Critics at Large | The New Yorker - “Beef,” “The Drama,” and the New Marriage Plot

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This is Critics at Large, a podcast from the New Yorker. I'm Vincent Cunningham.

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.

Hello. Hi. What's up?

We're all ready to, you know, discuss the matter at hand for this week. The topic of today's episode is, drum roll, please, marriage and all its discontents. Woo hoo. Imagine that.

There

are actually a few occasions for this. The first is a new season of the show Beef. I

think deep down, we both knew it was a temporary Band Aid.

Fight flying on the screen. Then it roar. Tearing at the scene.

For the immense pain of knowing that you picked the wrong person.

Which focuses on 2 very different couples that wind up in an increasingly tense standoff with each other, and that standoff quickly starts to expose the cracks that are forming in these relationships. And boy, is it harrowing? Okay. And we'll also be talking about the movie, the drama. The wedding is this Saturday.

What stories are you

gonna do?

What do mean? My speech? Are

they gonna use the first time we met?

Yes.

Okay. What about the first date?

Yeah. Of course. Fuck.

You don't have to do speed

It's about a couple, Charlie and Emma, and Emma reveals a deep dark secret about her past, and then things start to go south very fast. K? So I think it's fair to say that both of these texts put forward a somewhat cynical view of what it's like to be in a committed relationship. Would you guys say that this reflects a kind of broader feeling in the culture right now? Are these outliers, or are they indicators?

I think there is a general and I wouldn't even say pessimism, but a kind of downbeat pondering about what marriage is and what it's for. I mean, and maybe it's a question that comes up age after age, but what is this institution for? Who does it serve? Why do we enter into it? And, are there alternatives coming over the horizon?

I think that's the moment we're in, this resettling.

Yeah. Alex, what do you think?

I totally agree, Vincent. And I I think it's a long moment, and I think we're actually close to the beginning. To me, these things these questions really began with the advent of birth control, women's lib, and no fault divorce. And

The holy trinity

background. That's it. Exactly. But, yes, Nomi, I think these are indicators. And I think 1 theme that I see stretching across the 2 works you mentioned and others is this idea of revelation, the fear that you could be in a marriage with someone, feel that this is the person you know the best in the world, and wake up 1 day and discover that there is something big they've been hiding from you and that actually your life is a house of cards, a pack of lies, and have to of cards.

A pack of lying cards. And you have to renegotiate everything, ask everything, and that the foundations of the supposedly solid thing, your marriage, are actually quite shaky.

Yeah. I mean, I couldn't agree more, Alex. I mean, all of these things, the kind of the long moment of reinvestigating what marriage is good for, and then this particular question that I I do think is germane, am I in bed with a stranger? Anyway, today, we're gonna be talking about beef. We're gonna be talking about the drama.

We're gonna be talking about several other texts, and we're gonna be talking in general about modern attitudes towards this very old institution. As we've said, it's kind of at an inflection point right now. Statistically, marriage rates are hovering around an all time low. And at the same time, people are trying to find new approaches to make marriage work. I mean, open marriages, polyamory, all of these things are feeling increasingly mainstream.

And my question for us is, at a time when relationships are more flexible than ever, what do we as a culture want marriage to mean? That's today on Critics at Large. Beef, the drama, and the new marriage plot. Okay, you guys. Let's begin with Beef, okay, on Netflix.

The second season of the show is out today, and it's written and directed by Lee Sung Jin. Did you guys watch the first season of this show?

Sure did. Okay. It was about an incident of a road rage that led 2 people into an ever escalating conflict. So I think the connection is is conflict. Yeah.

Conflict as the driver of passion, fury, as the great revealer. Otherwise, totally different characters, totally different setup.

Absolutely. Right. So this is an anthology show. Right? And now we have a whole other story, a whole new set of characters, but the idea that beneath the seemingly placid surface of kind of, you know, regular everyday life, there are resentments.

There is violence. There are secrets and lies that lie and wait to be exposed. Right? So in this beef 2 season, who wants to give me a synopsis of kind of, like, the lay of the lay of the land?

We start on the grounds of a country club at what we come to understand as a fundraiser for that club. On stage is the general manager of the club played by Oscar Isaac. His name is Josh Martin.

So thank you. Thank you. Thank you to our incredible staff.

By his side is his wife played by Carey Mulligan, Lindsay Crane Martin.

My beautiful, talented wife, Lindsay, who helped put this event together. Alright. Everyone get home safe.

