Vinson Cunningham: This is Critics At Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Vincent Cunningham. 
Naomi Fry: I'm Alex Schwartz. And I'm Nomi Fry. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now. And how we got here. Hello friends? Yeah. Hello. It's that time of year, we're seeing year end lists everywhere.
Spotify wrapped has come and it's gone. What was, what was your Spotify wrap? Lead artist, 
Alex Schwartz: uh, PEV for Peter and the Wolf. Oh, beautiful. I just, you know, all 10 tracks. That's where it's been at in my household. That's 
Naomi Fry: where it's been at Vincent. 
Vinson Cunningham: Mine was an artist that I mentioned a lot on this podcast. Dijon. Oh, nice. Okay. Whose album Baby was my favorite album of this year. And also, um, Justin Bieber, whose best album Swag came out this year was also up there. Um, okay. Well, and then there was, there are other things happened.
How about you? 
Naomi Fry: You're cooler than me. 
Vinson Cunningham: I mean, mine hand me, 
Naomi Fry: mine was handle a classic for a reason. My, 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, mm, year it comes. What we settled on is the year of the broken mirror.
Alex, do you want to start us off, um, 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.
But I especially forgotten. Especially forgotten. Mm-hmm. But I, 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, 
        CLIP - One Battle After Another
or Edington by Ari Astor
        CLIP - Eddington
 or Sinners by Ryan Coogler.
        CLIP - Sinners
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, so when I, the mirror idea is like we're looking at ourselves and, uh, 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 Urist projects as these filmmakers try to tell us what they see when they look into the American mirror. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. 
Naomi Fry: Right, and we had the kind of like shifting nature of reality vis-a-vis ai. It's like, what is reality anymore? Where when everything can be kind of like reconstructed in, in the image of the real and yet be so, you know, defiantly unreal. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. It's, it's like in this effort, these big swing efforts to reflect the culture, often there were.
There, there had to emerge these alternate figures. Mm-hmm. This is a year of vampires and twins, almost as a way to inspect what it means to be human now. We had to see some sort of humanoid parallel to ourselves, um, 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, 
the sort of, um, the, the messy, weird, unsettling nature of maybe our self definition has to change. And that's always a kind of a startling phenomenon. 
Naomi Fry: Totally. Honestly, there were so many different ways that this year really started to feel like a broken mirror, and we're gonna 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 and 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, but let's start maybe with the biggest one or one of the bigger ones. Okay. This through line of, of kind of weird ask skew, 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.
Uh, where do you guys, 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. Good at that. I think that's a really good 
Vinson Cunningham: way to sort 
Alex Schwartz: Some norms should not be upended. Exactly.
Exactly. As an editor of mine Long said, you know, chronology is a very underrated way to tell a story. Very true. Um, yeah, so sinners, I think of, 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. Intriguing about ourselves.
Sinners came out April, 2025. Can you even remember that far back? I ask you barely. 
Naomi Fry: Who can? 
Alex Schwartz: Barely. I was a young girl then. Oh. And look at us now. Um, 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 urist projects.
Yes. Like Ryan Kler basically went up against the studios and won to, to, 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, um, vampires, vampires, 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 thirties. And, um, 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. 
Vinson 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.
        CLIP - Sinners
 Then the vampires show up. I mean, to me, this was Kugler 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 in some of the darkest history. Then the supernatural element I found totally fascinating and, and riveting. And the more I think about it, the more, yeah, the more it stuck with me. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. 
Naomi Fry: Yeah. I mean I, 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. Huge swing. Yeah. And it's a huge swing. And I wanna say also re kugler, because Kugler is a Marvel director. Right? He's most known as, you know, the director of Black Panther, and 
Vinson Cunningham: he also did, uh, creed 
Naomi Fry: and Creed. Mm-hmm. Yes. He's, he's a very talented director in, in everything he's done.
But those were movies that were beholden to this mm-hmm. Like story that the corporation is, is telling. Right. And with this, it's still a big movie. It's still, of course not an in, it's not an independent movie by any means, but the story itself, it's kind of like, it's a, it's kind of like his own mirroring.
Mm-hmm. You know, of, of kind of like, let's do a big movie. Let's kind of like 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, of kind of like, let's, let's see what is possible.
To do within kind of like the reality that we share in which like big moneymaking corporations expect you to do. Yeah. One thing. And he ended up doing another in a way that was, I found weirdly radical. Like it was like, it kind of like surprising to me. Yeah. I would say 
Vinson Cunningham: he's, he, he's such an interesting director because he is known for those bigger budget movies.
