The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Stories of #MeToo

Episode Date: November 21, 2022

Five years ago, reporting on the film producer Harvey Weinstein’s history of assault and misconduct opened the floodgates of the national reckoning with gender and power known as #MeToo. Three New Yorker critics—Alexandra Schwartz, Naomi Fry, and Vinson Cunningham—recently gathered to assess #MeToo’s impact on the culture more broadly. They discussed works like the new film “Tár,” the movie “The Assistant,” the fiction pieces “This Is Pleasure” and “Cat Person,” and more. Schwartz notes that #MeToo is not only an event in time but also a lens through which to tell stories about interpersonal relationships that have long been taken for granted. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. This is a special bonus episode of the podcast. This October marks five years since the news broke in the New York Times and in the New Yorker of Harvey Weinstein's appalling history of sexual misconduct in the equally shocking ways that his victims were silenced for so long. That story opened the floodgates of the Me Too movement. The reckoning that followed, transformed. Workplaces and upended entire industries. But Me Too went beyond the workplace, questioning ideas about sex, consent, and power relationships

more broadly. Five years on, storylines inspired by Me Too have shown up in films, books, television, and most recently in the movie Tar, starring Kate Blanchett. Three of the New Yorkers critics got together recently to look at whether or how Me Too has changed the cultural landscape. Here's Alexandra Schwartz, Vincent Cunningham, and Nomi Fry. Alex kicks off the conversation. So, Vincent, Nomi, let's try to think back, if we even can.

You know, what were some of the first Me Too storylines, you know, as opposed to stories, just cultural processes that you remember really making a splash after Me Too started? You know, it's really interesting. I was thinking about this. And I have to say that what I remember from the first months, and even I want to say like the first year or two, you know, post me too, is that cultural production was occluded by the actual stories or like took a backseat, let's say. there was such an emphasis on the real stories, rightly so, that I can't totally look back and like, oh, okay, this was like the defining text. So what would you say if I were to trigger your memory a bit and tell you that cat person, the infamous short story that our very own magazine published, around this story of a young woman who dates a kind of slightly older day. deadbeat guy and all that ensues there was published in December of 2017, a mere two months after Me Too began. Unbelievable.

It's pretty shocking. I mean, I would say, you know, just speaking, practically speaking, or like chronologically speaking, we know that probably the lead time to that story preceded, you know, the revelations of October 2017 because it came out in December. So, of course, this was, like, in the works. Like, it's not like, oh, this is a response to me, too. Right. And one thing that is interesting, and that I remember about cat person coming out is that when cat person came out, people kept calling it an essay. Like, people didn't remember, like, they didn't realize that it was, like, a fundamental category error that they, like, didn't realize that they were reading a short story. That's really interesting.

And I think that has to do with all kinds of things, whether people ever read short stories in their real lives anymore, all kinds of things. but it was also this in the middle of this huge cultural upheaval, it had the feel and texture of a kind of like testimonial. And I'll never forget, first of all, by the way, talking about like sense memories, that awful mouths and that photograph will live with me forever. The photograph captured something, zeitgeist. To remind everyone, it was a picture of two mouths in extreme close-up, kissing. A soft female mouth.

and a bearded rough male mouth. Yeah. I think it was the textural. In color. Yeah. Did something there. I mean, one of the things that I find fascinating, baffling, hard to reckon with itself about Me Too is kind of what is or was it? In one sense, it's a movement and we're used to calling it a movement, but it's also a lens.

And so one of the feelings that I remember a lot from the initial moment was, of course, the revelations were shocking in their specificity, in their number, most of all in the fact that they were being made publicly. But a story like cat person, to me, a lot of these things weren't, you know, the fact that bad sexual behavior was going on, or the fact that power came into sex and into the workplace through gender, sex, et cetera. these things were not surprising to me or revelations, but Me Too gave a new lens to look at them. So in some ways, maybe that was helpful. Yes. That it could provide a kind of definition around a work like a cat person or others. And in other ways, there's something so totalizing and sweeping about it.

