“Eddington” and the American Berserk

Summary

Critics at Large | The New Yorker Episode: “Eddington” and the American Berserk
Release Date: July 17, 2025

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Introduction

In this episode of Critics at Large, The New Yorker's staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Frye, and Alexandra Schwartz delve into the intricate tapestry of contemporary American culture through the lens of Ari Aster's latest film, "Eddington". They explore the concept of the "American Berserk", a term coined by novelist Philip Roth to describe the overwhelming and often chaotic nature of American society. The discussion intertwines film analysis, literary theory, and reflections on the current socio-political climate.

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The Fractured State of America

[02:31] Alex Schwartz opens the conversation by painting a vivid picture of America in the summer of 2025, asserting, “Things feel on a national and cultural level, I would argue absolutely, completely insane.” The trio acknowledges the pervasive sense of turmoil, citing incidents like the resurgence of Jeffrey Epstein and the polarized responses to events such as the Camp Mystic tragedy and the Texas floods. This backdrop sets the stage for their exploration of how art mirrors and contends with such societal chaos.

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Introducing "Eddington"

[03:56] Alex Schwartz introduces Ari Aster's new film, "Eddington", which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Described as a departure from Aster's earlier horror-centric works like Hereditary and Midsommar, "Eddington" blends elements of a Western, political thriller, conspiracy comedy, and action. The film portrays Joe Cross (played by Joaquin Phoenix), the sheriff of a small town grappling with a forthcoming mayoral election amidst a backdrop of COVID-19, BLM protests, and emerging conspiracy theories.

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Hosts' Reactions to "Eddington"

[04:47] - [05:24]

• Naomi Frye characterizes the film as "a mashup" that skillfully intertwines various genres to reflect the multifaceted crises engulfing America.
• Vincent Cunningham remarks on the film’s "encyclopedic" ambition, aiming to encapsulate every facet of the moment both in plot and atmosphere.
• Alex Schwartz ties the film’s complexity to the broader concept of the American Berserk, suggesting that "there's so much happening in this movie, and that's because there's so much happening in America."

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Defining the "American Berserk"

[26:47] - [27:16]
The discussion pivots to Philip Roth's term "American Berserk", introduced in his 1997 novel American Pastoral. Roth uses this concept to describe the relentless and often uncontrollable craziness of American reality that defies artistic representation. Alex Schwartz elaborates on Roth's struggles to capture this chaos in fiction, juxtaposing it with Tom Wolfe's assertion that contemporary journalists could fill this literary void.

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Analyzing "Eddington" Through the Lens of the American Berserk

[05:24] - [24:29]

• Vinson Cunningham initially perceives "Eddington" as a "parody of liberal overbearingness" but grows to appreciate its violent and expressionistic departures, acknowledging the film's reflection of the isolating polarization in America.

  Quote:
  Vinson Cunningham: “By the end, I felt the deeply isolating polarization of that time.” [11:59]

• Naomi Frye finds resonance in the film's depiction of overwhelming societal forces, aligning it with her own sense of bafflement and the challenge of engaging with fragmented realities.

  Quote:
  Naomi Frye: “I can think about what it means. Things from different sides of the map, I can look at and say, okay, this is what I think it means.” [20:19]

• Alex Schwartz critiques the film's apparent detachment but appreciates its ambition to portray a moment of profound societal unraveling.

  Quote:
  Alex Schwartz: “How do you out crazy what's actually happening in America? And should you.” [43:39]

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Comparative Analysis: Literature and Film Reflections

[27:16] - [36:15]
Alex Schwartz traces the evolution of the American Berserk from Philip Roth's literary musings to cinematic interpretations. He references Roth's challenge to himself and Tom Wolfe, culminating in American Pastoral, where Roth attempts to depict the unraveling of American idealism amidst historical upheavals.

• Naomi Frye draws parallels between "Eddington" and films like Natural Born Killers and Sorry to Bother You, emphasizing their roles in capturing the surreal and heightened realities of American society.

  Quote:
  Naomi Frye: “Natural Born Killers is ... very reflective of the kind of like overmuchness of kind of like 90s media culture.” [34:20]

• Vinson Cunningham contrasts the encyclopedic and seamless narratives of Melville’s Moby Dick and Roth’s American Pastoral with "Eddington", pondering the film’s ability to unify disparate societal issues without losing its narrative coherence.

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The Role of Art in Conveying Chaos

[39:23] - [52:52]
The trio debates whether artists can effectively encapsulate the "American Berserk" without succumbing to the same chaos they aim to portray. They discuss the balance between depicting raw, unfiltered reality and creating coherent narratives that offer reflection and synthesis.

• Vincent Cunningham suggests that "Eddington" subtly expresses leftist ideologies through its portrayal of distractions like the data center, which symbolizes materialistic distractions from deeper societal issues.

  Quote:
  Vinson Cunningham: “It wants to do that, through landscape...distractions from the real event.” [24:29]

• Naomi Frye contemplates the feasibility and artistic responsibility of creating works that mirror societal chaos, highlighting the commendable ambition even if the execution sometimes falters.

  Quote:
  Naomi Frye: “I appreciate the attempt, which I think is perhaps getting more and more rare as time goes on.” [43:39]

• Alex Schwartz emphasizes the importance of focusing on human elements amidst overwhelming systems to retain political and emotional resonance in art.

  Quote:
  Alex Schwartz: “How do you not get warped in the process?... stay with people, because none of this matters without people.” [40:09]

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Conclusion

The episode culminates in a contemplation of the persistent endeavor of artists to grapple with the ever-escalating complexities of American society. The hosts acknowledge the challenges inherent in depicting a nation in flux but remain cautiously optimistic about the potential for meaningful artistic engagement.

