The Year of the Broken Mirror

0:06This is Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Vincent Cunningham. I'm Alex Schwartz. And I'm Nomi Fry. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. Hello, friends. It's that time of year. We're seeing year-end lists everywhere. Spotify rap has come and it's gone. What was your Spotify rap lead artist? Prokofiev for Peter and the Wolf. Oh, beautiful. I just, you know, all 10 tracks. That's where it's been at in my household. That's where it's been at. Vincent? Mine was an artist that I mentioned a lot on this podcast. Dijon, whose album Baby was my favorite album of this year.

0:51And also Justin Bieber, whose best album Swag came out this year, was also Up Bear. And then there are other things that happened. How about you? You're cooler than me. I mean, am I? And me. Mine was Handle. This is true. A classic for a reason. My listening age was 65, you guys. So all of this is to say it's a very special time of year when we try to figure out what the hell happened. For avid listeners of the pod, you guys know that this has been something of a tradition. Our first year, we did an episode on the year of the doll. That was the year Barbie came out, poor things. And last year, we decided that it was the year of the flop, if you recall.

1:35Lots of flops. Lots of disappointments. And this year, here it comes, what we settled on is the year of the broken mirror. Alex, do you want to start us off discussing a little bit how we arrived at year of the broken mirror? How did this come about? Guys, to be honest with you, I find it very hard to sum up these years. I don't know if others agree or not, but so many things go on and so many different works of art are made and seen. and absorbed and forgotten or remembered. Especially forgotten. Especially forgotten. But I do think that one thing we all started to notice was that this was a year when artists started to really confront the messed up, divided nature of reality in these United States.

2:26Just thinking about films like One Battle After Another by Paul Thomas Anderson. I want you to create a show. This is an announcement on a revolution. Eddington by Ari Aster. I'm running from there. You can't keep your own office going, but you're going to run mine. They're your streets to keep safe. Or Sinners by Ryan Coogler. There are legends of people with the gift of making music so true. It can conjure spirits from the past and the future. It felt to me like a year when people were really going for it and wanted to say, this is how I see America. So when I, the mirror idea is like we're looking at ourselves and I'm not sure we like what we see.

3:09It's not a gorgeous reflection shining back. But, you know, big swings about the state of American reality that are also very distinctive auteurist projects as these filmmakers try to tell us what they see when they look into the American mirror. Right. And we had the kind of like shifting nature of reality vis-a-vis AI. It's like, what is reality anymore? when everything can be kind of like reconstructed in the image of the real and yet be so, you know, defiantly unreal. Yeah, it's like in this effort, these big swing efforts to reflect the culture, often there were, there had to emerge these alternate figures.

3:51This is a year of vampires and twins. Yeah. Almost as a way to inspect what it means to be human now, we had to see some sort of humanoid parallel to ourselves across the expanse of that mirror and be, you know, engage in our experience with another thing that came up a lot, which is like the uncanny. Yeah. The messy, weird, unsettling nature of maybe our self-definition has to change, and that's always a kind of a startling phenomenon. Totally. Honestly, there were so many different ways that this year really started to feel like a broken mirror. And we're going to be discussing a lot of them.

4:30My question, though, is when we're going into this discussion, as we're confronted with these reflections of ourselves and art and technology and our politics, what is it that we see? So that's today on Critics at Large, the year of the broken mirror.

4:57Okay, guys, let's get down to business. We're going to get into a bunch of reasons that this felt like the year of the broken mirror. But let's start maybe with the biggest one or one of the bigger ones, okay? This through line of kind of weird, askew mirroring across some of the biggest and best films of the year. Mirroring America back to us in some really interesting and fucked up ways. Where do you guys want to start? Which of the movies that we were thinking of talking about do you want to begin with? I think we should start chronologically. I'm a bit of a traditionalist. I think it's a really good way to sort.

5:35Some norms should not be upended. Exactly. Exactly. As an editor of mine long said, you know, chronology is a very underrated way to tell a story. Yeah. So Sinners, I think, of the movies that we're really looking at in this category of big swings about American reality trying to reflect back to us something broken. but intriguing about ourselves. Sinners came out April 2025. Can you even remember that far back? I ask you. Barely. Who can? Barely. I was a young girl then. Oh, and look at us now. It was written, directed, and co-produced by Ryan Coogler. It was a real, I think we should just say, like a lot of these that we're talking about, these are real auteurist projects.

6:16Yes. Ryan Coogler basically went up against the studios and won to get to make the exact movie he wanted to make. So Sinners takes place in the Mississippi Delta in the 1930s. It's a tale of music, of race, of oppression, of vampires. Vampires. Vampires. And what really struck me about this movie was that it started in such a historically realist way. You know, all these aspects of life. It takes place among black sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta in the 30s. and a musical teenager, Sammy Preacher Boy Moore, played by Miles Caten, maybe also, by the way, the debut of the year, the film debut of the year.