Uh. But also his debut was called, it's Fruitvale Station. Mm-hmm. 2013. I still remember seeing it and sobbing at the end. Mm-hmm. At uh, uh, at the Angelica Theater in New York. Uh, it's about a young man, a true story of a young man named Oscar Grant who was killed. Um. On the train by a police officer, um, in, in, 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, of a tough 
Naomi Fry: yes. 
Vinson Cunningham: Reality. Not without its joys, not without its triumphs, but a tough reality. And on the other hand, um, this kind of surrealist superhero, um, thing that happens with the, 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, uh, which comes alive most vividly in this great dance scene that brings together the past and the future. Um, making them speak to each other as if across, you know, two sides of a mirror, but also, you know, really sticking to a, a realist sort of. Historical impulse, which seems to be so alive, uh, with him and in telling a history, um, also give us a sort of new vision of ourselves.
Naomi Fry: Right. 
Alex Schwartz: There is one other wya that Sinners reflects haha our broken mirror theme. It’s really hard to talk about culture without talking about politics when it’s as all consuming and intrusive as it is. This was a year when so much of politics was about telling americans that what they know to be true about their country or about their past never happened. 
Naomi Fry: The year of gaslighting. 
Alex Schwartz: 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 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 I remember Richard Brody in his review of Sinners was really happy that the amount of money that things cost were put so directly, but also holding up this mirror to all of us who know that the country’s past is riven with brutality or ugliness and who don’t find looking away from that to be 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 of reality through fiction. 
Naomi Fry: 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, uh, Edington, the Ari Astor movie that came out in July, 2025.
Uh, so yeah, written and directed and co-produced by Astor himself and. Basically, this is a COVID movie, right? Just to, just to give a little bit of a prey 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, uh, named Edington 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, kind of like. Falling in the grip of the alternative reality of kind of conspiracy theories about COVID and and so on.
Um, then he has this nemesis, this sort of like woke annoyingly fae liberal, uh, contender to the mayor reality of the town played by, um. Pedro Pascal. 
        CLIP: Eddington
There are these, these sort of young white, again, annoyingly woke youth, uh, who are uh, 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 this, in a sense, a take on things that actually happened.
But then. not in a supernatural way, but in certainly off the rails way The movie goes kind of b bonkers, right? And, and gives us a view of America that I think we can also include among the, the broken mirror. Canon, the broken here canon that we growing, establishing, growing.
Yeah. Do you guys wanna wanna talk about that a little bit? 
Vinson Cunningham: Well, there's so many. Um, it's 
Naomi Fry: a, it's a co it's complicated to wrap our arms around what goes on in that movie. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. I mean, it's just like a, a, a deepening set of contradictions that, um, end really in what seems like the total decline of a, of a small but representative mm-hmm.
Society. Um. First of all, 
Naomi Fry: yes. 
Vinson Cunningham: The crime of the year is that this movie is not named after the actual town in which it was filmed. I was thinking about that, which is called Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. And it, the, the town was, it's a long story, but the town was named after a quiz show where, um, somebody, you know, you, you, you get asked a trivia question and if you can't answer it in a very short period of time.
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? Um, whatever divisions, ideological battles, bedevil them. Um. 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 it's discontent is totally what the movie's about. 
Naomi Fry: Well, just, just, something came up to me, Vincent, you, 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. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. 
Naomi Fry: And it made me think, you know. Altamont, the, you know, free Public Rolling Stones, uh, concert and Alman, California, Altamont Speedway, California known collectively as kind of the death of the sixties, right?
Mm-hmm. Like, uh, Meredith Hunter, a black, uh, concert attendee, knife to death by the, uh, hell's Angels who were doing security. Horrible tragedy. The movie, gimme Shelter, the Mazel movie about this, this event. You see Mick Jagger on stage and he keeps saying like, why can't we get it together? You know, can we keep it together?
People, you know, like love and light. Like, can we just all unite, can we all just get along understanding of what is kind of like the, the moral. Center that we all agree on is in a sense what I think edington is about. Yeah. Sorry this was a long tangent. That's totally right. Nothing to do with it's, but, but I was just thinking about, yeah.
Can we all keep it together? Can we all like agree and not even agree? Not ens just like a consensus reality, right? Yeah. No, apparently not. We can't, and this is what we're talking about. Kind of bleak. 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,
:: MIDROLL 1::
talking now about bleak, but perhaps with a touch of. Positive energy. Kind of a little bit bleak with a twist. Bleak with a twist. Paul Thomas Anderson's one battle after another came out not long ago. September, 2025. 
