How this interview with Vince Vaughn Captures the Cultural Moment

I previewed this piece in a previous email in December. This is the full essay.

Would you believe me if I told you that an interview with Vince Vaughn perfectly encapsulates the social and political tensions of our time?

Chances are that idea sounds unpleasant. Whether you’re elated or disappointed with November’s presidential results, you can agree that the state of American politics is distressing. The reasons are myriad and analysis is not hard to find elsewhere, but for everything that I’ve read I don’t think anything serves as a more telling artifact of the moment than the New York Times Interview with Vince Vaughn. 

Why would I recommend an interview that's hard to listen to? Because just like reportage on American politics itself, it may be grating but through all the bullshit there is something to learn from it. 

The interview spans across two days and is spliced together into one drag of a listening experience. It was published August 3rd, a full three months before the election.

The interviewer comes off like a living incarnation of Fyodor Dostovseky’s Underground Man (a cautionary tale we will come back to later). He’s insecure, anxious, and stilted. Questions surface as you listen: “how does someone like this land such a good gig?”. The Interviewer, unbeknownst to himself, comes off in a bad light but he also fails to realize that he’s also coming off as really, really incompetent. 

And this is why the interview is so interesting. In the aftermath of the election, the democratic party is or ought to be doing some soul searching after such a decisive routing, and yet, as evidenced by responses so far, they seem to be delving further into denial. This podcast shows the mechanics of that denial. Listening to it play out is stomach churning in the way that hearing arrogance is, but it goes beyond pity and into anger when you start to wonder how this thing got published- That there were a lot of other people who listened to it and thought that it wasn’t incompetent. Someone at the New York Times okayed this and put it on the front page of their quality paper. If this is considered quality, it’s no wonder people look to independent podcasters instead. Indeed Vaughn himself tries to help the guy by getting him to have a conversation rather than an interrogation, but as is his want, the interviewer doesn’t seem to listen nor care about what the very person he’s interviewing has to say. 

The next question that arises is: would you rather listen to an hour long conversation or this? 

In a way, the tables have turned, legacy media has become the joke and the independent podcast more serious. Deeper than that, independent media seems to show the return of the old style of interview. The nostalgic idea: black and white TVs with two people sitting across from each other, smoking cigarettes, talking, trying to get at the substantive points in their conversation. It was a punchline in the 90’s in early seasons of The Simpsons, then nostalgic in the 2000’s with Good Night and Good Luck and today, it re-emerges with the independent podcast. 

Through its runtime, the interviewer comes at Vaughn with labels and preconceived notions. Funny enough, he considered Vaughn’s active listening a style of “self help”. This makes sense, for the interviewer who admits later in the podcast, that not even the birth of his children caused him to change his mind, he must think of the art of conversation as a polite pattern of monologue, punctuated by head shaking in the affirmative.  

And then there’s part 2.

At the break, our host has a surprise for us as well as Vince Vaughn, now, for the next part of the interview he's going to ask his “real questions”. Apparently, it was by design that this interview went terribly- they were fake questions after all. Another surprise: Vince Vaughn, perhaps too exhausted from the first half, is taking the host’s questions on the phone and possibly on his way to somewhere else in between things. We learn that the host’s real intention was to get Vince to comment on Owen Wilson’s suicide attempt because you see he, the interviewer, had a friend do the same thing and it was his master plan to get Vince to relate to him once this secret was revealed. All listening, including Vaughn, are mystified by the dissonance. And this is where the NYT’s The Interview perfectly sums up the tensions of our time: The NYT interviewer, complaining to and about his subject, is unaware why his interviewee isn’t positively reacting to his manipulation. Vaughn, literally getting further and further away until finally waving goodbye as the car he's calling from cruises over into the horizon.

In the end, excuses are made. It couldn’t be the interviewer’s fault, it was Vaughn’s fault for not liking him and even more his fault for trying to help the interviewer.  (The guy even asks directly for Vaughn’s help, Vaughn gives it to him, he then throws another tantrum.)

Vaughn asserts, “I’m not having an argument, it's more of an observation.” 

This 30 minute audio shows us everything at play for the time and reflects back to us a story of our relationship with media. Though The New York Times serves a liberally inclined reader along the political spectrum it actually shares more in common with its bigger, right leaning counterparts. As it expands its modes of entertainment, its point of view calcifies.    

