The Year of the Broken Mirror

This 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. Hi. Hello. It's that time of year. We're seeing year and list everywhere Spotify rap has come, and it's gone. What was your Spotify rap lead artist? Prokofiev for Peter and the Wolf. Oh, beard before. I just, you know, 10 tracks. That's where it's been at. 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, and also Justin Bieber, whose best album swag came out this year was also up there, and then there were other things happen. How about you? You're cooler than me. Mine was handle. Mine was 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. Okay, 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, lots 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 The 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, but I 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, just thinking about films like One Battle After Another by Paul Thomas Anderson, Eddington by Ari Astor, or sinners by Ryan Cougler. 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. It's not a gorgeous reflection shining back, but you know, big swings about the state of American reality that are also very distinctive, altruist 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. This is a year of vampires and twins. 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. The messy, weird, unsettling nature of maybe our self-definition has to change and that's always a kind of 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. My 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. Okay, 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, a skew 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. Some know. You know, it should not be a pen. 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. Really. Barely. I was a young girl then. And look at us now. It was written, directed and co-produced by Ryan Kugler. It was a real, I think we should just say, like a lot of these that we're talking about. These are real, altruist projects like Ryan Kugler basically went up against the studios in one 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. 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 of, it takes place among black share croppers in the Mississippi Delta in the 30s and a musical teenager, Sammy preacher boy, or played by Miles Caten, maybe also by the way, the debut of the year, the film debut of the year. He 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 Duke joint. I'm a sharecropper from Sunflower Plantation. It called me preacher boy, kind of my daddy being a pastor. I wrote this song for him. And then the vampires show up. I mean to me, this was Cougar 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 and the more I think about it, the more, yeah, the more it stuck with me. Yeah. And 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, because Cougar is a Marvel director, he's most known as, you know, the director of Black Panther and he also did a creed and creed. He's a very talented director and everything he's done, but those were movies that were beholden to this like story that the corporation is telling, right? And with this, it's still a big movie. It'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, it relies on kind of genre tropes, like a horror. I really admire that sense of kind of like, let's, 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. Like 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 it's 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. And on the other hand, this kind of surrealist, superhero thing that happens with the vampires, the bravado of the two twin 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 dancing that brings together the past and the future, making them speak to each other as if across two sides of a mirror, but also 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. Right. There is one other way I think that sinners reflects our broken marathon. 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. And that like. Yeah. It was definitely your question. 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. We don't like it. And so that, to me, was part of the mirror of Ryan Kugler 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 driven with brutality and ugliness and who don't find looking away from that to be particularly comforting or elucidating. Yeah. 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. And 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 RE 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 pricey for those of us who haven't seen or don't, don't remember, would rather not remember, because it is about a period that many of us would rather not remember. The 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. And he has this nemesis, this sort of like woke, annoyingly, faux liberal contender to the mayorality of the town, played by Pedro Pascale. You know, if a healthy person with a mask, no, here we go, get exposed to a COVID-19 person without a mask, then they got a 70% chance to catch on it. And if we all wear them, then we can reduce the transmission rate to one or five. You don't even know what you're talking about, 1.4%, 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 bazawnkers, right, and gives us a view of America that I think we can also include among though