“Beef,” “The Drama,” and the New Marriage Plot

Summary

Podcast Summary: Critics at Large | The New Yorker

Episode: “Beef,” “The Drama,” and the New Marriage Plot
Date: April 16, 2026
Hosts: Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, Alexandra Schwartz

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Episode Overview

This episode of Critics at Large explores the shifting landscape of marriage and committed relationships, focusing on recent TV and film—especially the second season of Netflix’s “Beef” and Christopher Borgli’s movie “The Drama.” The hosts place these texts within broader cultural trends and question what modern audiences want marriage to mean, examining both the cynicism and possibilities within contemporary “marriage plots.” They bring in other examples—including books, memoirs, and internet phenomena—to highlight a moment of inflection in how relationships, marriage, and alternatives are depicted and perceived.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Marriage as Institution in Flux

• The hosts identify a “long moment of reinvestigating what marriage is good for” in culture today, with declining marriage rates, increased openness to alternatives (open marriages, polyamory), and a persistent fear of not truly knowing one's partner.
• Naomi Fry asks: “At a time when relationships are more flexible than ever, what do we as a culture want marriage to mean?” (05:50)

Notable Quote

“There is a general... not even pessimism, but a kind of downbeat pondering about what marriage is and what it’s for. Who does it serve? Why do we enter into it? And are there alternatives coming over the horizon?”
— Vinson Cunningham [03:32]

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2. TV Analysis: “Beef” Season 2

Premise and Structure

• Synopsis: Season 2 shifts to an anthology format, focusing on two couples (older, club-managing couple played by Oscar Isaac & Carey Mulligan, and a young, soon-to-be-married staff couple played by Charles Melton & Cailee Spaeny).
• Inciting Incident: An explosive marital fight is exposed (and recorded), leading to blackmail and escalation.
• Themes: Under the luxury-club surface, resentments, secrets, and status anxieties fuel conflict.

Relationship Dynamics & Class

• Show depicts class-fueled tension: older couple clings to their precarious class position, young couple aspires upward. Both couples become complicit in “illegal shit,” highlighting marriage as mutual cover rather than romantic union.
• Comparison to The White Lotus for dissecting status within luxury settings.

Memorable Exchange

“Marriage is complicity. What unites both of these couples is doing illegal shit... a good marriage is covering each other’s backs.” — Alex Schwartz [16:11]

Generational Blindness

• The younger couple’s idealism is juxtaposed against the older couple’s cynicism:

“The pretense in the younger couple is that one utterly knows the other... and you can never surprise me by veering from that sense I have of you.”
— Nomi Fry [14:01]

• Commentary that both couples lack a real sense of “why” they are together, leaving the show on a “shallow level” regarding marriage’s substance.

“It's the blind talking to the blind.” [14:39]

Timestamps for Segment: [06:24]–[16:37]

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3. Film Analysis: “The Drama”

Synopsis and Twist (Spoilers)

• Starts as a rom-com about Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya), morphs after a fateful dinner where Emma reveals she once planned (but didn’t execute) a school shooting as a teen.
• The revelation devastates the relationship, leading to a “wedding from hell,” and throws into relief the question of how much partners can (or should) know about each other.

Performances & Structure

• Zendaya described as a “cipher” and “all caps symbol” more than a flesh-and-blood character, demonstrating her magnetic star power, but the film does not deliver “fully embodied” characters. [26:03]
• Pattinson praised for his brooding presence; the movie seen as more “exercise” or “what-if diagram” than grounded drama.
• Lack of deep knowledge about one’s partner is both the point and, perhaps, a narrative weakness.

Notable Quote

“It's an example of: ‘Oh, I actually know nothing about this person that I'm about to marry.’ …it's almost like a parable... it's not even a realistic engagement with an actual relationship.”
— Nomi Fry [28:47]

Timestamps for Segment: [18:55]–[29:53]

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4. Memoirs & Real-Life Stories (“Strangers” and the Gisele Pellico Case)

Strangers by Belle Burden

• Memoir about a marriage that falls apart overnight when the husband walks out post-affair, leaving Burden fundamentally questioning who her partner is and ever was.
• The “unanswerable why” preoccupies both the book and the hosts, echoing the theme of not knowing one’s spouse.

Gisele Pellico Case

• Used as an extreme real-life example of horrific marital secrecy and ultimate betrayal—her husband repeatedly drugged and assaulted her, inviting others to do the same.
• This serves as an illustration of the public/private divide in marriage and societal shock when “revelation” occurs.

Notable Quote

“You as a participant in the marriage can figure out much too late that your spouse is... an absolute sociopathic monster. But also, there's the aspect of revelation that happens publicly, because marriage... is a very public thing.”
— Vincent Cunningham [33:24]

Timestamps for Segment: [29:53]–[34:39]

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5. The 19th-Century Origins & Literary Marriage Plots

• The marriage plot in literature (e.g., Madame Bovary, Phyllis Rose's Parallel Lives) is traced as the origin of the expectation that marriage will provide romantic, sexual, and economic fulfillment in one bundle.
• These fictions are still with us, with modern adaptations and ruptures.

Notable Quotes

“The argument that Phyllis Rose is making is that marriage is a political experience. And it's the primary political experience that most people will have... a body politic in which two people are jockeying and negotiating.”
— Alex Schwartz [36:52]

“Who you are at the start of a marriage is not going to be who you are at the middle... and yet that keeps coming as such a rude shock to us.”
— Alex Schwartz [38:57]

Timestamps for Segment: [35:37]–[41:29]

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6. Modern Alternatives: Polyamory, Open Marriage, Solitude

• Discussion of Lindy West’s memoir “Adult Braces,” where her marriage transitions to a throuple at her husband's prompting, exemplifies how the political and personal collide in contemporary relationships.
• Polyamory is seen as both an actual trend and a site of cultural anxieties about the “right” way to do relationships, raising questions about the place of contract, consent, and personal fulfillment.