Final Thoughts:
"Reality is always going to outstrip the art that's made about it. So my question is, what do we think the point is if this reality is always going to outstrip depiction?" [43:39]

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Key Takeaways

• "Eddington" serves as a cinematic embodiment of the American Berserk, attempting to capture a fragmented and polarized societal moment.
• The concept of the American Berserk, originating from Philip Roth, underscores the struggle of art to faithfully represent the chaotic essence of American reality.
• The hosts explore the balance between ambitious artistic portrayal and narrative coherence, emphasizing the importance of human connection amidst overwhelming societal forces.
• Comparative analyses with literary and cinematic works highlight the enduring challenge of depicting an ever-evolving American landscape.

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Notable Quotes:

• Alex Schwartz: “Things feel on a national and cultural level, I would argue absolutely, completely insane.” [02:23]
• Vinson Cunningham: “By the end, I felt the deeply isolating polarization of that time.” [11:59]
• Naomi Frye: “I can think about what it means. Things from different sides of the map, I can look at and say, okay, this is what I think it means.” [20:19]
• Alex Schwartz: “How do you not get warped in the process?... stay with people, because none of this matters without people.” [40:09]
• Alex Schwartz: “Reality is always going to outstrip the art that's made about it. So my question is, what do we think the point is if this reality is always going to outstrip depiction?"** [43:39]**

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This comprehensive summary captures the essence of the episode, weaving together the hosts' insights, critical analyses, and reflections on the interplay between art and the tumultuous state of American society.

Transcript

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[Nomi Frye]

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[Alex Schwartz]

That'S O-.

[Nomi Frye]

This is critics @ Large, a podcast from the New Yorker. I'm Nomi Frye.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I'm Vincent Cunningham.

[Alex Schwartz]

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

[Nomi Frye]

Hello, critics and critic.

[Alex Schwartz]

Critic and Critic.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Critic 1 Critic 2 How are you.

[Alex Schwartz]

Doing today, my critics?

[Nomi Frye]

It's not as hard as it was last week, so I'm doing a bit better.

[Alex Schwartz]

Oh, wonderful.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah, I'm drunk on Love Island. It's been a great weekend.

[Alex Schwartz]

Okay, well, we are here deep in the summer of 2025. We're right in the middle of it. And let's just get real right at the top. Things feel on a national and cultural level, I would argue absolutely, completely insane.

[Nomi Frye]

Right?

[Alex Schwartz]

You know, I'm just going to tick off on my five, maybe six or seven fingers.

[Nomi Frye]

Who knows nowadays?

[Alex Schwartz]

Who knows?

[Nomi Frye]

Who knows what the biological Truth is.

[Alex Schwartz]

Who could even know? I'm just gonna tick off some of the things that you might have heard of going on recently. Grok, the anti Semitic AI chatbot on Twitter. There was, is, and will be constant assaults by ICE on people in the United States. But I'm thinking very specifically of the kind of big ICE photo op of ICE officers fanning out across MacArthur park looking like, you know, they're on the Death Star. And off they go to storm troop their way through this empty park. We have Jeffrey Epstein again. Apparently, it'll never end, just a suicide. And, you know, some people are not very happy with that.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Not maybe even most.

[Alex Schwartz]

Maybe even most. FBI's in hot water. And the conspiracy theories that have been invited right into the White House are roiling the waters. We had the horrific floods in Texas, the terrible story about the girls at Camp mystic just watching this nightmare, and the frankly deranged response of politicians. So we're not in a good place. And let me take us back to a time that maybe I would venture to say could help explain some of our collective dysfunction today, May 2020, over five years ago.

[Vincent Cunningham]

It's hard to. It feels like yesterday and a lifetime.

[Alex Schwartz]

Right? I agree. It's very weird to contemplate, but we're going to contemplate it because even though many of us might prefer to forget it, it is back as the setting of a new film by the director Ari Aster, which is called Eddington.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I'm running for mayor, Devin. You can't keep your own office going.

[Alex Schwartz]

But you're gonna run mine.

[Vincent Cunningham]

They're your streets to keep safe.

[Alex Schwartz]

Eddington is out in theaters now. It's debuted at the Cannes Film Festival back in May. It wildly polarized audiences there. People walked out of the screening. The press conference was chaotic. There were mixed feelings, let's just say. And I think it's fair to call it a bit of a departure for Ari Aster. It's not a horror film like his breakout hits Hereditary and Midsommar were. How would you guys characterize this? Briefly, we don't want to get too deep, but what kind of movie are we talking about here?

[Nomi Frye]

I mean, it's a mashup, right? It's. I know Aster has called it a Western, and it's definitely in some ways a Western, but it's also kind of a political thriller, slash, conspiracy comedy, slash, rollicking action, you know, movie.

[Vincent Cunningham]

It does aspire to the encyclopedic. It wants to tell you every single thing about that moment, not only on the level of plot, but on the level of mood and atmosphere.

[Alex Schwartz]

It's a lot. There's a lot going on.

