The Year of the Broken Mirror

Summary

Critics at Large | The New Yorker

Episode: The Year of the Broken Mirror

Date: December 18, 2025
Hosts: Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry (Nomi Frye), Alexandra (Alex) Schwartz

Episode Overview

This year-end episode of Critics at Large reflects on 2025 in arts and culture, framing it as “The Year of the Broken Mirror.” The hosts explore how artists, filmmakers, and society at large grappled with fractured realities, divided truths, and the difficulty of seeing ourselves clearly amidst political turmoil, technological upheaval, and rampant unreality. Through lively, humorous, and incisive discussions, the critics break down the signal works, trends, and lived experiences that defined this “broken mirror” moment in America.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

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1. Year-End Ritual & Theme: "The Broken Mirror"

[00:49 – 02:27]

• Hosts reflect on year-end traditions and the process of naming each year’s cultural mood.

  • 2023: “Year of the Doll” (Barbie, Poor Things)
  • 2024: “Year of the Flop” (disappointments, failures)
  • 2025: “Year of the Broken Mirror”

• The “Broken Mirror” metaphor captures:

  • Fractured national identity and reality.
  • Art and culture reflecting a messy, divided society.
  • Reality bent by technology, conspiracy, and politics.

Notable Quotes:

• Alex Schwartz: “So many different works of art are made and seen and absorbed and forgotten or remembered.” [02:27]
• Nomi Frye: “This was a year when artists started to really confront the messed up, divided nature of reality in these United States.” [02:40]

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2. Cultural Reflections in Film: The "Big Swings"

[05:33 – 31:39]

a. Sinners – Ryan Coogler

[06:12 – 13:00]

• Historic, realist setting: 1930s Mississippi Delta; Black sharecroppers; music; vampires.
• Coogler’s auteur vision: blending historical realism and genre tropes to re-examine America’s origins.
• Subversive use of genre (vampires, twins): visually and thematically mirrors American history.
• Political context: Challenges denialism, addresses historical brutality not erased by political whitewashing.

Notable Quotes:

• Alex Schwartz: “It started in such a historically realist way… And then the vampires show up.” [07:04]
• Nomi Frye: “He ended up doing another in a way that was… weirdly radical.” [09:09]
• Vincent Cunningham: “It’s almost like Sinners wants to be a synthesis… of a tough reality, not without its joys, not without its triumphs, but a tough reality. And on the other hand, this kind of surrealist superhero thing that happens with the vampires.” [10:08]
• Alex Schwartz: “Politics was basically telling Americans that what they know to be true about their country... never happened.” [11:24]

b. Eddington – Ari Aster

[13:00 – 18:15; 44:22 – 45:25]

• COVID-era drama set in a New Mexico town.
• Sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix), his wife, conspiracy theories, rising paranoia, Pedro Pascal as rival mayoral contender.
• Highlights societal inability to forge consensus reality.
• Explores collapse of shared truth; parallel to Altamont as “death of the ‘60s”; consensus falls apart.

Notable Quotes:

• Vincent Cunningham: “It’s like a contest over the truth which once failed by the whole society... They can’t get it together to arrive at a... shared truth. They all have to face a deeply divided consequence.” [15:35]
• Nomi Frye: “Can we keep it together, people? [...] Can we just all unite on your understanding of what is... the moral center that we all agree on?” [17:01]

c. One Battle After Another – Paul Thomas Anderson

[19:24 – 25:31; 46:31 – 47:50]

• Anderson’s film adapts Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland: leftist radicals, betrayal, fugitives, and white supremacy.
• Crosses past political turbulence with present-day crises (ICE raids, immigration, burnout).
• Visually and narratively ambitious, but critiques on trying to collapse eras into a single “mirror.”

Notable Quotes:

• Vincent Cunningham: “It is another one of these big swings about a certain American persuasion... I like it more as a work of filmmaking. The images are aging beautifully in my mind. The story is aging not so great.” [22:31]
• Alex Schwartz: “I think if we want to talk about what the dominant image is of 2025... it’s ICE officers abducting people in plain daylight.” [24:16]
• On Benicio Del Toro’s character: “That’s a mirror moment: wake up, look at yourself in the mirror. This isn’t all about you.” [46:44]

d. Begonia – Yorgos Lanthimos

[25:51 – 31:39]

• Depicts a deranged conspiracy-theorist (Jesse Plemons) who kidnaps a pharma CEO (Emma Stone) he suspects is an alien.
• Explores the fine line between genius and delusion; the instability of consensus.
• The broken mirror here is both literal (paranoia) and stylistic (Lanthimos’s clinical, distancing direction).

Notable Quotes:

• Jesse Plemons (Character): “That is precisely the limp dick rhetoric that you’ve been instructed to counter the human insurgency with.” [27:20]
• Alex Schwartz: “Are you absolutely moronic to believe that aliens are controlling our planet? Or have you put all the signs together? Did you do your own research and are you gonna be proved right?” [28:02]
• Vincent Cunningham: “I’ve been through the whole digestive system. I started alt-right. I’ve been through, you know, communism, socialism... and what the movie does is posit all of this on top of issues of class, political economy, the environment...” [29:52]

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3. The Reality Crisis: AI, Images, and Unreality

[31:54 – 38:23]

• AI became pervasive in 2025; daily life now inundated by artificial “mirrors” of humanity.
• The blurring of real and fake: Diddy in jail image, social media “people” possibly not real, daily misinformation.
• Discussion of what might drive a desire for the “real” (e.g., authenticity, tangible goods) in response.
• Hope (however faint) that people may choose human interaction and reality as a counterbalance.

Notable Exchanges:

• Alex Schwartz: “This is really the year that AI broke through as a daily use item... complete sentences, often totally factually inaccurate about whatever you’re looking at.” [31:54]
• Nomi Frye: “I can’t be spending my whole life now wondering if an image is real or not.” [33:11]
• Vincent Cunningham: “I follow someone on Instagram that I’m not sure if they’re a person…” [34:37]
• Alex Schwartz: “The more that unreality becomes our daily environment, the more reality also commands a premium and seems to matter.” [36:19]

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4. Politics, History, and the Erasure of Reality

[40:14 – 46:15]

• The Trump 2.0 era: deliberate political “erasure” of uncomfortable truths (removal of slavery, Native dispossession from public exhibitions).
• The tension between reflecting accurate histories and imposed cheerful “mirrors.”
• Resilience of culture: such pressure can suppress or provoke greater resistance and creative production.