This is a Me Too era story. And potentially flattening. Yeah, because looking at it now, to Vincent's point about people calling it an essay, I think that does possibly have something to do with the fact that, in the immediate wake of Me Too, the real, you know, the reality gained, you know, kind of the upper hand, the true stories, women's testimonials, rather than kind of potentially more like gray area or oblique or subjective, you know, account that even women authors might tell. Totally. Well, yeah, this makes me want to ask you both, you know, moving forward a bit from that first moment. you know, getting into that 2019 or 2020 or 2021 onward moment that you're talking about, you know, as more time has passed, have there been examples of works of art that it, you know, address me to or let's say the circular and the themes of Me Too that you have found successful? I mean, I really like the assistant that came out in 2019, I believe. It's a movie directed and written by Kitty Green. It's fictionalized, but it seems to.

to be based on the life of like an assistant, a young female assistant who works at a Weinstein-like at a Miramax-like company as the assistant to a Weinstein-like figure, a sort of big, scary boss who was doing all manners of nefarious things. And it basically describes a day in her life. Okay, let's bear with me here. So a new assistant arrives from out of town. She's being put up at the mark, and your boss at some point left the office. To mean her at the mark, yes. Yes, according apparently to the jokes of the office. Yeah, I guess.

Okay. Okay, so that's it? That's why you came in. And I found an earring in the office today. The hearing? By his couch. and a hair tie on the foil last week. Forgive me, but are you often cleaning things off his floor?

I mean, we have a janitorial crew, right? I'm supposed to tidy up. And a girl came, and she picked the earring up. And I've never seen her before, and it was hers. The interesting thing about this movie is that the boss has never pictured. You hear his voice and his sort of hectoring. you know, demanding, like horrible presence, but you never see him. It's just you feel his all pervasive presence.

And I thought that was incredibly effective because it showed how that kind of power and that kind of oppression works on the day to day, you know, not in like the apex of the most harrowing moments, but just in the banality of evil, so to speak, yeah. And so did you see The Assistant? I didn't. Even though it stars one of your favorite actresses, Julia Garner. I love Julie Garner. She was great in that movie.

Was she? You got to complete the canon. The Garnerer Canaan. The Garnerverse? Step into the Garnerverse. But what it sounds like to me is, you know, it's so interesting because it's like, me too, me too. It was a Tarana Burke started. And it was just, it was about, like, sexual assault survivors saying, like, you know, this has happened to me, too.

on a sort of generic level. But the height of Me Too, as we know it, the classic Me Too setup is a sort of workplace environment where someone has overweening power and their power is felt even when they're not there. But it's interesting because something like the assistant is like a dark parody of something like The Devil Wears product. Okay, first of all, you and I answer the phones.

The phone must be answered every single time it rings. Calls roll to voicemail and she gets very upset. If I'm not here, Andrea, Andrea, you aren't chained to that desk. Well, what if I need to... What? No. One time an assistant left the desk, because, you know, she sliced her hand open with a letter opener. And Miranda missed Larkfeld, just before he boarded a 17-hour flight to Australia. She now works at TV Guide.

The movies already have this setup of, like, I've apprenticed myself to you, and, like, I'm in some ways abject and, like, abasing myself before you. Yeah. And it's just interesting that that setup is, first of all, the precondition for lots of art that we like and therefore makes us go back and think about a lot of it. But also, like, a lot of the art that we like also has that scenario and it can be then kind of switched up. Working Girl or, you know, like light comedy fair, light comedic fair. You know, I had this experience of recently rereading one of my very favorite memoirs. I'm with the band by Pamela DeBar. about the life of a groupie in the 60s.