Not so fast, mister. Let's not forget about the best general manager this club has ever seen. We love you, Joshi.

As soon as they leave the grounds, they are fighting. And then, I mean, every single recrimination in the world comes out. The show starts with a facade, these 2 on stage, and then a total outpouring of id in this fight. The fight gets so bad that a golf club becomes involved. Carey Mulligan's character is basically just destroying the house.

Isaac's character grabs the golf club, but then he seems to be kind of like almost threatening to to hit her with it. It's at this moment of just like unchecked raid.

Then fucking divorce me.

I won't. Please all my Meanwhile,

he left his wallet at the club. Therefore, 2 young members of the staff are coming to give the wallet. They see this, they record it. In the fullness of time, they decide that they should use this as a way to improve their own station. They are a young couple planning to be married, I think, importantly.

They wanna be married. They're engaged, newly engaged. So she's like, we need health care. We're gonna use this to extort this couple. And they think that this is their ticket.

Mhmm.

But the the main gist is the trouble that is caused by this 1 moment of unchecked rage in this marriage.

Yeah. I have now seen 7 out of the 8 episodes of Beef 2. Gobbled it up. Gobbled it up with my husband by my side. We were On the marital couch.

On the marital couch, just gobbling up beef too. I I really like this show. It really reminded me of the White Lotus.

Yes. It is From the from the jump.

Yes. Yeah. And I think this is a place that TV is increasingly interested in going to these luxury worlds that reveal personal and class fissures. And 1 thing I really like about the show is that the young couple, the Charles Melton and Kayleigh Spaney couple, Austin and Ashley, see the older managers as having it made. And the older couple see themselves as slipping down the class ladder.

They're kind of barely clinging to their position, and they spend all their time around the truly wealthy people who patronize the club catering to them. So everyone is just trying really hard to hold on to what they have, and the stress of that is in the show what fractures these relationships.

Yeah. Because it's all about comparison. Like, I think within the marriage, there is always and I think within their marriage and also increasingly in the younger couple's marriage, there is a looking outside. There is like, oh, maybe I should have, you know, been with this guy. Maybe I can, you know, secretly text an old boyfriend, an ex boyfriend to, you know, give myself a kind of a little boost, right, when I'm feeling, like, down that I'm, like, older and have made wrong choices in my life.

You know, there's everything is kind of ruled by this jockeying for status, whether in love or in in work. What did you think, Vincent?

It's a really interesting story. On on on 1 level, I feel like it sometimes, at its worst moments, threatens to be a kind of second rate white lotus. But at its best moments, it really does talk about what you just mentioned, Nomi. Like, how much political economy and our place within it in this great context, how much of that weight lands on the couple form? All of the tensions within these relationships and between them have to do with what does it mean that I have or don't have money, have or don't have health insurance, have or don't have a sense of security, whatever that means to me, and how much do I associate the health of a relationship with this other kind of more nebulous, like, whatever, economically driven health.

And that is really interesting to me. And the moments when that gets contemplated, maybe paradoxically, is when these characters are alone. There's a lot of loneliness in this. Oscar Isaac is, you know, like, on OnlyFans doing God knows what, looking at you know? So there's this undercurrent of loneliness.

Alex, like, what what did you think of that relationship? Like, those 2, Isaac and Mulligan.

Yes. I think there's a sense increasingly, I think, in the Lindsey Josh marriage of I know you too well, and I don't like what I see. There are no more surprises. You are horrible. Let's have the same fight we've had 1000000 times over again, but only more intensely, which is the moment when the younger couple, Ashley and Austin, come upon them.

And then you have the you're countered with the idealism of this very young couple. There's a scene where Austin is talking to Lindsay about what he's witnessed. And Lindsay says to Austin, okay. But you actually have no idea what marriage is really like.

How old are

29.

And

how long have you and what's her name? Ashley. Ashley. How long have you and Ashley been going out?

Year and a half. Wow.

So early. Well, you've got a good fight coming. And when it does come, you 2 are gonna be stronger for it.

If I may say this, ma'am, I don't think that's how relationships work.

Alright. All I'll say is that all the couples I know that lost, they've really had at it, you know. There's actually the ones that don't where someone's usually hiding something. I mean, not to say that that's your situation with

Ashley. Ashley,

but the bad does have to

come out

somewhere. Do you understand?

The pretense in the younger couple is that 1 utterly knows the other and and vice versa. That is, you can never betray me or you can never disappoint me because I know you are fully on my side, and you can never surprise me with kind of veering from that sense that I have of you. Right?