The interviewer, standing in for the New York Times, is so eager to preserve his worldview that he has lost all perspective of anything outside of it. In the context of a world that is expanding at an ever quickening pace, this narrowing becomes constrictive fast. As time goes on, it becomes impoverished to the degree that his assumptions show more about him than the subject being reported on. To put it in another way, the framework that legacy news outlets use to interpret and observe and report with are too simple to make sense of nuance and complexity. This has been evident with bigger news stories for some time but the Vince Vaughn interview painfully reveals this fact on the most personal level. For so long, institutions like the NYT assumed their authority because they were “professionals”, because they were “real”  journalists and therefore they produce higher quality work which was worth reading more than the entertainers posing as journalists at the bigger outlets. By the end, one longs for a multi hour podcast.

As we look at this interview and echoes like it, it begs the question, “is this professional?”

As mentioned, the most unsavory moment is the beginning of the second half of the interview. Where the interviewer brings up the question of Owen Wilson’s suicide attempt. Vaughn is gentle but firm, “You think it's a strange thing to ask somebody. I love Owen but it's not my place to comment on whatever was going on with him, other than I think he's terrific. I was honest when I defined success.” When the interviewer is finally honest about what he was getting at, Vaughn offers a helping hand, “I think that’s a common feeling anytime you lose somebody… You have to accept that you are not so powerful to fix everybody’s stuff all the time.” What makes this so challenging is the contradiction in the interviewer. He asks point blank for help from Vince Vaughn and then gets angry when it doesn’t meet his standard. He then veers into politics. (Playing out like a modern retelling of the party scene from Dostoevesky’s Notes From the Underground). Vaughn is as surprised as us, “I think that becomes a focal point for anybody who dares to not go with [what] the group think of the moment is.” So we have a microcosm: An unlistening arbiter, striving so hard to get the right opinions, dismissing the wrong ones, wallowing in their own disconnection. 

In the end, the interviewer dismisses Vaughn’s questions and the ensuing discussion on love and the nature of it as merely “the men’s group” portion of the interview. The dismissal is alienating. For an outlet that's open about its political leanings, I would expect a guy being curious about feelings to be encouraged rather than dismissed. It appears that the person most confused by this interview is not Vaughn or the audience, but the interviewer. As a reader I feel that the NYT is perplexed by me, they can’t understand that I am paradoxical: I don’t have time for 40 minutes of “professional” sniveling but I do have time for 2 hours of conversation. I’d go as far to say that with the results of the presidential election now and years past, that this disconnection seems to infect so many facets of this once lauded institution. It's the obliviousness and refusal for self reflection that causes us to push these things away and ultimately wave goodbye as we cruise on to different things.

Again, the question that comes up for me is “how did this guy land this job?” The only way this could have gone worse is if the interviewer’s multiple tantrums devolved into gibberish and tears. To be charitable, one has to hope that the platform learned from this and that whatever interviews follow are better.

So, that is what it shows, but what does it mean?

This isn’t an article about Notes From the Underground, but the parallels to Dostoevesky’s cautionary tale are unignorable. Wikipedia summarizes: “The Underground Man's every word anticipates the words of an other, with whom he enters into an obsessive internal polemic.” The similarities between our interviewer at the New York Times and Dostoesvky’s Underground Man hint at a problem that is much bigger than mere political leanings and is more serious. The problem that this podcast displays is foundational and philosophical. It affects American culture broadly and demands sharper attention than any political view can accommodate. But, for the sake of this piece, I am more interested in the folly of an established media institution and what it means in the context of other independent media outlets.  (I urge anyone to read Notes From The Underground, it's short and easy to find for free online, but for an excellent summary and analysis I recommend this episode of the Philosophize This! podcast)  What it means is a return to long form content. A return to competence. It means a need for a reassessment of left politics and media. It means that so-called “institutions” need to examine their responsibilities carefully. 

But then again, maybe the interviewer’s display does speak to someone. There have to be people who want to know if Vince Vaughn is “a big second amendment guy” or if he has “a libertarian attitude”. This interviewer seems to think so. Maybe he, like so many democratic politicians, subscribes to the views of his favorite celebrities, perceiving them to be that much smarter, more capable or at the very least, similar to him. Or maybe he thinks that his audience informs their politics by what the guy who danced on the diner table in Swingers thinks. With the shovel in the hands of someone so oblivious and so smug, it is actually enjoyable to watch legacy media dig its own grave. And if this interview was so unpleasant that it forced me to write about it, someone who once believed (and wants to believe) that establishments like the NYT are important, then they must have really fucked up.

If you are looking for an interview that you might actually like, Marc Maron’s live WTF with Vince Vaughn rules: 

Thank you for reading and being here. I’ve wanted to stay committed to sharing my thoughts and inspiration via a newsletter for a while. I’d love to hear any reflections or ideas this stirs up for you. Feel free to email me back, reach out on social media or even call or text me to talk about it. And stay tuned for next week!