Notable Moments

• On polyamory as performance of politics:

“[For some], 'what kind of romantic entanglement one enters is... the expression par excellence of your politics.'”
— Vincent Cunningham [44:37]

Cultural Imaginaries: #SingleLife

• Viral videos and reels valorizing single, childfree solitude (esp. women) are discussed as new counter-narratives to both marriage and “tradwife” culture.
• These images are sometimes celebrated, sometimes pathologized—as with “no friends” as a new perceived extreme.

Notable Quote

“You are an island to yourself—and what might have once counted as, like, a pathetic, sad, cat lady existence is now, for some people at least, the pinnacle of… living.”
— Nomi Fry [48:06]

Connecting It All

• The hosts conclude that individuals are “reimagining” relationships constantly. Imagination—and the courage to use it—is the throughline, possible now in ways that past generations could not have envisioned.

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Memorable Quotes & Timestamps

• “Are we in a moment where marriage is just a house of cards, a pack of lies you have to renegotiate?”
  — Alex Schwartz [04:02]

• “The bravery of the imagination... to imagine any kind of future for yourself at all.”
  — Alex Schwartz [50:18]

• “Love, like art and politics, is something conditioned by time and lives in time. What is beautiful in one age is not beautiful in another, and so it goes with love.”
  — Vincent Cunningham [51:24]

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Conclusions

• The marriage plot—on screen, in memoirs, and in our “real” social media lives—is in flux.
• A new era is underway: the institution is less prescriptive and more experimental but carries real and existential insecurities about intimacy, secrecy, and fulfillment.
• Pop culture’s depictions now reflect not so much marriage’s stability but its capacity for surprise, betrayal, and constant renegotiation.
• More than ever, finding or creating meaning in relationships is a matter of active, brave imagination—whether within a marriage, an alternative arrangement, or in solitude.

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For listeners seeking a thoughtful, incisive, and often witty meditation on why we get married—and what we believe it’s for—this episode is an indispensable cultural snapshot.

Transcript

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[Vincent Cunningham]

This is Critics at Large, a podcast from the New Yorker. I'm Vincent Cunningham.

[Alex Schwartz]

I'm Alex Schwartz.

[Nomi Frye]

And I'm Nomi Frye. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. Hello, friends.

[Alex Schwartz]

Hello.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Hey, what's up?

[Nomi Frye]

We're all ready to, you know, discuss the matter at hand for this week. The topic of today's episode is. Drum roll, please. Marriage and all its discontents.

[Alex Schwartz]

Woo hoo.

[Nomi Frye]

Imagine that. There are actually a few occasions for this. The first is a new season of the show, Beef.

[Unidentified Male Speaker]

I think deep down we both knew it was a temporary band aid fight.

[Nomi Frye]

Flight, all the sky, Benny.

[Alex Schwartz]

For what?

[Nomi Frye]

Life tearing at the sea?

[Unidentified Male Speaker]

For the immense pain of knowing that you picked the wrong person.

[Nomi Frye]

Which focuses on two very different couples that wind up in an increasingly tense standoff with each other. And that standoff quickly starts to expose the cracks that are forming in these relationships. And boy, is it harrowing. Okay, and we'll also be talking about the movie, the drama the Wedding is this Saturday. What stories are you gonna do?

[Vincent Cunningham]

What do you mean?

[Alex Schwartz]

My speech yeah. Are you gonna use the first time we met? Yes. Okay. What about the first date?

[Unidentified Female Speaker]

Yeah, of course.

[Alex Schwartz]

Fuck.

[Vincent Cunningham]

You don't have to do a speech.

[Nomi Frye]

It's about a couple, Charlie and Emma, and Emma reveals a deep, dark secret about her past, and then things start to go south very fast. Okay, so. So I think it's fair to say that both of these texts put forward a somewhat cynical view of what it's like to be in a committed relationship. Would you guys say that this reflects a kind of broader feeling in the culture right now? Are these outliers or are they indicators?

[Vincent Cunningham]

I think there is a general. I wouldn't even say pessimism, but a kind of downbeat pondering about what marriage is and what it's for. I mean, maybe it's a question that comes up age after age, but what is this institution for? Who does it serve? Why do we enter into it? And are there alternatives coming over the horizon? I think that's the moment we're in, this resettling.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah. Alex, what do you think?

[Alex Schwartz]

I totally agree, Vincent. And I think it's a long moment, and I think we're actually close to the beginning. To me, these things, these questions really began with the advent of birth control, Women's lib and no Fault divorce and the Holy Trinity. Right, Exactly. But, yes, Nomi, I think these are indicators. And I think one theme that I see stretching across the two works you mentioned and others, is this idea of revelation. The fear that you could be in a marriage with someone, feel that this is the person you know, the best in the world, and wake up one day and discover that there is something big they've been hiding from you. And that actually, your life is a house of cards, a pack of lies. And you have a pack of cards, a pack of lying cards, and you have to renegotiate everything, ask everything, and that the foundations of the supposedly solid thing, your marriage, are actually quite shaky.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah, I mean, I couldn't agree more, Alex. I mean, all of these things, the kind of. The long moment of reinvestigating what marriage is good for, and then this particular question that I do think is germane. Am I in bed with a stranger? Anyway, today we're gonna be talking about beef, we're gonna be talking about the drama, we're gonna be talking about several other texts, and we're gonna be talking in general about modern attitudes towards this very old institution. As we've said, it's kind of at an inflection point right now. Statistically, marriage rates are hovering around an all time low. And at the same time, people are trying to find new approaches to make marriage work. I mean, open marriages, polyamory, all of these things are feeling increasingly mainstream. And my question for us is, at a time when relationships are more flexible than ever, what do we as a culture want marriage to mean? That's today on critics at large, Beef, the drama and the new marriage plot. Okay, you guys, let's begin with Beef, Okay. On Netflix. The second season of the show is out today, and it's written and directed by Lee Seung Jin. Did you guys watch the first season of this show?