Notable Quotes:

• Alex Schwartz: “...all these efforts... to reflect reality accurately, there is a kind of falsification going on with the hope... that the population will look into the big American mirror and see, you know, nothing but... smiling white faces. It’s a nightmare.” [41:24]
• Nomi Frye: “The level things have reached in this respect are insane. And I think the difference this time around... is a complete... agreement to appease this version, this false version of reality.” [43:03]
• Vincent Cunningham: “To think about the first Trump administration and this second term is, on some level, to be on two sides of a great divide in our notions of what we are—not only as a country, but as a human community...” [44:22]

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5. Searching for Bright Spots and What Comes Next

[46:15 – End]

• Despite the cultural “brokenness,” the hosts find hope in the ongoing creation and sharing of culture and art.
• The importance of acts of solidarity (Benicio Del Toro’s character in One Battle After Another as a “Latino Harriet Tubman”).
• The value and comfort in critical conversation, enjoying art together, and small acts of resistance.

Notable Quotes:

• Alex Schwartz: “One way of being in opposition is toting machine guns and setting off explosions, and the other is having the quiet discipline and solidarity to carry on and continue to build the world as it should be.” [47:44]
• Nomi Frye: “For me, what is... the saving grace is people still intent on making culture and making art. The fact that people still are doing that... for me, that’s like... at least tide us over a little bit.” [48:58]
• Vincent Cunningham: “Thinking about the mirror, broken or not, is a way of describing a kind of stasis, a kind of almost narcissistic kind of figuring out... the fixation on democracy on the ground... describes a yearning for more action, for... a move away from the mirror and out... out into the streets, out into community with other people... as opposed to the long gaze into the mirror.” [49:18 – 50:37]

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Summary Table of Key Segments

| Timestamp | Segment & Highlights | |------------|---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:49-05:33| Year-end rituals, “Year of the Broken Mirror” intro, setting up the theme | | 06:12-13:00| “Sinners” (Coogler): historical realism, vampires, political resistance, discussion | | 13:00-18:15| “Eddington” (Aster): COVID, fractured reality, Altamont parallel, America’s splintered truths | | 19:24-25:31| “One Battle After Another” (Anderson): radical pasts, ICE, ambivalence about adapting the ’60s for today | | 25:51-31:39| “Begonia” (Lanthimos): conspiracy, alienation, psychological removal, critique of modern delusions | | 31:54-38:23| AI, unreality, blurred images, Instagram “person,” hope for valuing the real | | 40:14-46:15| Politics and historical erasure, Trump 2.0, culture as resistance, feeling the crisis stretch on | | 46:31-End | Hope, solidarity, value of culture, urging for action, gratitude for listeners, looking ahead to next season |

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Final Reflections

• Memorable closing by Alex Schwartz:
  “The more that unreality becomes our daily environment, the more that reality also commands a premium and seems to matter. It's very confusing.” [36:19]
• Hopeful note from Nomi Frye:
  “People still intent on making culture and making art... For me, that's... it makes people think that life is still worth living.” [48:58]
• Call for Community and Action from Vincent Cunningham:
  “Thinking about the mirror... is a way of describing a kind of stasis... the fixation on democracy on the ground... describes a yearning for more action, for... a move away from the mirror and out...” [49:18]

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For listeners seeking to understand where American culture found itself at the end of 2025, this episode provides an insightful, witty, sometimes bleak but ultimately affirming meditation on the power of art, reality, and collective self-examination—fractured reflections and all.

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.

[Nomi Frye]

It's that time of year. We're seeing year end lists everywhere. Spotify wrapped come and it's gone. What was your Spotify rap lead artist?

[Alex Schwartz]

Prokofiev for Peter and the Wolf.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Oh, beautiful.

[Alex Schwartz]

I just, you know, 10 tracks. That's where it's been at.

[Nomi Frye]

That's where it's been at, Vincent.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Mine was an artist that I mentioned a lot on this podcast, Dijon.

[Nomi Frye]

Oh, nice.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Whose album Baby was my favorite album of this year. And also Justin Bieber, whose best album, Swag came out this year, was also up there. Okay, well, and then there was. There were other things that happened. How about you?

[Nomi Frye]

You're cooler than me. I mean, mine was Handel.

[Alex Schwartz]

This is a classic for a reason.

[Nomi Frye]

My listening age was 65, you guys. So all of this is to say it's a very special time of year when we try to figure out what the hell happened. For avid listeners of the pod, you guys know that this has been something of a tradition. Okay? Our first year, we did an episode on the Year of the Doll. That was the year Barbie came out, poor things. And last year we decided that it was the year of the flop, if you recall. Lots of flops, lots of disappointments. And this year, here it comes. What we settled on is the Year of the Broken Mirror. Alex, do you want to start us off discussing a little bit how we arrived at Year of the Broken Mirror? How did this come about?

[Alex Schwartz]

Guys, to be honest with you, I find it very hard to sum up these years. I don't know if others agree or not, but so many things go on and so many different works of art are made and seen and absorbed and forgotten or remembered.

[Nomi Frye]

Especially forgotten.

[Alex Schwartz]

Especially forgotten. But I do think that one thing we all started to notice was that this was a year when artists started to really confront the messed up, divided nature of reality in these United States. Just Thinking about films like One Battle After Another by Paul Thomas Anderson.

[Nomi Frye]

I want you to create a show. This is an announcement on a revolution.

[Alex Schwartz]

Eddington by Ari Aster.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I'm running for mayor.

[Pedro Pascal (character voice)]

You can't keep your own office going, but you're gonna run mine. They're your streets to keep safe or.

[Alex Schwartz]

Sinners by Ryan Coogler There are legends of people with the gift of making.

[Wally Amos (voice in ad)]

Music so true it can conjure spirits.

