Carrie Brownstein on Cat Power. Plus, “Materialists,” “Too Much,” and the Modern Rom-Com.

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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Ramnick.

Over 20 years ago, in the summer of 2003, the musician Sean Marshall, better known as Cat Power, was on tour with an album called You Are Free.

Staff writer Hilton Niles went to see one of those shows, and he wrote a wonderful profile of Cat Power in The New Yorker.

Along with it, was a full-page portrait in black and white by the great photographer Richard Avidon.

Avidon's photograph put her in the lineage of rock and roll icons going back to the old days.

So in the portrait, Cat Power, aka Sean Marshall, she's holding a cigarette, which has a long ash dangling off the end of it.

She has a lot of bracelets on.

She's wearing a pair of low-rise jeans.

That's Carrie Brownstein, a member of the band Slater Kinney and a co-creator of the sketch show Portlandia.

And for the series we call Takes, Brownstein wrote in The New Yorker about that photograph that was taken right at the moment that Cat Power was going from Indy Darling to a wider musical phenomenon.

She has a smirk on her face, some smudged mascara or eyeliner, and

She's holding up a Bob Dylan t-shirt, and the shirt's neither on nor off her body.

And I just, I like the cheekiness of it.

There's something very canny about her holding this up.

You know, you're not sure whether the shirt is covering Cat Power or Cat Power is covering the shirt.

And of course,

Cat Power famously is a fan of Dylan.

And her most recent album is Cat Power Sings Dylan at the 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert.

She dies and she aches

just

like a woman.

She breaks

just like a little girl.

I'm trying to imagine what a 2003 New Yorker audience would think of this photo.

There's all these sort of juxtapositions.

Like it was Richard Avedon, like this is, you know, preeminent artist in his own right, um,

capturing a photo of someone who maybe doesn't give a shit about

uh being in the New Yorker, like you're not sure that she cares about being in the New Yorker, which I can't say is um, usually the vibe.

And uh, yeah, she's not wearing underwear, there's a lot going on, to be honest.

There are just a myriad of signifiers in this photo.

I think why

I wanted to do this take on the Avadon portrait of Kat Power was that I was curious to revisit this time in music,

this time in both in my own life as a fan and someone who was playing in a band at the same time as Cat Power.

And, you know, Cat Power is someone I do know personally, and she has opened for my band slater kinney we have played with her actually many times and avanon talks about how he's like photographs they're you know they don't reveal this is paraphrasing it's like they don't reveal truths but they're accurate and i just when i watch cat power like i feel like this is a non-conformist like in the truest sense you know like this is someone

who is perhaps asynchronous with what's going on now, or there's like something that feels anachronistic about it.

And the difference between a non-conformist, and we are in a time of such conformity, like the difference between a non-conformist and like someone who is reactionary or someone who is contrarian is that,

well, first of all, it's like a less obvious choice, but also it's just who they are, you know.

And I think that also creates kind of a dissonance with the listener or the viewer.

I think there's an earnestness.

I think there is a strong desire to connect.

And that is something that Slater Kinney, you know, I think shares with Cat Power: that it's just trying to make sense of a world of phenomena, of our own, you know, purpose.

It's this sort of existential journey that we don't really want to do alone.

And music is a conduit and a means to not do that by oneself.

Last time I saw you,

you were on the stage.

Your hair was wild, yes, red, and you were in a rage.

You were swinging your guitar around.

Cause they wanted to hear that sound that you didn't wanna play.

And I don't blame you.

That is I Don't Blame You off Cat Power's 2003 album

You Are Free.

I think a lot of people at the time assumed, and Cat Power confirmed, that she was singing at least partly about Kurt Cobain.

But I really think in some ways that's beside the point.

There's something about the song that's so

prayerful and redemptive.

And

when I hear her singing, I don't blame you, and then she is basically also singing the old the backup vocals too.

It's like the second, the backup vocals are singing to her, like she's singing to Kurt or to some, you know, troubled artists, and then the backup vocals are singing to herself as the artist who's suffering.

I think for me,

I just, I felt that your band or your music became part of of someone's identity.

And I think that is like the greatest privilege and also really, really frightening.

I think, especially if,

you know,

like I didn't yet feel like I had the ballast.

I guess, you know, I sort of was barely like carrying myself along, you know, and I think I could sense that

the cat power was, I think, also overwhelmed by

the ways that audiences, you know, were claiming her music.

It's like everything you wanted, and then you're afraid that it's maybe not enough.

And I think that pressure is hard.

And at the time, you don't really see it as pressure.

You just sort of see it as

like this really intense

ride that you've put yourself on.

Just because they knew your name

doesn't mean they know from where you came.

What a sad trick you thought

that you had to play,

but I don't blame you.

So, the Avadon portrait accompanied a Hilton Owls piece in which there was this line: Marshall was alternately shy and demanding,

a solipsist, a solipsist, That is to say, a star.

Her triumphs were as engaging as her disasters.

And when you read reviews of this era of cat power, in 2003,

people were frustrated because they found comfort in her songs, but at her shows, they felt uncomfortable.

The set lasted approximately an hour and 10 minutes, during which time she talked to her friend's baby from the stage, asked no one in particular if the photographer Mark Borthwick was in the house, house, talked about her friends who had brought the baby, directed a fair amount of bemused antagonism toward a particularly ardent fan, asked someone off stage how many minutes were left in the set, played with her hair, took her large sunglasses on and off, indulged in rambling confessions, and complained about the length of one tune from her current album, You Are Free, before singing an abbreviated version of it.