I will say, and I wonder what you guys think about this, both of these couples are total red herrings. Like, neither of these couples has any idea what any of this is about as far as I'm concerned. And therefore, the show remains on a pretty shallow level when it comes to speaking to marriage, I think.

It's it's the the classic blind leading the blind or not leading. It's the bland the blind talking to the blind.

I don't think you're about to say bland, and that's what it's kind of the bland leading the blind. Yeah.

Okay. Say more. What do you mean?

Well, it's neither of these couples, to to the point, seem to have a well developed idea of why, you know, why they're together. And this speech sends Austin into kind of a tizzy, right? He starts Googling, why do we never fight? Now, his sense of what a relationship is, is totally determined by the outside. Yeah.

And so, that sort of blandness of purpose maybe is a kind of profound statement, but it never it it doesn't really develop, though.

Yeah. I mean, I think if we were to kind of distinguish between the 2 couples apart from the stuff that we've already said, the older couple seems to kind of, like, have sinister intent more definitionally, I guess. I mean, both of them are kind of, like, sly and cynical and status seeking, fraudulent in a more intentional way. While the younger couple end up also doing a lot of kind of things that aren't great, but they're basically kind of like the idiot innocence. Right?

I mean, they don't mean to, like, stumble into these, but they're kind of like dummies who also want theirs, basically.

I think I would say when it comes to marriage, the thesis of the show is that marriage is complicity. What unites both of these couples is doing illegal shit. The older couple is gonna scam the club for money. The younger couple is gonna scam the club for jobs, and a good marriage is covering each other's backs. Do I find that a message that I wanna, you know, happily blast from the altar at everybody?

Probably not, but it does make for fun watching.

When we're back, we're talking about the new film, the drama, and whether it's actually a good thing to know everything. Critics at large from The New Yorker will be right back.

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Okay. I feel like this is now the time to turn to the drama. Take note. We're gonna be talking about the twist in the movie. There's a big twist.

You probably heard there's a big twist if you don't know the actual twist yet. But if you wanna continue to not know what Zendaya did in the movie, spoilers are coming. The drama, directed by Christopher Borgli, the Norwegian filmmaker, came out in the April, stars Robert Rob Pattinson as Charlie and Zendaya as his beautiful fiance, Emma. Who wants to set the scene of what we're dealing with here?

I'd be delighted. Great. The drama starts out seeming like it's gonna be a rom com. We get a meet cute that is presented with the framing that this couple who's meeting cute in a Boston cafe is now 2 years later about to get married. Everything has been absolutely great with them.

They have wonderful chemistry. They love each other so much. They live in a gorgeous apartment. Charlie is writing his wedding speech.

So I wanna say this thing about her laugh. Do you know how it's kind of like it's it's very cute, but it's also kind of like

Repulsive even.

Yeah. Okay. And then if she laughs, then I can point it out.

And then very close to their wedding, they go out to dinner at their wedding venue to do a final tasting with their 2 best friends. And these best friends who seem like freaks to me decide that what they most wanna do is talk about the worst thing that they did because they did that before they got married, and it only bonded them further together.

What's the worst thing you ever did in your

life?

Exactly. And even though that was an intimate exercise between the 2 of them that they agreed never to share, they somehow are sharing the worst things they ever did in their life, and the conversation is passed around until we get to Zendaya. Everyone else has done something, and I really hope we return to this, that really sucks. Like, I don't like what those other people did at all. I'm just gonna editorialize in here.

They bullied other people.

I have

stuff to say about it. Locked mentally disabled children in closets. They they cyber bullied. They used someone as a human shield in front of a mad dog. They just they did horrible selfish things.

And then Zendaya admits that she planned but did not execute a school shooting when she was 15. Boop. The tenor changes. Everybody freaks out. Alana Haim, who plays Rachel, the best friend, really freaks out, and everything becomes a complete disaster.

Charlie starts to think, who is this woman? I actually know nothing about her. I thought it was so cute that she's deaf in 1 ear, and I love to whisper sweet nothings and see if she can hear any of them. Oh, damn. Actually, she blew out her eardrum while firing her father's rifle in the swamps of Louisiana to prepare to commit mass murder.

Yes.

And yet, I somehow, inconceivably, am going to go through with this wedding. And meanwhile, Zendaya is all is very flummoxed. She's just flummoxed. Here I am. I thought my life was going 1 way.