Vinson Cunningham: It did. 
Naomi Fry: Yeah. Guys, I mean, it's mirroring 
Vinson Cunningham: it, it. Wait, 
Naomi Fry: before we talk about the mirror. Yes.
Should we explain to our listeners we should, uh, what's this movie about? 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. Um, one battle after another, as we said, written, directed, produced by Paul Thomas Anderson. It's based on, um, 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 Pin. This time, the 1990 book of Vineland. Um, and it's about. The action and then the afterlife of a band of, I don't know, what'd you call 'em? Left wing, 
uh, radical revolutionaries. Radicals. They're radical revolutionaries. Domestic terrorists. Yes. I don't 
know. Yeah.
Um, uh, tomato, tomato, tomato. Tomato. Exactly. This company is led, at least in the sort of the, the action of the film by Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays a guy named, uh, uh, Bob Ferguson, uh, who is sort of part of this group, falls in love, um, with a a, a Tiana Taylor, a team member named Peria Beverly Hills, played by Tiana Taylor.
Um, they have a kid. Tiana Taylor is, uh, I don't know, she's detained. And then. Spoiler alert, she is a snitch. Everybody gets in trouble. People go into hiding. 
Naomi Fry: Sings like a canary 
Vinson Cunningham: there, she sings. Um, and, uh. Leo was left to raise, um, their daughter, Charlene or Willa, depending on, you know, whether she needs to hide or not.
Uh, played really amazingly by Chase Infinity. 
Alex Schwartz: Another incredible film debut, 
Vinson Cunningham: great debut. These young people, performance 
Alex Schwartz: keep getting more, more and more 
Naomi Fry: talented. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. And this group is sort of haunted or hunted by, um, Sean Penn in a absolutely bonkers performance as, uh, Colonel Stephen Lockjaw. So, um.
There is a white supremacist group that comes up into it. Um, there is of course the sort of worsening fate of, uh, Leo DiCaprio as he is forced back into revolutionary action with an absolutely burnt out brain. 
        CLIP: One Battle After Another
There are car chases. Uh, there are, there are, there's a nunnery for a moment. It's this, the black sound of music.
It's great. Gets into a 
Naomi Fry: nunnery. Yeah. And um. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. It, it is another one of these big swings about a certain American persuasion. About a certain tendency. Mm-hmm. Um, and its many ripples through a pond. I thought it was, I mean, it, it has, it's so strange. I like it less and more in my mind. I like I, 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. Yeah. It's a really interesting film to keep thinking about. I wanna see it again actually. 
Naomi Fry: Yeah. You know, I famously did not love this movie. I mean, I, I loved some things about it, but I think it seemed to me to be, and, and I think it was because the source material of Vineland is about the sixties, sort of like seventies burnout post sixties, whereas like kind of putting mm-hmm.
The story in today's terms. Didn't seem to work, but it clearly, like PT wanted it to work. Yeah. 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? 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. You 
Naomi Fry: know, so for me, the bro, the brokenness. Yeah. I mean it's certainly, it certainly portrayed a fractured, broken reality.
Sure. 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, uh, 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 and the world of the movie seemed to me to be comp completely imaginary. 
Alex Schwartz: Yeah, I hear that. And I, myself have mixed feelings about this film. I think all three of us do. Yeah. Um, I will say this though, I think if we.
Wanna talk about what the dominant image is, uh, uh, of 2025 or set of images are they are, um, ice officers walking through the streets of the United States and abducting people mm-hmm. In plain daylight. Mm-hmm. 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, um, has never been that interested in the contemporary and has usually liked to stay, uh, in the past, try to come right in with an opening, a very revera opening of this movie at about a 30 minute sequence, kind of without stop, which begins with a group of people freeing.
Migrants from a detention center. Mm-hmm. Um, you know, of course the movie didn't, 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, you know, any longer. This is now leaking into culture in a, in with a, with a big capital C.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, 
Naomi Fry: guys. Moving right along to the forest. So 
Vinson Cunningham: suspenseful, 
Naomi Fry: auteur, male auteur. Yes. Four men. Four men taking big swings. They love to do it. The year that was, um, sorry, Yorgos Lando, director of once again of That's Begonias. Sicko, 
Vinson Cunningham: yeah. 
