinner. I am a sinner. I am sorry, Lord. I am sorry, Lord. I want the blood. I want the blood. You have abandoned your child.

31:53Naomi Fry:Say it. Say it. I abandoned my child. Say it louder.

31:58Alexandra Schwartz:Say it louder. I've abandoned my child! I've abandoned my boy! Beg for the blood! Give me the blood, Eli. Let me get out of here. Give me the blood, Lord!

32:10Vinson Cunningham:And what I love about it is a kind of biblical quality. It is about good and evil, but there's not very much good. It's about an oil man who wants to extract from the earth every penny he can, who will stop at nothing to do it, who will lie and cheat and falsely confess his way in to acquisition, and who will be left, much like Citizen Kane, with a bounty that he kind of has no use for and doesn't know what to do with. And that's a very classically American story. Daniel Plainview is a huge villain. He's an antihero. He's an evil, evil man who represents a lot of what's wrong with America. But he's riveting.

32:51Vinson Cunningham:And he's beautiful. And he's terrifying in a way that, like, in one battle after another, the Sean Penn character is just laughable. And I loved his performance. I think it's a great performance. But there's no part of you that wants to be inside what's going on with that guy.

33:09Alexandra Schwartz:You don't want to walk like that?

33:10Vinson Cunningham:I would love to do a little duck walk. You don't want to do a little fucking weird. A literal duck walk, just kind of quack quacking as he goes. Whereas in There Will Be Blood, I think it's kind of asking you to look at what made the world you live in. And it's men like this. And here you are in his face in one of the most beautiful shots in the movie, Daniel Day-Lewis' face, is smeared in oil that, of course, looks like blood. So, you know, are you clean? It's just a gorgeous work of art. And I love it. And then I love that Paul Thomas Anderson can give us something like, you know, Phantom Thread, also with Daniel Day-Lewis from 2017, about a very finicky and persnickety dressmaker from 1950s London who likes things just so, but is equally intent on control.

33:57Vinson Cunningham:Like when I look at these movies and I wonder what you guys think about this. Domination and control is very much a theme that I see. Masculinity is very much a theme that I see, which goes hand in hand with that. We have these battles of like, Vincent, you mentioned the master. And the master is about kind of the attempt of one domineering man to make and break and master another. Yeah.

34:21Naomi Fry:I mean, I think one scene in The Master, I don't know if you guys recall, but Amy Adams, who plays the master's wife, jerks him off into the sink. Do you remember that? Yes. So this is a man who's, you know, all encompassing. You know, he's the master. What could be more kind of like dominating, domineering? And yet, Alex, I think it's so correct what you're saying. And it's the same with Phantom Thread, for instance, this man who seeks control at all costs and yet is revealed at particular moments to absolutely desire the release of control That, you know, brief scene in The Master, like, remains in my mind as the kind of like, okay, she's going to take over now.

35:10Naomi Fry:I'm just going to be like an object in her hands, in her paws, right? Right. And it's the same Sean Penn in one battle after another. It's a comical portrayal of the same thing, I think. I mean, from the very beginning of the movie, Profitia Beverly Hills arrives at the tent or the barracks, whatever, where Sean Penn is kind of sitting guard and with a gun basically overtakes him, but overtakes him kind of with his agreement in some sense. She makes him, you know, gain an erection by her overpowering him. And he is a willing, in fact, a yearning participant in this exchange of power. Please, somebody take away my power.

36:07Naomi Fry:While also being incredibly intent on retaining that power more generally. Totally.

36:14Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, I agree. I think the will to dominate, the will to submit. I think these things are in interesting conversation in his movies. Let me mention a movie that we have yet to discuss that is one that I personally wrestle with. And in fact, I rewatched it recently. And I feel, even though I don't love it, that I'm going to keep rewatching it to try to figure out what is going on with my feelings about it. Inherent Vice from 2014. PTA loves Thomas Pynchon. Inherent Vice is much more faithful to the book. It's shambolic. It's roving. I don't love this movie. When I first saw it, I hated it. And I walked out of the theater.

36:47Vinson Cunningham:I was like. Walked out in the middle?

36:49Naomi Fry:Yeah. Yeah. I watched it until the end, but I remember very much. I agree with you. I really didn't like it.

36:57Vinson Cunningham:I'm just like, am I being forced in this movie to confront my own rigidness? I was like, what's the point? I don't understand. I was literally struggling to understand.

37:06Naomi Fry:I was like, am I stupid?

37:07Vinson Cunningham:I want to love it. I feel a little bit like I'm stupid around it. Yeah. And yet, no me, we're not.