[Alex Schwartz]

From the past and the future. It felt to me like a year when people were really going for it and wanted to say, this is how I see America. So when I. The mirror idea is like we're looking at ourselves and I'm not sure we like what we see. It's not a gorgeous reflection shining back, but, you know, big swings about the state of American reality that are also very distinctive auteurist projects. As these filmmakers try to tell us what they see when they look into the American mirror.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah, right. And we had the kind of like shifting nature of reality vis a vis AI. It's like, what is reality anymore when everything can be kind of like reconstructed in the image of the real and yet be so, you know, defiantly unreal.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah. It's like in this effort, these big swing efforts to reflect the culture, often there were. There had to emerge these alternate figures. This is a year of vampires and twins. And almost as a way to inspect what it means to be human now we had to see some sort of humanoid parallel to ourselves across the expanse of that mirror and be. You know, engage in our experience with another thing that came up a lot, which is like the uncanny. Yeah, the messy, weird, unsettling nature of maybe our self definition has to change. And that's always a kind of a startling phenomenon.

[Nomi Frye]

Totally. Honestly, there were so many different ways that this year really started to feel like a broken mirror. And we're going to be discussing a lot of them. My question though is when we're going into this discussion, as we're confronted with these reflections of ourselves in art and technology and our politics, what is it that we see? So that's today on critics at Large, the Year of the Broken Mirror. Okay, guys, let's get down to business. We're going to get into a bunch of reasons that this felt like the Year of the Broken Mirror.

[Alex Schwartz]

We.

[Nomi Frye]

But let's start maybe with the biggest one or one of the bigger ones. Okay? This through line of kind of weird askew mirroring across some of the biggest and best films of the year, mirroring America back to us in Some really interesting and fucked up ways. Where do you guys wanna start? Which of the movies that we were thinking of talking about do you wanna begin with?

[Alex Schwartz]

I think we should start chronologically. I'm a bit of a traditionalist.

[Nomi Frye]

Good idea.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I think it's a really good way.

[Nomi Frye]

To sort some norms. Should.

[Alex Schwartz]

Exactly, exactly. As an editor of mine long said, you know, chronology is a very underrated way to tell a story.

[Katie Drummond]

Yeah.

[Alex Schwartz]

So Sinners, I think of the movies that we're really looking at in this category of big swings about American reality, trying to reflect back to us something broken but intriguing about ourselves. Sinners came out April 2025. Can you even remember that far back, I ask you?

[Nomi Frye]

Barely.

[Vincent Cunningham]

You can?

[Alex Schwartz]

Barely.

[Nomi Frye]

I was a young girl then and.

[Alex Schwartz]

Look at us now. It was written, directed and co produced by Ryan Coogler. It was a real. I think we should just say, like a lot of these that we're talking about, these are real auteurist projects. Like Ryan Coogler basically went up against the studios and won to get to make the exact movie he wanted to make. So Sinners takes place in the Mississippi Delta in the 1930s. It's a tale of music, of race, of oppression, of vampires.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Vampires.

[Alex Schwartz]

Vampires. And what really struck me about this movie was that it started in such a historically realist way, you know, all these aspects of life of. It takes place among black sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta in the 30s. And a musical teenager, Sammy Preacher Boy Moore, played by Miles Caton, maybe also, by the way, the debut of the year. The film debut of the year.

[Vincent Cunningham]

He was wonderful.

[Alex Schwartz]

He was great. Goes off with a pair of twins, Smoke and Stack, played by Michael B. Jordan, and agrees to play music at a juke joint.

[Supporting Actor (unnamed)]

I'm a sharecropper from Sunflower Plantation. They call me Preacher Boy. Counting my daddy being the pastor. I wrote this song for him. Something I been wanting to tell you for a long time. It might hurt you. Hope you don't lose your mind. Well, I was just a boy, about.

[Alex Schwartz]

Eight, and then the vampires show up. I mean, to me, this was Coogler wanting to show us something very real about America to remind us in a lot of ways, you know, this wasn't long ago. This is within the last century. Here's the origin of so much of our life, our culture, our politics as we know it now in positive and negative ways. Some of the greatest music, you know, ever made coming from this place and some of the darkest history. And then the supernatural element I found totally fascinating and riveting and the more I think about it, the more. Yeah, the more it stuck with me.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's like, in retrospect, actually one of my favorite movies of the year. When we're talking about, like big swings. This is a big swing and it's a huge swing. And I want to say also Ric Coogler, because Coogler is a Marvel director. He's most known as the director of Black Panther.

[Vincent Cunningham]

He also did Creed and Creed.

[Nomi Frye]

He's a very talented director in everything he's done. But those were movies that were beholden to this story that the corporation is telling. Right. And with this, it's still a big movie. It's still, of course, not an independent movie by any means, but the story itself, it's kind of like his own mirroring, you know, of kind of like, let's do a big movie. Let's kind of use the tools of the master, so to speak, to tell this different story, which is quite original, even though, again, it relies on kind of genre tropes like horror. I really admire that sense of kind of like, let's see what is possible to do within kind of like the reality that we share in which like big money making corporations expect you to do one thing and he ended up doing another in a way that was, I found weirdly radical. Like, it was like, kind of like surprising to me, I would say he's.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Such an interesting director because he is known for those bigger budget movies. But also his debut was called It's Fruitvale Station 2013. I still remember seeing it and sobbing at the end. At the Angelica Theater in New York. It's about a young man, a true story of a young man named Oscar Grant who was killed on the train by a police officer. In very short, and it's almost like Sinners wants to be a synthesis. Speaking of a mirror, right? Both sides of a mirror, of a tough reality, not without its joys, not without its triumphs, but a tough reality. And on the other hand, this kind of surrealist superhero thing that happens with the vampires. The bravado of the two twins, Smoke and Stack, trying to put together these pieces of the American story. Both the sort of, maybe a comment on American entertainment, which comes alive most vividly in this great dance scene that brings together the past and the future, making them speak to each other as if across two sides of a mirror, but also really sticking to a realist sort of historical impulse which seems to be so alive with him and in telling a history, also give us A sort of new vision of ourselves.

[Nomi Frye]

Right.

[Alex Schwartz]

There is one other way, I think, that Sinners reflects our Broken mirror theme. It's really hard to talk about culture without also talking about politics, when politics is as all consuming and intrusive of daily reality as it is. And this was a year when so much of politics was basically telling Americans that what they know to be true about their country, about their past, never happened.