the broken mirror cannon, the broken mirror cannon that we're just establishing. Yeah. Do you guys want to want to talk about that a little bit? There's so many-- 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 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-- I was thinking about that, which is called Truth or Consequences New Mexico. And it's a long story, but the town was named after a quiz show where somebody, you know, you get asked a trivia question, and if you can't answer it in a very short period of time, you get 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, is it's 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 it's discontent is totally what the movie is about. Something came up to me, Vincent, you said something along the lines of they can't get it together, like the people of the town can't keep it together, can't get it together. And it made me think, you know, Ultima, the free public Rolling Stones concert and Ultima and Speedway, California, known collectively as kind of the death of the '60s, right? Like Meredith Hunter, a black concert attendee, knife to death by the Hell's Angels who were doing security, horrible tragedy, the movie Gimme Shelter, the mezals movie about this event. You see Mick Jagger on stage and he keeps saying, like, well, I can't we get it together. Can we keep it together, people? You know, like love and light, like 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. No, that's totally right. 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 it can sense this reality, right? No. Apparently not. And this is what we're talking about. We're kind of bleak. Pretty bleak, for sure. In a minute, we'll come back with something a little less bleak, just a little. That's in a minute on critics of large from the New Yorker. Right now we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnik, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Katanji Brown-Jackson, Newk Engage, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Charlemagne the God, and so many more. That's all on the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts. Talking now about bleak, but perhaps with the 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, yeah, guys, 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, 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 Pinchin, this time the 1990 book, "Vine Land," and it's about the action and then the afterlife of a band of, I don't know what you call them, left wing, revolutionaries, radicals, domestic terrorists, I don't know, to me know, to me that's a matter, exactly. Um, this company has led at least in the sort of the, 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, everybody gets in trouble, people go into hiding, things like a canary, there she sings, and Leo was left to raise their daughter, Charlene or Willa, depending on, you know, whether she needs to hide or not, played really amazingly by Chase Infinity. Another incredible film debut, great debut, these young people, keep getting more, more and more talented, and this group is sort of haunted or hunted by Sean Penn in an absolutely bunkers 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. All right, I was part of French 75 for years, years and years, all right, they used to call me, get a pad, rocket man stuff like that, only problem is I fried my brain since then, man, I 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? 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 is a nunnery for a moment, it's the black sound of music, it's great. Yeah, that's not a nunnery. 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 making 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 Inland is about the 60s, sort of like 70s burnout, post 60s, whereas like kind of putting the story in today's terms didn't seem to work, but it clearly like PTA wanted it to worry, 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 broken, I mean, it's certainly, it's 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 the kind of like ice like, you know, establishment of 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. It'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 on plane daily. 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 bravira 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. You know, of course the movie didn't, 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, okay, here we go. This is no longer, this can't be contained any, you know, any longer. This is now leaking into culture with a big capital C. Yeah. Guys, moving right along to the floor. It's possible. Autor. Mail. Autor. Yes. Foreman. Foreman taking big swings. I love to do it. That was your ghost land the most director once again of begonia. That came out just this October. I must admit I didn't get a chance to see the movie yet, and you have promised me that there is a broken mirror they're in. This 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 Adon Delvis, and he believes he works at a corporation that seems to have something to do the 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 femboss with blood-healed lubutowns is actually an alien who is destroying planet earth. So he kidnapped her. They do what anybody would do. They kidnapped her. Of course. Where was her security service that day? I've often wondered this in 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 this dialogue. This isn't death of a salesman. Okay, can we talk, please? Or are you just going to do this? 