Naomi Fry: This is Critics At Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Naomi Fry. 
Vinson Cunningham: I'm Vinson 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. Hello Critic. Hello and critic. That Critic and critic, a critic one, critic two.
Alex Schwartz: How are you doing today? My critics. It's not as hot as it was last week, so I'm doing a bit better. Oh, wonderful. 
Vinson Cunningham: Uh, yeah. Great. I, you know, hung out on my stoop in, in Fort Green Park, and then I got, I'm drunk on Love, love Island. It's been a great weekend. 
Alex Schwartz: Okay. Well we are here deep in the summer of 2025. Mm-hmm. We're right in the middle of it. Mm-hmm. And let's just get real right at the top. Things feel on a national and cultural level, I would argue absolutely, completely insane. Mm-hmm. Right. You know, I, I'm just going to tick off on my five, maybe six or seven fingers.
Naomi Fry: Who knows nowadays, who knows, who knows what the biological truth is? Who could 
Alex Schwartz: even know? I'm just gonna tick off some of the things. That you might have heard of going on recently grok, the antisemitic AI chatbot on Twitter. 
Mm-hmm. 
Alex Schwartz:    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, um, 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. Mm-hmm. Um, we have Jeffrey Epstein again. Apparently it'll never end just a suicide. And you know, some people are not very happy with that. Not as in maybe even most, maybe even most. Mm-hmm. FBIs in hot water and the conspiracy theories that have been invited right into the White House or 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. Uh, frankly, deranged response to politicians. So we are not in a good place. Mm. 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, May, 2020 over five years ago.
Wow. It's hard to, it feels like yesterday and a lifetime, right? I agree. It's very weird to contemplate, but we're going to contemplate it because. Even though we, many of us might prefer to forget it, it is back as the setting of a new film by the director Ari Astor, which is called Eddington.
        CLIP
Edington is out in theaters now. It, uh, debuted at the Cannes Film Festival back in May. It wildly polarized audiences there. People walked outta the screening. The press conference was chaotic. There were mixed feelings, let's just say, and I think it. It's fair to call it a bit of a departure for Ari Astor.
It's not a horror film like his breakout hits, hereditary and Midsummer were. How would you guys characterize this briefly? We don't wanna get too deep, but what kind of movie are we talking about here? 
Naomi Fry: I mean, it's a mashup, right? It's a, I know Astor 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.
Vinson 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. It's a lot. There's a lot going 
Naomi Fry: on. 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 Q Anon 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, uh, 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.
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 the too muchness of American life? That's today on critics at Large: Eddington and the American Berserk.
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Alex Schwartz: So we're gonna start with Edington 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 edington. It was 
Naomi Fry: so fun to do it together. It was so fun.
Alex Schwartz: 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. You were like, 'cause I knew, I knew that we needed to save it for this table. That's true. Yeah. So let's just, let's get the basics outta the way first before we get into it.
Who would like to lay out the premise? Of the film edington. 
Naomi Fry: Okay. I'm gonna, 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 Edington 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 him because of COVID. So a couple things happen. There is a mayoral election forthcoming in Edington. The incumbent mayor is this pretty smarmy guy named Ted Garcia. He is played by. Pedro Pascal,  and Ted is kind of, um. Liberal. He wants to bring this new data center into town, um, to, to kind of like advance Addington into the 21st century, into the tech real and bring jobs in. Joe Cross hates him,  And. It. 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. To 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 edington as well. Mm-hmm. Then it kind of goes, batch 
Vinson Cunningham: it.
Alex Schwartz: Yes. Right. Totally. 
Vinson Cunningham: the only. Things I would add, texturally is that it's a movie that's obsessed with screens.
Yes. 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, uh, ambient relationship to this, um, sort of almost like haunted looking data center, which is growing and growing as the movie goes on. Yeah. Anything else? I think that's. I'm ready to ask you Descriptively. 
Alex Schwartz: Yeah, I'm ready to ask you the big question. Vinson Cunningham, did you like Eddington? 
Vinson Cunningham: Oh,  at the beginning I was kind of worried about the movie because it seemed to me like a, a very broad parody of a time that I lived through and did not particularly like.
It, it, you know, oh, you 
Naomi Fry: didn't like it. I 
Vinson Cunningham: didn't like the pandemic. What if you were like, that will be the revelation of this episode. It was wonderful. It was great. Yeah. Um, anyway, uh, it seemed to be a kind of above it all. Omnidirectionally hostile parody of liberal, overbearing. This on the, on the one side, a sort of cruel emphasis on masks.
