Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen
Sign up for our daily newsletter to get the best of The New Yorker in your in-box.
Alex Barasch is a culture editor at The New Yorker and he recently profiled the director of “Babygirl,” Halina Reijn. The movie, about an affair between a C.E.O., played by Nicole Kidman, and a much younger man at her company, opened on Christmas Day. It inspired Barasch to spend some time educating himself in the grand tradition of erotic thrillers. “If you look at the ones that came out in the eighties, nineties, early two-thousands, I feel like the hallmarks are these very baroque, over-the-top plots mostly to justify the sex, and also the idea that the danger and the sex are inextricable from each other,” Barasch explains to David Remnick. “You know, the erotic and the thriller have to go hand in hand. The point is that that’s why it’s exciting until it decidedly is not.”
New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