And it's like, you know, they wanted like the fragility, but not the mess.

And they wanted this brokenness without the shards.

And it was like, what are we asking her to clean up?

Like, why are we making her do chores?

I think my point is when I looked back on this photo, it just really reminded me

how lucky we are that Cat Power still makes music.

And Avadon has a way of reminding us

to keep remembering, I guess, to keep going back to that place that feels

sacred and special and

uncynical.

The musician Carrie Brownstein of Slater Kinney.

She wrote about Richard Avidon's portrait of cat power in our series called Takes.

Is she arriving home or going out, dressing or undressing?

The Bob Dylan shirt is neither on nor off her body.

She's not covering Dylan, he's covering her.

Displaying, discarding.

Stop, it's only a shirt.

The unbuttoned jeans are going down, coming up.

The pubic hair is staying, either way.

Take in her morning after smokey eye, that half-smile.

Try squeezing between cat power and Avadon's lens.

The space is slippery, inaccessible.

You're not sure you were even invited.

In the end, you're the one who feels unknown.

As temporary as the ash on Marshall's cigarette.

Everything else is cat power.

You can find Carrie Brownstein's piece and a whole selection of essays about the New Yorkers archive at newyorker.com/slash takes.

There's Zadie Smith writing about Grace Paley, Ina Garten on Julia Child, and much more.

You can also subscribe to the magazine as well at newyorker.com.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

Every week, three of the New Yorkers critics sit down to talk about what's happening in the culture for our podcast, Critics at Large.

This week, maybe no surprise, they wanted to talk about Lena Dunham's new Netflix show, Too Much.

And there was a larger question in the room, too, whether the rom-com still has anything to tell us in 2025.

We wanted to share that episode with you and staff writer Vincent Cunningham kicks things off.

Friends, we're gathered here today to discuss, to celebrate the state of the rom-com.

That's right, the romantic comedy.

They used to be a staple at the box office.

And even though that's not really the case anymore, there has been a trend in the last, I don't know, five, 10 years of trying to reimagine the rom-com for today, whatever that means, and by whatever means possible.

We're going to dig into this a little bit more later in the episode, but let's give the listeners a little teaser.

What do we think is going on with the rom-com in 2025?

Well, the rom-com, as you said, Vincent, used to be like a mega-commercial proposition, right?

But I think with the advent of the tentpole IP type movie as kind of the only commercial proposition in town, the rom-com has weirdly become kind of, if not actually indie, then a place for potential experimentation.

You know?

Aaron Powell, we're in yet another cycle of

is the rom-com dead?

Long live the rom-com.

I think we've been here before a few times.

We're back again in 2025.

But if it's dead, people still keep wanting to make them, to watch them, to discuss them.

But it's true that it doesn't have the kind of mainstream cultural purchase that it it used to have, for sure.

And to your point about the cyclical nature of the rom-com and its life and death, this is not the first time that we've talked about this and tried to explore the state of the rom-com.

Way back on Valentine's Day, 2023, can you believe it?

Were we ever so young?

The New Yorker published a roundtable discussion where we talked about movies like Bros, You People, and Shotgun Wedding.

Do you remember that?

Starring Josh DeMell and J-Lo.

There you go.

It took me so long into rereading that to remember what Shotgun Wedding was.

The abyss that was the film You People did come more readily back to me.

Yeah.

But Shotgun Wedding was truly forgettable in that I forgot all about it.

Yeah, that's what sometimes that's what it's for as well.

I mean, we're here because there are these two new properties that we were curious to discuss.

Celine Song's movie Materialists, which is being billed as the return of the rom-com, and Lena Dunham's Netflix show, Too Much.

We have these two women who are saying, I love the genre.

I want to reclaim the genre.

And we are going to talk about if they have.

So, today we're going to be talking about our favorite rom-coms from the screwball era through the 90s.

And we're also going to be considering these new entries into the genre.

And the question I want us to consider is: is there anything new for the rom-com to do?

That's today on Critics at Large.

Or will they, won't they, with the rom-com.

So as we mentioned, we're going to get into materialists.

We're going to get into too much, but maybe it bears laying some groundwork.

What are some must-have elements, Alex and Nomi, of a romantic comedy?

What are we looking for just to begin with?

I think there should be a pleasing balance between fantasy and reality.

It should be, to an extent, relatable, the plot and the characters, but it has to reach for the stars in some way.

Like it has to have some element of wish fulfillment.

And that equilibrium is hard to get, but when it's achieved, it's perfect.

I'm thinking about like Pretty Woman.

for instance, which is of course completely fantastical, but has a kind of core of subjective relatability, like in its characters.

All right, I have a radical answer.

Here's what needs to be in a romantic comedy.

Full penetration.

I actually myself do prefer a little sheet rustle, although, you know, I'm not afraid.

I'm not afraid of it.

No, I'm going to say romance and comedy.

And you're all going to say, well, that's obvious.

But you know what?

Those qualities are often sorely lacking.

By romance, I mean just that little hopefulness,

that little inner shimmy that you want to see someone undergoing, that you want to feel yourself.

And for me, that does have everything to do with if you can, Nomi, you're talking about relatability.

There is a kind of fantasy and a romantic fantasy about who you could be, like playing yourself into the film that is almost more important than the romantic partner.

And then the comedy element,

funny, it does have to be funny.