There is a scene. Where the Joe Cross character goes to the supermarket and the mask mandate is being sort of draconian enforced. Uh uh, 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, dunderhead conservatism that that's kind of ev it, it's everybody's stupid.
Mm-hmm. 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. Mm, but I, you know, it, it was kind of, it felt a little thin. And then when the movie ruptures and gets, um, I don't think this is too much of a spoiler, uh, very violent and scary and almost sinister.
I started to really like the movie with the first like, weird. Moment of violence that just inexplicable. Yeah. Someone dies very abruptly. Mm-hmm. And then it just like goes on this like 30 minute absolute psychotic, expressionistic, um, journey. Yeah. I was so with it. 
Naomi Fry: Yeah. 
Vinson Cunningham: And by the end I felt a mixture of those things.
Naomi Fry: Mm. 
Vinson Cunningham: Um, but I did feel. The excruciating of that time, even though they're making lots of, you know, masks, social distancing, um, the, the, the blithe uh, ignorance of the Sheriff's Office, once Black Lives Matter comes into play, all that stuff, by the end, I, I did feel the deeply isolating polarization of that time.
Can I step back and put us back in that screening room? 
Alex Schwartz: Yes. For a second. I wish you would. Please do. 
Vinson Cunningham: So 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 gawing along in this very dark humor way with you.
All of this sort of references to the pandemic, et cetera, et cetera, as things worsened, um, 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 go fall 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, the laughter and the, the, 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. Um, it's almost like a doubling down on the cognitive 
mm-hmm. 
Vinson Cunningham: Dissonance of the time. And it was like a weird moment. It 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. Vinson, I totally agree with you.
That moment really stands out to me too because so much of Edington 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. 
Naomi Fry: Mm-hmm. 
Alex Schwartz: 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 un Why are you laughing? I can't understand why you're laughing. Yeah. 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. 
Alex Schwartz: Yeah. If I may, yes, please 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 reaction to this movie. 
You, you had the exact opposite reaction. You liked the beginning more than you liked the post rupture. Yes. Okay. Because I liked the moment of rupture. I will say I liked that I was, 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. Mm-hmm. Between, let's say March and July, 2020. Mm-hmm. Like, yes. It had this huge effect. The, 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 handwashing, the masking, the six feet apart.  But 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 Astor was not only depicting those things, but really putting basically as fine a point on it as you can put on it. Yeah. 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. 
Naomi Fry: Mm-hmm. 
Alex Schwartz: Um, 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 God damnit way, but in really, um, having to consider how the intensities and the political intensities at the time weighed in on how we treated one another. Yeah. 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, um, I don't give a shit about reality attitude here, and I wish I could read that as an extreme form of critique. Mm-hmm. But I just read it as a total abandonment of critique in the end. Mm-hmm. There is, um, 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 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. Mm-hmm. And at that point I sort of thought, I don't understand this anymore. I think Ari Asta really exploited the setup. Mm-hmm. 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. 
Mm-hmm. 
Alex Schwartz:  Of directorial responsibility, point of view, and, you know, just, just the movie itself. At the end of that rant. I turn to Naomi Fry
and I say, what did you make of this? 
Naomi Fry: Alex, I don't disagree with you about the detachment point. The sort of like, okay, I'm gonna take this, um, view from, from nowhere in some senses to look at this. absolutely disgusting tapestry of, of American reality in, you know, the first half of the 2020s. 
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, I don't know if I always know what to do, but you know, I have this sense.
I know how, how you're gonna address 
Vinson Cunningham: them. 
Naomi Fry: I know how to address them, I think, or I hope, or I have the desire mm-hmm. Still to engage. Like if I look at like a Trump AI ad about like rebuilding Gaza with like a, whatever, like a gold statue of Trump and like Beachside condos. Then, yeah, I can, I can engage with that.
I can, I can think about what it means. Uh, 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 sum, you know? And even if it's like from the viewpoint of like, okay, five years on May, 2020, we're looking at BLM, we're looking at the masking, we're looking at, uh, this data center.
This like, okay, it's bringing progress to the town of Edington. However, it's clearly like 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, uh, the Emma Stone character, Louise is.
Is kind of becomes involved with there's mm-hmm. Austin Butler is this kind of like conspiracist. 