Now this thing from the past has come out to haunt me. It's escaped. What goes on? And so all of this culminates in a classic wedding from hell.

Masterful, Alex.

That's that's what I got from it, and I have much more to say.

Okay. What did we think? Alex, I'm I'm getting the sense that you might not have liked this movie, but maybe maybe let's let's let's go to Vincent. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's it's a really interesting film. It's got a playful texture. Right? Think 1 of the things to to

point Playful out is is a about good the word. Yeah.

The editing is full of all these red herrings, almost counterfactual stems that you can see 1 character ideating how they wish something that they said was received and it's actually received in a different way. All these flashes backwards and forwards to moments in the relationship that might have been tells. First of all, I have questions. First of all, okay? Okay.

No 1, no matter how drunk, would ever tell anybody this, number 1. Number 2, what about it's the best thing I did? What about I stopped a mass shooting?

Correct.

I stopped a mass shooting in its tracks.

By not doing it? Yes.

Well, what if what if what if I don't have to put that clause in there? What if I just Oh. What if I just convinced somebody, myself, not to shoot up a school? Alana Haim, who I love. I love her music.

I I think she's a pretty good actress. She's the 1 who admits to putting a kid in a

She's the worst.

She she's the 1 who put the person in the closet and left them there seemingly overnight, locked in a closet, not telling a single adult what she has done. Okay, Alannaheim, get off of your high horse, number 1. And then and then we have the brooding figure of Pattinson, sort of looking not unlike a vampire trying not to eat his beloved. You know, he's got the same kind of, I don't know, clenched body, posture as he does in the, what's the name of that series? Twilight.

In the Twilight series.

What's the name of that series?

He pretends He pretends not to.

Nonetheless, I do, I I would I will see this movie again, and I kind of enjoyed it. Partial this is what I like about it.

Okay.

We are entering the absolutely white hot prime of Zendaya's career. And here's the thing, she is always she's very often in a situation just like this 1.

What do mean?

In the middle of some sort of, either erotic or romantic entanglement that makes her character more a a kind of symbol or signifier than a real person.

Yes.

But but weirdly, in an interesting way. Think about Challengers, how she's just in the middle of that the 2 rival friend rivals, united not only by their love of tennis, but by their love of this same woman. Think of the 2021 Sam Levinson film, Malcolm and Marie. She and John David Washington are are the couple in that he's a filmmaker. She's upset that he won an award, but didn't thank her, because his movie is about this young addict that is found by another character.

Turns out that was she was an addict before they got together, and she was like rehabilitated through the form of their relationship. She's always someone who's in a romantic situation, and her position in that relationship becomes, like, a a all caps symbol for a larger social thing. She's a really talented actor in what in that she can kind of play these screens. In this film, we get a sense of how this is really tearing everyone else apart, but really, we see her so much from the outside, which I think might be a demerit toward the film, but it is totally, I think I was watching Zendaya the whole time being like, I'm glad to be watching this because I can't take my eyes off her character whenever she's there, even though she's a total

cipher. Vincent,

this is a fascinating take because I agree with everything you're saying, and I just conclude I want so much more for her. I want I want her to be able Yeah. To play a fully embodied person.

Yeah. Well,

yeah. I want so much more Well, arguably drama could give us.

Okay. Arguably, this is not a movie about fully embodied characters. I actually thought, you know, Zendaya, perhaps the most beautiful woman right now that we have in the world. We have. I mean, not that I've seen every single person in the world.

If you would like to contest this, send your headshot to the mail But newyorker.com.

Subject line, hotter than Zendaya.

Exactly. Absolute

She pops off the screen.

Pops off the screen. She is absolutely gorgeous. She is likable. I actually don't think her performance in this movie is that great, but maybe again, it's it is the fault of the role. I actually thought Pattinson was good.

I I really liked him. But in general, when we're talking about embodiment and depth and kind of, like, you want more for her, you know, this is not the movie in which that will happen, and I think that's okay. Like, I enjoyed this movie. I thought it was a slight and fun and funny and very good looking exercise. You know?

When I say exercise, I don't mean even to undercut it, but it's almost like, like a game, you know, or like a a kind of a diagram of, like, here is, like, what if? You know? Here is, like, a situation. What if this happens? Wouldn't that be crazy?

And then, like, how would people react? Like, let's take this as far as it might go. Mhmm. And on that level, I thought it was successful and enjoyable. I am not looking for answers, or I I think we shouldn't or we can't look for answers about, like, what does it mean to be married right now?