And that can actually be a harder note to strike comedy is hard comedy is famously hard yeah it's impossible i just think and this is just straight up rudiments of storytelling the reason the speech has to happen is that there has to be a moment when all seems impossible that's i i judge it by like how

good is the moment when whatever it is somebody's been caught lying somebody's done some sort of betrayal where it's over

and I want to see them climb that hill back into plausibility.

You love an obstacle, and it's weird because, in other forms of storytelling, I kind of don't like that.

I'm like not as invested in that kind of vertiginous plot, but in the rom-com, for some reason, I do like it.

Yeah, what's on the Mount Rushmore then?

So, like, based on these criteria and many more, there are many more criteria that we could name.

What then rises to the top?

Well, this is not the first time that I've sung this tune on the show: Let the River Run.

There she goes.

There she goes.

She'll take any opportunity.

Any opportunity.

Working girl, my friends.

Mike Nichols' working girl, starring Melanie Griffith and Harrison Ford,

about

a woman's search for love, but not just love and the kind of tradition of like 1980s feminism, love, and professional fulfillment.

I have a head for business and a bod for sin.

Is there anything wrong with that?

No.

No.

And it's a great example of

a complete wish fulfillment movie where career does not negate love, but in fact complements it in an incredibly satisfying way.

She can have it all.

She can have it all.

Exactly.

And she can be it all.

I mean, it's such a great movie, and it is so fascinating because it has to do.

I mean, I have a whole argument that I'm just can't wait to trot out at some point in this episode about the condition of women in the 20th century and how it directly tracks onto the rom-com.

Another New York movie, New York is such a place in the rom-com world because of this kind of, I think, striving woman who we Naomi and I relate to, surprise.

You've Got Male is a perfect film.

It's a perfect film.

And its reception history, eyes were rolled.

And now everyone is regretting those roles because...

now we love Barnes and Noble.

Because first of all, Barnes and Noble, the enemy in that movie in the guise of Fox books,

the mega store that's going to put out Barnes and Noble.

Now it's like a mom and pop shop.

Oh my goodness.

Barnes and Noble is our last hope.

Like a little shoemaking Atelier.

Exactly.

But more to the point.

So You've Got Male's a Perfect Movie.

It starts with the trope we were discussing in our romantic episode from a few months ago, Enemies to Lovers.

And it's a clash all the way until some, okay, fairly questionable stuff involving manipulation, but like all for the good goes down and they befriend one another and accept life.

But here's why I love this movie.

I love this movie because of Meg Ryan, who is utterly pitch perfect as she's exactly the right degree of frazzled.

Why did you stop by again?

I forget.

She's utterly functional and loving and adorable and wears her heart on her sleeve, but she also is like totally who she is in the way that she was in those like Nora Efron movies, also in When Harry Met Sally, another total great.

And so you're rooting for her, you're rooting for the good side of him that could potentially come out.

And this is, of course, the other fantasy in romantic comedy.

The man is transformed by his love of a good woman.

Oh, yeah.

Like he is this, you know, little shriveled soul divorce who just wants to make money and hang out on his houseboat in the Hudson River,

who's transformed.

I always go back and forth about my favorite rom-com.

It's often Love and Basketball, Omar Epps, Sanal Lathan.

Sanal Lathan is also in another one of my favorite rom-coms, which is,

it's a hybrid comedy, drama.

ensemble piece, but romance is really at its core.

It's called The Best Man.

And essentially, it's about a group of friends.

This for me is classic.

Really, it's about a wedding.

It's the lead-up to the wedding of two of the friends.

And it is learned because one of the friends played by Tay Diggs is a writer and he has written a novel.

And it's found out by the character that's played by Morris Chestnut, who's getting married, that way back in college, there was a betrayal.

Mia slept with your best man.

And what ensues is a drama of betrayal, including Tay Diggs potentially cheating on his girlfriend, played by Sonal Lathan, who

that should never have happened to you.

For me, The Best Man is the great text of a kind of black Gen X sensibility.

They're kind of like, they have, there's incense, and people are playing the guitar.

And it's like sexy in a way that I want it to be.

It came out in 1999.

And it's directed by Malcolm D.

Lee, who has continued to create these movies.

But for me, one of the good things about a rom-com is that it can introduce you to a whole milieu and a whole kind of social stratum to which you can sort of aspire to live in.

Yeah, I mean, that makes me think of another point,

Vincent, the idea of kind of aspirationality

and when the rom-com catches you in your own life.

Like, when are you watching this?

Like, in my early teen years, you know, like watching these classic rom-coms when I was myself on the verge of entering into the romance plot, right?

Or like the sex plot, I guess.

And

having these movies transmit to me

what to look for.

Like what are the values that I

would myself want to adopt as like a

person who is seeking her own love connection.

That's right.

I love that you're saying that because I do think that in some rom-coms, in some of the great ones, that issue is itself dramatized.

What kind of life do I want to live?

And your expectations around it or the fantasies around it being actually defied in favor of something that is not at all what you thought would be your ideal.

And that is so fun to watch because the ideal rom-com is also a journey to self-knowledge.

It's not just just about your perfect wish fulfillment and you got exactly what you wanted.

You have to learn something about yourself and have your expectations defied and come out realizing that you now know what love is because it caught you by surprise.

That's where the magic is.

And when there's chemistry between the leaves, chemistry, chemistry,

so that you believe it,

that's where the magic is.

Yes, yes.

And I want to return once again to full penetration.

Okay.

Not because I actually think there should be full penetration in the rom-com.

Let's clarify.

Let's clarify it was a joke.

But the belief in the possibility of sex, because actual sex, you know, the rom-com is historically not an explicit genre.