Alex Schwartz:  Yeah. He's a conspiracist who believes in, in powerful pedophile rings and Yeah. But again, 
Naomi Fry: like what is happening? Was he abused? He says he was abused. How do we know? Believe victims? Not 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. 
Mm-hmm. I just don't know. And maybe, you know, maybe you're right. I mean, you, you say it's an abdication of dicial 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, the kind of like.
Attempt to map out and the utter impossibility of mapping out what the fuck is going on Yeah. In America right now. And to me, you know, Vince and I, 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 like, 
Vinson Cunningham: it is really wonderful film making. It's good, can do the thing it making, like I felt like, 
Naomi Fry: I was like, I felt like the performances were good. I felt like the cinematography was Darius Kanji. Uh, is this is the photographer. 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. Um, so I enjoyed that as well. Okay. 
Alex Schwartz:  But here's my question for you. Yes. 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? Mm-hmm. For the artist to say, I actually just don't know what to make of any of this.
Yeah. Or do you guys disagree that that's what's going on? 
Vinson Cunningham: I kind of disagree that that's what's going on be. At first I was like, oh, this is a movie. At least that indulges more in nihilism than politics. Mm-hmm. 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 kinda like vulgar Marxism. It's like culture is a grand blanket. It's a conspiracy thrown over the material. There is a, a concern that is growing in this town. Um, the, uh, it's called Solid Gold Magic harp 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, um, take place in this land of the cultural, which I think Astor is saying is a distraction, is  nothing, is the land of screens. Mm. Um, 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 it in, its, I think there is a throwing up of hands, but only to say, um, these are all grand mystifications distractions, um, from the real event. Yeah. Astor 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. It does begin and end with it. Discern at least his politics, whether it works or not. Mm-hmm. Expresses itself perfectly or not. I don't know, but I do think that that is discernible 
 in the design of the film.
Alex Schwartz: Edington 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.
:: MIDROLL 1 :: 
Naomi Fry: Alex, I would like to thank you for bringing up this term that I was not familiar with. It's, uh, a term coined by Philip Pro and American Pastoral is 1997 novel, and the term is American Berser. It really brought into focus this type of text for me. So maybe can you tell us a little bit about it, first of all, in Roth?
Like what, what it is, is 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 beautiful. Like  not those literal three words, but how we 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? Yeah, please. Alright. It has to do with, it has to do with American intellectuals, my friends. It has to do with, with the magazine culture, basically. Wow. In, I, 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 ies, 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. 
Naomi Fry: And this is 61 my friends. 
Alex Schwartz: This is 61. I mean, imagine 
Naomi Fry: now 
Alex Schwartz: you think back to 1961, they're looking around and being like, what is happening?
This is too wild. Even. We're not even in 67, 68. Oh my God. They had no idea. And already he's saying, this is too crazy. This is too hard trying to take hold of. Nor are we 62 or 63. Indeed. Americans are bewildered people. It's part of our thing. 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 Wolf, the man in the white suit. Mm-hmm. He writes an essay, 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 eighties 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. Mm-hmm. What happened? And then he basically is like, well, I did it in bonfire of the vanities. Okay, fine. Did you Tom Wolf? That's a whole other question, but this just brings us to my, the end point of my theory. Mm-hmm. 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. Mm-hmm. 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 Swede love of who was this? It rhymes with the love. It rhymes with the love. That's what theys what they say. 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 sixties.
Naomi Fry: Mm-hmm. 
Alex Schwartz: And. The Vietnam War, which his daughter becomes passionate about when she's a teenager and passionate about resisting. Certainly, yeah. And she commits a crime that then haunts this family and destroys his family. And the phrase the American berserk comes into this novel is the narrator of the novel, Nathan Zuckerman Ross 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 Wolf and to those who, like Tom Wolf said, he himself, Roth himself, had said, I don't think this can be done. And Tom Wolf 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. Um, first of all, if you've read American Pastoral, if you like it, because I think like 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, um, 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, and attempt at wrestling with it? 
Naomi Fry:I was intrigued, Alex, by your take about realism because to me, the American berserk. It 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 Astor's, like Oliver Stone movie.
You know, I mean, talk about like drilling down into reality to achieve a kind of like transcendent hysteria, 
you know, um, 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, in Stone's case, like later 20th century.