[Alex Schwartz]

Sure did.

[Nomi Frye]

Okay.

[Alex Schwartz]

It was about an incident of road rage that led two people into an ever escalating conflict. So I think the connection is conflict. Conflict as the driver of passion, fury as the great revealer. Otherwise, totally different characters, totally different setup.

[Nomi Frye]

Absolutely right. So this is an anthology show, right? And now we have a whole other story, a whole new set of characters. But the idea that beneath the seemingly placid surface of kind of, you know, regular everyday life, there are resentments, there is violence, there are secrets and lies that lie in wait to be exposed. Right? So in this Beef 2 season, who wants to give me a synopsis of kind of like the lay of the lay of the land?

[Vincent Cunningham]

We start on the grounds of a country club at what we come to understand as a fundraiser for that club. On stage is the general manager of the club, played by Oscar Isaac. His name is Josh Martine. Thank you, thank you, thank you to our incredible staff. By his side is his wife, played by Carey Mulligan, Lindsey Crane. Martine, my beautiful, talented wife Lindsey, who

[Alex Schwartz]

helped put this event together. All right, everyone get home safe.

[Unidentified Male Speaker]

Not so fast, mister. Let's not forget about the best general manager this club has ever seen.

[Nomi Frye]

We love you, Doshi.

[Vincent Cunningham]

As soon as they leave the grounds, they are fighting. And then, I mean, every single recrimination in the world comes out. The show starts with a facade. These two on stage, and then a total outpouring of ID in this fight. The fight gets so bad that a golf club becomes involved. Carey Mulligan's character is basically just destroying the house. Isaac's character grabs the golf club, but then he seems to be kind of like almost threatening to hit her with it. It's at this moment of just like, unchecked raid.

[Alex Schwartz]

Then fucking divorce me. I would.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Please divorce me. Meanwhile, he left his wallet at the club. Therefore, two young members of the staff are coming to give the wallet. They see this, they record it in the fullness of time. They decide that they should use this as a way to improve their own station. They are a young couple planning to be married. I think importantly, they wanna be married. They're engaged, newly engaged. So she's like, we need healthcare. We're gonna use this to extort this couple. And they think that this is their ticket. But the main gist is the trouble that is caused by this one moment of unchecked rage in this marriage.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah.

[Alex Schwartz]

I have now seen seven out of the eight episodes of Beef 2. Gobbled it up, gobbled it up with my husband by my side. We were on the marital couch on the marital couch just gobbling up Beef 2. I really like this show. It really reminded me of the White Lotus. Yes, it is.

[Nomi Frye]

From the jump.

[Unidentified Narrator]

Yes.

[Alex Schwartz]

And I think this is a place that TV is increasingly interested in going to. These luxury worlds that reveal personal and class fissures. And one thing I really like about the show is that the young couple, the Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny couple, Austin and Ashley, see the older managers as having it made. And the older couple, see, see themselves as slipping down the class ladder. They're kind of barely clinging to their position and they spend all their time around the truly wealthy people who patronize the club catering to them. So everyone is just trying really hard to hold onto what they have. And the stress of that is in the show what fractures these relationships.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah, because it's all about comparison. Like I think within the marriage there is always, and I think within their marriage and also increasingly in the younger couple's marriage, there is a looking outside, there is like, oh, maybe I should have, you know, been with this guy. Maybe I can, you know, secretly text an old boyfriend, an ex boyfriend to, you know, give myself a kind of a little boost. Right when I'm feeling like down that I'm like older and have made wrong choices in my life. You know, there's. Everything is kind of ruled by this jockeying for status, whether in love or in work. What did you think, Vincent?

[Vincent Cunningham]

It's a really interesting story to me on one level, I feel like it sometimes at its worst moments threatens to be a kind of second rate White Lotus. But at its best moments, it really does talk about what you just mentioned, Nomi, like how much political economy and our place within it in this great context, how much of that weight lands on the couple form all of the tensions within these relationships and between them have to do with what does it mean that I have or don't have money, have or don't have health insurance, have or don't have a sense of security, whatever that means to me. And how much do I associate the health of a relationship with this other kind of more nebulous, like, whatever, economically driven health. And that is really interesting to me. And the moments when that gets contemplated, maybe paradoxically, is when these characters are alone. There's a lot of loneliness in this. Oscar Isaac is, you know, like on Onlyfans doing God knows what, looking at, you know, so there's this undercurrent of loneliness. Alex, like, what did you think of that relationship? Like those two, Isaac and Mulligan.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yes. I think there's a sense increasingly, I think, in the Lindsay Josh marriage of I know you too well and I don't like what I see. There are no more surprises. You are horrible. Let's have the same fight we've had a million times over again, but only more intensely, which is the moment when the younger couple, Ashley and Austin, come upon them. And then you have the. You're countered with the idealism of this very young couple. There's a scene where Austin is talking to Lindsay about what he's witnessed, and Lindsay says to Austin, okay, but you actually have no idea what marriage is really like.

[Unidentified Male Speaker]

How old are you?

[Vincent Cunningham]

29.

[Unidentified Male Speaker]

And how long have you and what's her name?

[Vincent Cunningham]

Ashley.

[Unidentified Male Speaker]

Ashley. How long have you and Ashley been going out?

[Unidentified Female Speaker]

Year and a half.

[Unidentified Male Speaker]

Wow, so early. Well, you've got a good fight coming. And when it does come, you two are going to be stronger for it.

[Unidentified Female Speaker]

If I may say this, ma', am,

[Vincent Cunningham]

I don't think that's how relationships work.