There is a hint of forthcoming sex.

There should be in the good ones, there is attraction, you know, chemistry.

The promise, the potential of sex needs to be there.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, it's

look, I'm, I'm deep in the Nor Ephron thing, obviously.

I know that's rather typical and not going to shock anyone, but when Harry Mets Sally, of course, directed by Rob Reiner, but written by Nora Efron, sex ruins everything briefly before everything is made right again.

And that is also such a great part of that movie because that's also realistic.

We're like, the wish fulfillment finally happens.

And I just, I will never forget that kind of like, disappearing.

I know when she wakes up

on Meg Ryan's face.

and he's like so happy, and he's just like, I cannot get out of here fast enough.

Um, brilliant, brilliant.

You know, how are you going to work your way back from that?

Let's let's get to that third act and find out.

Let's find out

this summer.

Two projects are trying to take up the mantle of the modern rom-com: materialists and too much.

How do they succeed or not in updating the genre?

That's in a minute on Critics at Large from the New York.

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Okay, now it's time to get contemporary.

Let's turn to the 2025 hopeful entries into the rom-com canon.

Do they make it in?

Let's see.

Let's start with Celine Song's Materialists.

Would anyone like to offer us a synopsis?

I can try.

So in Materialists, we have Lucy,

played by Dakota Johnson.

She is a matchmaker.

How many marriages are you responsible for now, Lucy?

Nine.

She knows exactly what makes a relationship potentially work.

And what makes her so good at her job is that she is completely unsentimental.

She sees marriage as a business proposition.

It's math, as she says.

When the movie opens, she is attending a wedding of one of her clients that she set up successfully.

And two things happen in that wedding.

First of all, she meets Harry, played by Pedro Pascal.

You are what we call a unicorn-y.

An impossible fantasy.

He is incredibly wealthy.

He's very handsome.

He's tall.

He's urbane.

He's stylish.

He appears at least kind.

And he's single.

At the same time, as she's kind of flirting with Harry, she runs into John, her old boyfriend, played by Chris Evans, who she broke up with because he was broke.

And so the movie is basically about this triangle.

It's about Lucy trying to determine whether she should go with Harry, which according to her principles is the perfect match, or whether she should go back to John, who according to her principles is a complete dud.

That is 100%

correct.

Between

the dashing, very eligible.

viable Pedro Pascal and the dirtbag artist Chris Evans.

Alex, did you like this movie?

Oh my God, I have so much to say about this movie.

Oh my God, I can't wait to hear Alex's take.

I have a feeling I'm going to be right in between Nomi and Vincent.

I'm guessing, don't tell me yet if I'm right.

I'm guessing Vincent loved, Nomi hated, and here I am, very confused in the middle.

Okay.

I'm seeing nods, so I think I'm on to something.

Okay, I know my fellow critics.

No, it's Nomi, don't feel slighted.

Don't feel slandered.

Not at all.

I'm just going to say right now.

I'm going to feel, in fact, seen

and recognized.

And that's love.

And that is love.

Good.

But it's also hate.

Well, it's my love for you.

Yes, it's my hate for the material.

Got it.

No, no, no, no, no.

It's not hate.

I did not think it was a very good movie.

I thought it was trying to do something interesting.

And there were things about it that I liked,

but I felt it was completely, and I understand, I think that this was intentional in some ways.

The saporific vibe of this movie, the complete kind of evenness of it in terms of dialogue, in terms of tonality, in terms of the characters being indistinguishable from each other in anything, except obviously like appearance, was trying, I think,

to make a point about this kind of world

that amounts to math.

Dakota Johnson characters, especially.

She is unruffled, but unruffled to the extent where I was like, is she, has she taken like seven Xanax bars like before,

you know, doing every scene?

That I was like, okay, I can see that this could be,

yes, again, a comment on like, we're not talking about big emotion here.

We're talking about calculation, right?

We're talking about business.

And so this is the way relationships between people are.

She,

you know, famously, and this has been talked about in stuff written about this movie.

Up front tells Harry, the Pedro Pascal character, when she first meets him, she's like, I make $80,000 a year.

I know you make much more, basically.

She comes to his beautiful Trebeka apartment the first time.

She's like, How much is this place?

He's like, It's $12 million.

Right.

The problem for me was

that this, that the same kind of saporific, like Xanax vibe continued like from start to finish for me.

But then that seemed to me to be at odds with the kind of like central conflict the movie was trying, the choice, which seemed the kind of the rison d'être of this movie.

Alex, what do you think?

Well, I had a splendid time seeing this movie by myself, the chair next to me absolutely empty, laughing out loud, enjoying myself.

Laughing out loud.

I was laughing out loud because what I liked very much about it, especially in the first half of the movie, and what I found refreshing was that it foregrounded these materialistic aspects and made them the total focus and part of the comedy of the movie right up top.

Like we were talking about Jane Austen a few weeks ago.

This is a world in which everybody knows how much the eligible mate has per year and the material conditions of what that marriage will look like are everything to determining whether there's compatibility.

And though we like to think we've moved so far from this world and we like to flatter ourselves that we care about such different things, I don't think that's really so much the case.

And this is a very like harsh light shown on that.

There's a really fun opening where it begins with a caveman couple and a scene of courtship that is both ridiculous and somewhat touching and cuts to contemporary Manhattan where Dakota Johnson is click-clacking around in her click-clack heels.

But, you know, what I I like about it up front is you get these interviews between the Dakota Johnson character and her clients, and you see that all of them, first of all, have this desperation around them.