[Nomi Frye]

There's a lot going on. And that's kind of the point.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah, exactly. There's so much happening in this movie, and that's because there's so much happening in America. This movie goes to the moment when the confluence of COVID and the George Floyd protests and QAnon and mask mandates came to the fore. And on and on and on. And it did seem to shatter something about America. So today we're talking about Eddington and the way it presents that moment five years ago when Americans stopped believing in the same basic facts. And when I saw the movie, I kept thinking about this phrase from the novelist Philip Roth that I think kind of gets to the heart of some of what's going on here, which is the indigenous American berserk. And what he meant by that was the kind of just overwhelming nature of American crazy, that no matter how you try to tamp it down, will always find a way to kind of burst through the seams and assert itself, no matter what your ordering principles are about life in this very over the top country. And so we are going to try to trace the evolution of some of that indigenous American berserk, which is to say art that tries to wrap its arms around a rupturing of American society. So what I want us to consider, the big question I have for us is at a time when reality is way outstripping fiction in many of its absurdities, how should art contend with. With the too muchness of American life that's today on critics at large? Eddington and the American Berserk. So we're gonna start with Eddington. And I just want to set our personal scene for a second for the listeners. It is rare that the three of us are in the same movie theater for a viewing. Yeah, it's rare. And we all went to this press screening of Eddington.

[Nomi Frye]

It was so fun to do it together.

[Alex Schwartz]

It was so fun. And afterwards, all I wanted to do was to talk to you guys about what was going on. And yet as you were waiting in the bathroom line, I ran out the door because I knew, I knew that we needed to save it for this table.

[Nomi Frye]

That's true.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah. So let's just. Let's get the basics out of the way first before we get into it. Who would like to lay out the premise of the film? Eddington.

[Nomi Frye]

Okay, I'm gonna try to do this pretty bare bones. So we have Joe Cross, played by Joaquin Phoenix. He is the town sheriff in a small town called Eddington in New Mexico. And as you said, Alex, this is May 2020. So the pandemic has begun. A scary time as we all recall it. And Joe Cross is kind of like established in the beginning as a kind of like pretty earnest guy. He is married to Louise, played by Emma Stone, who is seems kind of, you know, fragile. There appears to be some trauma in her past, maybe some sexual abuse. We don't know exactly what that is. Her conspiracy theory pilled mother has moved in with them because of COVID So a couple things happen. There is a mayoral election forthcoming in Eddington. The incumbent mayor is this pretty smarmy guy named Ted Garcia. He is played by Pedro Pascal. And Ted is kind of a liberal. He wants to bring this new data center into town to kind of like advance eddington into the 21st century, into the tech realm, bring jobs in. Joe Cross hates him and he decides spur of the moment to run for mayor, to challenge Garcia. And so we have these two individuals kind of facing off against each other. Two ideologies, two worldviews clashing. But in the meantime, there are a lot of kind of other ideologies and political happenings that are roiling through the town. There is the George Floyd murder and the subsequent, you know, BLM protests that arrive in Eddington as well. Then it kind of goes batshit.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yes, right, totally.

[Vincent Cunningham]

The only things I would add texturally is that it's a movie that's obsessed with screens.

[Nomi Frye]

Yes.

[Vincent Cunningham]

And the screen within the screen is maybe the signature visual event of this movie. And we see it over and over. People on their phones, people on their laptops, people in a sort of ambient relationship to this sort of almost like haunted looking data center, which is growing and growing as the movie goes on.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Anything else? I think that's.

[Alex Schwartz]

I'm ready to ask you descriptively, I'm ready to ask you the big question. Vincent Cunningham, did you like Eddington?

[Vincent Cunningham]

At the beginning I was kind of worried about the movie because it seemed to me like a very broad parody of a time that I lived through and did not particularly like.

[Nomi Frye]

Oh, you didn't like it?

[Vincent Cunningham]

I didn't like the pandemic.

[Alex Schwartz]

What if you were like, that will be the revelation.

[Nomi Frye]

It was wonderful.

[Vincent Cunningham]

It was great.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Anyway, it seemed to be a kind of above it all, omnidirectionally hostile parody of liberal overbearingness. On the one side, a sort of cruel emphasis on masks. There's a scene where the Joe Cross character goes to the supermarket. And the mask mandate is being sort of draconianly enforced. An older gentleman, we get the sense that he's kind of beloved within the community, doesn't wanna wear the mask, and therefore they try to send him home with no groceries. And on the other hand, a kind of, you know, dunderheaded conservatism that's kind of. It's everybody's stupid. And. And you could kind of feel the filmmaker pointing out, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, in a way that. There were times that I was laughing, but it was kind of. It felt a little thin. And then when the movie ruptures and gets. I don't think this is too much of a spoiler. Very violent and scary and almost sinister. I started to really like the movie. The first weird moment of violence that is inexplicable. Someone dies very abruptly, and then it just, like, goes on this, like, 30 minute, absolute, psychotic, expressionistic journey. I was so with it.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah.

[Vincent Cunningham]

And by the end, I felt a mixture of those things. But I did feel the excruciation of that time. Even though they're making lots of, you know, masks, social distancing, the blithe ignorance of the sheriff's office once Black Lives Matter comes into play, all that stuff, by the end, I did feel the deeply isolating polarization of that time. Can I step back and put us back in that screening room?

[Nomi Frye]

Yes, I do.

[Alex Schwartz]

I wish you would.

[Nomi Frye]

Please do so.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Something happened while we were in the screening, and I think we should talk about it right when the movie gets really strange. Everybody had been kind of guffawing along in this very dark humor way with all the sort of references to the pandemic, et cetera, et cetera. As things worsened, a lot of the way that the people in our screening room, mostly probably critics and journalists or whatever, were dealing with that cognitive dissonance was by laughing. We all know that this is a thing. A few things happened. And then you heard a guffaw from behind us. And then a woman in my row says really loudly, really loudly, what are you laughing at? Like, it was. All of a sudden, it was the laughter. And the mode of ingesting the film became not aesthetic simply, but also moral. And if you do not interpret or respond to this aesthetic experience in the same way, it's almost like a doubling down on the cognitive dissonance of the time. And it was like a weird moment and took me a while to get over. I don't like that. But it seemed to me like symbolic of what the movie wanted to do to me.