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. But that is precisely the lymph-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 seven and a half billion people that they're not your captives, to keep us believing in these fucking false institutional fucking shibolids. You mean shibolids? That's what I said. He 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 has kept in constant suspense about whether or not this conspiracy theory could possibly be true. And I'm going to tell you, not my favorite movie of the year. I know the lengthmost 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 an American idiot who might also be an American genius. That's the question for the movie. Are you absolutely moronic to believe that aliens are controlling our planet or have you put all the signs together? Did you do your own research and are you going to be proved right? And that kind of a conflict is not that intriguing to me since the way that the mirror was held up to that conflict, I felt was just to make every, it was a very land the most thing. Everyone comes off looking appalling, absolutely appalling. And I think land the most is a filmmaker who really likes to hold himself at a remove from people and from his subjects and kind of almost, it's almost like a little kid watching like an ant farm. Like, oh, will they, will they eat each other? You know, maybe I'll put a magnifying glass on one and see what happens when it burns. So that, I felt that we are so swimming in conspiracy and in aggression and violence. This did not illuminate our situation for me, even though it was a much more, it might have for other people as much more, you know, it's a very extreme take on what's going on kidnapping someone is a lot to do. Vincent, did you disagree? Did this do it for you? I loved it because I love the work of the actor Jesse Clemens who is just always so demented and strange and off kilter. And here he's made to stand in for the kind of someone who's become a trope in our society, just the absolutely alienated sad and potentially violent young man. He also has a great line in the movie where I think sort of trying to understand this person, he says, you know, I've been through the whole digestive system. I started all right, I've been through, you know, communism, socialism, the sort of travel through ideologies that ends up in just utter, we think, out to lunchness. And what the movie does, I thought, well, is posit all of this on top of issues of, you know, class, political economy, the environment, in a way that I thought had on a very much smaller scale. And even though it's visually kind of all over the place, in terms of its terrain, it's less of a huge swing than the others that we're talking about. A very small scale with a limited number of characters, try to say something about the interiority of a certain kind of person. And yet all that smallness and interiority has consequences for the entire human race, you won't spoil it. But this is, this movie gives you the equivalent of a little shot of cyanide at the end. And it just says, drink up. It goes galactic. Yeah. And I'm going to see this. This is your really wetting my appetite. If you want the cyanide, go for it. That was too bitter to swallow for me at the end. Guys, we've talked about all these big releases, the big swings, the big swing of it all. Were there any other aspects that you saw around you of this broken mirror theme that struck you this year? To me, this is really the year that AI broke through as a daily use item for the majority of the population. Yeah. Of course, these tools have been around for a while. But this is the year when they became ubiquitous and unavoidable. When just signing onto Google, means that the little Google thing is going to give you complete sentences, often, totally factually accurate about whatever you're looking at. I do think it's the year when I mean, we know that people increasingly are turning to AI as they return to other people to have conversations with, to get information from, to find emotional connection. And so we have now in our pockets, everywhere, this mirror of humanity. And we will see where this leads. I think it's going to be good. I'm glad. Done. You know, I try not to be the land the most off like handing everyone the cyanide shot. And I try to think it's all going to be okay. And there are many things that I enjoy about technology in the way it is and having access to many things that are fingertips. But I'm going to go ahead and call that a broken mirror. I'm going to go ahead and call the AI chatbots who want to flatter and cajolus to be a broken mirror of humanity. Yeah. A friend of mine I saw on Instagram posted something like some image, which it was kind of very realistic and said, I can't be spending my whole life now wondering if an image is real or not. Because this is the year when this really happened. And I'm realizing with certain things that I see, I still don't, I don't bother finding out almost. So for instance, I do think this was fake, but there were ultimately, but I definitely thought it was real when I looked at it. There was an image of Diddy in jail, like in the prison yard. I've