[Unidentified Male Speaker]

All right. All I'll say is that all the couples I know that last, they've really had at it. You know, it's actually the ones that don't, where someone's usually hiding something. I mean, not to say that that's your situation with Ashley. Ashley. But the bad does have to come out somewhere. Do you understand?

[Nomi Frye]

The pretense in the younger couple is that one utterly knows the other and vice versa. That is, you can never betray me or you can never disappoint me because I know you are fully on my side. And you can never surprise me with kind of veering from that sense that I have of you. Right.

[Alex Schwartz]

I will say, and I wonder what you guys think about this. Both of these couples are total red herrings. Like, neither of these couples has any idea what any of this is about as far as I'm concerned. And therefore, the show remains on a pretty shallow level when it comes to speaking to marriage.

[Nomi Frye]

I think it's the classic blind leading the blind or not leading. It's the blind talking to the blind.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I think you're about to say bland, and that's what it's kind of the bland leading the bland as well.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, say more. What do you mean?

[Vincent Cunningham]

Well, neither of these couples, to the point, seem to have a well developed idea of why, you know, why they're together. And this speech, it sends Austin into kind of a tizzy, Right. He starts googling, why do we never fight? Now his sense of what a relationship is is totally determined by the outside.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah.

[Vincent Cunningham]

And so that sort of blandness of purpose maybe is a kind of profound statement, but it doesn't really develop, though.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah, I mean, I think if we were to kind of distinguish between the two couples apart from the stuff that we've already said. The older couple seems to kind of like have sinister intent more definitionally, I guess. I mean, both of them are kind of like sly and cynical and status seeking fraudulent in a more intentional way, while the younger couple end up also doing a lot of kind of things that aren't great. But they're basically kind of like the idiot innocents. Right. I mean, they don't mean to, like stumble into these, but they're kind of like dummies who also want theirs, basically.

[Alex Schwartz]

I think I would say when it comes to marriage, the thesis of the show is that marriage is complicity. What unites both of these couples is doing illegal shit. The older couple is gonna scam the club for money. The younger couple is gonna scam the club for jobs, and a good marriage is covering each other's backs. Do I find that a message that I wanna, you know, happily blast from the altar at? Probably not, but it does make for fun watching.

[Nomi Frye]

When we're back, we're talking about the new film, the drama, and whether it's actually a good thing to know everything. Critics at large from the New Yorker will be right back.

[Nicole Phelps]

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 Mao and head of editorial content at British Vogue, Choma Nadi as they explore style and culture through the lens of fashion with guests like Martha Stewart, Kamala Harris and Tracee Ellis Ross. The Run through with Vogue. New episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Wherever you get your podcasts,

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[Nomi Frye]

Okay, I feel like this is now the time to turn to the drama. Take note, we're gonna be talking about the twist in the movie. There's a big twist. You probably heard there's a big twist. If you don't know the actual twist yet. But if you wanna continue to not know what Zendaya did in the movie, spoilers are coming. The drama, directed by Christopher Borgli, The Norwegian filmmaker came out in the beginning of April, stars Robert Rob Pattinson as Charlie and Zendaya as his beautiful fiance Emma, who wants to set the scene of what we're dealing with here.

[Alex Schwartz]

I'd be delighted.

[Nomi Frye]

Great.

[Alex Schwartz]

The drama starts out seeming like it's gonna be a rom com. We get a Meet Cute that is presented with the framing that this couple who's meeting cute in a Boston cafe is now two years later, about to get married. Everything has been absolutely great with them. They have wonderful chemistry, they love each other so much, they live in a gorgeous apartment. Charlie is writing his wedding speech.

[Vincent Cunningham]

So I want to say this thing about her laugh. Do you know how it's kind of like, it's very cute, but it's also kind of like repulsive even. Yeah, okay. And then if she laughs, I can point it out.

[Alex Schwartz]

And then, very close to their wedding, they go out to dinner at their wedding venue to do a final tasting with their two best friends. And these best friends, who seem like freaks to me, decide that what they most want to do is talk about the worst thing that they did. Because they did that before they got married, and it only bonded them further together.

[Vincent Cunningham]

What's the worst thing you ever did in your life?

[Alex Schwartz]

Exactly. And even though that was an intimate exercise between the two of them that they agreed never to share, they somehow are sharing the worst things they ever did in their life. And the conversation is passed around until we get to Zendaya. Everyone else has done something, and I really hope we return to this. That really sucks. Like, I don't like what those other people did at all. I'm just gonna editorialize in here. They bullied other people.

[Nomi Frye]

I have stuff to say about it.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah, they locked mentally disabled children in closets. They cyberbullied. They used someone as a human shield in front of a mad dog. They just. They did horrible, selfish things. And then Zendaya admits that she planned but did not execute a school shooting when she was 15. Boop. The tenor changes. Everybody freaks out. Alana Haim, who plays Rachel, the best friend, really freaks out, and everything becomes a complete disaster. Charlie starts to think, who is this woman? I actually know nothing about her. I thought it was so cute that she's deaf in one ear. And I love to whisper sweet nothings and see if she can hear any of them. Oh, damn. Actually, she blew out her eardrum while firing her father's rifle in the swamps of Louisiana to prepare to commit mass murder.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yes.

[Alex Schwartz]

And yet I somehow, inconceivably, am going to go through with this wedding. And meanwhile, Zendaya is all. Is very flummoxed. She's just flummoxed. Here I am. I thought, my life is going one way now. This thing from the past has come out to haunt me. It's escaped what goes on. And so all of this culminates in a classic wedding from hell.

[Nomi Frye]

Masterful, Alex.

[Alex Schwartz]

That's what I got from it, and I have much more to say.