[Nomi Frye]

Yes. And that like the gaslight, the year of gaslighting.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah, it was definitely the year of gaslighting. Like, oh, if it wasn't great, it didn't happen. If it involved violence, it didn't happen. If it involved oppression or anything, you know, a little bit uncomfortable, it's woke. We don't like it. And so that, to me, was part of the mirror of Ryan Coogler. Holding up this actual mirror and again, trying to make it very granular and authentic down to. I remember our colleague Richard Brody, in his review of Sinners, was really happy that the amounts of money that things cost were put so directly. You know, really kind of giving the fabric of a time, but also holding up this mirror to all of us who know that the country's past is riven with brutality and ugliness and who don't find looking away from that to be particularly comforting or elucidating. So here in this really popular and fun and dynamic setting, was the mirror, the ugly part of the mirror, and also some beauties staring us back in the face. And I thought that in the Spring was a great way to start this confrontation with reality through fiction.

[Nomi Frye]

Let us move on to our next contender for broken mirror movie 2025. And I think maybe we should now talk again, sticking to the chronology of the year. Eddington, the Ari Aster movie that came out in July 2025. So yeah, written and directed and co produced by Aster himself. And basically this is a Covid movie, Right. Just to give a little bit of apresis for those of us who haven't seen or don't. Would. Don't remember, would rather not remember, because it is about a period that many of us would rather not remember. The movie takes place in May 2020. It's in a small town named Eddington in New Mexico. And the protagonist is a sheriff played by Joaquin Phoenix, whose wife is kind of depressed and along with her mother who's living at their house, they're kind of like falling in the grip of the alternative reality of kind of conspiracy theories about COVID and so on. Then he has this nemesis, this sort of like woke annoyingly faux liberal contender to the mayorality of the town, played by Pedro Pascal.

[Pedro Pascal (character voice)]

You know, if a healthy person with a mask.

[Supporting Actor (unnamed)]

No, here we go.

[Pedro Pascal (character voice)]

Gets exposed to a COVID 19 person without a mask.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah, yeah.

[Pedro Pascal (character voice)]

Then they got a 70% chance of catching it. But if we all wear them, then we can reduce the transmission rate to 1%.

[Vincent Cunningham]

You don't even know what you're talking about. 1.4% of nothing is what.

[Pedro Pascal (character voice)]

And actually, Joe, this is simple.

[Nomi Frye]

There are these sort of young, white, again, annoyingly woke youth who are kind of joining the Black Lives Matter movement. So these are all things, all the elements are again, much like in sinners, historically accurate or in a sense a take on things that actually happen, but then not in a supernatural way, but in certainly off the rails way. The movie goes kind of bazonkers. Right. And gives us a view of America that I think we can also include among the broken mirror canon. The broken mirror canon that we were just establishing. Yeah. Do you guys wanna talk about that a little bit?

[Vincent Cunningham]

Well, there's so many.

[Nomi Frye]

It's complicated to wrap our arms around what goes on in that movie.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah, I mean, it's just like a deepening set of contradictions that end really in what seems like the total decline of a small but representative society. First of all, yes, the crime of the year is that this movie is not named after the actual town in.

[Nomi Frye]

Which it was filmed. I was thinking about that, which is.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Called Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. And the town. It's a long story, but the town was named after a quiz show where somebody, you know, you get asked a trivia question and if you can't answer it in a very short period of time, that is get the truth of the situation. You have to face a consequence, some sort of zany thing. And that is exactly what's going on in this film is it's like a contest over the truth which once failed by the whole society. Right. Whatever divisions, ideological battles bedevil them. They can't get it together to arrive at a notion or a sort of shared truth. They all have to face a deeply divided consequence. Right. And this, this double, this like kind of dialectic between truth and its discontents is totally what the movie's about.

[Nomi Frye]

Just something came up to me. Vincent, you said something along the lines of they can't get it together. Like the people of the town can't keep it together. Can't get it together.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah.

[Nomi Frye]

And it made me think, you know, Altamont, the, you know, free public Rolling Stones concert in Altamont Speedway, California, known collectively as kind of the death of the 60s. Right. Like Meredith Hunter, a black concert attendee, knifed to death by the Hell's Angels who were doing security. Horrible tragedy. The movie Gimme Shelter, the maisel's movie about this event. You see Mick Jagger on stage and he keeps saying, like, why can't we get it together? Can we keep it together, people? You know, like love and light. Like, can we just all unite on your understanding of what is kind of like the moral center that we all agree on is, in a sense, what I think Eddington is about. Sorry, this was a long tangent. It had nothing to do with it. But I was just thinking about, yeah, can we all keep it together? Can we all agree and not even agree, not consent. Just like a consensus reality, Right?

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah.

[Nomi Frye]

No, apparently not. And this is what we're talking about.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Kind of bleak.

[Nomi Frye]

Pretty bleak, for sure. In a minute we'll come back with something a little less bleak. Just a little. That's in a minute on Critics at Large. From the New Yorker.

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[Nomi Frye]

Talking now about bleak, but perhaps with a touch of positive energy, kind of.

[Alex Schwartz]

A little bit bleak with a twist.

[Nomi Frye]

Bleak with a twist. Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another came out not long ago, September 2025.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Damn.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah, guys, mirroring. Wait, before we talk about the mirror, should we explain to our listeners?

[Vincent Cunningham]

We should.

[Nomi Frye]

What's this movie about?

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah. One battle after another, as we said, written, directed, produced by Paul Thomas Anderson. It's based on. This is Anderson's second time sort of taking a swing. Speaking of big swings and speaking of big swings about America, his second time adapting a novel by Thomas Pynchon, this time the 1990 book Vineland. And it's about the action and then the afterlife of a band of, I don't know what you call them, left wing revolutionaries, radicals, domestic terrorists, I don't know.

[Nomi Frye]

Tomato, tomato, tomato, tomato.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Exactly. This company is led, at least in sort of the action of the film by Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays a guy named Bob Ferguson, who is sort of part of this group. Falls in love with a team member named Perfidia Beverly Hills, played by Teyana Taylor. They Have a kid. Teyana Taylor is, I don't know, she's detained. And then, spoiler alert, she is a snitch. Everybody gets in trouble, people go into hiding.

[Nomi Frye]

Sings like a canary there she sings.