Naomi Fry: That came out just this October. I ha must admit I. I didn't get a chance to see the movie yet, and you have promised me, Ooh, that there is a broken mirror.
They're in.
Alex Schwartz: this movie is about conspiracy. It's about how, uh, conspiracy lurks and lingers everywhere. In this movie, Jesse Clemens plays a conspiracy theorist whose name is Teddy, who lives with his mentally handicapped in someway.
Cousin played by Aiden Bu, 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, um, you know, terrifying fem boss with blood healed. Boutta is actually an alien who is destroying planet Earth.
So he kidnaps her. They do what anybody would do. They kidnap her, of course. 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.
        CLiP: Bugonia
And 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, uh, conspiracy theory could possibly be true. And I'm gonna tell you not my favorite movie of the year.
Okay? I know the Lanham mosts heads are all out there. They're loving it. 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, I gotta tell you, I felt just talking about the mirror, the broken mirror is like, you're looking at a, you know, an American idiot who might also be an American genius.
That's the question of the movie. Mm-hmm. Are you, are you absolutely moronic to believe that aliens. Have control 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? Um, and that kind of a conflict is not that intriguing to me since like the way that the mirror was held up to that conflict mm-hmm.
I felt was just to make every, it was a very lmos thing. Everyone comes off looking appalling, absolutely appalling. 
Vinson Cunningham: Mm-hmm. 
Alex Schwartz: Um, and I think Lan Theos is 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? Yeah. Maybe I'll put a magnifying glass on one and see what happens when it burns. So. That I, 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, it might have for other people.
It's a much more, you know, it's a very extreme take on what's going on. Mm-hmm. Kidnapping someone is a lot to do. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. 
Alex Schwartz: Um, Vincent, did you disagree? Did this do it for you? 
Vinson Cunningham: I loved it because I love, uh, the work of the actor Jesse Clemens, 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 utter, we think.
Out to lunch ness. Yeah. Um, trying to piece together and, and what the movie does, I thought, well, is posit all of this on top of issues of, you know, class, political economy, the environment, uh, in a way that I thought had on a very, a much smaller scale. And even though it's visually kind of all over the place, um.
In terms of its terrain, it's less of a huge swing 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.
Yes. You won't spoil it, but this is, um, this movie gives you the equivalent of a little shot of cyanide at the end, and it just says, drink up, it 
Vinson Cunningham: goes 
Alex Schwartz: galactic. Yeah. And well, I didn't, I'm gonna see 
Naomi Fry: this, this 
Alex Schwartz: is your really wedding, my appetite for the cyanide. Good. If you want the cyanide, go for it. Yeah.
That, uh, that was, that was too bitter to swallow for me at the end, 
Naomi Fry: 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. Yeah, 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 and accurate about whatever you're looking at. I do think it's the year when I mean.
We know that, uh, people increasingly are turning to AI as they would turn to other people. Mm. To have conversations with, to get information from, to find emotional connection. Um, and so we have now in our pockets, everywhere this mirror of humanity. Yeah. And we will see where this leads. I, I think it's gonna be, it's gonna be great guys.
I'm glad. Done. You know, I try not to be the lanham mosts off, like handing everyone the cyanide shot. Uh, 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 that are fingertips. But, um, 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 in cajoles to be a broken mirror of humanity. 
Naomi Fry: Yeah. A friend of mine I saw on Instagram posted something like some, some, some image, which it was kind of very realistic and said, I can't be spending my whole life now wondering if an image is real or not.
Vinson Cunningham: Mm-hmm. 
Naomi Fry: Because this is the year when this really happened and true. I'm realizing with certain things that I see. I still don't, I, 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, in the prison yard.
Vinson Cunningham: I've seen this one. Yeah. So terrible 
Naomi Fry: 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. Mm-hmm. It was, it was probably fake, but IS. 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 that, I'm pretty sure 
Vinson Cunningham: it was confirmed as fake.
But to your point, like how would you know? 
Naomi Fry: That's it. Alex, have you like experienced any of these, like kind of AI daily and constantly 
Alex Schwartz: miss I don't know what's, ha I don't even know if you are real. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm beed the hell it's happening. Yeah. 
Vinson Cunningham: I follow someone on Instagram that I'm not sure if they're a person.
Naomi Fry: Oh, oh, that's interesting that it's an AI creation or 
Vinson Cunningham: someone that, like I and several of my friends follow on both Instagram and Twitter. I've never seen them in a picture with more than like two people. The Google results are very low, like in interacts with my posts sometimes like. 