[Nomi Frye]

Okay, what did we think? Alex, I'm getting the sense that you might not have liked this movie, but maybe. Maybe. Let's go to Vincent.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Vincent Cunningham]

It's a really interesting film. It's got a playful texture. Right. I think one of the things to point out playful is that the editing is full of all these red herrings, almost counterfactual stems, that you can see one character ideating how they wish something that they said was received and it's actually received in a different way. All these flashes backwards and forwards to moments in the relationship that might have been tells. First of all, I have questions. First of all. Okay, okay. No one, no matter how Drunk would ever tell anybody this, number one. Number two, what about it's the best thing I did. What about I stopped a mass shooting?

[Alex Schwartz]

Correct.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I stopped a mass shooting in its

[Nomi Frye]

tracks by not doing it.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yes.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Well, what if I don't have to put that clause in there? What if I just convinced somebody myself not to shoot up a school? Alanaheim, who I. I love her music. I think she's a pretty good actress. She's the one who admits to putting a kid in a.

[Alex Schwartz]

She's the worst.

[Vincent Cunningham]

She's the one who put the person in the closet and left them there seemingly overnight, locked in a closet, not telling a single adult what she has done. Okay, Alanaheim, get off of your high horse. Number one. And then we have the brooding figure of Pattinson, sort of looking not unlike a vampire trying not to eat his beloved. You know, he's got the same kind of, I don't know, clenched body posture as he does in the. What's the name of that series?

[Alex Schwartz]

Twilight.

[Vincent Cunningham]

In the Twilight series, what's the name of that series?

[Alex Schwartz]

He pretends. He pretends to know.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Nonetheless, I do. I will see this movie again and I kind of enjoyed it. This is what I like about it. Okay, we are entering the absolutely white hot prime of Zendaya's career. And here's the thing. She is always. She is very often in a situation just like this one.

[Nomi Frye]

What do you mean?

[Vincent Cunningham]

In the middle of some sort of either erotic or romantic entanglement that makes her character more a kind of symbol or signifier than a real person. Yes, but weirdly, in an interesting way. Think about challengers, how she's just in the middle of that. The two rival friend rivals united not only by their love of tennis, but by their love of this same woman. Think of the 2021 Sam Levinson film, Malcolm and Marie. She and John David Washington are the couple in that he's a filmmaker. She's upset that he won an award, but didn't thank her because his movie is about this young addict that is found by another character. Turns out that was. She was an addict before they got together and she was like, rehabilitated through the form of their relationship. She's always someone who's in a romantic situation and her position in that relationship becomes like all caps symbol for a larger social thing. She's a really talented actor and with. In that she can kind of play these screens in this film, we get a sense of how this is really tearing everyone else apart. But really we see her so much from the Outside, which I think might be a demerit toward the film, but it is totally. I think I was watching Zendaya the whole time being like, I'm glad to be watching this because I can't take my eyes off her character whenever she's there, even though she's a total cipher.

[Alex Schwartz]

Vincent, this is a fascinating take because I agree with everything you're saying and I just conclude I want so much more for her. I want her to be able to play a fully embodied person who is real. I want so much more than what the drama could give us.

[Nomi Frye]

Okay. Arguably this is not a movie about fully embodied characters. I actually thought, you know, Zendaya, perhaps the most beautiful woman right now that we have in the world.

[Alex Schwartz]

That we have.

[Nomi Frye]

I mean, not that I've seen every single person in the world.

[Alex Schwartz]

If you would like to contest this, send your headshot to the Mail eyork.com

[Vincent Cunningham]

subject line hotter than Zendaya.

[Nomi Frye]

Absolutely.

[Vincent Cunningham]

She pops off the screen.

[Nomi Frye]

She pops off the screen. She is absolutely gorgeous. She is likable. I actually don't think her performance in this movie is that great, but maybe again, it is the fault of the role. I actually thought Pattinson was good. I really liked him. But in general, when we're talking about embodiment and depth and kind of like, you want more for her, you know, this is not the movie in which that will happen and I think that's okay. Like, I enjoyed this movie. I thought it was a slight and fun and funny and very good looking exercise. You know, when I say exercise, I don't mean even to undercut it, but it's almost like a game, you know, or like a kind of a diagram of like, here is like, what if, you know, here is like a situation. What if this happens? Wouldn't that be crazy? And then like, how would people react? Like, let's take this as far as it might go. And on that level, I thought it was successful and enjoyable. And I am not looking for answers or I think we shouldn't or we can't look for answers about, like, what does it mean to be married right now? I mean, it is an example of like, oh, I actually know nothing about this person that I'm about to marry. You know, I don't know even. Because of course when she does tell him that she planned this, you know, mass murder, she tells him, like, I was a reject. And indeed, there are flashbacks to her past in high school and it's like, oh, he knows nothing about her. Like, imagine if this was one's origin story, not even. Even barring the killing part of it. It's almost like a parable, right? It's not like a realistic engagement with an actual relationship.

[Alex Schwartz]

I mean, my issue with it, I had a great time at the theater. I think this is not a good film. And that's sometimes my favorite viewing experiences are those where I'm like, hooting and hollering and then I'm like, nope. Actually, I think it's very bad for these reasons. Nomi. I think the big point for me about this movie, as far as marriage goes, is what you're bringing up, the lack of knowledge, the total lack of knowledge between two people who are theoretically prepared to commit the rest of their lives to one another, who seem to have no knowledge of one another's families, one another's backgrounds, even high school photos, things like this. But I think a big part of marriage and marriage depiction and marriage depiction is about change. And it's about how much can you stand to change and how much can you tolerate change in someone whose life you've hitched yours to. And when those changes come over time, maybe it's great when they come boom, all at once, it's can rock the whole boat. And that's what I see going on in the drama. I don't think it's explored in an interesting way particularly, but I also see it going on all over the culture.