7:00He was wonderful. He was great. Goes off with a pair of twins, Smoke and Stack, played by Michael B. Jordan, and agrees to play music at a juke joint. I'm a sharecropper from Sunflower Plantation. They called me Preacher Boy, counting my daddy being the pastor. I wrote this song for him.

7:29Something I've been wanting to tell you for a long time. It might hurt you. Hope you don't lose your mind. Well, I was just a boy. And then the vampires show up. I mean, to me, this was Coogler wanting to show us something very real about America to remind us in a lot of ways, you know, this wasn't long ago. This is within the last century. Here's the origin of so much of our life, our culture, our politics as we know it now, in positive and negative ways, some of the greatest music, you know, ever made coming from this place and some of the darkest history. And then the supernatural element, I found totally fascinating and riveting.

8:10And the more I think about it, the more, yeah, the more it stuck with me yeah yeah i mean i i think it's like in retrospect actually one of my favorite movies of the year when we're talking about like big swings this is a big swing and it's a huge swing and i want to say also reek kugler because kugler is a marvel director and he's most known as you know the director of black panther and he also did uh creed and creed he's he's a very talented director and everything he's done, but those were movies that were beholden to this story that the corporation is telling, right? And with this, it's still a big movie.

8:53It's still, of course, not an independent movie by any means, but the story itself, it's kind of like his own mirroring, you know, of kind of like, let's do a big movie. Let's kind of like use the tools of the master, so to speak, to tell this different story, which is quite original, even though, again, And it relies on kind of genre tropes like horror. I really admire that sense of kind of like let's see what is possible to do within kind of like the reality that we share in which like big money making corporations expect you to do one thing. And he ended up doing another in a way that was I found weirdly radical.

9:35Like it was like it kind of like surprising to me I would say. He's such an interesting director because he is known for those bigger budget movies. But also his debut was called Fruitvale Station 2013. I still remember seeing it and sobbing at the end at the Angelica Theater in New York. It's about a young man, a true story of a young man named Oscar Grant who was killed on the train by a police officer in very short. And it's almost like Sinners wants to be a synthesis. Speaking of a mirror, right, both sides of a mirror of a tough reality, not without its joys, not without its triumphs, but a tough reality.

10:13And on the other hand, this kind of surrealist superhero thing that happens with the vampires, the bravado of the two twins, Smoke and Stack, trying to put together these pieces of the American story, both the sort of maybe a comment on American entertainment, which comes alive most vividly in this great dance scene that brings together the past and the future, making them speak to each other as if across, you know, two sides of a mirror. But also, you know, really sticking to a realist sort of historical impulse, which seems to be so alive with him. And in telling a history also give us a sort of new vision of ourselves.

10:54There is one other way I think that sinners reflects our broken marathine. It's really hard to talk about culture without also talking about politics when politics is as all-consuming and intrusive of daily reality as it is. And this was a year when so much of politics was basically telling Americans that what they know to be true about their country, about their past, never happened. Yes. The year of gaslighting. Yeah, it was definitely the year of gaslighting. Like, oh, if it wasn't great, it didn't happen. If it involved violence, it didn't happen. If it involved oppression or anything, you know, a little bit uncomfortable, it's woke.

11:36We don't like it. And so that, to me, was part of the mirror of Ryan Coogler holding up this actual mirror and, again, trying to make it very granular and authentic down to—I remember our colleague Richard Brody in his review of Sinners was really happy that the amounts of money that things cost were put so directly, you know, really kind of giving the fabric of a time. But also holding up this mirror to all of us who know that the country's past is riven with brutality and ugliness and who don't find looking away from that to be particularly comforting or elucidating. So here in this really popular and fun and dynamic setting was the mirror, the ugly part of the mirror, and also some beauties staring us back in the face.

12:22And I thought that in the spring was a great way to start this confrontation with reality through fiction. Let us move on to our next contender for Broken Mirror Movie 2025. and I think maybe we should now talk again sticking to the chronology of the year Eddington, the Ari Aster movie that came out in July 2025 so yeah, written and directed and co-produced by Aster himself and basically this is a COVID movie, right? Just to give a little bit of a praise see for those of us who haven't seen or don't remember would rather not remember because it is about a period that many of us would rather not remember.