[Vincent Cunningham]

And Leo was left to raise their daughter, Charlene, or Willa, depending on, you know, whether she needs to hide or not. Played really amazingly by Chase Infinity, another incredible film debut. Great debut.

[Nomi Frye]

These young people keep getting more, More and more talented.

[Vincent Cunningham]

And this group is sort of haunted or hunted by Sean Penn in an absolutely bonkers performance as Colonel Stephen Lockjaw. So there is a white supremacist group that comes up into it. There is, of course, the sort of worsening fate of Leo DiCaprio as he's forced back into revolutionary action with an absolutely burnt out brain.

[Pedro Pascal (character voice)]

All right, I was part of French 75 for years, years and years, all right? They used to call me Ghetto Pat, Rocket man, stuff like that. Only problem is I. I fried my brain since then, man, I. I have abused drugs and alcohol for the past 30 years, man. I'm a drug and alcohol lover. And I cannot remember for the life of me or the life of my only child the answer to your question. What time is it?

[Supporting Actor (unnamed)]

8:15.

[Pedro Pascal (character voice)]

Now, I. I need this rendezvous point. You understand what I'm saying? I need it.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I understand.

[Nomi Frye]

And the question is, what time is it?

[Vincent Cunningham]

There are car chases, there's a nunnery. For a moment. It's the Black Sound of Music. It's great.

[Nomi Frye]

Get back to a nunnery.

[Rebecca Ford]

Yeah.

[Vincent Cunningham]

And yeah, it is another one of these big swings about a certain American persuasion, about a certain tendency and its many ripples through a pond. I thought it was. I mean, it has. It's so strange. I like it less and more in my mind. I like it more as a work of filmmaking. Like, the images are aging beautifully in my mind. The story is aging not so great in my mind. It's a really interesting film to keep thinking about. I want to see it again, actually.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah. You know, I famously did not love this movie. I mean, I loved some things about it, but I think it seemed to me to be. And I think it was because the source material of Vineland is about the 60s, sort of like 70s burnout, post 60s, whereas, like kind of putting the story in today's terms didn't seem to work. But it clearly like, Pite wanted it to work. He wanted to kind of like put a mirror in front of America as it is right now. And I was like, is this the way America is right now? You know, so for me, the brokenness, I mean, it certainly portrayed a fractured, broken reality and some of the realities that it portrayed, which, you know, there's a lot of. To do with a kind of like ice, like, you know, establishment, establishment, the, you know, migrant snatching off the street, et cetera, et cetera. There's like the white supremacy thing which actually rung like, maybe most true to me in the world of the movie. It's not like it's detached from the reality right now, but I think the kind of like potential ways to engage with that reality in the world of the movie seem to me to be completely imaginary.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah, I hear that. And I myself have mixed feelings about this film. I think all three of us do. I will say this, though. I think if we want to talk about what the dominant Image is of 2025 or set of images are, they are ice officers walking through the streets of the United States and abducting people in plain daylight. That's the dominant image in the United States of America in 2025. So it was interesting to me to have Paul Thomas Anderson, a director who has never been that interested in the contemporary and has usually liked to stay in the past, try to come right in with an opening, a very bravura opening of this movie at about a 30 minute sequen, kind of without stop, which begins with a group of people freeing migrants from a detention center. You know, of course, the movie wasn't made like filmed this past year when all that was going on, but seeing that image, the cinematic version of it, I just thought, okay, here we go. This is no longer. This can't be contained any longer. This is now leaking into culture with.

[Nomi Frye]

A big capital square C. Yeah, guys, moving right along to the four Auteur. Male auteur, yes.

[Alex Schwartz]

Four men.

[Nomi Frye]

Four men taking big swings.

[Alex Schwartz]

They love to do it.

[Nomi Frye]

That was.

[Katie Drummond]

Sorry.

[Nomi Frye]

Yorgo Slanthemos, director once again of Begonia. That came out just this October. I must admit, I didn't get a chance to see the movie yet. And you have promised me that there is a broken mirror therein.

[Alex Schwartz]

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

[Vincent Cunningham]

Of course.

[Alex Schwartz]

Where was her security service that day? I've often wondered this since seeing the film, but let's not nitpick. They get her and they keep her in the bottom of their squalid home in rural somewhere or other and try to make her confess. Can we have a dialogue, please?

[Jesse Plemons (character voice)]

Don't call it a dialogue. This isn't Death of a Salesman, okay?

[Alex Schwartz]

Can we talk please? Or are you just going to.

[Jesse Plemons (character voice)]

We don't need to talk. Yes, okay, Because I know exactly what you're going to say. You're going to say that I'm in some kind of Internet induced auto hypnotic feedback loop in gatekeepers and norms and all that weak hegemonic horseshit. But that is precisely the limp dick rhetoric that you've been instructed to counter the human insurgency with. That's the fucking hyper normalized dialectic by which you've convinced seven and a half billion people that they're not your captives to keep us believing in these fucking false institutional fucking shibboleths.

[Alex Schwartz]

You mean shibboleths.

[Jesse Plemons (character voice)]

That's what I said.

[Nomi Frye]

You said.

[Jesse Plemons (character voice)]

Yeah, whatever.

[Alex Schwartz]

Sorry. What goes on is a kind of hostage standoff for the ages where Emma Stone both denies everything and then agrees to everything. And the audience is kept in constant suspense about whether or not this conspiracy theory could possibly be true. And I'm gonna tell you, not my favorite movie of the year. I know the Lanthimos heads are all out there, they're loving it and I'm happy for them, but I'm not happy for myself. Cause I really. This one didn't do it for me. Even though I liked all the performances in it, I felt. I gotta tell you, I felt just talking about the mirror, the broken mirror, is like you're looking at an American idiot who might also be an American genius. That's the question of the movie. Are you absolutely moronic to believe that aliens are controlling our planet? Or have you put all the signs together? Did you do your own research and are you gonna be proved right? And that kind of a conflict is not that intriguing to me since the way that the mirror was held up to that conflict, I felt was just to make every. It was a very Lanthimos thing. Everyone comes off looking appalling. Absolutely appalling. And I think Lanthimos as a filmmaker who really likes to hold himself at a remove from people and from his subjects and kind of Almost. It's almost like a little kid watching, like an ant farm. Like, oh, will they. Will they eat each other? You know, maybe I'll put a magnifying glass on one and see what happens when it burns. So that I felt that we are so swimming in conspiracy and in aggression and violence. This did not illuminate our situation for me, even though it was a much more. It might have for other people. It's a much more. You know, it's a very extreme on what's going on. Kidnapping someone is a lot to do.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah.