Naomi Fry: And you follow them?
Vinson Cunningham: I follow them. They follow me. Sometimes they reply to my stuff, but it's like the, the, the, 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 like a test for a better ai. I'm just saying, did you, do you 
Naomi Fry: follow them?
Did you follow them because they're like hot or something? Like what was the reason? Or because your friends are Oh, that was a little smile. Yeah, that was, he was, he was smiling. Okay. So, so it's like, so it's like a bust, like a 
Vinson Cunningham: medical researcher also like. Files a lot of writers for her. So it's a busty herty 
Naomi Fry: model.
Vinson Cunningham: Not busty. Not busty. Oh, not busty. 
Naomi Fry: Small naturals.
It's all coming out. Sorry. 
Vinson Cunningham: Sorry. They post stuff about literature and art or whatever, and they're like, literature and art. I'm like, yeah, she's a pretty girl. But that's not the reason the rea. My point is I'm like. Uh, as it goes on, I'm like, your tone is oddly consistent. Your pictures are oddly consistent.
Are you, are you a canary in some coal? Mine? I don't. You know, I don't know. Okay. 
Naomi Fry: Off mic. We're gonna all put our minds together. We'll have to. We're not gonna, 
Vinson Cunningham: if it's a, if it is, I'm, 
Naomi Fry: I'm gonna crack this. I have to say, I just wanna 
Vinson Cunningham: admit this, this is the, my first time even talking about this outline. Okay.
No, I, 
Naomi Fry: I think it's good admitting 
Alex Schwartz: it to as many people as possible. Right. It's good, right? You all once it's good. They're very obvious. 
Vinson Cunningham: Ai, like actual like Yeah, of course. Thirst traps. I know about of course of those ladies I've already, right, right, right. You're over swatting them away, like flies over that.
But you 
Alex Schwartz: know, I do feel like with this whole mirror concept and the reality, unreal reality, like the more that unreal reality becomes our daily environment, the more that reality also commands a premium and seems to matter. Yes. It's very confusing. Mm-hmm. I'm like, look at the labu boos and the Laos. We did a whole episode about the labu boos and woe bati, anyone whose child asked them, or you know, I guess lover or whatever, whoever's wanting lab boo boos, ask them for labu boo and they show up at the fufu.
You gotta, 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, um, you know, plastic and fake fur. 
Naomi Fry: But it's, 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, um.
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, you know, and that it's gonna be increasingly like this, does this happen? Does this not happen? Are these people actually interacting in real life? Is Diddy like, you know, is, did he in the prison yard, et cetera, will maybe, and this is like the best case scenario, I think.
Lead to people putting the phone aside more. Hmm. I mean, this is the best case scenario, right? That would be great. 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. Like I'm not, I can't tell anymore. And so screw all of it.
I mean, that would be the best case scenario. Obviously the 
Alex Schwartz: scroll of it in what? I'm gonna go touch grass and sit by myself now. I mean, yes. Not by myself. I'm gonna talk to you with your friends 
Naomi Fry: in a podcast studio. Okay. In a podcast studio. In a podcast. I mean, this is just because we're here, but I could also talk to you.
I'll engage with my real friends. I'll engage with real people. I'll go in a controlled 
Vinson Cunningham: meat space environment in a controlled 
Naomi Fry: meat space environment. I'll, 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, but you know, I mean, again, this is maybe wishful thinking.
Something to possibly dream about is do 
Alex Schwartz: we 
Naomi Fry: hear resolution 
Alex Schwartz: for 2026? 
Vinson Cunningham: Are they gonna touch grass in 2026? 
Alex Schwartz: Wow. Um, you should. I should. 
Vinson Cunningham: Me too
Naomi Fry: 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.
:: MIDROLL 2::
We've been talking about the shattered looking glass. The, the jagged shards, the mirror cracked from side to side, the mirror stage, but broken. And um, I mean obviously like 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: Um, I mean the, the situation. Defies easy summary, but one of, one of the, that's one way to put it. 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, um, 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.[1]
Mm-hmm. Um, when references to Trump's impeachments were removed from the exhibit on the presidency[2], um, 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.[3] Like, okay. It's one thing to not want a land acknowledgement every time you go to the movies.
It's quite another thing. Sorry to, I mean, and, and that can be discussed by reasonable people, but it's quite another thing to go to Yellowstone and just be like. Nope. Yeah. There's nothing here. Nothing happen. So, so all these efforts that have been made to, to try to reflect reality accurately. Mm-hmm.