And it's a pretty light book, you know, light fun, tons of gossip, tons of sexual intrigue, a lot of famous people stuff, you know. But a lot of it, there's a lot of stuff there where she talks about like almost being raped or like certainly being taken advantage of and mistreated by men. But even worse stuff. like, you know, hitchhiking and having men, you know, like literally like tearing your clothes, you know, but it's all told in this kind of like, because, quote, unquote, this is what happens. This is what happens, you know, like this was the life and this is what it was.

But with a shift of the dial, as you say, looking at it now, I was like, oh my God, like, these were some really rough things. And, you know, probably a lot of it is like influenced by the education we've received, last five years. Not that I didn't, not that before that I was, by any means a rape apologist. No, I think it's about a, well, I think this applies directly to culture. You know, it's about changing a way, changing a collective way of seeing. And that's part of the huge powerful effect on the culture. I mean, Vincent, can you think of any, you know, Me Too works that particularly struck you? Well, so for me, and, you know, all of this makes me wonder, you know,

exactly what qualifies. But for me, what I think about is one of my favorite television shows of the last couple of years, which is I May Destroy You, which is written, I believe, in part directed, also starring the very talented Michaela Cole. And this was 2020, I think. 2020. Yeah. It's about, you know, a black woman in London who we see in the first episode, her being sexual assaulted. She's out. She's, you know, under deadline.

She's a writer. she's decided she's going to go out instead of work on her work. And she's in a sort of club environment and in a bathroom, something horrible happens to her. And the rest of the show is in some ways the afterlife of that event. And so when you were just talking about that memoir, it reminded me that one way that it's changed my reading is that I too notice those moments in texts that I have loved for other reasons before. And then it makes me wonder like, oh, so the later thing that happens to them, am I supposed to understand this person as in some ways a traumatized person? Yeah.

Our great colleague, Parole Segal, has had a great essay talking about the trauma plot in specifically literature. You're talking about Parole Segal, a fellow critic at The New Yorker. Yes, yes, exactly. But it makes me, I think it has in some ways subtly tweaked my approach to characters in dramas, as television shows how I see a person later on. Because I may destroy you for sure is like a treatise on trauma. Like self-consciously so. How it changes character.

And there are moments when like Michaela Cole's character is like being an asshole in a way that we like are meant to be like, okay. So do we do we give this all to this event? Or do we, is it about someone who's like wasn't perfect before? It's all these questions about how do we then take somebody's age? into account. How do we think of them as a person, a subject, and also take into account something that's happened to them?

And the assault, you recall? The thing in my head. Yes. Yeah, I wouldn't, because now you're calling it, something that I never. Do you see anyone else in this memory? No, you can't call it a memory. Okay, other than the man in the...

in my head, it may not even be real because I'm the person that can actually see it, and I'm not sure. So we should probably pay attention to that. Yes. Yeah, because we don't know. That's a very big thing to assume. I'm just saying that we should refrain from talking about things like that in facts, and we should probably just...

What I really loved about I May Destroy You is how totally inconsistent the character's response. are. Yes. To the event that's happened, which is also reflected in the direction of the show. I mean, Vincent, you say we see the assault. I actually think you don't see it in my memory in the first episode. Not in the first episode. We see it later on.

That's correct. I mean, by the way, a flashback was totally like a thing of like, in some ways, ideological about what it is to remember. Yes, exactly. And it's not totally clear. I think she doesn't, I mean, I think the suggestion is, if I recall, is that she doesn't totally know exactly what happened, like in the first episode. She knows something because she's taking drugs.

And I'm only nitpicking with you. No, please. Not to be, not to be crazily pedantic. It matters. But, well, one reason I think it matters is because what comes into that blank space where memory fails, you know? This is, again, I'm clearly obsessed with my idea of Me Too as a lens. But this is where so many different things can come in. Oh, it was nothing probably making it up.

But I think that one really interesting piece of the show was just reckoning. with what could have happened based on different templates of what we know the possibilities to be. You know, oh, it's no big deal. It happens to everyone. Oh, it's a huge deal. This is a moment when you have to speak your truth. Yeah. I feel like that show really reckoned with those things, especially in an episode that comes later in the show where so many people have turned to the character of Arabella as a kind of avatar for their own experience.