[Alex Schwartz]

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

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah.

[Alex Schwartz]

And that is so interesting because that is the crux of this movie. People who cannot understand one another's realities and absolutely refuse to. Yeah. If I may just react to some things you said before, please. I'm like, nodding the studio. My eyes are going wide. In the studio. We had the opposite reactions to this movie.

[Nomi Frye]

The opposite reaction.

[Vincent Cunningham]

You liked the beginning more than you liked the post rupture.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yes, because I like the moment of rupture. I will say I liked that. I was there. I was in it. But what initially really appealed to me about this movie is the fact that I think culturally, we have kind of all decided that we don't really want to look at some of the kind of defining objects from that time. We don't wanna see people on our screens with masks, period, like we. And that. And therefore, we don't really wanna make visual art or perhaps even other kinds of art about that very condensed but enormously significant time between, let's say, March and July 2020. Like, yes, it had this huge effect. The George Floyd protests are shorthand that are constantly referenced. The details of the time which came to seem, I think, quickly, really banal in their absolute outlandishness. The hand washing, the masking, the six feet apart. In terms of art, I think artists, and we're in the world of movies right now, so let's just stay in the world of movies. Film, television, et cetera, has had a very, very hard time depicting that moment because it both was so extreme and also just got assimilated very fast. That's what human beings do. We assimilate new realities and we deal with them. And so it seems almost cheesy to point to some of the things we all went through. And I liked that Ari Aster was not only depicting those things, but really putting basically as fine a point on it as you can put on it. Like getting into the masking conflict, the six feet apart stuff. And I found myself laughing, absolutely, yes, in part because it did make me Think the first part of the movie where some of these social attitudes are really atomized and satirized, I would say it really made me think about what's changed in my own understanding of my behavior from that time. And I appreciated that. And so I felt kind of put back into that moment. Not in a like, yeah, put on your mask, goddammit way, but in really having to consider how the intensities and the political intensities of the time weighed in on how we treated one another. And I liked that all these elements were being set up to explode. I liked the kind of self righteousness that everyone has, the foolishness that everyone has. And then the whole thing fell apart for me. And I will just say why briefly. I think that there is a sense of wanting to deeply engage with American reality in this movie that leads to such a profound detachment from American reality. Such a I don't give a shit about reality attitude here. And I wish I could read that as an extreme form of critique, but I just read it as a total abandonment of critique in the end. There is a moment in this movie where the forces that have been set up against one another, the kind of, you know, gun toting, I'm gonna protect this town western situation going on with the Joaquin Phoenix character. The sheriff collides against the darker, shadowy forces. And here, this is a brief general spoiler. We're not gonna say exactly what happens, but just gonna let you guys know of Antifa. And at that point I sort of thought, I don't understand this anymore. I think Ari Aster really exploited the setup. He had produced the scenario and the characters to try to make a point about how nothing matters, our reality is not stable and values don't exist. And that, I felt, was just an enormous abdication of directorial responsibility, point of view and, you know, just the movie itself. At the end of that rant, I turned to Nomi Fry and I say, what did you make of this, Alex?

[Nomi Frye]

I don't disagree with you about the detachment point. The sort of like, okay, I'm gonna take this view from nowhere in some senses, to look at this absolutely disgusting tapestry of American reality in, you know, the first half of the 2000 and twenties. But I think in some ways, and maybe I have become cynical, I felt like the movie was pretty good about mirroring my own bafflement of the current moment or of the last few years. I don't know what to do with anything anymore. I mean, I know what to do with particular cultural objects or I don't know if I always know what to do. But you know how you're gonna address them. I know how to address them. I think or I hope or I have the desire still to engage. Like, if I look at, like, a Trump AI ad about, like, rebuilding Gaza with, like, whatever, like a gold statue of Trump and, like, beachside condos, then, yeah, I can engage with that. I can think about what it means. Things from different sides of the map, I can look at and say, okay, this is what I think it means when it comes to everything in some. And even if it's from the viewpoint of, okay, five years on May 2020, we're looking at BLM, we're looking at the masking, we're looking at this data center. This, like, okay, it's bringing progress to the town of Eddington. However, it's clearly some front first. Probably some disgusting billionaire, you know, Pizzagate stuff. We didn't address this really. But there's a lot of kind of, like, sexual abuse of children like that Joe Cross's wife, the Emma Stone character, Louise, is kind of becomes involved with. There's Austin Butler, is this kind of, like, conspiracist.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah, he's a conspiracist who believes in powerful pedophile rings and calls it.

[Nomi Frye]

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

[Vincent Cunningham]

Like, it is really wonderful filmmaking.

[Nomi Frye]

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

[Alex Schwartz]

Okay, but here's my question for you, which is, I hear you, I see you and I hear you, but do you think like, I hear what you're saying about the reflection, but is that an okay thing for the artist to do? To just kind of set up this whole scenario and throw up his hands and say, I actually don't know what to do with this mess I've made? Because that's what I'm contending he kind of does. I can see another way of looking at it. I can see, you know, I brought up the antifa thing. I could see someone saying, oh no, that was a false flag. And but this is a movie in which I do think on a very fundamental level, the idea is to go in without a politics. And okay, I'm okay with that. I'm not asking for this movie to be a leftist, you know. You know, let's get the right conspiracy, people. It's about how we're all in our silos. Fine. But it just kind of devolves to me into this endless shoot em up thing. And I just feel like there is a cynicism, you know, Is it okay for the artist to say, I actually just don't know what to make of any of this? Or do you guys disagree that that's what's going on?