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 C you know. Nothing, but I don't know. Smiling white faces. Like, what? What's the idea here? Yeah, it's, it's, it's a nightmare. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. 
Alex Schwartz: 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 the culture caves.
But also it creates many, many more opportunities for, um, what, for lack of better word, we can call resistance. Yeah, yeah. Like it becomes a lot easier to, it's harder to resist when the pressures are so high, but it's also easier 'cause even smaller things become more meaningful, you know what I mean? Yeah, 
Naomi Fry: yeah.
I mean, the lies are just so, um, 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, the, the level. Things have reached in this respect are insane. Well, and I think the diff 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, 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 is like willing to kind of kiss, kiss the ring in a very public way.
Like the shame about that 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. 
Naomi Fry: Is gone. And these are people who are presiding over the making of culture. Yeah. Whether it's Apple, whether it's Netflix, you know, whether it's the social media audience, 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 the warping in any meaningful sense?
Well, 
Vinson Cunningham: I think Edington is a, 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, in the fabric of our common reality, but it's really interesting. It's important that it's Trump 2.0, right? Yeah. Most of the first Trump administration happened before the pandemic.
Naomi Fry: Yes. 
Vinson 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, 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. Um, 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 absolutely different and seeing how many warts practiced there are.
It's only 10 years. It's 
Naomi Fry: only been 10 years. Yeah. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. Um, 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. Right. I absolutely agree. Great 
Alex Schwartz: point. 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. 'cause we're living through this crisis that just is, it's lasting forever. It's, 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 decline, this narrative obviously with politics that, you know, Trump is saying we're better than ever.
And everything is, 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 like lists from various. Taste makers and people just kind of say, Ugh, this year sucked. Um, and that has me feeling down. I don't know what to 
Naomi Fry: say about that, but, uh, 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 in the best character of this whole movie. Sensei Sergio St. Carlos. It's true. It's very true. It's been laid by Benicio del Toro. Yeah. And, and, 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, um, find a way through the traps that have been placed for them.
There's an incredible sequence. I could've watched a whole movie about this, about the safe house where, um, where he and his family Yes, 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 sense says, we've been laid siege to 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. Mm-hmm. This isn't all about you. That I come back to that, to the two ways of being in opposition. One of them is toing machine guns and, um, setting off explosions.
Mm-hmm. And the other is having the kind of quiet discipline and solidarity to, um, carry on and continue to build the world as it should be. That's what I'm taking with me into 2026.
Naomi Fry: 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 mm-hmm. 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, my daughter. You know, I see this with like, her excitement about discovering things, you know, and for us, we're who old, you know, whatever. Although of course we still long on the 
Vinson Cunningham: tooth, we 
Naomi Fry: still get excited.
We still of course discuss and, and, 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 
Vinson Cunningham: mm-hmm. 
Naomi Fry: It's, uh, that's what life's about. And, uh, even in the world of the Broken Mirror, hopefully we have these examples to at least tide us over a little bit.
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. And, 
Naomi Fry: and what do you think, Vincent, 
Vinson Cunningham: in many different ways. These are, uh, 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, um, and the efficacy or whatever doom of people acting on their own, like sort of democracy closer to the, to the ground.
Call it revolutionary, call it, um, whatever you want. And um, it does seem that thinking about the mirror, uh, broken or not is a way of. Describing a kind of stasis, whether it's cultural, political, social, um, a kind of almost like narcissistic, kind of figuring out, and, 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, 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, um, where change. Is potentially made, fates are decided, you know, as opposed to the, yeah, the, the long gaze into the mirror.
Naomi Fry: 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, and, and we love it. 
Alex Schwartz: Listeners, we absolutely love you. Please be in touch with us. We, we love hearing from you and you guys really make the show. 
Vinson Cunningham: We are wishing you the brightest end of the year. 
Naomi Fry: We're so lucky to have you.
This has been critics at large. Alex Barish is our consulting editor and Riann and Corby is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Steven Valentino. Alexis Quadra composed our theme music and we had engineering help today from Michael Geno with Mixing by Mike Kuman. 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.


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[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-smithsonian-portray-americas-brightness-bad-slavery/story?id=124788598
[2] https://www.npr.org/2025/08/01/g-s1-80602/smithsonian-impeachment-trump
[3] https://www.npca.org/articles/10871-erasing-history-silencing-science