Yeah. And it's, you know, you can understand why people want. want to do that, why the general public wants to go on social media or a cost this person in the street and say, you're my hero, et cetera. But it's too much also for one person to handle. Absolutely. And that I thought was really beautifully shown how a collective experience, something like Me Too, can make you feel empowered. You know, when you talk about Toronto Burke, that was, of course, the point of the phrase Me Too in the beginning to say, yes, I've been through this as well.

This has happened to me as well. You're not alone. But it implies a collective. But it implies a collective and what if you can't totally fit yourself into that collective? And a kind of template, exactly. Yes. And to me, the best works of culture coming out of me, too, want to take a really granular look at that as opposed to just slap a kind of trauma label on something and say, this is the experience of trauma. 100%. And I think it's also, that's why, like, an essay like Parles or, you know, which is a work of criticism or, you know, works, which, as you say are.

more granular, ambivalent, you know, particular about kind of trying to parse out what it means to undergo an experience like that. I feel I couldn't have come immediately in the wake of Me Too. Because then just the political input of what was happening was just too, it was too hot, you know. It was too close to the bone. I think we needed a couple years at least to sort of reach the point where we could be like, okay, this is very important what has happened here. This lens to look at things is very important. But now let's look at art and let's see how human experience depicted in art maps or doesn't map on to the political aims of this larger.

movement. Yeah. And I think, you know, it's really tough when you talk about art because the moment something happens in the political world and art jumps in. I remember that between the world in me, for example, Tanahasi Coates' book came out. It was rushed out. Its pub date was kind of famously pushed up to July of 2015. It was just in the wake of the mass shooting at Emmanuel AME Church.

in Charleston, South Carolina. The thing is that art also is meeting commerce at this moment of sort of we need stories to fit this template, you know? And a flattening does occur, you know? And then we do need these correctives to say, okay, the real people to whom things happen don't fit so many of our story templates and don't fit so many of our discourse arguments

and even don't fit into the... the very real political arguments that then ensued that. Yeah, yeah. So there's always this, I think, mostly healthy, mostly productive, mostly generative, back and forth between sort of the imperatives of the moment, a certain blankly reflective kind of attempt to get something down that is parallel to the moment,

and then a step back and say, okay, so, but what about people, people? Yes. Let me ask you guys about something that's kind of on my mind. You know, Me Too happens. We get all these stories, stories from mostly women, not exclusively, who have been silenced in a very real way, often by non-disclosure agreements, by threats, et cetera. These stories come pouring out. And then much as Isaac Newton, you know, told us there would be. There's a counterforce. I'm going right back to the laws of physics. Wow. I'm going right there. The science critics of the New Yorker. I'm going right there because, you know, I don't know much beyond that. Is this a science podcast?

You know, could I tell you the three laws? Yeah, probably. But let's just talk about this one. I mean, for every force there's a counterforce. And so we get a different genre of story. And that genre of story is the story of the accused, which in my experience, culture-wise, has been irresistible for artists, which is someone who thought they were in a certain position of power and have fallen. and what that experience is like for them.

And that brings me to one of my favorite entries in the genre, which is Mary Gateskills novella, This Is Pleasure, which came out in 2019, which deals with the experience of a publishing executive who has had what seemed like blatantly, obviously, inappropriate relationships, provocative, flirtatious, driven by a certain desire to titillate and insult younger,

women in his workplace. But the weird moral and emotional gray area of how he sees the situation and how a female friend of his suit is the situation too. Yeah, I love that story, the novella, I guess, because first it came out in the magazine, then it came out, I think, as a slim volume. A pleasingly slim volume. A pleasingly slim volume. There's nothing I love more than a pleasingly slim volume that could just go into a pocket. And I, when Dis's Pleasure came out, and I remember reading it and thinking maybe Mary Gayskill is the only person I'll trust on this and who has like the balls to publish something from the perspective of this sort of like semi-repellent, semi-charming man in the wake of me too. And to me, I felt like it was a, the room was suddenly filled with air. I was like, okay, we can talk about this.

