The first person is a narrative style as old as storytelling itself—one that, at its best, allows us to experience the world through another person’s eyes. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz trace how the technique has been used across mediums throughout history. They discuss the ways in which fiction writers have played with the unstable triangulation between author, reader, and narrator, as in Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” and Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho,” a book that adopts the perspective of a serial killer, and whose publication provoked public outcry. RaMell Ross’s “Nickel Boys”—an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel—is a bold new attempt to deploy the first person onscreen. The film points to a larger question about the bounds of narrative, and of selfhood: Can we ever truly occupy someone else’s point of view? “The answer, in large part, is no,” Cunningham says. “But that impossibility is, for me, the actual promise: not the promise of a final mind meld but a confrontation, a negotiation with the fact that our perspectives really are our own.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Nickel Boys” (2024)
“The Nickel Boys,” by Colson Whitehead
“Lolita,” by Vladimir Nabokov
“Meet the Director Who Reinvented the Act of Seeing,” by Salamishah Tillet (The New York Times)
“Great Books Don’t Make Great Films, but ‘Nickel Boys’ Is a Glorious Exception,” by Richard Brody (The New Yorker)
“Lady in the Lake” (1947)
“Dark Passage” (1947)
“Enter the Void” (2010)
“The Blair Witch Project” (1999)
Doom (1993)
“The Berlin Stories,” by Christopher Isherwood
“American Psycho,” by Bret Easton Ellis
“The Adventures of Augie March,” by Saul Bellow
“Why Did I Stop Loving My Cat When I Had a Baby?” by Anonymous (The Cut)
“Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910-1930” at the Guggenheim Museum

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

Margaret Talbot, writing in The New Yorker in 2005, recounted that when animators at Pixar got stuck on a project they’d file into a screening room to watch a film by Hayao Miyazaki. Best known for works like “My Neighbor Totoro,” “Princess Mononoke,” and “Spirited Away,” which received the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, in 2002, he is considered by some to be the first true auteur of children’s entertainment. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the themes that have emerged across Miyazaki’s œuvre, from bittersweet depictions of late childhood to meditations on the attractions and dangers of technology. Miyazaki’s latest, “The Boy and the Heron,” is a semi-autobiographical story in which a young boy grieving his mother embarks on a quest through a magical realm as the Second World War rages in reality. The Japanese title, “How Do You Live?,” reveals the philosophical underpinnings of what may well be the filmmaker’s final work. “Wherever you are—whether it seems to be peaceful, whether things are scary—there’s something happening somewhere,” Cunningham says. “And you have to learn this as a child. There’s pain somewhere. And you have to learn how to live your life along multiple tracks.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Kiki’s Delivery Service” (1989)
“My Neighbor Totoro” (1988)
“Old Enough!” (1991-present)
“Princess Mononoke” (1997)
“Spirited Away” (2001)
“The Boy and the Heron” (2023)
“The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” by C. S. Lewis (1950)
“The Moomins series” by Tove Jansson (1945-70)
“The Wind Rises” (2013)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

This episode originally aired on December 7, 2023.

This year, high-profile failures abounded. Take, for example, Francis Ford Coppola’s passion project “Megalopolis,” which cost a hundred and forty million dollars to make—and brought in less than ten per cent of that at the box office. And what was Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump but a fiasco of the highest order? On this episode of Critics at Large, recorded live at Condé Nast’s offices at One World Trade Center, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz pronounce 2024 “the year of the flop,” and draw on a range of recent examples—from the Yankees’ disappointing performance at the World Series to Katy Perry’s near-universally mocked music video for “Woman’s World”—to anatomize the phenomenon. What are the constituent parts of a flop, and what might these missteps reveal about the relationship between audiences and public figures today? The hosts also consider the surprising upsides to such categorical failures. “In some ways, always succeeding for an artist is a problem . . . because I think you retain fear,” Schwartz says. “If you can get through it, there really can be something on the other side.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

HBO’s “Industry” (2020–)
The 2024 World Series
The 2024 Election
“Megalopolis” (2024)
“Woman’s World,” by Katy Perry
“ ‘Woman’s World’ Track Review,” by Shaad D’Souza (Pitchfork)
“Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, and the Unstable Hierarchy of Pop” (The New Yorker)
“Tarot, Tech, and Our Age of Magical Thinking” (The New Yorker)
“Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and the Benefits of Beef” (The New Yorker)
“Am I Racist?” (2024)
“Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 1” (2024)
“Apocalypse Now” (1979)
“Madame Web” (2024)
“The Great Gatsby,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fugees
“Moby-Dick,” by Herman Melville
“NYC Prep” (2009)
“Princesses: Long Island” (2013)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.