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.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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 |

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]

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.