37:11Alexandra Schwartz:I think it's the movie of his that I've seen that most alludes to and is a product of his history as a music video director because it really is kind of like it's stitched together by mood affect music often and by the like sort of comedic acting of joaquin phoenix there's a moment when he gets hit by a baseball bat and it's like the way he goes out is pure bugs bunny yeah it's hilarious i don't like it as much as any movie that we've talked about today but i do think aesthetically one battle after another is closer to that than any other i mean not just the Pynchon thing, but the kind of dreaminess of the visuals and specifically of the transitions, the broad scope, and its engagement with, maybe this is one way to divide the, some of them are really character studies that deal with like intimacies and relationships.

38:03Alexandra Schwartz:But these two seem to engage, like Pynchon, with the idea of like the systems novel, that it's about a broader scope. Maybe Magnolia might fit into this as well, but it's like a systems cinema. and then he has a personal cinema.

38:16Vinson Cunningham:But they do overlap. I mean, there is this, again, like this only connect, this need for connection at the heart of that movie too. You have Joaquin Phoenix playing Doc Sportello, who's a stoned sort of private investigator. And you have his ex-lover and true love, Shasta, played by Katherine Watterson, I want to say. Yeah. And actually one of my favorite scenes in the movie, again, a movie I don't particularly love, but I think about this scene all the time is the sex scene that happens between them. And it's a great sex scene. It's very sexy. It's very sad. It's about the moment where two people can truly be together surrounded by a bunch of moments in which they can't.

38:57Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah, but it seems like even just like the father-daughter thing in one battle after another, I think the thematic heat is not with that moment. I think you like it, I like it because we like stuff like that. Even PTA says that I don't think one battle after another cares that much about the father-daughter thing with Leo and Chase Infinity.

39:16Naomi Fry:I think that's all he cares about. I think he says it. He says it. He's like saying that that's the reason.

39:20Alexandra Schwartz:I don't, the movie, that's not what I'm going to remember about that movie. At all. They're not even in it together that much. Yeah, I just don't feel, the heat is not there.

39:29Naomi Fry:I agree with Vincent. That's how I feel.

39:30Alexandra Schwartz:And I feel in the same way, the heat is not there with Inherent Vice. Both of those movies are really interested in like conspiracy. And the individual is a part of a bigger thing.

39:44Vinson Cunningham:So as we've mentioned, One Battle After Another is Anderson's first film in decades to be set today, or in a slightly anachronistic version of today. So how is this master of the period film approaching our own period? That's in a minute on Critics at Large from The New Yorker.

40:11Vinson 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 G 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.

40:47Vinson 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.

41:12All right.

41:12Vinson Cunningham:We've been talking PTA. We've been talking what we love, what we don't love quite as much. I want to come back to this question of the present and how this film does or doesn't work in and with the present. Paul Thomas Anderson has been talking about adapting Vineland since at least the time when he did Inherent Vice. There were interviews then where he said he would like to do another Pynchon. He loves Vineland. I had heard he wanted to make it earlier after Phantom Thread, but he needed the cast of Licorice Pizza, Cooper Hoffman, and so on. He needed them right where he had them then, so he made that movie.

41:49Vinson Cunningham:But now at this bizarre moment, this movie arrives. I mean, from the interviews I've seen, and I wonder what you guys think about this, like, I don't think it's PTA is like thrilled that some of this stuff feels a little on the nose. Like, he's not delighted that there's an extreme topical relevance here to like a bunch of left wing assassins. And frankly, I myself am surprised. You know, when we discussed Eddington, the Ari Aster movie that came out this summer, I was skeptical to the point of rageful that there was an Antifa or maybe it was a false flag, whatever. We're not going to relitigate that.

42:30Vinson Cunningham:But that there was this kind of figure of a violent, supremely armed left. And now we're living in the reality we're living in, which is post-Charlie Kirk assassination. And suddenly this stuff doesn't seem as fanciful anymore. What do you guys make of this moment and how it's being depicted?

42:50Naomi Fry:I think we are living through momentous times. And I think it's completely understandable that audiences would like to see these times depicted on screen and would want to see some form of resistance to some of the more insidious aspects of the times we're living in depicted on screen. I can totally understand why he would feel, I don't know, annoyed that it just so happens that this movie that he's been obviously working on for a long time and thinking about for a long time lands at exactly this particular moment. because I don't think he is a topical filmmaker. I think he's political in the sense that his movies often deal with America.

43:46Naomi Fry:They deal with power. All the things that we've been talking about, of course, all of these things are political. But he's not a filmmaker that responds to particular issues in the political landscape as they come. It didn't also seem to me that the people in the French 75 and the political and the guerrilla group in the movie even necessarily had kind of like an ideological sense of what they were doing, you know, which also made me a little upset because I was like, OK, to me, it's totally fine if a movie doesn't want to deal like, I mean, indeed, please. I love movies that don't necessarily deal directly with like the various crises that we're encountering on the ground in present day America.