[Vincent Cunningham]

I kind of disagree that that's what's going on. At first I was like, oh, this is a movie at least that indulges more in nihilism than politics, which I'm not actually. Whatever. I don't think that that's necessarily a bad thing, but I think that it's actually kind of a crudely, and I don't mean crude in a bad way, a crudely materialist movie. I think it's kind of like vulgar Marxism. It's like culture is a grand blanket. It's a conspiracy thrown over the material. There is a concern that is growing in this town. It's called Solid Gold. Magikarp is the name of the corporation behind the data center. And every other skirmish exists to distract the citizens of a town from the real danger. Land sovereignty are the only real things in the movie. And even deaths and even killings take place in this land of the cultural, which I think Aster is saying is a distraction, is nothing, is the land of screens that are meant to turn our heads away from real concerns. So I think I was like, oh, wait, maybe it is a very leftist movie. And that's what I took away in its I think there is a throwing up of hands, but only to say these are all grand mystifications, distractions from the real event. Yeah, Aster has said in his sort of press tour that the movie really is about the building of the data center, which is sort of a perverse reading of his own movie. It's not part of the action of the film, but if you read it like that, I think you can.

[Nomi Frye]

It does begin and end.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Discern at least his politics. Whether it works or not expresses itself perfectly or not, I don't know. But I do think that that is discernible in the design of the.

[Alex Schwartz]

Eddington is hardly the first work to tackle the complexities of a moment in American history. In a minute, the Many faces of the American berserk on Critics at Large from the New Yorker.

[Nomi Frye]

I'm David Remnick, host of the New Yorker Radio Hour. There's nothing like finding a story you can really sink into that lets you tune out the noise and focus on what matters in print or here on the podcast. The New Yorker brings you thoughtfulness and.

[Alex Schwartz]

Depth and even humor that you can't find anywhere else. So please join me every week for the New Yorker Radio Hour wherever you listen to podcasts.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Hi, I'm cartoonist Jason Adam Katzenstein and as a 34 year old new York based freelance artist, lately I've been finding myself at a lot of my friends Off Broadway shows. There's a delicate art to dressing for these events because I need to feel all right sitting in the dark for two hours in the most uncomfortable chair of my life. And then there are these receptions afterward and everybody's looking amazing. And it's summer so I need clothes that really breathe. Quince's summer wardrobe selection has me feeling confident and comfortable at these events. Quint has breathable flowknit polos, crisp cotton shirts and comfortable lightweight pants that somehow work for both weekend hangs and your friends Off Broadway shows. And everything with Quince is half the cost of similar brands. By working directly with top artisans and cutting out the middlemen, Quint gives you luxury pieces without the markup. I got the 100% European linen short jacket in olive and I am getting so many compliments. I went to one of these Off Broadway shows and an actor asked me if I was an actor. Give your summer closet an upgrade with quints. Go to quince.com nycritics for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Quincom nycritics to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com nycritics.

[Nomi Frye]

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

[Alex Schwartz]

So I have a little bit of a theory about how we got the phrase the indigenous American berserk. Like not those literal three words, but how he got to a place where Philip Roth was just putting that on the table and saying, this is what I'm writing about here. Here's how we're doing it. Can I just lay out my slightly weird theory here?

[Nomi Frye]

Yes, it is.

[Alex Schwartz]

All right. It has to do with American intellectuals, my friends. It has to do with. With the magazine culture, basically. Wow. I know. We're going there. In 1961, Philip Roth publishes this essay, kind of surprisingly, in Commentary magazine. And the essay is called Writing American Fiction. And in this essay, Philip Roth contends the following. He says, the American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates. And finally, it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist. So Roth is saying in this essay, I cannot write a reality or a take on reality, a fiction that is as crazy as American reality.

[Nomi Frye]

And this is 61, my friends.

[Alex Schwartz]

This is 61. And imagine now you think back to 1961. They're looking around them being like, what is happening? This is too wild to even. We're not even in 67, 68. Oh, my God, they had no idea. And already he's saying, this is too crazy.

[Nomi Frye]

This is too 62 or 63.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Indeed, Americans are a bewildered people. It's part of our thing.

[Alex Schwartz]

It's part of our thing. So Philip Roth is basically saying, I don't know if it can be done. We can try it, but I don't know if it can be done. Then cut to cut to 1989, a very different writer, Tom Wolfe, the man in the white suit, he writes an essay in Harper's Magazine called Stalking the Billion Footed beast. This is 1989. We are now 27 years in the future from Philip Roth. And basically what he says is, okay, shit got crazy in America. Reality, it was nuts. The hippie stuff, absolutely out of control. The 80s in New York City. The rich, the poor, the racial tensions. It's all bananas. I've been sitting around here waiting for a novelist to write about this stuff, but nobody was. People were writing nonfiction. People. The novelists were getting scared. They were getting small. They didn't feel they could contend with this. What happened? And then he basically is like, well, I did it in Bonfire of the Vanities. Okay, fine. Did you? Tom Wolfe? That's a whole other question. But this just brings us to the end point of my theory, which is that in 1997, Philip Roth publishes this novel, American Pastoral, which is the first in his series of three novels about the fracturing of American life. Continues with I Married a Communist and the Human Stain. And this novel is about all the things he said you couldn't write about or he couldn't write about or that fiction would defy. He is about to use realist fiction to go in as far as he can go and get as realist with his realist fiction as he can go, to put away all this stuff in the postmodernist toolbox. The kind of, you know, all these literary tricks that were purported to be a way to get at reality. And he just goes deep back into the heart of realism. He tells a story about this guy, Seymour, the Swedlov of who Was this?

[Vincent Cunningham]

It rhymes with the love.