And I found the frank acknowledgement that worth and the acknowledgement of worth is what people are looking for in the dating market to be funny and to feel true.

I didn't, you know, is it cynical?

It's absolutely cynical, but part of the promise of the movie is that it's going to break down that cynicism and get to the warmer crust underneath.

So, therefore, you have the Chris Evans character.

And what got me there was it is for Lucy this choice between the past and the future.

Chris Evans' character is living, he's 37, he lives like he's 27.

And I found that funny too, like his horrible apartment with his gross roommates, you know, there's a wince of recognition from me.

Like, if you're a woman, you've seen that apartment.

Possibly if you're a man, it's not good.

It's not a good feeling.

And I found the truthfulness of that and the fact that she wouldn't want to go back there refreshing and I enjoyed it.

And I also admit to being absolutely fascinated by the affectlessness of Dakota Johnson.

Like, it's fascinating.

It's fascinating.

In part because I think in Dakota Johnson, you have a really capital A adult.

She is living in her uncluttered apartment.

She's making money for herself.

She looks really great.

She's focused on her end game.

She's adulting all the way.

And that kind of character, I think, has actually fallen out a bit of the rom-com space and of someone who actually has it together?

Yeah, someone who actually has it together.

Then, of course, the problem becomes that there's nothing underneath that you don't understand.

You don't see what the Grace Evans character is seeing in her, and the movie doesn't try to make you see it either.

It just relies on the idea that they had a past together.

It relies on

him declaring his feelings for her inexplicably.

And while she treats him quite badly, the inexplicability.

Yeah, that's what I'm trying to say.

So

it did all fall apart, apart, in my opinion.

And

my question for you guys and for the audience of this movie and for Celine's song is, is there no middle ground?

Whence the grown-up?

Where's the grown-up man option who isn't this like weird corporate, I'm going to take you only to sushi restaurants person

or an absolute mess who I'm sorry I can't respect?

Yeah.

Well, I think part of that is like the description of Dakota Johnson's character that you offered at the beginning, which is she's the middle ground.

She is neither of those things.

One of my favorite things about this film, and this is one of the reasons that you're totally right in profiling me, I loved it, was in fact the performances.

Because

Nomi's right when we think about the rom-com, we do think about relatability.

And with relatability comes naturalism in acting.

And this movie's like, nope, these people don't act like people.

And the dual meaning, it seems to me, of the title is like, yes, there's economic materialism, but there's also a kind of spiritual material.

What if there's no great soul either?

What if

people aren't these bundle of wonderful qualities that are waiting to be awakened by love, right?

The self-realization thing that you mentioned, Alex.

What if that's not in play, actually?

It seemed to me to be a counterfactual exercise.

What if...

we just are an accrual.

Like, yes, we have histories, but we're not some great thing beneath the surface.

And we're so the awkwardness of all the performances to me seemed to be part of a kind of mission statement, which I admired, the commitment to it all through the film.

I don't really think that we're supposed to think that she and Chris Evans are really some great all-compat.

Like, every single backstory shot is just of them.

There's one where they get out of a car in the middle of what seems to be Times Square, and they're just yelling at each other because of, you know, it's their anniversary, and there's this shitty date and nothing that he does is good enough.

He's not, it's not like he's poor, but thoughtful.

It's not like he's poor, but particularly funny.

Yeah.

He's kind of nice to her, but that's he's just poor.

Yeah, he's just poor.

Come on, you guys.

He's a handsome man.

I'm not even poor.

He's a hot man.

He's a hot man.

And so, by the way, is Pedro Pascal.

And then there's a great big joke in the middle of the movie.

I won't let it go, but he has

done things to sort of enhance his viability, which calls into question even his sort of dashing exterior.

But one thing I do want to highlight is that we won't spoil it, but there is like somewhere in the middle of this movie, we are reminded that beneath all dating is also the specter of violence, right?

And so

this hope, this aspiration is a great big risk that why are we taking it?

It really does call the whole enterprise into question in a way that, again, I thought was brave, but also made me think maybe it's not a romantic comedy.

It seemed to me to be just like a romantic thriller or horror movie

that was marketed in this way because of

it wants to subvert a thing.

I don't know that this movie believes in love.

That's what I like about it.

This movie's like, no, we're all alone.

I would like to talk about a story that does believe in love, a TV show called Too Much.

It's written, produced, largely directed by now a seasoned entrant into this melee, which is Lena Dunham.

And it is about a young woman named Jessica, played by, for me, and I'll get into my take, the brilliant Megan Stalter,

who has left New York after a disastrous breakup.

and moved to London and immediately,

first through kind of a hookup at a bar, immediately finds herself in the throes of a new romance.

I will add another drop into the cup by saying that the personality mix is kind of what this is all about.

The Megan Stelter character, Jessica Salmon, is the too much of the title.

She is

going to say whatever comes to her mind as soon as it comes to her mind.

She's the opposite in every way of who Dakota Johnson is in Materialists.

She's going to be as much herself as possible, and that person is brassy, loud, out there, unafraid to look like a total mess, which she is at the start of the series.

And her love object is this indie musician, Felix Remin, who she meets at a pub.

And he is much lower key.

He's conventionally handsome, whereas, and this is something that the show I think wonderfully does not emphasize, but it is part of the subtext, the Jessica character is like this fat woman, and he's just sort of like this conventionally handsome guy.

And he has had this dark relationship to drugs and alcohol.