[Alex Schwartz]

Vincent, did you disagree? Did this do it for you?

[Vincent Cunningham]

I loved it because I love the work of the actor Jesse Plemons, who is just always so demented and strange and off kilter. And here he's made to stand in for the kind of someone who's become a trope in our society. Just the absolutely alienated, sad, and potentially violent young man. He also has a great line in the movie where I think, sort of trying to understand this person, he says, you know, I've been through the whole digestive system. I started alt right. I've been through, you know, communism, socialism, the sort of travel through ideologies that ends up in just utterance. We think out to lunchness. And what the movie does, I thought, well, is posit all of this on top of issues of class, political economy, the environment, in a way that I thought had. On a very much smaller scale. Even though it's visually kind of all over the place in terms of its terrain, it's less of a huge than the others that we're talking about. On a very small scale with a limited number of characters, try to say something about the interiority of a certain kind of person.

[Alex Schwartz]

And yet all that smallness and interiority has consequences for the entire human race. You won't spoil it, but this movie gives you the equivalent of a little shot of cyanide at the end. And it just says, drink up.

[Vincent Cunningham]

It goes galactic.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Nomi Frye]

And while I'm gonna see this, this is. You're really whetting my appetite for the cyanide.

[Alex Schwartz]

If you want the cyanide, go for it.

[Nomi Frye]

Y.

[Alex Schwartz]

That was too bitter to swallow for me at the end.

[Nomi Frye]

Guys, we've talked about all of these big releases, the big swings, the big swing of it all. Were there any other aspects that you saw around you of this broken mirror theme that struck you this year?

[Alex Schwartz]

To me, this is really the year that AI broke through as a daily use item for the majority of the population. Of course, these tools have been around for a while. But this is the year when they became ubiquitous and unavoidable, when just signing onto Google means that the little Google thing is going to give you complete sentences, often totally factually inaccurate about whatever you're looking at. I do think it's the year when, I mean, we know that people increasingly are turning to AI as they would turn to other people to have conversations with, to get information from, to find emotional connections. And so we have now in our pockets, everywhere, this mirror of humanity. And we will see where this leads. I think it's gonna be great.

[Nomi Frye]

It's gonna be great, guys.

[Alex Schwartz]

I'm glad.

[Nomi Frye]

Done.

[Alex Schwartz]

You know, I try not to be the lanthimos, like, handing everyone the cyanide shot. And I try to think it's all gonna be okay. And there are many things that I enjoy about technology and the way it is and having access to many things at our fingertips, but I'm gonna go ahead and call that a broken mirror. I'm gonna go ahead and call the AI chatbots who want to flatter and cajole us to be a broken mirror of humanity.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah. A friend of mine I saw on Instagram posted something like some image which was kind of very realistic and said, I can't be spending my whole life now wondering if an image is real or not, because this is the year when this really happened. And I'm realizing with certain things that I see, I still don't. I don't bother finding out almost. So, for instance, I do think this was fake, but there was ultimately. But I definitely thought it was real. When I looked at it, there was an image of Diddy in jail, like, in the prison yard.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I've seen this one. Yeah. So terrible.

[Nomi Frye]

Taken of him, like, talking to another inmate. And I was like, okay, yeah, here's a picture of somebody. You know, paparazzi caught a picture of Diddy in the jail yard talking to another inmate and, like, smiling and laughing. It was probably fake, but I have to admit, I never found out. And I think this is gonna be the way it's gonna be now, I guess. Unless it's something.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I'm pretty sure it was confirmed as fake. But to your point, like, how would.

[Nomi Frye]

You know that's it? Alex, have you experienced any of these.

[Alex Schwartz]

Kind of AI Daily and constantly misfits. I don't know what's. I don't even know if you're real. I'm blessed.

[Nomi Frye]

What's happening?

[Vincent Cunningham]

I follow someone on Instagram that I'm not sure if they're a person oh.

[Nomi Frye]

Oh, that's interesting. That it's an AI creation or someone.

[Vincent Cunningham]

That I and several of my friends follow on both Instagram and Twitter. I've never seen them in a picture with more than. The Google results are very low. Like, interacts with my posts sometimes.

[Nomi Frye]

And you follow them?

[Vincent Cunningham]

I follow them. They follow me. Sometimes they reply to my stuff. But it's like the angle is always, like, the camera's always waving in this very interesting way. The smile is always the exact. I'm like, I am wondering if it's a test for a better AI.

[Alex Schwartz]

I'm just saying, do you follow them.

[Nomi Frye]

Because they're hot or something? Like, what was the reason?

[Alex Schwartz]

Or because your friends are. Oh, that was Lisa.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah, that was. He was smiling. Okay, so it's like. So it's like a Busty.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Like a medical researcher who also, like, files a lot of writings.

[Nomi Frye]

So it's a Busty model.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Not busty. Not busty. Oh, not busty.

[Nomi Frye]

Small naturals.

[Alex Schwartz]

It's all coming out.

[Nomi Frye]

Sorry, sorry.

[Vincent Cunningham]

They post stuff about literature and art or whatever.

[Nomi Frye]

Not literature and art.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I'm like, yeah, she's a pretty girl, but that's not the reason. My point is, I'm like. As it goes on, I'm like. Your tone is oddly consistent. Your pictures are oddly consistent. Are you a canary in some coal mine? I don't. You know, I don't know.

[Nomi Frye]

Okay, off mic. We're gonna all put our minds together. We'll have to.

[Vincent Cunningham]

We're not gonna. If it's a.

[Nomi Frye]

If it's a. I'm gonna crack this.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I have to say, I just want to admit this. This is my first time even talking about this.

[Nomi Frye]

Okay.

[Alex Schwartz]

No, I think it's good. Admitting it to as many people as possible. Right?

[Nomi Frye]

You know all. It's good.