I mean, it is an example of, like, oh, I actually know nothing about this person that I'm about to marry. You know? I know I don't know even because, of course, when she does tell him that she planned this, you know, mass murder, she tells him, like, I was a reject. And indeed, there are flashbacks to her past in high school, and it's like, oh, he knows nothing about her. Like, imagine if this was one's origin story, not even even barring the

No.

Of course. The killing part of it. It's almost like a parable. Right? It's it's not like a realistic engagement with an actual relationship.

I mean, my my issue with it, I had a great time at the theater. I think this is not a good film. And that's sometimes my my my favorite viewing experiences are those where I'm like hooting and hollering, and then I'm like, nope. Actually, I think it's very bad for these reasons.

Mhmm.

Nomi, I think the big point for me about this movie as far as marriage goes is what you're bringing up, the lack of knowledge. The total lack of knowledge between 2 people who are theoretically prepared to commit the rest of their lives to 1 another, who seem to have no knowledge of 1 another's families, 1 another's backgrounds, even high school photos, things like this. But I think a big part of marriage and marriage depiction. And marriage depiction is about change, and it's about how much can you stand to change and how much can you tolerate change in someone Mhmm. Whose life you've hitched yours to.

Mhmm.

And when those changes come over time, maybe it's great. When they come boom all at once, it can rock the whole boat. And that's what I see going on in the drama. I don't think it's explored in an interesting way particularly, but I also see it going on all over the culture. Mhmm.

Right. So let's maybe let's turn now from the drama and this topic of kind of, like, 0 to 1, like, you know, black and white kind of change of, like, oh, who is this person that I've hitched my my wagon Mhmm. To, this total stranger, we can talk about some other texts where this happens. And 1 of them is actually titled strangers by Bell Burton, which came out a couple months ago.

Mhmm.

And it's a memoir based on a modern love column that was published in the Times in 2023, and it has become a phenomenal success, best selling. We have just learned that it's gonna become a movie. Gwyneth Paltrow is gonna play the the author and the protagonist, Belle Burton. And let's talk a little bit about this book because, really, so many people and especially women with my cohort, I've found that have read it. Yeah.

Strangers is the

kind of book that, of course, men it would be great if men read, but women will read it by the drove, and and we have, and we are. Essentially, it's Bell Burton, writes about being a young woman swept up in a fast moving sweep you off your feet kind of romance when she was a young professional woman working at a law firm in New York City, gets married in very short order, and they have a great marriage that goes on for many, many years, produces 3 children, pandemic hits. They decamp from their lovely Tribeca apartment to their lovely home in Martha's Vineyard. And within a week of quarantine, it is revealed that the husband

Mhmm.

Has in fact been having an affair. And after initially seeming to be contrite and concerned about this, the husband says, in fact, I'm just gonna leave you. And I'm gonna leave not only you, but our whole family. Don't wanna do it anymore. Don't wanna be a husband anymore.

Don't wanna be a dad anymore. I'm out. It's a sense of who are you? I don't know you. You have built this family with me.

You have taken the kids on these activities. You have enjoyed them. You have provided for them. You've done the same for me, And you can just walk away, and I'll never know why. I think the the big preoccupation of this book is not knowing why.

And that that is I really think that's getting to the heart of where our culture is at. This question of why, who are you, and what if I can't know? It's the same thing with the drama. Yeah. I'm thinking of it also with I'm sorry.

I'm gonna bring up something very dark here, but with the Giselle Pelico story. Yeah. Absolutely. Pelico, of course, this French woman who was discovered had been serially raped by her husband and by other anonymous men who he had found on the Internet and recruited to rape her while she was asleep because he had drugged her, who had a very, very well covered public, notably public trial in France, was very, very visible as the victim in this case, and as the heroine of this case, and who's just come out with this book, A Hymn to Life, Shame Has to Change Sides. The most horrific form of not knowing.

And I think just to think of her case as a cultural lightning rod, which it certainly was in France, and I think to an extent was in The United States too, there's this question of how could it have happened to her? Could it happen to to me, to anyone? That's the horror story aspect, the fear aspect. Mhmm. Vincent, did you have you followed any of that case?