13:08The movie takes place in May 2020. It's in a small town named Eddington in New Mexico. And the protagonist is a sheriff played by Joaquin Phoenix, whose wife is kind of depressed and along with her mother who's living at their house, they're kind of like falling in the grip of the alternative reality of kind of conspiracy theories about COVID. and so on. Then he has this nemesis, this sort of like woke, annoyingly faux-liberal contender to the mayorality of the town played by Pedro Pascal. You know,

13:51if a healthy person with a mask gets exposed to a COVID-19 person without a mask, then they got a 70 % chance It's a catch in it. But if we all wear them, then we can reduce the transmission rate to 1.5. You don't even know what you're talking about. 1.4 percent of nothing is what? And actually, Joe, this is simple. There are these sort of young, white, again, annoyingly woke youth who are kind of joining the Black Lives Matter movement. So these are all things, all the elements are, again, much like in Sinners, historically accurate or in a sense a take on things that actually happen. But then, not in a supernatural way, but in certainly off-the-rails way, the movie goes kind of bazonkers, right?

14:45And gives us a view of America that I think we can also include among the broken mirror canon. The broken mirror canon that we were just establishing. Yeah. Do you guys want to want to talk about that a little bit? Well, there's so many. It's a it's a it's complicated to wrap our arms around what goes on in that movie. Yeah. I mean, it's just like a deepening set of contradictions that end really in what seems like the total decline of a of a small but representative society. first of all the crime of the year is that this movie is not named after the actual town in which it was filmed which is called Truth or Consequences New Mexico it's a long story but the town was named after a quiz show where somebody you get asked a trivia question and if you can't answer it in a very short period of time i.e.

15:44get the truth of the situation you have to face a consequence some sort of zany thing And that is exactly what's going on in this film. It's just like a contest over the truth, which once failed by the whole society, right? Whatever divisions, ideological battles bedevil them, they can't get it together to arrive at a notion or a sort of shared truth. They all have to face a deeply divided consequence, right? And this double, this kind of dialectic between truth and its discontents is totally what the movie is about. Just something came up to me, Vincent. You said something along the lines of they can't get it together.

16:29Like the people of the town can't keep it together, can't get it together. Yeah. And it made me think, you know, Altamont, the, you know, free public Rolling Stones concert in Altamont Speedway, California, known collectively as kind of the death of the 60s, right? Like Meredith Hunter, a black concert attendee, knifed to death by the Hells Angels who were doing security, a horrible tragedy. The movie Gimme Shelter, the Maisel's movie about this event. you see Mick Jagger on stage and he keeps saying like, why can't we get it together? Can we keep it together, people? You know, like love and light.

17:14Like, can we just all unite understanding of what is kind of like the moral center that we all agree on is in a sense what I think Eddington is about. Sorry, this was a long tangent. I have nothing to do with it. But I was just thinking about, yeah, can we all keep it together? Can we all, like, agree and not even agree, not consent, just like a consensus reality, right? Yeah. No. Apparently not. You can't. And this is what we're talking about. Kind of bleak. Pretty bleak for sure.

17:52In a minute, we'll come back with something a little less bleak, just a little. That's in a minute on Critics at Large from The New Yorker.

18:24Thank you.

18:36talking now about bleak but perhaps with a touch of positive energy kind of bleak with a twist bleak with a twist paul thomas anderson's one battle after another came out not long ago September 2025. It did. Yeah, guys. Amazing. Mirroring? Wait, wait. Before we talk about the mirror, should we explain to our listeners what's this movie about? Yeah, One Battle After Another, as we said, written, directed, produced by Paul Thomas Anderson. It's based on, this is Anderson's second time sort of taking a swing, speaking of big swings, and speaking of big swings about America, his second time adapting a novel by Thomas Pynchon, this time the 1990 book Vineland.

19:29And it's about the action and then the afterlife of a band of, I don't know, what do you call them? Left wing revolutionaries? Radicals? They're radical revolutionaries. Domestic terrorists? I don't know. Yeah. Tomato, tomato. Tomato, tomato. Exactly. This company is led, at least in sort of the action of the film, by Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays a guy named Bob Ferguson, who is sort of part of this group, falls in love with a team member named Perfidia Beverly Hills, played by Tiana Taylor. They have a kid. Tiana Taylor is, I don't know, she's detained. And then, spoiler alert, she is a snitch.

20:16Everybody gets in trouble. People go into hiding. Sings like a canary. She sings. And Leo was left to raise their daughter, Charlene or Willa, depending on whether she needs to hide or not, played really amazingly by Chase Infinity. Another incredible film debut. Great debut performance. These young people keep getting more and more talented. And this group is sort of haunted or hunted by Sean Penn in an absolutely bonkers performance as Colonel Stephen Lockjaw. So there is a white supremacist group that comes up into it. There is, of course, the sort of worsening fate of Leo DiCaprio as he's forced back into revolutionary action with an absolutely burnt out brain.

21:03All right. I was part of French 75 for years, years and years. All right. They used to call me Ghetto Pat, Rocket Man, stuff like that. Only problem is I fried my brain since then, man. I have abused drugs and alcohol for the past 30 years, man. I'm a drug and alcohol lover, and I cannot remember for the life of me or the life of my only child the answer to your question, what time is it? 8.15. Now, I need this rendezvous point. You understand what I'm saying? I need it. I understand. And the question is, what time is it? There are car chases. There's a nunnery. For a moment, it's the Black Sound of Music.