He's now sober and kind of trying to stay in the straight and narrow, but he is not part of grown-up life.

And she sort of is.

She has a job.

She's in London to be a producer on a Christmas ad, but he in many ways seems more grown up than she does, while on paper, she's the one who's more grown up.

And I think the series really works with that.

Again, these questions of what is attraction, but also how does that translate into making a life together?

And how do these sort of youthful questions of sex and love and infatuation lead into something more stable?

I think that's at the heart of this series, too.

Yeah.

And one other thing that I think we should note is that this show was produced by Working Title, which is a production company that has worked on kind of the most famous British rom-coms, you know, like Love Actually and like Notting Hill and, you know, that whole genre.

And so,

and the series itself plays with that, you know, Jessica as a kind of expat who's coming to London and has these dreams, these fantasies based on watching exactly these rom-coms is coming to this new city imagining that she might find her kind of British lover that answers certain kind of either Jane Austinian or kind of the contemporary version of that ideas that she has in her mind about what makes a romance and what ends up happening.

And this is kind of part of the restructuring of the whole idea of the rom-com in the series is

life happens in a different way than what she might fantasize about.

It's interesting, though.

And first of all, I mean, I am a big fan of

Lena Delma's work.

The first season of Girls, I think, is just...

Well, yeah, I mean, nothing like that will ever be repeated.

It's just such a fastball.

And I think she's done it again.

I think she's done it again.

It really is

a show about

a kind of life cycle of the most intense parts of romantic couplings.

Breakups and beginnings.

Two things that are equally...

if different in valence, equally kind of unbearable.

The texting, the waiting,

the roller coaster of emotions that happens in the early parts of a relationship that kind of make it impossible to...

Jessica has come to work to London and she can barely even pay attention to work.

There's a capsule episode where she stays up all night knowing that she's got important stuff to do, cannot do it because

they're talking, they're watching movies, they're having sex, can't focus on anything.

And on the other hand, she's fixating on her breakup.

Her ex, Zev, who's played by Michael Ziegan, is in

a relationship with a kind of influencer who's played by Emily Radikowski.

And she's watching all of their videos, keeping a diary on a secret Instagram, which is directed toward this influencer, whose name is Wendy.

And so this obsession, the horrible bits of love,

I just thought it was great.

I love what you say.

And yet I have a question for you.

And that question is,

did you like the relationship at the heart of this TV show?

Did that work for you?

Do I like the relationship?

Did that give you rom-commie, ooh, will they or won't they?

Or how's this gonna go?

Because it's like they get to, it's almost not that because they're so together at the beginning.

And part of it is that the like absolute mania of the beginning of a relationship when you're not even sure if it's the right thing to do and you're spending probably too much time together.

So I liked, I believed the relationship for sure.

Did Did I like it?

No, I was harrowed by it.

You were harrowed by it.

There you have it, folks.

It's harrowing.

And there you have it, folks.

It's harrowing.

And I will tell you why.

Okay, so what were you harrowed by?

Because apropos what you were saying, Alex, about like the will there, won't they?

They will from the very beginning is the thing which I thought was very interesting and an interesting choice because once again, you know, we talked about materialists and it's kind of like like weird relationship to like, is this even a rom-com?

Here, in a different way, I think that's a question as well.

Because from the very beginning, it's like they move in together, essentially.

I mean, not move in together.

You know, it's like...

Some of us are like this.

No, no, no.

I'm not saying it doesn't happen.

It's a serial relationship.

representation.

Yeah, no, I'm not saying it doesn't happen.

I'm just saying it's a particular choice to say, we're going in.

We're meeting at the bar and we're moving in.

You know, like it's, it's just a different type of thing.

No, you're exactly right.

They're meeting, they're fucking, they're spending all night talking, they're, you know, they're in each other's lives.

But there's the bigger question of: will these two very, very different people find compatibility and a kind of a stability together?

And in one way, even beyond the way the show works, we know they will because this is a kind of a Romana Clay show.

It's based on Lena Dunham's relationship with her now husband, Louis Feldber, who is her co-creator on the show.

And there are strong notes of her ex, Jack Antonoff, in the ex who she leaves in New York, who is not a Jack Antonoff mega producer, but is this kind of failing music writer who's really self-serious and goes from this kind of love bomber character into this much darker,

egomaniacal putter-downer of Jess.

He's a putter-downer.

He's a real putter-downer.

So here's what I think about this show: I got very irritated by the Jess character.

It's not a fact I'm proud of necessarily, but it's just what it is.

She was too much for me for a while.

Like, I just felt like her expectations for the relationship were things that would serve her in every single particular.

Finding someone who would kind of just be able to

accommodate her in every single way without having to move an inch in a direction towards accommodating the needs of this guy.

And I've seen five episodes.

I think there are 10 total.

There's 10.

So maybe that will change, but there's a lot of putting up with Jess and kind of the chillness of Felix.

And to me, I sort of started to feel like, you know, Lena Dunham specializes in these over-the-top female characters.

That's what made girls such a

lightning rod of discussion, I think, in a lot of ways.

And I really admire her for that.

And yet, I felt this kind of self-justifying note in some of this, where, and I don't know if this changes later in the series, but it just felt like a lot of taking a mile and giving no inches on the part of the character Jess.

And where she really came alive to me was in this flashback episode about her first relationship.

And I like that the show accommodates the space for that, this kind of anti-rom-com, basically, in this long episode where you have this super meet cute.

They meet at a bar, and he, like, her pizza's been taken, and her friends have left, and he just swoops in like a Prince Charming, and he love-bombs the hell out of her.