[Alex Schwartz]

It rhymes with the love.

[Vincent Cunningham]

That's what they say.

[Alex Schwartz]

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

[Nomi Frye]

Passionate about resisting, certainly.

[Alex Schwartz]

And she commits a crime that then haunts his family and destroys his family. And the phrase the American berserk comes into this novel. As the narrator of the novel, Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's kind of alter ego writer figure, takes a look at the underbelly of this American perfection that this family thought they had created. And so that I'm just bringing all of this stuff up, as random as it may Seem, because I kind of believe that Roth wrote this novel as a challenge to himself and to Tom Wolfe and to those who like Tom Wolfe said he himself, Roth himself had said, I don't think this can be done. And Tom Wolfe is saying, it hasn't been done. And here comes Roth saying, I'm going to do it. So I was curious to know if you guys also, first of all, if you've read American Pastoral and if you like it, because I think everybody should read it. And it will offend, almost undoubtedly, and it will hurt. And I think it's one of the books that really everybody should read, especially at this moment. And, yeah, like, do you guys have other examples of the American Berserk that come to mind for you, successful or otherwise, an attempt at wrestling with it?

[Nomi Frye]

I was intrigued, Alex, by your take about realism, because to me, the American Berserk has to do with such a heightening of realism that it crosses over almost into the surreal. I mean, many other things fit in with this lineage, I think. But to me, I was like, okay, this is kind of like Ari Aster's Oliver Stone movie. You know, I mean, talk about, like, drilling down into reality to achieve a kind of, like, transcendent hysteria, you know, of kind of, like, how do we contend with this, like, too muchness. How do we contend with this, like, utter, like, sex and violence and resistance and oppression and you know, all of the kind of, like, mishegoss of, like, what America is. In Stone's case, like, later 20th century. I was thinking particularly of Natural born killers from 1994, which was kind of like, for those of you who remember the 90s, remember how all we could talk about was serial killers and copycat serial killers and, you know, the remorselessness and the psychopathy of serial killers that emerges from. As a kind of poison fruit or like an unlacerated boil on the ass of American society. You know, the kind of, like, the fever pitch of too muchness that has been simmering for decades and centuries in capitalist America has finally reached its apex in the case of Natural Born Killers, with the figure of the serial killer.

[Alex Schwartz]

Tell us a little bit about Natural Born Killers. Okay, Bring those right to me.

[Nomi Frye]

Natural Born Killers, which I. I recently rewatched it, like, maybe a year ago, and I was like, okay, this movie actually rocks. I was like, talk about kind of, like, effective, maybe somewhat exploitative, probably, but, like, absolutely energetic filmmaking. It's about Mickey and Mallory. Mickey is Woody Woodsy Harrelson. Malorie is Juliet Lewis, who is great in the role. They have both emerged from the kind of like abused, you know, the sort of like underclass of kind of like working class. Like at the point when the movie is, you know, sort of like deadened by TV and you know, the TikTok of back then, you know, kind of like. And the movie is a kind of collage about these two people, young people, finding each other and taking revenge on society. And the revenge is not political, crucially, which is why it kind of like. I'm not saying Eddington is devoid of politics, but the idea of kind of like depicting a kind of like nihilistic space in which the only answer is a kind of like confused violence, right? There is no real order to it or logic, except that when they go and shoot up like a diner or whatever, they always leave one survivor to tell the tale of Mickey and Mallory, you know, the 90s Bonnie and Clyde. But just like the texture of it is so like disgusting in a way that is like very reflective of the kind of like over muchness of kind of like 90s media culture, let's say.

[Alex Schwartz]

Vincent, how about you? Where does the American Berserk take you?

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah, it seems to me that part of the American Berserk as it presents itself today is like as specifically a strategy of the encyclopedic, a landscape that addresses itself to many issues. Pedophilia, violence, this, that, the litany of troubles, and tries to put them all into one space and not totally synthesize them. When we first brought this up, I was thinking a lot about actually a bygone strategy. I'm thinking about the American Romantics and Herman Melville, right? You think about Moby Dick and it's an opposite strategy. It's a way of trying to grab everything, but put it into one vast metaphor to unify things. And the great romantic thing is like everything becomes symbolized by nature, by the landscape, the whale, the ship, those congregated on the ship and forge a unitary metaphor. Melville's novella Benito Serino works in a very similar way. It's a meeting of two ships. One of them an American merchant ship, a sealer, I guess, and the other a Spanish slave vessel. And unbeknownst to us, there has been a slave revolt. And just in the meeting of these two worlds, the American, the Protestant, the sunny, the Spanish, the Catholic, the Gothic, saying something about modernity through one metaphor, right? And this is what's interesting about Eddington. It is at once trying to do that, like I mentioned before, through landscape. And this one sort of. There is a thing being built, but also wants to do the magazine effect of everything that's going on in the landscape. In the landscape, on the landscape at once. One of the similarities between sort of Roth's approach in American Pastoral and the prescription laid down by Tom Wolf is Wolf says, this is why journalists are going to be the novelists of the future, because we are not afraid to go report, and we'll go to the courthouse, and we'll go to the homeless shelter, and we'll go to the DA's office, basically creating again, an X ray of the Bonfire of the Vanities, a very good and also very racist novel, and make of that reportorial process a portrait. But weirdly, and this is what I kept thinking about with the crazily encyclopedic but also smooth texture of Melville, the great big, like, everywhereness of something like Eddington and then American Pastoral, which is told in this one seamless way. It's not hectic, it's almost nostalgic. He's telling a story. He's like, I used to know this guy, you know, it's almost essayistic. I was trying to decide what I like about this kind of text, when it works well. And it's something about the essayistic that, like, action can happen and then there can be reflection. And if I don't like Eddington, it's because there's no character who can reflect or synthesize or think.