I was thinking particularly of natural born killers from 1994. Mm-hmm. Which was kind of like,  for those of you who remember the nineties, remember how all we could talk about. With serial killers and copycat serial killers, and you know, the remorselessness and the psychopathy of serial killers that emerges from.
Like as a kind of a poison fruit or, 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 us, bring us right to it. So natural 
Naomi Fry: born killers, which I,  I recently rewatched it like maybe a year ago when I was like, okay, this movie actually rocks. I was like talk about kind of like effective, um, maybe somewhat exploitative, probably, but like absolutely energetic filmmaking.
Mm-hmm. It's about Mickey and Mallory. Mickey is Woody Woodsy Harrelson. 
Vinson Cunningham: Mm-hmm. 
Naomi Fry: Um, Mallory is Juliette Lewis, who is great at 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, 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.  Mm-hmm. Crucially. Which is why it kind of like, I'm not saying edington 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. 
Mm-hmm. 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 that the nineties 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 nineties media culture, let's 
say. 
Alex Schwartz: Vinson, how about you? Where does the American berserk take you? 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. It seems to me that part of the American berserk as it presents still today is like, as specifically a strategy of the encyclopedic a landscape that addresses itself to many issues.
It can, you know? Mm-hmm. Pedophilia, violence, this, yeah. That the kind of, the litany of troubles and tries to. Put them all into one space and not totally synthesize them. Mm-hmm. When we first brought this up, I, 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 that's. Trying to grab everything, but put it into one vast metaphor to unify things. And the, the great romantic thing is like everything becomes symbolized by nature, by the landscape, the whale, the ship. Mm-hmm. 
Mm-hmm. 
Vinson Cunningham: Those congregated on the ship and, and, and forge.
A unitary metaphor. Melville's novella. Uh, Benito Serino, oh, 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, um, 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. Um, saying something about modernity through one metaphor. Mm. Right. Um, and this is what's interesting about Edington. 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, the magazine effect of.
Yeah. Everything that's going on 
Naomi Fry: in the landscape, in the landscape. On the landscape, yeah. At 
Vinson Cunningham: once. One of the similarities between sort of, um, Roth's approach in American Pastoral and the prescription laid down by uh, Tom Wolf is, Wolf says. This is why journalists are gonna 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, you know, homeless shelter and we'll go to the DA's office basically creating, again, an x-ray of the bonfire, of the vanities. Um, a very good and also very racist novel and, um, and make of that repertorial 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 some of something like Edington.
And then American Pastoral, is told in this one seamless way. It's not hectic and it's right. It's, it's almost nostalgic. He's telling a story. He's like, I used to know this guy. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's almost essayistic. I was trying to decide what I like about this kind of thing 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 edington, it's because there's no character who can reflect No. Or synthesize or think. No, that's such an interesting point.
Alex Schwartz: And so I'm, I'm, I mean, I'm guessing, or I'm, I am now working on the inference that this is also what attracts you to Melville because you have so much of the essays stick in there. It's, it's, it's, you got all the raw material, but you also get the essays stick. 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?
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. Yeah. And to leave us with, uh, to unify, yeah. A coherent reflection. Even if that unification is not uplift, it does not have to be uplifted. And I think it would be a lie for it to be uplifted.
 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. Mm. 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. 
:: MIDROLL 2 :: 
Alex Schwartz: 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 were just having a wonderful lunch on the side of a mountain, actually. That mountain is Mount Aetna. 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 question mark. 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 gonna outstrip depiction of trying to depict it?
Naomi Fry: Well, isn't art about trying. Like in some ways, you know what I mean? Like I think, and I was saying this to you guys before. The one thing I appreciate about Edington and I think in general about a project that is, you know, an ambitious project that seeks to show us a slice, a sort of like the different strata of reality at a particular battle 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, 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 a, 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, the misadventure, you know, in Vietnam. And it's famously trying to do something monstrously, almost big and ambitious.
Uh, to the extent that it almost killed like several people involved in the production as Hearts of Darkness. Mm-hmm. Shows, you know, I mean there's, uh, the Hearts of Darkness opens with this incredible, um, press conference where Francis Ford Copa stands at a podium and he says, um. This movie isn't about Vietnam.
This movie is Vietnam, which is of course, it's over exaggerated and it's, uh, kind of grandiose and, and pompous. Yeah, but in the sense of, of saying, you know, this movie ballooned to like, whatever it was, how many millions of dollars over budget like Martin, she, and having a heart attack almost dying, you know, just like monsoons everything.