She's the best, she's so great.

And over time, you just see like a noose tightening, and he starts withholding affection.

He starts criticizing her body and her fashion choices.

He just becomes cruel and cold and manipulative.

And that, talk about harrowing, utterly harrowing.

So that brings a lot of sympathy to the character.

And I love what Lena Dunham did with that anti-rom-com format, the falling out of love and the realizing that you've been betrayed by love.

I thought that was brilliant.

I will absolutely keep watching this show.

But at the moment, I'm wondering, and maybe this has to do with materialists also.

These are two totally, these are just like poles of straight womanhood that are the extremes.

One is this like adult robot, like I am adulting, and the other is this, yeah, and the other is this like absolute mess.

Yeah, but like a child, like, like

needs a caretaker, insists on her independence, but actually insists on being taken care of at all times.

And I'm looking for the one who accommodates both.

Romantic comedies have always reflected their era's gender dynamics.

So, what do these rom-coms have to say about ours?

That's in a minute on Critics at Large.

Alex, earlier you mentioned that you had a theory to unspool about the rom-com and the changing fate of women in their lives.

I would love to hear this take uncorked.

You ready to unspool that thread?

Unspool it.

Unfurl it.

Unfurl, uncork.

All different kinds of metaphors I'm offering.

I like it.

Yeah, well, so Nomi was talking earlier about this kind of like projection onto these figures in the rom-com and the need to project on.

And I I do think that the rom-com really gets its lifeblood from reflecting back women's circumstances in this realistic but also idealized way, as Nomi was saying.

And because

the economic, the political, and the domestic fate of women has changed utterly over the last you know, hundred years, just so happening to coincide with the history of cinema itself, you know, we get this kind of track record of female fantasy of what life and love is.

And I find that really interesting.

So, like, you know, we have earlier rom-coms.

Like, I love the classic Tracy Hepburn rom-coms.

I don't know if that's big for you guys, but like, those movies are sparkling and charming and hilarious.

And, of course, chemistry up to the nines, you know, lifelong semi-secret relationship, like, hello, there it is on screen.

And, like, so a classic example of that is the movie Adam's Rib, which was made in 1949, was directed by George Cooker, and from screenplay written by Ruth Gordon and Garson Koenan.

And it's about married lawyers who oppose each other in court, and they oppose each other on the question of men and women's rights and relationships.

And so you have this great view into a time when women had just, you know, been working.

during World War II, when the men were gone.

Now they have been powered like never before, but they're on, as we know, the cusp of the regressive 1950s.

And so you have Spencer Tracy as a prosecutor, Catherine Hepburn as a defense attorney.

She is defending a woman who tried to kill her husband because he was having an affair.

He is prosecuting that guy.

And you get such

comedic

friction, like no other, of this couple going up against one another.

But you also have real tension because this starts to eat into their own relationship.

And this kind of drives them apart before they come back together.

So those are some really real issues getting worked out in the space of one very funny comic movie.

And then, like, cutting ahead to the rom-coms that Nomi and I love, like, in the 80s, everything has changed.

Women, suddenly, it's not taboo to pursue a career.

There is the beginning of the having-it-all discourse, the like ruinous having-it-all discourse, where there is this idea that you can wear your shoulder pads and perhaps have get higher up on the corporate ladder or have a career as a journalist, as Sally does.

And when Harry met Sally, even though we don't know very much about her career as a journalist, divorce is an option.

So the rom-com has to give you a relationship that, first of all, doesn't feel like it's just settling because we now know divorce is an option.

It has to like sell that fantasy of the empowered women back to women.

And when it does, like we eat it up with a spoon.

We totally do.

Guilty is charged.

Yeah, because what could be really more perfect?

Yeah, career fulfillment and love fulfillment.

Yeah, and someone who recognizes, you know, your value value in both areas, basically.

And now I feel like we're in a little bit, I wonder if the crisis in rom-coms has to do with a crisis in how adult women want to be or want to see themselves.

Because again, these characters in Too Much and in Materialists are on total opposite poles to a point of extremity that I find instructive.

And neither of them seems to me to be living a life that, like, I like to think that the ideal romantic comedy heroine has a little bit of frazzle.

Not too much, like a little bit of relatable frazzle.

And in too much, it's all frazzle.

And in materialists, it's absolutely zero frazzle.

She is a straightened ponytail.

Like, that's what she is.

So, you know, where are women wanting to see ourselves?

And also, where do men come into this equation?

Right.

And

is a little bit of frazzle, but everything's going to be okay.

Is that just the romantic expression of Clinton-era political economy?

Is that just the end of history?

Because what's interesting about materialists is the fact that you feel that

certainly the Chris Evans character could fall off the end of the earth.

And there is precarity such that

there's kind of danger in it.

You know, I don't want to do like any kind of rote identity politics, but it does seem to me interesting that Celine Song

has created a world of mostly white people and is not herself white and was not born in this country.

And therefore, some of the gimlet-eyed stuff that we're watching in this movie is an outsider's look in

to perhaps a

white middle class that doesn't really exist anymore.

Yeah, exactly.

And is fraying and is falling apart.

So all of a sudden, class differences are not just aesthetic.

They are existential.

And I wonder if that's our changing political economy sort of asserting itself.

I think there's also a point to be made here that too much takes place in England while materialists takes place in America, in New York.

I think you're absolutely right.

It's existential, the class thing, or there's a sense that it could potentially be life and death.