[Nomi Frye]

Right. So maybe let's turn now from the drama and this topic of kind of like 0 to 1, like, you know, black and white kind of change of like, oh, who is this person that I've hitched my wagon to, this total stranger? And we can talk about some other texts where this happens. And one of them is actually titled Strangers by Belle Burden, which came out a couple months ago. And it's a memoir based on a modern love column that was published in the times in 2023. And it has become a phenomenal success, best selling. We have just learned that it's gonna become a movie. Gwyneth Paltrow is gonna play the author and the protagonist, Bell Burden. And let's talk a little bit about this book because really, so many people, and especially women in my cohort, I've found that have read it.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah, Strangers is the kind of book that, of course, men. It would be great if men read, but women will read it by the drove. And we have, and we are essentially, it's. Belle Burden writes about being a young woman swept up in a fast moving, sweep you off your feet kind of romance. When she was a young professional woman working at a law firm in New York City. Gets married in very short order, and they have a great marriage that goes on for many, many years, produces three children. Pandemic hits. They decamp from their lovely Tribeca apartment to their lovely home in Martha's Vineyard. And within a week of quarantine, it is revealed that the husband has, in fact, been having an affair. And after initially seeming to be contrite and concerned about this, the husband says, in fact, I'm just gonna leave you. And I'm gonna leave not only you, but our whole family. Don't wanna do it anymore. Don't wanna be a husband anymore. Don't wanna be a dad anymore. I'm out. It's a sense of, who are you? I don't know you. You have built this family with me. You have taken the kids on these activities. You have enjoyed them, you have provided for them. You've done the same for me. And you can just walk away and I'll never know why. I think the big preoccupation of this book is not knowing why. And that. That is. I really think that's getting to the heart of where our culture is at. This question of why, who are you and what if I can't know? It's the same thing with the drama. I'm thinking of it also with. I'm sorry, I'm gonna bring up something very dark here, but with the Gisele Pellico story.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Alex Schwartz]

Giselle Pellico, of course, this French woman who, it was discovered, had been serially raped by her husband and by other anonymous men who he had found on the Internet and recruited to rape her while she was asleep because he had drugged her, who had a very, very well covered public, notably public trial in France, was very, very visible as the victim in this case and as the heroine of this case and who's just come out with this book, A hymn to life. Shame has to change sides. The most horrific form of not knowing. And I think just to think of her case as a cultural lightning rod, which it certainly was in France, and I think, to an extent was in the United States, too. There's this question of how could it have happened to her? Could it happen to me? To anyone? That's. That's the horror story aspect, the fear aspect. Vincent, have you followed any of that case?

[Vincent Cunningham]

I've just followed the case. And I think for me, the aspect of revelation when it comes to marriage, therefore, is twofold. Right. It's you as a participant in the marriage, one of the members of the marriage can figure out much too late that your spouse is, in the case of Pellico, an absolute sociopathic monster. But also there's the aspect of revelation that happens publicly because marriages, it seems to me, I mean, I guess just philosophically, there are these strangely very public things. This is why we inaugurate them in front of other people. The whole spectacle of them, as far as other people are concerned, is how we look and comport ourselves and treat ourselves and treat each other, that is, in public. But there is such and this is why marriages can become, not only can become prisons, but historically were prisons for generations and generations of women. So much of it is still conducted in private that when in this case a horrifying aspect of the marriage comes out, it so radically changes and threatens our notions not just of this marriage, but of marriage in general.

[Nomi Frye]

When we're back, is the culture totally disenchanted with married life? And if so, what else is there? Critics at large from the New Yorker will be right back.

[Unidentified Female Speaker]

We are in uncharted territory.

[Alex Schwartz]

Staff writer Evan Osnos on the New Yorker Radio Hour.

[Unidentified Female Speaker]

I think all of us right now are trying to make sense of an avalanche of news every day. And there aren't very many places where you can go and understand how something looks in the grand scope of history and context. That's what I come to the New Yorker for.

[Alex Schwartz]

I'm David Remnick, and each week my colleagues and I try to make sense of what's happening in this chaotic world. And I hope you'll join us for

[Vincent Cunningham]

the New Yorker Radio Hour.

[Alex Schwartz]

Vincent, you got me thinking when you were talking just now about the pre assumptions of marriage, like the old ways of marriage about woman as property to man, which was the condition for a very long time. And it got me thinking about how we even got to our current ideas of romantic partnership in marriage. And I credit slash, blame the 19th century.

[Nomi Frye]

Shout out, 19th century.

[Alex Schwartz]

Shout out to the long 19th century for this idea that marriage is not just a pact between two families and mutually advantageous decision made to further the line, but also that people are supposed to find love and romance and sexual fulfillment all wrapped up into this economic bundle with marriage. And as my support, I have on my lap two of my favorite friends, Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert and parallel Phyllis Rose's wonderful study of five Victorian marriages. Have you guys read this book, Parallel Lives? Yes, yes, my dear critics, friends, I've

[Vincent Cunningham]

read the first half of it.

[Nomi Frye]

Well, I read the whole thing.