44:39Naomi Fry:But if you're going to if you're going to do it, then like make it convincing. I wasn't buying it. And so I was like I was stuck between these two feelings of like, is it is it not? And if it is, then like, do we even really care? Is it just like aestheticize? Like, what the fuck is happening here? And if not, then why make it into present day? Then why have like the detention centers? Then why have the, by the way, quite faceless migrants, you know, escaping in the sort of tunnels and, you know, Benicio del Torres, which was a more somewhat more convincing depiction of actual on the ground, you know, caring about actual people.

45:22Naomi Fry:And yet still kind of felt like an excuse for a caper.

45:25Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah, yeah. This is why I don't buy – I just feel like when people do something that is so about today and then they act like that. Oh, I'm not political. Oh, this is about a father and a daughter.

45:35Naomi Fry:This is – right.

45:36Alexandra Schwartz:It kind of annoys me. It's like, okay, he's trying to talk about the present and where that thought was like – get broad or get specific but don't like be in the middle. But there are really, I think, kind of electric moments. I wonder – this is a movie that I wonder what it will feel like to watch five years from now, I guess.

45:50Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, I think some of this is like what I think Paul Thomas Anderson is trying to do. A huge key to the movie for me is the Gil Scott Heron song, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. This is a song that the members of the French 75 use as a passcode to one another. You know, the point of the song, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, is frankly that. When the revolution comes, you're going to get off your ass, you're going to get out of the movie theater. and you're going to be in the streets and life is going to be different and there aren't going to be commercials and there isn't going to be Warner Brothers giving you$140 to$170 million to make your movie.

46:30Vinson Cunningham:And I feel like Paul Thomas Anderson is walking that line and seeing if he can have it a bit both ways. Can he televise the revolution? Can he film the revolution? And he knows that he can't. Like, we're dealing with a failed revolution. We're dealing with a bunch of people who thought that, like, sending off bombs and shooting people and even, like, doing something liberatory, like cutting open the wire at a nice migration detention center would make a difference. And none of it has made a difference because in the present, those are the forces that are still being reckoned with. But do you still need to try?

47:07Vinson Cunningham:Do you still need to film the revolution? Do you still need to participate in the revolution? Like, that's what I think the movie is about. And this is, you know, also just, like, the possible power of a big Hollywood movie, like if people come out to see this movie, is about just getting on the same page a little bit, even if it's Paul Thomas Anderson's out there page. What I mean by this is the very atomized experience of scrolling on social media, where some of us see videos of ICE beating up, as, you know, the widely circulated video last week, beating up a mother just trying to ask where her husband went.

47:42Vinson Cunningham:Absolutely gutting.

47:43Alexandra Schwartz:the worst thing I've ever seen.

47:44Vinson Cunningham:And yet, I know that many people are not seeing that video. And that's just like a not a part of many people's visual presence. And I've seen Paul Thomas Anderson do this stuff that directors always do when they shoot on film, which is to be like, see this movie in a theater. It's made on film, capital F. And I'm all for that. I'm all for film. Go Vista Vision. You're having your moment. Love it for you. Like, that's great. But I think another like and perhaps this isn't just inexcusably cheesy but another big part of the movie is like seeing it together being together it's a movie that is going to draw different kinds of audiences because it's a multi-racial movie a lot of movies like are not it's a white director as you were saying vincent who's like dealing with black people in a way that most white directors don't so i think that's the optimism of it in a way it's not necessarily the message at the end of the film, which is like, this shall continue on.

48:36Vinson Cunningham:I didn't find that optimistic. I didn't find the idea that a failed movement continuing on in diminished form in the future was going to be so encouraging. Like, that's not making me happy. But what is making me feel something good is the attempt to, like, get everyone together to look this in the face.

48:55Naomi Fry:I like that. And that really is inextricable from the movie's ambition. And the fact that That industry got behind it because that size of thing, that reach doesn't happen without the backbone of big money.

49:12Vinson Cunningham:I have friends who feel like this movie could change the world. I'm not a person who thinks that, but I guess the movie is making a case for. What? I know. No, dude, I know. But I guess the movie is making a case for like it's about failed radicals. It's making a case ultimately for incremental action and for just carrying something forward. and like the inevitable failure of the grand gesture. And so maybe that's what we must hold on to. It is what it is.

49:42Alexandra Schwartz:It's about humanity's struggle to remember the password.

49:45Vinson Cunningham:Exactly.

49:52Vinson Cunningham:This has been Critics at Large. This week's episode was produced by Michelle O 'Brien. 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.

50:27Hey, listeners.

50:28Alexandra Schwartz:This is Liz Mainz-Amanzadi, the New Yorker's Puzzles and Games editor.

50:32Vinson 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. Here's a helpful hint. The app gives you free access to our entire archive of catalogs, along with our word scramble game Shuffalo and the mini crossword.

51:06Alexandra Schwartz:So download the New Yorker app for new games to play every day.