we can have this perspective. It's not a laudable perspective. But she's also saying the lens has changed things for people, the way people used to behave, count it as one thing, and now it counts as another thing. And here is a man who was kind of caught in the midst, and there are people like that. And it's interesting to look at their lives,

because it's a real thing. One thing that that story really illuminates, for me. And this, and so with the rise of the Me Too story, there has also risen an archetype, I think, of the woman roughly of the same age as the Me Too man, who observes it with the mores of the old ways, not the new ways. Interesting. Who is like, sort of like, galled by the sensitivity of these young women.

So there's all these weird moments where like, where the, the, the, The narrator of This Is Pleasure has like, can I read like one line? Yes. Well, we'll explain a bit, just set us up a bit and explain who the narrator is. Because there are two narrators. It goes between the man's perspective and... His female friend. And a female friend.

He's about his age. Who's about his age. Right. And she, the female narrator is a sort of witness to his many inappropriatenesses after at the beginning sort of being... And she's the target of one of them early on. and has like sort of integrated this into understanding of him without developing any sort of like condemning feeling, I guess. Is that? Definitely.

I think that's right. Yeah. There are so many funny or awful stories that it's hard to stop telling them. Funny or awful, right? The 19-year-old who texted him every time she, A, took a shit or B, had sex with her boyfriend. The girl who texted him to describe her fantasies every time she masturbated on and on and on. So here's a person who is, I get it. I guess to take the sort of trauma lens, like remembers these things minutely,

remembers them for a reason, is telling them to us for a reason, but also is telling them to us as a kind of slapstick? Right. With another valence. So there's all this weird stuff through this observer character. She's been a witness to her friend's behavior for years, and that's what she's recounting here. Right.

The stuff that he asked for or imposed on these younger ones. women. Yeah. I mean, right, that dichotomy between, yeah. It's like, oh, him, you know, but it's also like, I remember all of them because it was fucked up. Yeah, I think you're so right to point out that very fascinating figure of the woman who is friends with the man. And, you know, one thing that happens is she recalls, and her own perspective has been totally destabilized by his fall, which is part of what makes the novell is so fascinating that she had. She now has occasion, not through something that happened to her and has triggered new reactions, but through something that has happened to him, which is that his behavior has been called out as pigish, which I think all of us reading it would be like, yeah, that's pretty objectively bad. Yeah. She has to reconsider her own role and also her feelings about herself.

There's a moment she recounts when she first met the publishing executive, and he tested her, basically. They were out at some meal, and he put his hand on her thigh. and moved it up, and she puts her hand in his face, and she says no. And he never did it again. And her feeling is a bit, well, I was able to assert myself. That's how it's done. That's part of the deal. This is part of the compact.

Men will try. You have to be strong. Put a line in the sense. Yeah. And this was a perspective that started to come up in polemical, not fictional form, with people like, you know, Laura Kippness. and Katie Roy Fee, and, you know, you have to be able to assert yourself part of growing up, part of being. Yeah. Of course, that leaves completely, leaves, leaves, leaves unquestioned all the behaviors and assumptions that lead up to that moment, which I think is part of, in its most idealistic form, what Me Too wants to change.

Sure. I dare say that this is a perfect transition for us to move to one of the current works on the table that seems to come right out of the Me Too movement and to be talking to where we are with it or aren't with it five years in, which is the movie Tar starring Kate Blanchett and directed by Todd Field. I had heard buzz around Tar, but I didn't know anything about what it was about. there are these rather impressive posters all around the city showing Kate Blanchet leading back in ecstasy as she conducts an orchestra. And I thought, okay, cool. And then it was like, oh, wait, whoa, wait. This is a story about a me-toed woman, like a woman who's been in a position of power and is called out. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

So we've all gone to see it in the past few days. You know, Vince and I even were at the same. We were at the same show with several other New Yorker people. Really? Quite the scene. Where did you see at Abham? I saw it at Bam. I saw it at Bam last night. I will just say we didn't sit together simply because we prefer, and I think this is wonderful and just in a metaphorical and literal sense, different perspectives on the screen.