21:52It's great. Get to a nunnery. Yeah. And yeah, it is another one of these big swings about a certain American persuasion, about a certain tendency. And it's many ripples through a pond. I thought it was, I mean, it has, it's so strange. I like it less and more in my mind. I like it more as a work of filmmaking. Like, the images are aging beautifully in my mind. The story is aging not so great in my mind. It's a really interesting film to keep thinking about. I want to see it again, actually. Yeah. You know, I famously did not love this movie. I mean, I loved some things about it. But I think it seemed to me to be, and I think it was because the source material of Vineland is about the 60s, sort of like 70s burnout, post-60s.

22:42Whereas like kind of putting the story in today's terms didn't seem to work. But it clearly like P.T. wanted it to work. He wanted to kind of like put a mirror in front of America as it is right now. And I was like, is this the way America is right now? You know, so for me, the brokenness, I mean, it certainly it certainly portrayed a fractured, broken reality. And some of the realities that it portrayed, which, you know, there's a lot of to do with a kind of like ice like, you know, establishment, the, you know, migrant snatching off the street, et cetera, et cetera. There's like the white supremacy thing, which actually rung like maybe most true to me in the world of the movie.

23:26It's not like it's detached from the reality right now. But I think the kind of like potential ways to engage with that reality in the world of the movie seemed to me to be completely imaginary. Yeah, I hear that. And I myself have mixed feelings about this film. I think all three of us do. I will say this, though. I think if we want to talk about what the dominant image is of 2025 or set of images are, they are ICE officers walking through the streets of the United States and abducting people in plain daylight. That's the dominant image in the United States of America in 2025. So it was interesting to me to have Paul Thomas Anderson, a director who has never been that interested in the contemporary and has usually liked to stay in the past, try to come right in with an opening, a very bravura opening of this movie at about a 30 minute sequence kind of without stop, which begins with a group of people freeing migrants from a detention center.

24:34You know, of course, the movie wasn't made, like filmed this past year when all that was going on. But seeing that image, the cinematic version of it, I just thought, OK, here we go. This is no longer, this can't be contained any longer. This is now leaking into culture with a big capital C. Yeah. Guys, moving right along to the fourth auteur, male auteur. Yes, four men. Four men taking big swings. They love to do it. The year that was. Sorry. Yorgo Slanthimos, director of Begonia. Once again. That's sicko, yeah. That came out just this October. I must admit, I didn't get a chance to see the movie yet.

25:27And you have promised me that there is a broken mirror therein.

25:37This movie is about conspiracy. It's about how conspiracy lurks and lingers everywhere. In this movie, Jesse Plemons plays a conspiracy theorist whose name is Teddy, who lives with his mentally handicapped in some way cousin, played by Aidan Delbiss. And he believes he works at a corporation that seems to have something to do with pharmaceuticals. And he believes that the CEO of this corporation, played by Emma Stone, called Michelle Fuller, who's a kind of, you know, terrifying femme boss with blood-heeled Louboutins, is actually an alien who is destroying planet Earth. So he kidnaps her. They do what anybody would do.

26:20They kidnap her. Of course. Where was her security service that day? I've often wondered this since seeing the film, but let's not nitpick. They get her, and they keep her in the bottom of their squalid home and rural somewhere or other, and try to make her confess. Can we have a dialogue, please? Don't call it a dialogue. This isn't death of a salesman. Okay, can we talk, please? Or are you just going to keep doing— We don't need to talk. Yes, okay. Because I know exactly what you're going to say. you're going to say that I'm in some kind of internet-induced, auto-hypnotic feedback loop and gatekeepers and norms and all that weak, hegemonic horse shit.

26:57But that is precisely the limp-dick rhetoric that you've been instructed to counter the human insurgency with. That's the fucking hyper-normalized dialectic by which you've convinced 7.5 billion people that they're not your captives to keep us believing in these fucking false, institutional fucking shibboleths. You mean shibboleths? That's what I said. You said... Yeah, whatever. Sorry. What goes on is a kind of hostage standoff for the ages where Emma Stone both denies everything and then agrees to everything, and the audience is kept in constant suspense about whether or not this conspiracy theory could possibly be true.

27:42and I'm going to tell you not my favorite movie of the year. I know the Lanthimos heads are all out there. They're loving it and I'm happy for them. But I'm not happy for myself because I really, this one didn't do it for me. Even though I liked all the performances in it, I felt, I got to tell you, I felt, just talking about the mirror, the broken mirror is like you're looking at, you know, an American idiot who might also be an American genius. That's the question of the movie. Are you, are you absolutely moronic to believe that aliens are controlling our planet? Or have you put all the signs together?