seen this one. Yeah. So terrible. Taken of him, like talking to another inmate. And I was like, okay, yeah, here's a picture of somebody, you know, paparazzi caught a picture of Diddy in the jail yard talking to another inmate and like smiling and laughing. It was, it was probably fake, but I I have to admit, I never found out. And I think this is going to be the way it's going to be now. I guess, unless it's something that I'm pretty sure it was confirmed as fake, but to your point, like, how would you know? That's it. Alex, have you like experienced any of these like kind of AI daily and constantly miss? I don't know what's how. I don't even know if you're real. I'm, I'm, I'm the person. Yeah. I follow someone on Instagram that I'm not sure if they're a person. Oh, oh, that's an AI creation or someone that like I and several of my friends follow on both Instagram and Twitter. I've never seen them in a picture with more than like two people. The Google results are very low. Like interacts with my posts sometimes. Like, and you follow them? I follow them. They follow me. Sometimes they reply to my stuff, but it's like the, the, the, the angle is always like the camera is always waving in this very interesting way. The smile is always the exact, I'm like, I am wondering if it's like a test for a better AI. I'm the same. Did you follow them because they're like hot or something? Like what was the reason? Or because your friends are, oh, that was nice. Yeah, that was he was, he was fine. Okay. So it's like, so it's like, so it's like a bus. It's like a medical researcher who also like falls a lot of letters. So it's a busty model. Not busty. Not busty. Oh, not busty. Small naturals. It's all coming out. Sorry. Sorry. They post stuff about literature or or whatever. Not literature. And I guess she's a pretty girl, but that's not the reason the reason my point is I'm like, as it goes on, I'm like, your tone is oddly consistent. Your pictures are oddly consistent. Are you, are you a canary in some coal mine? I don't, you know, I don't know. Okay, off like we're going to all put our minds together. We'll have. We're not going to, if it's a, if it is, I'm going to crack this. I have to say, I just want to admit this. This is my first time even talking about this. I think it's good emitting. It's good. It's good. It's good. It's good. Right. Yeah. It's good. They're very obvious AI like actual like, yeah. Of course. Those ladies I've already, that's right. Right. Right. You know, I do feel like with this whole mirror concept and the reality, unreality, like the more that unreality becomes our daily environment, the more that reality also commands a premium and seems to matter. It's very confusing. I like, yes, look at the Labubus and the LaFoufus. We did a whole episode about the Labubus and whoa, but tied anyone who's child asked them or, you know, I guess, love or whatever whoever's wanting Labubus. Ask them for Labubus and they show up at the LaFoufus. You got to, you got to count every single one of those teeth. You got to get the real thing, even though the real thing is a hideous piece of, you know, plastic and fake fur. But it's, but it's real. You got to feel that fur. You got to stroke that fuzz. You know, and I was thinking about something a friend of mine said. And I don't know if I believe this, but that the increasing inability to tell real from fake online, that thing of like, I don't know that it's going to be increasingly like this. Does this happen? Does this not happen? Are these people actually interacting in real life? Is did he like, you know, is it did he in the prison yard, et cetera? Well, maybe. And this is like the best case scenario, I think, lead to people putting the phone aside more. I mean, this is the best case scenario. I don't know if this is real, but like, okay, yeah, it's like a potential positive is people being like, okay, yeah, I'm not getting anything from this. Screw all of it. I mean, that would be the best case scenario. But screw all of it in what? I'm going to go touch grass and sit by myself. Now I mean, yes, I myself. I'm going to talk to you in the podcast studio. Okay. In the podcast studio. I mean, this is just because we're here, but I could also talk to you, you know, I'll engage with my real friends. I'll engage with real people. I'm a controlled meat space environment. And a controlled meat space environment. I'll join a run club. No, I'm kidding. I'm never going to join a run club. No matter if the bots take over. That's not happening. But, but, you know, I mean, again, this is maybe wishful thinking, but something to possibly dream about. Do we hear a resolution for 2026? Are you going to touch grass in 2026? Wow. You should. I should. Me too. In a minute, in this atmosphere of a total break from reality, do we need these cinematic reflections of ourselves more than ever? Critics at large from the New Yorker will be right back. Hi, I'm Rebecca Ford, senior awards correspondent at Vanity Fair and co-host of Little Gold Men. Oscar season is upon us. Little Gold Men takes you behind the scenes of the race for the biggest prize in Hollywood. There's a hundred wrestlers in the room, but only one can be Oscar-nominated. Whether you're a movie lover or an industry buff, Little Gold Men from Vanity Fair has everything you need to know about this year's Oscar