It's true. Oh, what are the perspectives? I like the fourth row, fourth or fifth row. Okay, Alex. I will leave a theater if I can't sit in the back half. I will not go. I will leave. I will leave. I will simply leave.

I must be in the center and up towards the back because I have to, I can't be looking up at the screen in any fashion. I've got to be meeting it head on. Interesting. I like to feel like I'm in it. I like to be able to see images and not even see the edge of the screen. Okay. So let's get a summary going. For anyone who wants to just dive right in and give us a little synopsis of tar.

I can do it. No me fry her up. Okay. Lydia Tar, played by Kate Blanchett. Beautiful. impeccably dressed, extremely accomplished lesbian,

conductor. I was like, oh, that's an interesting first round to slap on it. And she is that the movie opens. You know, we are forced to plug the New Yorker. The movie opens. And this one isn't our fault. It's not our fault.

It's just part of the movie. The movie opens. opens with an interview on stage conducted with this fictional character, Lydia Tar. Her interlocutor is our colleague Adam Gopnik. It is some form of festival. I don't think it's a New Yorker festival. It seems to resemble the New Yorker Festival, you know, in, well, it's, I think it is intended to be the New Yorker Festival. The New Yorker Festival plus the 92nd Street, why?

Time is the thing. Time is the essential piece of interpretation. You cannot start without me. See, I start the clock. My left hand, it shapes, but my right hand, the second hand, marks time and moves it forward. However, unlike a clock, sometimes my second hand stops, which means that time stops.

Now, the illusion is that, like you, I'm responding to the orchestra in real time, making the decision about the right moment to restart the thing or reset it or throw time out the window altogether. The reality is that right from the very beginning, I know precisely what time it is and the exact moment that you and I will arrive at our destination together. She is the maestro at the Berlin Philharmonic. She has just written a book that's about to come out, a memoir Tar-on-Tar. I mean, it's almost like a parody. of accomplishment, sort of high middlebrow accomplishment. Yes.

Please, please, please, you must watch. That is quite free here. Okay? It's got to be like just one person singing their heart out. She is extremely overly, one would say, confident, self-assured, domineering, charismatic. and little by little, however, we start to understand that she might have done some things which aren't completely on the level in her life.

Namely, there are hints of, you know, kind of increasing in force, that a former protégé of hers that she probably had an affair with ended up committing suicide after kind of becoming embroiled and obsessed and being rejected by her, by Tar. And more than being rejected, we see that Tar has sent emails to the conductors

and the leaders of every possible orchestra or music ensemble where this young woman, Krista, has applied for a job saying she's not mentally stable, she shouldn't, she's blocked her career actively

and we see that. You know, I've spent a lot of time since seeing it, just thinking about the gesture of having Lydia Tar be a woman

So what do you think about that? Well, so first of all, the title, Tar. It's like Herzog, Ravelstein, Henderson the rain. I just kept on thinking about... We're going to the bellow canon.

I love it. It's like the sort of male bellow protagonist questing, often lecherous, in the end, in one way or another, unstable,

male, unstoppable, can't stop until stopped by either external forces or God or whatever, you know? Yeah. To have a woman in that place and a woman who not just because of her sexual orientation, she is a lesbian, but because of her self-presentation, she's like, we see her having a suit cut for her. Like all of her signifiers, at one point she calls herself a U-Haul lesbian.

All of her signifiers are like... She identifies herself to a bullying school made of her daughter as her daughter's father. I'm Petra's father. In German. Yes. Yeah. Which is like the sort of the moment that we get to see her like, you know, her wrath, her revealed through this like slipping of a mask. All of these like very mask signifiers.