[Alex Schwartz]

That's such an interesting point. And so, I mean, I'm guessing, or I'm now working on the inference, that this is also what attracts you to Melville, because you have so much of the essayist in there. It's. It's. You got all the raw material, but you also get the essayistic processing of it. And this is like. This brings me back a little bit to what I was trying to say about what I think goes wrong in Eddington, because I do understand what you're saying about the reflection of the overwhelm and the kind of throwing up the hands and the sense of, well, how do you make sense of a reality that is this fragmented, this crazy, this over the top, this fluorescent? What do you do with it? And at the same time, I also do believe it is possible for the artist to try to meld it to a purpose and to leave us with.

[Vincent Cunningham]

To unify.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah. A coherent reflection. Even if that unification is not uplift, it does not have to be uplift. And I think it would be a lie for it to be uplift. I think this is the thing, I think when you're dealing with the realm of the American berserk. The big risk is getting the bends or the equivalent of the bends, you know, and having. Because you're trying to describe a warping. So how do you not get warped in the process? And I think the answer, and this is a very traditional answer, but to me, the answer is to stay with people, because none of this matters without people. And it's exciting and it's liberating and it's intellectually fulfilling. And in some ways, it is realistic to try to portray those enormous systems and to turn it into metaphor, symbol, as a way of grasping it. But I think when you start to get away from the people who are still going through life in the midst of all of this wildness and when people become merely symbols, you start to lose. I think you start to lose in politics when that happens, and I definitely think you start to lose in art in a minute. How do you out crazy what's actually happening in America? And should you. This is critics at large from the New Yorker. Don't go away. I am Shilpa Oskokovic. And I'm Jesse Shepczak. And we're the hosts of the BA Bay Club podcast. It's Bon Appetit's book club, but it's for baking. We would like to invite you to a live show on July 23rd at the Bell House in Brooklyn.

[Nomi Frye]

We'll be joining the amazing teams at.

[Alex Schwartz]

Taste and Hark for Stay Cool, a summer food podcast evening. Shilpa and I will be talking about how to keep your composure when things go wrong when you're baking. We have a lot of experience. Things go wrong often.

[Nomi Frye]

Yes, yes.

[Alex Schwartz]

But all for all in the name of research. Yes. You know, I love a baking mistake. I think you learn so much.

[Nomi Frye]

And it won't be just us that night.

[Alex Schwartz]

Padma Lakshmi, Haley Catalano, and Chuck Cruz will also be there. It's gonna be really fun. Tickets for the event are on sale now. You can go to thebellhouseny.com staycool that is thebellhouseny.com StayCool we can't wait to see you at the Bell House in Brooklyn on Wednesday, July 23rd. So we've been talking about the American berserk, this idea of the craziness, the chaos, the explosiveness that is the United States of America, that if you think you are just having a wonderful lunch on the side of a mountain. Actually, that mountain is Mount Etna. It's a volcano. It's gonna blow. The lava is coming right at you just. When you think that everything is okay. And that's what it's like to live in the United States of America sometimes. Question mark all the time. And so the premise of the genre, the art genre of the American berserk, I would say, is that reality is always going to outstrip the art that's made about it. So my question is, what do we think the point is if this reality is always going to outstrip depiction, of trying to depict it?

[Nomi Frye]

Well, isn't art about trying, like, in some ways, you know what I mean? I think, and I was saying this to you guys before, the one thing I appreciate about Eddington and I think in general about a project that is, you know, an ambitious project that seeks to show us a slice of sort of like the different strata of reality at a particular battled moment. Right. I don't think I'd have the balls to take on something like that. But I do appreciate the attempt, which I think is perhaps getting more and more rare as time goes on, perhaps in the filmic realm. I happened to one weekend I watched Apocalypse now at Film Forum, and the weekend after I watched Hearts of Darkness, the documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now. And so that actually kind of. I mean, Apocalypse now is like the American berserk par excellence. You know, I mean, it takes place in Vietnam, but of course it's about America. And it's about the kind of like, soul of America being increasingly poisoned by the misadventure, you know, in Vietnam. And it's famously trying to do something monstrously, almost big and ambitious to the extent that it almost killed, like, several people involved in the production, as Hearts of Darkness shows. You know, I mean, there's the Hearts of Darkness opens with this incredible press conference where Francis Ford Coppola stands at a podium and he says, this movie isn't about Vietnam. This movie is Vietnam, which is, of course it's over exaggerated and it's kind of grandiose and pompous, but in the sense of saying, you know, this movie ballooned to like, whatever it was, how many millions of dollars over budget, like Martin Sheen having a heart attack, almost dying, you know, just like monsoons, everything, the sets getting swept away, like Coppola almost killing himself, like going insane, et cetera, et cetera, it's hard to do this sort of thing. And so I think even. Just the attempt, to me even is, I guess, commendable. Maybe this is like a naive thing to say. I don't know.

[Vincent Cunningham]

No, I think I totally agree.

[Nomi Frye]

I mean, the sort of wild Ambitions of art making.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah. Art is about trying, among other things, but it's about that too. And I think that's right. The reach, the sort of asymptotic reach towards something that, you know, you will approach but never quite touch, I think is an ideal that I share. But I do think that we are always trying, and the question is, which way do we go? Our episode in April 17 about the movie Warfare, I was thinking about that too.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah.

[Vincent Cunningham]

It's a miniature. It's one thing, a thorough scraping of one experience, but trying, I think, by suggestion to achieve something not too unlike what Eddington is doing, which is to sort of juice it for metaphor. Right. And so I think there's this continuum of attempts. I think it's. Nobody's ever gonna stop trying. Americans are too.