race. Follow and listen to Little Gold Men wherever you get your podcasts. We've been talking about the shattered looking glass, the jagged shards, the mirror cracked from side to side, the mirror stage, but broken. And, I mean, obviously, like, this was the first year of Trump 2.0. I feel like a lot happened around that. That could be talked about in mirror terms or broken mirror terms, rather. I mean, the situation defies easy summary, but one of one of the things very much on my mind is just the total constant warping of reality that is at the point where if you resist even one little aspect of the reality warping, another one will just come in. I mean, I was talking before about how interesting it was to see sinners go back to the 1930s, deep south, at a time when the government itself is trying to erase history. And what I mean by that, just to get more granular, like, this was the year that we heard that the Smithsonian was told to focus more on America's brightness and not about and not, you know, get into how bad slavery was when references to Trump's impeachments were removed from the exhibit on the presidency when various national parks were had to remove signs that explained that the land that the parks exist on belong to native tribes who were forcibly removed. Like, okay, it's one thing to not want to land acknowledgement every time you go to the movies, it's quite another thing to, I mean, and that can be discussed by reasonable people, but it's quite another thing to go to Yellowstone and just be like, eight nope, there's nothing here, you know, so all these efforts that have been made to try to reflect reality accurately, there is a kind of falsification going on with the hope and the idea that the population will look into the big American mirror and see, you know, nothing but, I don't know, smiling white faces, like, what's the idea here? It's a nightmare. And so that is a political thing, but it also really is a cultural thing. And it does make me wonder, you know, like one of the big pieces of news from the last week was, is about this Netflix deal. We'll see which way it goes, but we now know that the administration wants to be involved. So when there's pressure coming from that level on culture, how does culture react? Like, you could see really depressing bad thing, which is the culture caves, but also it creates many, many more opportunities for, um, what, for lack of better word, we can call resistance. Yeah, it becomes a lot easier to, it's harder to resist when the pressures are so high, but it's also easier because even smaller things become more meaningful, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, I mean, the lies are just so, um, I mean, even talking about this, I feel like it's such a cliche, you know, like, Trump lies, it's like, yeah, no shit, you know, but the, the, the level things have reached in this respect are insane. And I think the difference this time around in this new iteration of the administration is that the self-preservation instinct of corporate entities seem to have reached such a fever pitch, you know, that there's a complete kind of like agreement to appease this version, this false version of, of reality, you know, if we're thinking about like, the inauguration and all kind of the heads of industry, you know, Zuck and Bezos, Tim Cook, all of that. And just like, everybody just is like willing to kind of kiss, kiss the ring in a very public way, like the shame about that is gone. And these are people who are presiding over the making of culture. Yeah, you know, whether it's Apple, whether it's Netflix, you know, whether it's the social media audience, you know, it's like, this is it. And you know, this kind of leads me to a question of like, do you think the movies that we were discussing are responding to this warping in any meaningful sense? Well, I think Eddington is a good example of this because it takes place in 2020, a moment of incredible fracture, not only politically, ideologically, sort of just in the in the fabric of our common reality. But it's really interesting. It's important that it's Trump 2.0, right? Yeah. Most of the first Trump administration happened before the pandemic. Yes. And then we had this interregnum with Biden and here Trump comes again. And so to think about the first Trump administration and this, this second term is on some level to be on two sides of a great divide in our notions of what we are not only as a country, but as a human community to be alive now is to look over that golf to try to remember what it was really like in 2015 is to imagine a whole different world. And it is kind of looking into a mirror. Absolutely different. It's only been 10 years. Yeah. Yeah. In some ways, it seems like 2025 is the year that 2020 finally ramified. It's like this is the world that we now have. Absolutely a great point. That's why I do think it's interesting to see people taking it on directly and trying maybe failing, but also trying to actually present a vision of the crisis in American culture. Because we're living through this crisis that just it's lasting forever. It's a non-ending crisis. I mean, I also think there's like, I don't know what you guys think about this. There's a big decline as narrative obviously with politics that, you know, Trump is saying we're better than ever and everything is everything is