[Alex Schwartz]

Well, I Watched seven episodes of Beef, too. This is a great book, and it's a wonderful book. And it has, shockingly, a great deal to say to our condition, I think, in the 21st century. The argument that Phyllis Rose is making is that marriage is a political experience. And it's the primary political experience that most people will have. It is about balancing of power. It is, of course, about power between genders. But it's about the family and the marriage as a body politic in which two people are jockeying and negotiating. And things are, frankly, set up to not work more than they're set up to work. I think we have this kind of fantasy idea of marriage as a time where everyone knew their place. The man was the center. And the woman's job was to just help the man fulfill whatever had to be done. And one thing that I love about the book Parallel Lives. Is that it shows us that that was really never satisfying for anyone. And I think that a lot of these ideas that we have now about freedom, personal freedom, sexual freedom. We're trying to reconcile them with marriage. And I think we're in a place where we're trying to make marriage seem more like a positive choice. Rather than an obvious obligation. That we're doing this because the love is so great. Because we can envision the rest of our lives together. Because it's this great mark of affirmation and faith in another person and also in yourself. That you're gonna be the kind of person who. To hold this down. And so, in a way, it's a fascinating fiction that those who get married subscribe to. Hoping that the fiction becomes true. Phyllis Rose has a great line about reading marriage like you can read a novel. And I think that's true in a lot of these cases, too. That life is a kind of fiction writing. You are making it up as you go along. And who you are at the start of a marriage is not gonna be who you are at the middle and who you are at the end. And yet that keeps coming like such a rude shock to us. It's such a rude shock that great literature, movies, TV shows, albums from the shock of discovering that the other person is not who you thought they were. And that you're not who you thought you were either.

[Vincent Cunningham]

One way to articulate that and part of this long renegotiation that, to your point, has its early tremors in the 19th century. Has some pretty big explosion in the middle of the 20th with the onset of modern feminism. And still continues today. Part of that trajectory is okay, if we acknowledge that it can't just be an economic situation, a situation of bondage, really. And yet it still carries, at least in its sort of outward form, those traces. It still is a contract, but it's also supposed to be this place of personal revelation. I mean, this is sometimes the characteristic of love, especially in fiction. Okay, yeah, there's public revelation, what others learn about you through the fact that you're married. There is intra marital revelation, what I learn about the other. But there's also, I love how you say marriage is a fiction because, like an artwork, it has many forms that present themselves to us. And through these forms, their generality, the specificity of ourselves and the self of the other, we're supposed to learn something about ourselves, too. I mean, for me, the great passage, the great moment in Madame Bovary is the opera where, you know, Emma goes to the opera and she's, like, reawakened by the opera, sees Leon, the sort of romantic rival of her husband, is like, you know what? I have to have an affair. You know, that romance is like art in that it has moments of cathartic learning. And if we're supposed to do that at the same time as we're in a contract, that's a lot of weight for any one institution, personal, privately, publicly, aesthetically to bear.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Nomi Frye]

And this leads me to the question of, okay, what if we split the difference? Right. You present an Emma Bovary who's, you know, in this unsatisfying relationship with Charles Bovary and is awakened to the possibilities that might lie outside of marriage. And, of course, it's an illicit affair. There was no such thing as polyamory. There was no such thing as, you know, open marriage as a kind of, like, legitimate cultural choice, let's say, at least not in Emma Bovary's world. And today, of course, things are different. It's like you can't, like, leave your house without hearing of, like, someone being polyamorous or having an open marriage.

[Alex Schwartz]

You can't even stay in your house without hearing about it.

[Nomi Frye]

Absolutely. And we come to examples, for instance, like the writer Lindy west, right, who recently published a memoir called Adult Braces, which raised a big discourse around it that had to do with what happens when you are married. You, as Lindy, are not interested in polyamory, not interested in an open marriage. You want to be monogamous with your husband, but your husband wants something different, and you can take it or leave it. And the book ends up being about the opening of a relationship to include this other partner, another Girlfriend and the cohabiting of this throuple, essentially. Why has this conversation become so heated online about this book? What can.

[Alex Schwartz]

What a great question. Even as I was engaging with the heatedness of it, I also was wondering why. Yeah, why? I think part of it has to do with that. Lindy west, for those who are listening and don't know, is a very public figure, has been kind of vocal memoirist, written a lot about the body, body identity, fatness and feminism, and has made her life very public in the way of many female writers, especially from that period, who wrote a lot online. She was part of the early days of Jezebel and, you know, other such websites. And I think, again, it has to do with this question of revelation. The thing that everyone is picking on is this idea that the ethics. I think when people talk about the ethics of polyamory, there's all this conversation that goes into everything being consensual, everything being above board, everything being agreed upon. It is the contract of contracts. It's like more contractual than a marriage contract for everything to operate as it should.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Well, it's interesting, obviously, like, you know, polyamory has been a discourse. You know, they were on wave, what, 7 of polyamory discourse over the past decade or so. But it's interesting here. We have to your point, Lindy west is a very public writer and a very straightforwardly political writer. And it's interesting you mentioned Phyllis Rose's contention that all marriage is political. And in fact, that is, for most of us, the primary political experience. And it almost seems that that observation has come full circle where what kind of romantic entanglement one enters is, at least for some segment of people, the expression par excellence of your politics. You know, a lot of the book excerpts are. You don't even need to read the book to see these passages. You go on Twitter, go on threads, go on wherever you want. Part of the dialectic of arriving at this arrangement is the husband saying, well, you know, actually, monogamy is a little bit. He's a black gentleman. Is a little bit like ownership, which,

[Nomi Frye]

you know, you're a white woman, you own. You want to own me.

[Alex Schwartz]

And so, yeah, extraordinarily, it wasn't implied that it was the woman who was the one.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Right, Exactly.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yes.

[Vincent Cunningham]

So, you know, chilling listeners. You do it that way, you will. I'm exercising extreme restraint because of this being like a real person who's busy, but chilling argument. Right. And part of the reason that west reasons herself, and it really is maybe the book part of the book, at least it's a road trip physically, but it's also a road trip of reasoning oneself toward an arrangement that one does not originally want to be in. Part of that reasoning is explicitly political. It's like, how can I be a progressive if I can't understand this? Not only on the level of the emotions, but on the sort of formal palette that is marriage, which. Okay, fine. But it really is interesting to see that this political dimension of marriage has migrated from a descriptive fact to a kind of prescriptive arrangement. That marriage becomes a place where we show what we believe.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah. And also just in general, I mean, I think it bears mentioning. This is not just something obviously that's happening on the level of culture in the sense of. On the level of fiction. I mean, I know we said that actual marriages are also fiction, but these are things that statistically have been happening. According to Pew, the US marriage rate hit 140 year low in 2019 and has never fully rebounded. People are not looking to marriage necessarily as much as they used to as the kind of pinnacle of adult life. You know, thinking about this statistic about kind of marriage losing its luster, it's kind of like capability as a solution for people in their lives. It made me think about this. Like, I'm off Instagram currently, but when I was still on Instagram and I'm sure on TikTok as well, a kind of popular reel that would keep coming up for me would be like, Friday night as an unmarried woman with no friends.