The sets getting swept away, like, 
Vinson Cunningham: uh, 
Naomi Fry: 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 that's, this is like a naive thing to say. I dunno. 
Vinson Cunningham: No, I think I totally agree. I mean, the sort of wild ambitions of art making Yeah, art is about trying 
Naomi Fry: Yeah.
Vinson Cunningham: Among other things, but it's about that too. And I, I think that's right. The, the, the, the reach, the sort of asymptotic reach towards something that, you know, you, you will approach, but never quite touch, I think. Is an ideal that I, I share, but I do think that we are always trying, and the question is, which way do we go?
Our episode of, uh, in April 17th, um, about the, the movie warfare. 
Alex Schwartz: Mm-hmm. 
Vinson Cunningham: Alex Garland. I was thinking about 
Alex Schwartz: that too. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. It's a, it's a miniature, it's one thing. A thorough scraping of one experience, but trying, I think by suggestion to, to, to achieve some, not something, not too unlike what Edington is doing, which is to sort of juice it for metaphor, right?
But, and so I think. There's this continuum of attempts. I think it's, nobody's ever gonna stop trying. It's 
Naomi Fry: Americans are, I mean, many people will stop trying. Yes, 
Vinson Cunningham: that's true. Um, there will always be people who try. Yeah. In various forms.  Americans are too obsessed with ourselves for that not to be part of the structure of our art Make.
Alex Schwartz:  Do you guys think that there have been other recent examples about trying to capture our current American berserk?
Naomi Fry: Mm-hmm. I was thinking when we were talking about the American Berserk, I was thinking about   the Boots Riley movie, sorry to bother You. Oh yeah.
Mm-hmm. From 2018, um, where Laith Stanfield plays, um, this sort of like black telemarketer who. Adopts like White Voice as, as the telemarketer, and suddenly rises in, 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, it's right there with the American. Berserk. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. Yeah. 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, he an ideological man. He's got mm-hmm. He's got ideas.
Yeah. And one way to think about this form of art making is. The paranoid. And, and I don't mean that he's paranoid. I've, I, you know, I share lots of his politics. Mm-hmm. I just mean that like, when you've got an account, do you know what I mean? The, the person who's got it all figured out, and now I'm gonna tell you, you know, that this idea that becomes like the crank, the prophet, whatever, um, this kind of artwork is that kind of prophecy, you know?
Yeah. And we live in an age. Of ideologies that what happens when the splintering happens in the world is that everybody gets, and this is, you know, this is where that the same qualities of being that create paranoid conspiracy also create large scale omnidirectional works of art. 
Naomi Fry: That's really interesting. 
there's talking about the 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, the kind of craggy hills mm-hmm. Surrounding the town of Eddington. Mm-hmm. I was stumbling into town,  It's dark. You don't really see who it is. Yeah. You just see kind of a muttering mouth and I was like, is that, is that Joaquin in Phoenix? Like is this the hero of the movie? Mm-hmm. 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 the mayor,  with some of the other characters in the movie. Mm-hmm. He's a kind of public disturbance, right?  this character who's like, looks like a kind of, in some ways, an Old Testament prophet stumbling into town to tell everyone what's really happening.
And then what emerges is 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, the two sidedness mm-hmm.
Of that I think is figured in the movie. 
Alex Schwartz: Yeah, I think you're exactly right, Vinson, to put your finger in this idea of, um, paranoia and paranoia, politics and paranoia and art, because paranoia is all about connection making. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And it's, it's all about connecting everything to everything else.
Yeah. It's like that meme of 
Naomi Fry: like the, the person, it's always Sunny's, 
Vinson Cunningham: sunny Philadelphia. Yes. String eyes connecting picture. Yes, yes. 
Alex Schwartz: Yeah, 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, you know, 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.
Mm-hmm. 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 prob 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 wanna 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 so. So do we go out and tell the artists on you go, yeah, of course we do.
Yeah. And to extend what are we gonna do? 
Vinson 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 win.
Alex Schwartz: This has been Critics at Large. This week's episode was produced by Michele O'Brien and edited by Stephanie Kariuki. Alex Barasch is our consulting editor. Our executive producer is Steven Valentino. Conde Nast's Head of Global Audio is Chris Bannon. Alexis Cuadrado 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 large at Newyorker.com/critics.