[Vincent Cunningham]

They're very obvious AI, like actual, like, thirst traps. I know about those ladies. I've already.

[Nomi Frye]

Right, right, right.

[Vincent Cunningham]

You know, swatting them away.

[Alex Schwartz]

But, you know, I do feel like with this whole mirror concept and the reality unreality, like, the more that unreality becomes our daily environment, the more that reality also commands a premium and seems to matter. It's very confusing. Look at the Leboos and the Lefoufus. We did a whole episode about the Labubus. And woe betide anyone whose child asks them, or, you know, I guess lover or whatever, whoever's wanting Labubus asks them for Labubu and they show up at the Lefufu. You gotta count every single one of those teeth. You gotta get the real thing, even though the real thing is a hideous piece of, you know, plastic and fake fur, but it's.

[Nomi Frye]

But it's real. You gotta feel that fur. You gotta stroke that fuzz, you know, And I was thinking about something a friend of mine said, and I don't know if I believe this, but that the increasing inability to tell real from fake online, that thing of, like, I don't know, that it's gonna be increasingly like this. Does this happen? Did this not happen? Are these people actually interacting in real life? Is Diddy like, you know, is diddy in the prison yard, et cetera? Well, maybe. And this is like the best case scenario, I think, lead to people putting the phone aside more. I mean, this is the best case scenario, right?

[Vincent Cunningham]

That would be great.

[Nomi Frye]

I don't know if this is real, but like, okay, yeah, it's like a potential positive is people being like, okay, yeah, I'm not getting anything from this. Screw all of it. I mean, that would be the best case scenario, but screw all of it.

[Alex Schwartz]

And what, I'm gonna go touch grass and sit by myself now? I mean, yes, not by myself.

[Nomi Frye]

I'm gonna talk with your human friends in a podcast studio. Okay, In a podcast studio. I mean, this is just because we're here, but I could also talk. You know, I'll engage with my real friends, I'll engage with real people in.

[Vincent Cunningham]

A controlled meatspace environment.

[Nomi Frye]

In a controlled meatspace environment. I'll join a run club. No, I'm kidding. I'm never gonna join a run club, no matter if the bots take over. That's not happening. But, you know, I mean, again, this is maybe wishful thinking, but something to possibly dream about.

[Alex Schwartz]

Do we hear a resolution for 2026?

[Vincent Cunningham]

Are you gonna touch grass in 2026?

[Alex Schwartz]

Wow, you should. I should.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Me too.

[Nomi Frye]

In a minute. In this atmosphere of a total break from reality, do we need these cinematic reflections of ourselves more than ever? Critics at large from the New Yorker will be right back.

[Katie Drummond]

What the hell is going on right now? And why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis, and maybe you are, too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week, I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun.

[Nomi Frye]

I want a shark that.

[Katie Drummond]

That eats the Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid so in.

[Nomi Frye]

A lot of ways, I try to.

[Jesse Plemons (character voice)]

Be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online.

[Alex Schwartz]

To the best of my ability, every.

[Katie Drummond]

Week, we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times. Meaning and context. True or false. You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across.

[Alex Schwartz]

From me, one day, at some point.

[Katie Drummond]

As of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False.

[Alex Schwartz]

Tell me more.

[Katie Drummond]

Listen to the big interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.

[Nomi Frye]

We've been talking about the shattered looking glass, the jagged shards, the mirror cracked from side to side, the mirror stage, but broken. And I mean, obviously this was the first year of Trump 2.0. I feel like a lot happened around that that could be talked about in mirror terms or broken mirror terms, rather.

[Alex Schwartz]

I mean, the situation defies easy summary. But one of the things.

[Nomi Frye]

That's one way to put it.

[Alex Schwartz]

I mean, one of the things very much on my mind is just the total constant warping of reality. That is at the point where if you resist even one little aspect of the reality warping, another one will just come in. I mean, I was talking before about how interesting it was to see sinners go back to the 1930s deep south at a time when the government itself is trying to erase history. And what I mean by that, just to get more granular. Like, this was the year that we heard that the Smithsonian was told to focus more on America's brightness and not about. And not, you know, get into how bad slavery was, when references to Trump's impeachments were removed from the exhibit on the presidency, when, when various national parks were had to remove, signs that explained that the land that the parks exist on belonged to native tribes who were forcibly removed. Like, okay, it's one thing to not want a land acknowledgement every time you go to the movies. It's quite another thing. I mean, and that can be discussed by reasonable people, but it's quite another thing to go to Yellowstone and just be like, nope, there's nothing here. So all these efforts that have been made to try to reflect reality accurately, there is a kind of falsification going on with the hope and the idea that the population will look into the big American mirror and see, you know, nothing but, I don't know, smiling white faces, like, what's the idea here? It's a nightmare. And so that is a political thing, but it also really is a cultural thing. And it does make me wonder, you know, like, one of the big pieces of news from the last week was. Is about this Netflix deal. We'll see which way it goes. But we now know that the administration wants to be involved. So when there's pressure coming from that level on culture, how does culture react? Like, you could see a really depressing bad thing, which is that culture caves. But also it creates many, many more opportunities for what, for lack of better word, we can call resistance. It becomes a lot easier to. It's harder to resist when the pressures are so high. But it's also easier. Cause even small things become more meaningful. You know what I mean?

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the lies are just so. I mean, even talking about this, I feel like it's such a cliche, you know, like Trump lies. It's like, yeah, no shit, you know, but the level things have reached in this respect are insane. And I think the difference this time around in this new iteration of the administration is that the self preservation instinct of corporate entities seem to have reached such a fever pitch, you know, that there's a complete kind of like, agreement to appease this version, this false version of reality. You know, if we're thinking about like the inauguration and all kind of the heads of industry, you know, Zuck and Bezos, Tim Cook, all of that, and just like everybody just as like, willing to kind of kiss the ring in a very public way. Like, the shame about that is gone. And these are people who are presiding over the making of culture. You know, whether it's Apple, whether it's Netflix, you know, whether it's the social media or in, you know, it's like, this is it. And, you know, this kind of leads me to a question of like, do you think the movies that we were discussing are responding to this warping in any meaningful sense?

[Vincent Cunningham]

Well, I think Eddington is a good example of this because it takes place in 2020, a moment of incredible fracture, not only politically, ideologically, sort of just in the fabric of our common reality, but it's really interesting. It's important that it's Trump 2.0, right?