Save yourself and hitch your wagon to the star of Pedro Pascal, who will never go hungry.

You will never go hungry.

Please, daddy, save us.

Save us with your like $12 million loft, you know?

That's right.

Because that's the only chance we're grasping at like, please, like the Bezoses of the world.

Like those are that.

Send me to space, Daddy.

Send me to space, daddy.

That's the only way to be safe.

Right.

Whereas I do think that in too much, there is a scene early on.

I don't remember if it's the first or the second episode where Felix is on the dole.

It's implied.

He goes to talk to like the welfare office and is talking to this guy who's like, have you tried to find a job?

Like in the last, you know, I'm not saying that's some idealized state, right?

Of like welfare isn't happening in England like seamlessly and frictionlessly.

That's right.

Certainly, but there is a sense that he's not going to go hungry.

Like he'll somehow go on with his life and kind of like be an indie musician and live with a lot of roommates, but it's not going to be a life and death situation, right?

Whereas I think you're completely right.

In materialists, there is a much harsher,

kind of starkly black or white life and death thing going on.

And I think it also has to do with masculinity.

You know, surprise, how could it not?

But in materialists, you have these two very very different visions of masculinity that are both in crisis.

You have the Pedro Pascal character who, yes, looks like a very traditional husband material kind of guy.

He has all the money, he's suave,

he buys the right flowers for the date, he goes to the right restaurant, he is a provider figure.

And then you have the polar opposite, this kind of, I can't even provide for myself.

I don't, you know, I broke my shoelace three days ago and I've had to walk around with a rubber band, you know?

Kind of, kind of vibe, kind of vibe.

Kind of vibe.

Kind of vibe.

From this other guy who feels himself to be in crisis over his masculinity for obvious reasons, he can't provide.

But it comes out, and here is a little bit of a spoiler.

It comes out that Pedro Pascal has, his character has, and here we almost laugh together, physical insecurities.

Okay.

He's had physical insecurities about his own marketability, his own ability to attract.

So on the one hand, like,

I like like that this movie is highlighting that fact of reality for men, you know, the fact that the culture is talking about this a little more.

And then in Too Much, you have a character who basically is analogous to John.

He's an Indian musician.

And

the masculinity there comes through in this kind of softer, caring way, I think.

The fact that he is equipped to care for Jess, to make her tea, to listen to her, to kind of have this gentle touch.

I think that's presented as this winning version of contemporary masculinity, it's opposed to Jess's ex-boyfriend who feels frustrated and takes out his thwarted ambition on his girlfriend by denigrating her and bringing her down.

So, I think that both of these projects are basically trying to speak to the fact that

everyone's ideals are in question.

No one kind of knows.

And like to add to this, we're sitting around here talking as if it's, you know, as if we're ourselves cave people about like men and women in heterosexual relationships.

Like, okay, there are many alternatives to these things now.

It's enough course, but it's also, I think, like, you know, what you see in what's fun in Too Much is you see that like all of her coworkers are living these very different lives, like divorced or wanting to try being a lesbian or whatever it is, like wanting to kind of flirt with all of the possibilities that are open in 2025, as opposed to like going down the standard rom-com road.

Yeah.

Well, you say masculinity, and it's so true.

One of the refrains of materialists is this idea of the quote-unquote high-value man, tall, rich, whatever.

And that is a refrain that is taken directly from, at least in my experience, the manosphere.

Yeah.

One of the refrains of this space, the men's rights activism space is 80% of women want 10% of men.

This idea of a kind of scarcity that

nobody wants, and this goes to the point you made about Dakota Johnson's wide chasm of choices, nobody wants the 80K man who kind of gets by and rents an apartment.

And no, no, no, you have to be this superman who can provide and perhaps let you not work.

All of a sudden, these ideas of the love match of two equals, even the two income household, nobody in a 90s rom-com is like, therefore, leaving their job because they got married.

That's not the, at least the ethos.

We're together.

I'm the publisher.

I'm a journalist.

We do this together, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And now we both look at each other's work over our shoulder and be like, oh, good job at work, honey.

All of a sudden, there's this idea that

the love match is not only a haven from the outside world, but it seems that patriarchal heterosexuality is, as it is in our culture, reasserting itself.

Yeah, this actually makes me feel very hopeful because about the rom-com, because it does mean that the rom-com has a kind of like a political

radicalness to it

simply by positing, you know, in that intermediate space that I keep being drawn to, that's between the fairy tale and the utter Hobbesian, you know, life is nasty, brutal and shortishness of it all, between the looks maxing and the, you know, oh, I just, you know, you took off your glasses and a beautiful flower was beneath the ogress.

Yes.

Like, you know, that in the space of reality where love and attraction and soul spark happen for all different kinds of reason that are both material and totally non-material, that like that's the place to explore, that that's interesting.

And I do think you're seeing two heterosexual women trying to make a case against that culture that you're talking about, Vincent, that kind of like, you know, the manosphere.

culture of where everything is about a number and there is this idea that everyone's in competition with one another and yeah, that it's just about resource hoarding.

But we're all trying to figure out what we want from other people.

And that is kind of what the rom-com is about.

So it's rich ground.

Come back to it, filmmakers.

I'm David Remnick.

Thanks for joining us this week.

See you next time.

Hi, I'm Tyler Foggett, a senior editor at The New Yorker and one of the hosts of the Political Scene podcast.

A lot of people are justifiably freaked out right now, and I think that it's our job at the political scene to encourage people to stop and think about the particular news stories that are actually incredibly significant in this moment.

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