I've just followed the case. And I think for me, the the aspect of revelation when it comes to marriage, therefore, is twofold, right? It's you as a participant of the marriage, 1 of the members of the marriage can figure out much too late that your spouse is, in the case of, probably, oh, an absolute sociopathic monster. But also, there's the aspect of revelation that happens publicly, because marriages, it seems to me I mean, I guess, just philosophically, they're these strangely very public this is why we inaugurate them in front of other people. The whole spectacle of them as far as other people are concerned is how we look and comport ourselves and treat ourselves and treat each other that is in public.

But there is such and this is why marriages can become not only can become prisons, but historically were prisons for generations and generations of women. So much of it is still conducted in private that when, in this case, a horrifying aspect of the marriage comes out, It so radically changes and threatens our notions not just of this marriage, but of marriage in general.

When we're back, is the culture totally disenchanted with married life? And if so, what else is there? Critics at large from The New Yorker will be right back.

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Vincent, you got me thinking when you were talking just now about the pre assumptions of marriage, like the old ways of marriage, about woman as property to man

Mhmm.

Which was the condition for a very long time. And it got me thinking about how we even got to our current ideas of romantic partnership and marriage, and I credit slash blame the nineteenth century.

Mhmm. Shout out nineteenth century.

Shout out to the long nineteenth century for this idea that marriage is not just a pact between 2 families and mutually advantageous decision made to further the line, but also that people are supposed to find love and romance and sexual fulfillment all wrapped up into this economic bundle with marriage. And as my support, I have on my lap 2 of my favorite friends, Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert and Parallel Lives, Phyllis Rose's wonderful study of 5 Victorian marriages. Have you guys read this book? Our Lives? Yes.

Yes. My dear critic friends?

I've read the first half of it.

Well, I read the whole thing.

Well, I watched 7 episodes of beef too. Uh-huh. This is a great book, and it's a wonderful book. And it has shockingly a great deal to say to our condition, I think, in the 20 first century. The argument that Phyllis Rose is making is that marriage is a political experience, and it's the primary political experience that most people will have.

It is about balancing of power. It is, of course, about power between genders, but it's about the the family and the marriage as a body politic in which 2 people are jockeying and negotiating. And things are frankly set up to not work more than they're set up to work. Mhmm. I think we have this kind of fantasy idea of marriage as a time where everyone knew their place.

The man was the center, and the woman's job was to just help the man fulfill whatever had to be done. And 1 thing that I love about the book Parallel Lives is that it shows us that that was really never satisfying for anyone. And I think that a lot of these ideas that we have now about freedom, personal freedom, sexual freedom, we're trying to reconcile them with marriage. And I think we're in a place where we're trying to make marriage seem more like a positive choice

Mhmm.

Rather than an obvious obligation. Mhmm. That we're doing this because the love is so great, because we can, envision the rest of our lives together, because it's this great mark of affirmation and faith in another person and also in yourself that you're gonna be the kind of person to hold this down. And so in a way, it's a fascinating fiction that those who get married subscribe to hoping that the fiction becomes true. Phyllis Rose has a great line about reading marriage like you can read a novel.

And I think that's true in a lot of these cases too, that life is a kind of fiction writing. Yeah. You are making it up as you go along, and who you are at the start of a marriage is not gonna be who you are at the middle and who you are at the end, and yet that keeps coming like such a rude shock to us. It's such a rude shock Yeah. That we get great literature, movies, TV shows, albums Yeah.

From the shock of discovering that the other person is not who you thought they were and that you're not who you thought you were either.

1 way to articulate that, you know, in this and part of this long renegotiation that, to your point, has its early tremors in the nineteenth century, has some pretty big explosion in the middle of the twentieth, with the onset of modern feminism, and and still continues today, part of that trajectory is, okay, if we acknowledge that it can't just be an economic situation, a situation of bondage, really, and yet it still carries, at least in its sort of outward form, those traces. It still is a contract. But it's also supposed to be this place of personal revelation. I mean, this is sometimes the the characteristic of love, especially in fiction. Okay.

Yeah. There's public revelation, what others learn about you through the fact that you're married. There is intramarital revelation, what I learn about the other. But there's also I love how you say marriage is a fiction because like an artwork, it has many forms that present themselves to us. And through these forms, their generality, the specificity of ourselves and the self of the other, we're supposed to learn something about ourselves too.

I mean, for me, the great passage, the great moment in Madame Bovary is the opera, where, you know, Emma goes to the opera and she's like reawakened by the opera, sees Leon, the the sort of romantic rival of her husband, is like, you know what? I have to have an affair. You know? That romance is like art in that it has moments of cathartic learning. And if we're supposed to do that at the same time as we're in a contract, that's a lot of weight for any 1 institution, personal, privately, publicly, aesthetically, to bear.