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Most of the first Trump administration happened before the pandemic.

[Nomi Frye]

Yes.

[Vincent Cunningham]

And then we had this interregnum with Biden, and here Trump comes again. And so to think about the first Trump administration and this second term is, on some level, to be on two sides of a great divide in our notions of what we are, not only as a country, but as a human community, to be alive now is to look over that gulf, to try to remember what it was really like in 2015 is to imagine a whole different world. And it is kind of looking into a mirror.

[Nomi Frye]

Absolutely different.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Seeing how many more.

[Nomi Frye]

It's only been 10 years. It's only been 10 years.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah. Yeah. In some ways, it seems like 2025 is the year that 2020 finally ramified. It's like this is the world that we now have.

[Alex Schwartz]

I absolutely agree. That's why I do think it's interesting to see people taking it on directly and trying, maybe failing, but also trying to actually present a vision of the crisis in American culture, because we're living through this crisis that just is lasting forever.

[Nomi Frye]

It's.

[Alex Schwartz]

It's a non ending crisis. And I also think there's like, I don't know what you guys think about this. There's a big declinist narrative, obviously with politics, that Trump is saying, we're better than ever and everything is better than ever. Many people are saying, nothing could be worse. This is the worst thing ever. I've seen a lot of lists from various tastemakers and people just kind of say, ugh, this year sucked. And that has me feeling down. I don't know what to say about that, but.

[Nomi Frye]

Well, I do want towards the end of this episode to maybe lift us up a little bit and urge us to think what could be a potential bright point after all that we've said about the broken mirror stage of our nation and culture?

[Alex Schwartz]

Well, I kind of do think, you know, as mixed feelings as I have about one battle after another, and I know you guys share it, we're ignoring the number one hero and the best character of this whole movie, Sensei Sergio San Carlos.

[Vincent Cunningham]

That's true. It's very true.

[Alex Schwartz]

Played by Benicio Del Toro. Yeah. And the thing about Benicio and the thing about who's amazing in this role, as he calls himself, he's a kind of Latino Harriet Tubman who's helping migrants find a way through the traps that have been placed for them. There is an incredible sequence, I could have watched a whole movie about this, about the safe house where he and his family are helping to hide people. And also a great confrontation with the hilarious lame ass Bob, Leo DiCaprio's character, where Bob kind of apologizes for turning the police onto him. And the sensei says, we've been laid siege to you for hundreds of years. It's not your fault. Don't get selfish. That's a mirror moment of like, wake up, look at yourself in the mirror. This isn't all about you. I come back to that to the two ways of being in opposition, one of them is toting machine guns and setting off explosions, and the other is having the kind of quiet discipline and solidarity to carry on and continue to build the world as it should be. That's what I'm taking with me into 2026.

[Nomi Frye]

I'm gonna say the thing that I always say that for me, what is kind of like the saving grace is people still intent on making culture and making art. The fact that people still are doing that and trying to do that, and the fact that people like us, I mean, this is what this podcast is about, are trying to, like, take these works in and reflect on them and maybe bring other people into them. For me, that's like. I mean, it's not everything, but it's something. And it makes people think that life is still worth living, maybe even if it's not necessarily, you know, immediate political action. And I see this with my daughter, you know, I see this with, like, her excitement about discovering things, you know, and for us, we're hoary old, you know, whatever. Although, of course, we still belong on the tooth. We still get excited. We still, of course, discuss and live and breathe it, but we have been doing it for a long time. But for someone finding out, oh, this is a really funny, super smart TV show, or, oh, can you believe this band and the music they're making, whatever it is, or that's what life's about. And even in the world of the broken mirror, hopefully we have these examples to at least tide us over a little bit.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah.

[Nomi Frye]

What do you think, Vincent?

[Vincent Cunningham]

In many different ways, these are some of the texts that we've talked about, are about the limits of a certain kind of politics, let's call it, whether institutional, partisan, and the efficacy or whatever doom of people acting on their own, like sort of democracy closer to the ground. Call it revolutionary, call it whatever you want. And it does seem that thinking about the mirror, broken or not, is a way of describing a kind of stasis, a kind of almost like narcissistic kind of figuring out. And we all have to do it. We all have to describe problems before we solve them. But, you know, the fixation on this fixation on democracy on the ground, whether it's, you know, violent or not, whether it's misguided or not, mistaken or not, is a maybe, I hope, describes a yearning for more action, for like, a move away from the mirror and out. This goes to your point about touching grass, like, out into the streets, out into community with other people, where Change is potentially fates are decided, you know, as opposed to the long gaze into the mirror.

[Nomi Frye]

So this is our final episode of the year and we would be remiss not to take a moment and thank all of you listeners. Without all of you, we'd just be three people in a room yapping, as they say. But, you know, knowing that all of you are out there tuning in each week and, you know, hearing from you and, you know, sometimes we even meet you on the street and that is like such a pleasure, it makes it all feel worthwhile. This is a community and we love it.

[Alex Schwartz]

Listeners. We absolutely love you. Please be in touch with us. We love hearing from you and you guys really make the show.

[Vincent Cunningham]

We are wishing you the brightest end of the year.

[Nomi Frye]

We're so lucky to have you. 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. Alexis Quadrato composed our theme music and we had engineering help today from Michael Geno, with mixing by Mike Kutchman. That's it from us for 2025. We have so many fun episodes that we're planning for you all in the new year, and we can't wait to share them with you. We hope you get some nice time off to unwind, relax, spend with your families, maybe watch some movies or read a book. We'll see you all back here in 2026.

[Rebecca Ford]

Hi, I'm Rebecca Ford, senior awards correspondent at Vanity Fair and co host of Little Gold Men. Oscar season is upon us. Little Gold Men takes you behind the scenes of the race for the biggest prize in Hollywood.

[Nomi Frye]

There's 100 wrestlers in the room, but only one can be Oscar nominated.

[Rebecca Ford]

Whether you're a movie lover or an industry buff, Little Gold Men from Vanity Fair has everything you need to know about this year's Oscar race. Follow and listen to Little Gold Men wherever you get your podcasts.

[Nomi Frye]

From. Prx.