better than ever. Many people are saying nothing could be worse. This is the worst thing ever. I've seen a lot of like lists from various taste makers and people just kind of say, oh, this year sucked. And that has me feeling down. I don't know what to say about that. But well, I do wanters the end of this episode to maybe lift a supple little bit and or just to think what could be a potential bright point after all that we've said about the broken mirror stage of our nation and culture? Well, I kind of do think, you know, is mixed feelings that I have about one battle after another and I know you guys share it. We're ignoring the number one hero and the best character of this whole movie since a Sergio St. Carlos. That's true. That's very true. It's made by Benicio Doutora. Yeah. And the thing about Benicio and the thing about who's amazing in this role as he calls himself, he's a kind of Latino Harriet Tubman who's helping migrants find a way through the traps that have been placed for them. There is an incredible sequence. I could have watched a home movie about this about the safe house where he and his family are helping to hide people and also a great confrontation with the hilarious lame ass Bob Leo de Caprio's character where Bob kind of apologizes for turning the police onto him and the sense he says, we've been late siege to for hundreds of years. It's not your fault. Don't get selfish. That's a mirror moment of like wake up. Look at yourself in the mirror. This isn't all about you. I come back to that to the two ways of being in opposition. One of them is toting machine guns and setting off explosions. And the other is having the kind of quiet discipline and solidarity to carry on and continue to build the world as it should be. That's what I'm taken with me into 2026. I'm going to say the thing that I always say that for me, what is kind of like the saving grace is people still intent on making culture and making art. The fact that people still are doing that and trying to do that and the fact that people like us, I mean, this is what this podcast is about, are trying to like take these works in and reflect on them and maybe bring other people into them. For me, that's like, I mean, it's not everything but it's something and it makes people think that life is still worth living, maybe even if it's not in this early, you know, immediate political action. And I see this with my daughter, you know, I see this with like her excitement about discovering things, you know. And for us, we're horrid, you know, whatever. Although, of course, we still get to we still get excited. We still, of course, discuss and live and breathe it, but we have been doing it for a long time. But for someone finding out, oh, this is a really funny, super smart TV show. Or, oh, can you believe this band and the music they're making, whatever it is? Or it's a, that's what life's about. And even in the world of the broken mirror, hopefully we have these examples to at least tie this over a little bit. Yeah. And what do you think Vincent? In many different ways, these are some of the texts that we've talked about are about the limits of a certain kind of politics. Let's call it whether it institutional partisan and the efficacy or whatever doom of people acting on their own, like sort of democracy closer to the ground, call it revolutionary, call it whatever you want. And it does seem that thinking about the mirror broken or not is a way of describing a kind of stasis, a kind of almost like narcissistic kind of figuring out. And we all have to do it. We all have to describe problems before we solve them. But, you know, the fixation on this fixation on democracy on the ground, whether it's, you know, violent or not, whether it's misguided or not mistaken or not, is a, maybe I hope describes a yearning for more action, for like a move away from the mirror and out, this goes to your point about touching grass, like out into the streets, out into community with other people where, where change is potentially made, fates are decided, you know, as opposed to the, the long gaze into the mirror. So this is our final episode of the year. And we would be remiss not to take a moment and thank all of you listeners. Without all of you, we just be three people in a room yapping, as they say. But, you know, knowing that all of you are out there tuning in each week and, you know, hearing from you and, you know, sometimes we even meet you on the street and that is like such a pleasure. It makes it all feel worthwhile. This is a community and, and we love it. Listeners, we absolutely love you. Please be in touch with us. We love hearing from you and you guys really make the show. We're wishing you the brightest end of the year. We're so lucky to have you. This has been critics at large. Alex Barish is our consulting editor and Rianne Corby as our senior producer. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Alexis Quadrado composed our theme music and we had engineering help today from Michael Geno with mixing by Mike Kuchman. That's it from us for 2025. We have so many fun episodes that we're planning for you all in the new year and we can't wait to share them with you. We hope you get some nice time off to fun wine, relax, spend with your families, maybe watch some movies or read a book. We'll see you all back here in 2026. From PRX.