[Alex Schwartz]

Oh my God. With no friends.

[Nomi Frye]

Yes.

[Alex Schwartz]

Where are the friends?

[Nomi Frye]

I don't know where the friends are. But basically it wasn't a get ready with me. It was like, get like unready with me. Right? It's like I come home from work, I like do my skincare routine, I watch my shows. I'll pull one up.

[Alex Schwartz]

I mean, the has no friends is the part I'm struggling.

[Nomi Frye]

Pov. You're a child free girl that lives alone and has no friends. So this is what your Friday night looks and sounds like. 176,000 likes.

[Alex Schwartz]

Okay, let's have a little look.

[Nomi Frye]

She's entering her clean, quiet, peaceful apartment for a cozy night in. She ran to the store afterward to get some ingredients for dinner. Friday night is pizza night. Oh. Everything is kind of clean and cozy. She's taking out the pizza from the box, slipping it in the clean oven. People ask if I miss being more social. Honestly, I really have no interest in dating. Oh my God. Ate dinner while watching Midwest Safety Body Camp videos. I've seen enough, okay? Alex has seen enough.

[Alex Schwartz]

I've seen enough.

[Nomi Frye]

Everything is just so. As a solitary person is basically the idea.

[Alex Schwartz]

I see. No one can impinge on my pleasures.

[Nomi Frye]

No one is impinging on what I want to do when I get home from work. And it can be, obviously, a little depressing in some ways, but in other ways, and I look at the comments and it's like, damn, that looks good. I love me some me time. Oh, God. Mom of three here. If only I could be, you know, if only my husband could go on a vacation and I could do this, you know, or like, whatever. The notion that you are an island to yourself and what might have once counted as, like, a pathetic, sad, like, cat lady existence is now, for some people at least, the pinnacle of, you know, living of existence as kind of a modern person woman. I guess I've seen this with women. I haven't seen this with men.

[Alex Schwartz]

Okay, well, here's what I wanna say about this.

[Nomi Frye]

Yes.

[Alex Schwartz]

Much like the left loves to express horror at the tradwife phenomenon, the right loves to express horror at this phenomenon. And we have these two extremes of. I don't find the childlessness, unmarried thing an extreme. I find no friends. No.

[Vincent Cunningham]

What are you talking about?

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah, like no social connection to be extreme. Much as I find having 10 children and saying I want to live in submission to my husband's will to be rather extreme. So we have if marriage. We're talking about marriage as a fiction that we make as we go along and as a political experience. Both of those things are in crisis in the culture war sense, with two opposing poles pushing and pulling. But also in the middle, you've got a lot of people who are trying to figure out a new way forward. Whether that's in, you know, we got a piece of paper and they're just two of us, or whether it's in an expanded polyamory situation. Whatever it is, people are trying to reimagine this for themselves because you're only living your own experience in the larger cultural context. You have to reimagine it for yourself. And what this really makes me think of is the bravery of the imagination to imagine any kind of future for yourself at all.

[Nomi Frye]

I love that.

[Alex Schwartz]

The bravery of the imagination. And it makes me think back to the 19th century. May I share something with you guys from one of my favorite stories in Parallel Lives?

[Nomi Frye]

Please.

[Alex Schwartz]

Okay. So the thing that I love in this. I mean, there's so many things I love in this book, but one is the story of George Eliot, whose name was Marianne Evans, and George Henry Lewis fell in love with one another. But one thing that I really like about this is later Elliot marries someone else. She marries someone who's 20 years younger than she is. Super unconventional. This is after Lewis had died. I think people thought this was utterly bizarre. And there is a quote here from someone about this marriage where she says, you see, I know all of love is so different that I do not see it unnatural to love in new ways. And I think that's kind of it. Love in the old ways, love in the new ways. But we've got to recenter the love part of it.

[Nomi Frye]

Maybe I love that.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah. And it strikes me that love, like the things that we have likened it to art and politics, is something that is conditioned by time and lives in time. That, you know, what is beautiful to us in one age is not beautiful to us in another. And so it goes with love. And it does seem to me that love does have this correspondence with beauty. And for me, I don't want to be all the things around polyamory. It's like too many emails, too many.

[Nomi Frye]

He has the patience.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I'm not saying it to, to put it down. My point is that it doesn't appeal to me aesthetically. And one way to be asking these questions over and over is like, what seems beautiful to me.

[Nomi Frye]

This has been critics at large. Alex Barish is our consulting editor and Rhiannon Corby is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Our show is mixed by Mike Kutschman and we add engineering help today for Pran Bandy with music by Alexis Cuadraro. You can listen to all of our episodes [e-mail] Critics.

[Alex Schwartz]

Hi, I'm Rebecca Ford.

[Unidentified Female Speaker]

And I'm John Ross.

[Alex Schwartz]

And we're the hosts of Little Gold Men, Vanity Fair's podcast for film, TV and awards lovers.

[Unidentified Female Speaker]

And just because the Oscars are done for now doesn't mean we are.

[Nicole Phelps]

Join us every week for coverage of

[Alex Schwartz]

the biggest stories in Hollywood, interviews with today's brightest stars, and so much more.

[Unidentified Female Speaker]

Listen to Little Gold Men every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

[Nomi Frye]

From prx.