In some ways, I think the logic is to buy. Even though, like, it doesn't really desex the dynamic because of everything I've just said. But it, like, takes men off the table, right? So whatever you think about this parable, Todd Field says, whatever you think about this parable, I'm not going to let you, to our point about, like, flattening templates. I'm not going to allow it to live in that. Or at least I'm going to flirt with it, but I'm not going to leave it to that alone.

I just, just the gesture there. We're taking away the story of the powerful man and the weak woman. We're mixing it up so that you have to see these, you have to see this character as a person. Right. It's pure power. I mean, it's defamiliarizes, you know, it defamiliarizes the story that now five years into, you know, post me to, arguably some people will like, will be like, okay, yada yada. Like, we've seen this. It's like, oh, we're going to like flip the script.

and we'll show you how this is about power. So, you know, one question I think we need to ask about a movie like Tar and other movies that are coming out. You know, where does art intersect with politics? You know, of course, I think the three of us are a little bit like probably aligned, maybe I'm wrong, on the idea that art does its own thing. Art goes its own way. Art has no obligation and probably the antithesis of an obligation to support a given movement. I mean, Naomi, I'm thinking about something you said earlier in the episode when we were talking about this is pleasure, the Mary Gateskill novella, and you said that it felt like a breath of fresh air, and I totally agree with you.

And one thing that reflects to me is how interesting it is that the Me Too template became so widely accepted. And so suddenly there was a sense of, well, we need to hear the stories we haven't heard before, which because there were so many of them quickly became the story. And so anything that went in a different direction or pushed against the brain with more. more nuance or subtlety felt super refreshing. Yeah. And, you know, I think that even though it's something like Tar shows, there's this sense of, oh, well, me too, of course, it happened. Yes, you know, this is, naturally, this is the world we're living in.

But, you know, Tar herself doesn't totally feel accountable in that world or, you know, and women have, are not only far from achieving equal rights and power with men in this country, but in some ways are farther. Right. than they were, I think, when Me Too began. It's like as a narrative template, it seems so familiar, but also it may still have a lot to teach us or to guide us with. Definitely. And, you know, we should hasten to say that for all our discussions about like, okay, five years after the fact, where are we?

Are we done with it? You know, like, you know, we're living in a world in which women's rights are impinged upon, like, as you said, more than they were five years ago. And so what is the role of art in that, as we said, it's complicated. My concern is almost not that art takes on too political meaning, but that politics comes to seem too attached to a certain storyline, you know, that the stories we hear, the actual stories of people, the real stories of what happens, the way that power operates, the way that sex operates, start to seem predictable as a plot line,

that we almost start to get it backwards, so that it leads to a certain sense of cliche, repetitiveness, and we've heard it before fatigue. And so, you know, the art continues to be productive and interesting. I'm worried that the politics becomes like flattened into art cliche. Right, right. Like we all given ex-pologics. Yeah, we've heard it before. We've seen that movie.

We've read that book. We're done with that now. Which is how we turn to fascism because it seems exciting. Yes, novelty. Novelty. It's like, I think we are aligned, Alex, about sort of the criterion of art being on a deep level different from any criterion that we can get from politics. But their interplay, I think, is something like political happenings, especially the deepest and most lasting ones, kick up, as you've been saying, new lenses, new truths about people. They give a new way to see people and new things to know about human beings.

Art can only grab those, but then bring them into settings that help us play out those truths, right? And so I think the only way to evaluate any of these things will be to say, what do we do with this new knowledge that we have? Not just spit it back at each other, but say, and then what? And then what? We'll have to wait and see. And then what? Thank you, Nomi and Vincent. Thank you, Alex. Thank you, Vincent.

That was Vincent Cunningham, Nomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz on a special episode of our podcast. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks so much for joining us. This episode was produced with special production assistants from Alex Barish, Riannon Corby, and Stephen Valentino.