Yeah. And this leads me to the question of, okay, what if we split the difference? Right? You present an Emma Bovary who's, you know, in this unsatisfying relationship with Charles Bovary and is awakened to the possibilities that might lie outside of marriage. And, of course, it's an illicit affair.

There was no such thing as polyamory. There was no such thing as, you know, open marriage as a kind of, like, legitimate cultural choice, let's say, at least not in Emma Bovary's world. And today, of course, things are different. It's like you can't, like, leave your house without hearing of, like, someone being polyamorous or having an open marriage.

You can't even stay in your house without hearing about it.

Absolutely. And we come to examples, for instance, like the writer Lindy West, right, who recently published a memoir called Adult Braces, which raised a big discourse around it that had to do with what happens when you are married. You, as Lindy, are not interested in polyamory, not interested in an open marriage. You wanna be monogamous with your husband, but your husband wants something different, and you can take it or leave it. And the book ends up being about the opening of a relationship to include this other partner, another girlfriend, and the cohabiting of this throuple, essentially.

Why has this conversation become so heated online about this book? What what can can

What a great question. Even as I was engaging with the heatedness of it, I also was wondering Why? Yeah. Why? I think part of it has to do with that Lindy West, for those who are listening and don't know, is a very public figure, has been a kind of vocal memoirist, written a lot about the body, body identity, fatness, and feminism, and has made her life very public in the way of many female writers, especially from that period who wrote a lot online.

She was part of the early days of Jezebel and, you know, other such websites. And I think, again, it has to do with this question of revelation. The thing that everyone is picking on is this idea that the ethics I think when people talk about the ethics of polyamory, there's all this conversation that goes into everything being consensual, everything being above board, everything being agreed upon. It is the contract of contracts. It's like more contractual than a marriage contract for everything to operate as it should.

Well, it's interesting. Obviously, like, you know, polyamory has been a discourse. You know, they were on wave, what, 7 of polyamory discourse of over the past decade or so. But it's interesting. Here, we have, to your point, Lindy West is a very public writer and a very straightforwardly political writer.

And it's interesting. You mentioned Phyllis Rose's contention that all marriage is political, and in fact, it is, for most of us, the primary political experience. And it almost seems that that observation has come full circle, where what kind of romantic entanglement 1, enters is, at least for some segment of people, the expression par excellence of your politics. Yeah. Know, a lot of the a lot of the book Mhmm.

Excerpts are run you don't even need to read the book to to see these passages. You go on Twitter, go on threads, go on wherever you want. Part of the dialectic of arriving at this arrangement is the husband, saying, well, you know, actually monogamy is a little bit he's a he's a black gentleman. Is a little bit like ownership, which, you know

You're a white woman. You own me. You wanna own me. And so Yeah.

Extraordinarily, it wasn't implied that it was the woman who was the 1 Right.

General. Exactly. Yes. So, you know Chilling. Listeners, you do it that way you will.

I'm gonna I'm I'm exercising extreme extreme restraint because

It's chilling.

This being like a a real person who's busy. But Yeah. Chilling argument. Right? And part of the reason that West reasons herself and and and it really is a maybe the book part of the book at least, it's a road trip physically, but it's also a road trip of reasoning oneself toward an arrangement that 1 does not originally want to be in.

Part of that reasoning is explicitly political. It's like, how can I be a progressive if I can't understand this? Yeah. Not only on the level of the emotions, but on the sort of formal palette that is marriage. Which, okay, fine.

But it really is interesting to see that this political dimension of marriage has migrated from a descriptive fact to a kind of prescriptive, arrangement that marriage becomes a place where we show what we believe.

Yeah. And also, just in general, I mean, I think it it bears mentioning, this is this is not just something, obviously, that's happening on the level of culture in the sense of on the level of fiction. I mean, I know we said that actual marriages are also fiction, but these are things that statistically have been happening. According to Pew, The US marriage rate hit 140 year low in 2019 and has never fully rebounded. People are not looking to marriage necessarily as much as they used to as the kind of pinnacle of of adult life.

You know? Thinking about this statistic about kind of marriage losing its luster or its kind of, like, capability as a solution

Mhmm.

For people in their lives. It made me think about this, like I'm I'm off Instagram currently, but when I was still on Instagram, and I'm sure on TikTok as well, a kind of popular reel that would keep coming up for me would be, like, Friday night as an unmarried woman with no friends. Oh my god. With no friends? Yes.