[Nomi Frye]

American people stop trying.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yes, that's true. There will always be people who try in various forms. Americans are too obsessed with ourselves for that not to be part of the structure of our art making.

[Alex Schwartz]

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

[Nomi Frye]

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

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Well, that makes me think. That makes me less optimistic for the world and more optimistic for perhaps this form of artistic endeavor. Because, you know, Boots Riley also a very kind of, you know, an ideological man. He's got ideas. And one way to think about this form of art making is the paranoid. And I don't mean that he's paranoid. I share lots of his politics. I just mean that, like, when you've got an account. Do you know what I mean? The person who's got it all figured out. And now I'm gonna tell you that this idea that becomes, like, the crank, the prophet, whatever this kind of artwork is that kind of prophecy, you know, and we live in an age of ideologies. What happens when the splintering happens in the world is that everybody gets. And this is, you know, this is where the Same qualities of being that create paranoid conspiracy also create large scale omnidirectional works of art.

[Nomi Frye]

That's really interesting. There's talking about this sort of prophecy or the figure of the prophet, we should say maybe or. I would like to say that the movie opens with this kind of like muttering wild man coming down off the kind of craggy hills surrounding the town of Eddington and stumbling into town. It's dark, you don't really see who it is. You just see kind of a muttering mouth. And I was like, is that. Is that Joaquin Phoenix? Like, is this the hero of the movie? Is this the sheriff? And it's like, no. In fact, it's this homeless man who gets into kind of violent interactions with the mayor with some of the other characters in the movie. He's a kind of public disturbance. Right. This character who's like looks like in some ways an Old Testament prophet stumbling into town to tell everyone what's really happening and then what emerges as just like these mutterings of a drunken, you know, impoverished, you know, probably mentally ill person. It's kind of like, okay, this is what prophecy can look like right now. You know, this is what prophecy turns into kind of garbled conspiracy. I think those, those kind of like the two sidedness of that I think is figured in the movie.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah, I think you're exactly right, Minsten, to put your finger in this idea of paranoia and paranoia in politics and paranoia in art. Because paranoia is all about connection making and it's all about connecting everything to everything else.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah, it's like that meme of like the person.

[Vincent Cunningham]

It's always sunny.

[Alex Schwartz]

It's always sunny in Philadelphia. Yes.

[Nomi Frye]

Strange size.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yes, yes, yes, exactly. It all makes sense. It all connects. And of course so few things really are making sense or are connecting that. I think the paranoid instinct and the art making instinct may collide in a strange way by trying to create a kind of sense and by trying to create a kind of network to make things link up and to make things match. And it may be why art that attempts to go after the American berserk. I mean, I think some of it succeeds beautifully and some of it fails. And it's exactly in the failings. Like the More Tom Wolfie. Let's connect all of it up. I know exactly this type of person. It's in a kind of knowingness that it fails, I guess I would say, because ultimately my feeling is when you're left with the reality of America, whether it's in 2025, which I think feels like the craziest time ever. But also, we know now from looking back, people felt 1961 was the craziest time ever. They felt 2001 was the craziest time ever. And every other year in between, pretty much, we feel destabilized, rocked. It is the nature of the game. And I guess my last question for us is like, do the artists have a shot? Because I don't want to sound cynical or downtrodden, but I do feel that when you're playing, you know, with the American berserk, the house always wins. So do we go out and tell the artists on you go?

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah, of course we do.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah. And to extend.

[Nomi Frye]

What are we gonna do?

[Vincent Cunningham]

That's right. And they've got, you know, to extend the metaphor, they've got as much chance as that voice crying out in the wilderness does. Maybe in the long term they.

[Alex Schwartz]

This has been critics at large. This week's episode was produced by Michelle o' Brien and edited by Stephanie Kariuki. Alex Barish is our consulting editor. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Conde Nast's head of global audio is Chris Bannon. Alexis Quadrato composed our theme music and we had engineering help today from James Yost with mixing by Mike Kutchman. You can find every episode of Critics at [e-mail] critics.

[Nomi Frye]

Hi, I'm Chloe Mel.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Editor of Vogue.com and I'm Cho Manardi.

[Alex Schwartz]

Head of editorial content at British Vogue.

[Nomi Frye]

Our show the Run through takes you.

[Alex Schwartz]

Behind the scenes at Vogue. Yes. With two episodes every week. You'll find out what's really happening inside.

[Nomi Frye]

The world of fashion and culture. Every Tuesday, hear from Nicole Phelps, global director of Vogue Runway and Vogue business, as she discusses the latest fashion news and speaks to designers and industry leaders.

[Alex Schwartz]

That Vogue editors can't stop talking about. There's so much shakeups happening in fashion. I'm curious what you think of this moment. Ooh, I am here with Marc Jacobs. Longevity is something we talk about a lot. It's not easy to achieve. How does it feel this moment?

[Nomi Frye]

I have so much to say on this subject.

[Vincent Cunningham]

And on Thursday, you'll hear from the two of us, Chloe Marle and Cho.

[Nomi Frye]

Minardi, as we share our thoughts on fashion through the lens of culture. From the Oscars to the Met Gala.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Plus conversations with the biggest stars right now.

[Nomi Frye]

Tyler, congratulations on your first Vogue cover.

[Alex Schwartz]

Thank you all. Join us to get your bi weekly fashion and culture news.

[Nomi Frye]

Listen to the run through with Vogue.

[Alex Schwartz]

Every Tuesday and Thursday.

[Nomi Frye]

Wherever you get your podcasts from PRX.