Where are the friends? I don't know where the friends are. But, basically, it wasn't a get ready with me. It would it was it was, like, get, like, unready with me. Right?

It's like, I come home from work. I, like, do my skincare routine. I watch my shows. I'll I'll pull 1 up.

I mean, the has no friends is

the part I'm struggling. POV.

You're married part

is child fee girl that lives alone and has no friends, so this is what your Friday night looks and sounds like. A 176,000 likes. Okay? Let's have a little look. She's entering her clean, quiet, peaceful apartment for a cozy night in.

She ran to the store afterward to get some ingredients for dinner. Friday night is pizza night. Oh, everything is kinda clean and cozy. She's taking out the pizza from the box, slipping it in the clean oven. People ask if I miss being more social.

Honestly, I really have no interest in dating. Oh my god. Ate dinner while watching Midwest safe TV cam videos

on YouTube. Okay.

Alex has seen enough.

I've seen enough.

It everything is just so as a solitary person

Mhmm.

Is basically the idea.

I see. No 1 can impinge on my pleasures.

Is impinging on what I wanna do when I get home from work, and it can be obviously a little depressing in some ways, but in other ways, I you know, and I look at the comments, and it's like, damn. That looks good. I love I love me some me time. Oh god. Mom of 3 here.

If only I could be you know, you know, if only my husband could go on a vacation and I could do this, you know, or, like, whatever. The the notion that you are an island to yourself and what might have once counted as, like, a pathetic, sad, like, cat lady existence is now, for some people, at least, the the pinnacle of of, you know, living of existence as kind of a modern person Yeah. Woman, I guess. I've seen this with with women. I haven't seen this with men.

Okay. Well, here's what I wanna say about this. Yes. Much like the left loves to express horror at the trad wife phenomenon, the right loves to express horror at this phenomenon. And we have these 2 extremes of I don't find the childlessness unmarried thing an extreme.

I find no friends, no

What are talking about?

Yeah. Like, no social connection to be extreme, much as I find having 10 children and saying I wanna live in submission to my husband's will to be rather extreme. So we have if marriage we're talking about marriage as a fiction that we make as we go along and as a political experience, both of those things are in crisis in the culture war sense with 2 opposing polls pushing and pulling. But also in the middle, you've got a lot of people who are trying to figure out a new way forward, whether that's in, you know, we got a piece of paper and they're just 2 of us or whether it's in an expanded polyamory situation, whatever it is. People are trying to reimagine this Mhmm.

For themselves because you're only living your own experience in the larger cultural context. You have to reimagine it for And what this really makes me think of is the bravery of the imagination to imagine any kind of future for yourself at all. I love that. The bravery of the imagination, and it makes me think back to the nineteenth century. May I share something with you guys from 1 of my favorite stories in parallel lives?

Please. Okay. So the thing that I love in this I mean, there's so many things I love in this book, but 1 is the story of George Eliot, whose name was Marian Evans, and George, Henry Lewis fell in love with 1 another. But 1 thing that I really like about this is later, Elliot marries someone else. She marries someone who's 20 years younger

Oh,

yes. Than she

is. Yes.

Super unconventional. This is after Lewis had died. I think people thought this was utterly bizarre, and there is a quote here from someone about this marriage, where she says, you see, I know all of love is so different that I do not see it unnatural to love in new ways. And I think that's kind

of it.

Love in the old ways, love in the new ways. But we've got to recenter the love part of it maybe. I love that.

Yeah. And it strikes me, you know, that love, like the things that we have likened it to, art and politics, is something that is conditioned by time and lives in time. You know, what is beautiful to us in 1 age is not beautiful to us in another, and so it goes with love. And it does seem to me that, you know, love does have this correspondence with beauty, you know? And for me, like, know, I'm not I don't wanna be all the things around polyamory, it's like too many emails, too many it's like it doesn't Yeah.

It's like it's the

Who has the patience?

I'm not saying it's I'm not saying it to

Yeah, no.

To put it

down To add

all on. It its own. My my point is that it doesn't appeal to me aesthetically. And 1 way to ask be asking these questions over and over is, like, what seems beautiful to me?

This has been Critics at Large. Alex Barish is our consulting editor, and Rhiannon Corby is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Steven Valentino. Our show is mixed by Mike Cushman, and we had engineering help today for Pran Bandy with music by Alexis Quadrado. You can listen to all of our episodes anytime at newyorker.com/critics.

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