Bang-Bang Podcast

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.comVan and Lyle are joined by historian and American Prestige co-host Danny Bessner to revisit Marco Brambilla’s Demolition Man, a silly 1993 action movie that doubles as a surprisingly sharp meditation on liberal order, technocratic repression, and the thin line between utopia and dystopia. Released at the tail end of the Cold War, the film belongs to a broader golden age of dystopian cinema—alongside RoboCop, Total Recall, Blade Runner, The Running Man, and Gattaca—that all seemed to anticipate the coming post-ideological world. Set in a pacified, hyper-managed Los Angeles, Demolition Man imagines a society that has solved violence and sex by regulating them out of existence. Or so it tells itself.The film’s joke, which Danny helps unpack, is that utopia and dystopia are not opposites but partners. San Angeles is clean, safe, polite, and utterly incapable of handling conflict. Its police officers are untrained for real violence; its elites speak in moralizing euphemisms while outsourcing brutality; its culture has been flattened into wellness slogans, museum exhibits, and Taco Bell. Simon Phoenix, Wesley Snipes’ flamboyant villain, is not an aberration but a product of the system, unleashed when elites decide they need “an old-fashioned criminal” and therefore resurrect “an old-fashioned cop.” Stallone’s John Spartan is less a hero than a reminder of what this world has repressed, from messiness to physicality to desire. Even sex has been replaced by sanitized, techno-sensory simulation.Beneath the jokes (three seashells, the Schwarzenegger Presidential Library, Denis Leary’s sewer populism) the film lands on a bleak insight. The real antagonists aren’t Phoenix or the underground “scraps,” but figures like Dr. Cocteau and Chief George Earle. That is, snobbish, managerial liberals who confuse control with peace and civility with justice. Demolition Man suggests that a society allergic to disorder will reproduce violence in more dangerous forms, while congratulating itself for having moved beyond it. The solution it gestures toward is clumsy but telling. Not a return to barbarism, but a reckoning with conflict as unavoidable and political. Somewhere between clean and dirty, Spartan says, “you’ll figure it out.”Further ReadingDanny’s websiteAmerican PrestigeThe 1984 Ad for Apple“Conservative’s Dystopia” by Lee KepraiosBrave New World by Aldous HuxleyTeaser from the EpisodeDemolition Man Trailer

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.comVan and Lyle are joined by returning guest Matt Duss—former foreign policy advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders and current executive vice president at the Center for International Policy—to revisit Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor, a paranoid thriller that captures a vanishing moment when American institutions still feared exposure. Robert Redford’s Joe Turner is no action hero but a reader, an analyst, a man whose job is to interpret texts rather than enforce power. When his CIA front office is wiped out in broad daylight, the shock is not just the violence, but how casually it is absorbed by “the community,” a euphemism so bland it becomes obscene. This is a film less about rogue evil than about bureaucratic normalcy, where murder is a logistical inconvenience and accountability a procedural error.What gives Condor its present-day melancholy is its faith that truth, once surfaced, still matters. The film’s final wager rests on the idea that the press, embodied by The New York Times, might still function as a check on clandestine empire. “They’ll print it,” Turner insists. The ending leaves that faith unresolved, but history has not been kind to it. We contrast the film’s hopeful premise with the Times’ recent “Overmatched” series on U.S. military power and China, which dresses escalation in the language of sober realism. Rather than interrogating militarism, the series laments America’s supposed weakness while advocating more spending, more production, and deeper entrenchment in a defense-industrial oligopoly. Condor imagined exposure as a threat. Today, exposure is often indistinguishable from advocacy.The conversation widens to the economic and ideological machinery behind permanent war: Consolidation among defense contractors, the fetishization of exquisite platforms over mass production, and the quiet assumption that U.S. global dominance is both natural and necessary. Where Condor traces an oil conspiracy hidden just beneath the surface, our present feels almost worse, one in which the logic of empire no longer requires secrecy at all. Joubert’s cold observation that he only cares about “how much” now sounds less like villainy than candor. In that sense, Three Days of the Condor is not cynical enough. Its tragedy lies in believing that revelation alone could still interrupt the system it so clearly understood.Recommended Reading / ViewingMatt on TwitterMatt at the Center for International Policy“Overmatched: America’s Military Is No Longer the World’s Best”Bland Fanatics by Pankaj MishraThe Jakarta Method by Vincent BevinsTeaser from the EpisodeThree Days of the Condor Trailer

Do US troops have a threshold for the kind of unlawful order they’re unwilling to follow? If Venezuela wasn’t a breaking point, is Greenland? Can the US have mid-term elections under martial law? Will troops fire on fellow Americans if ordered? And why is the permanent war economy at the root of everything from economic insecurity to America’s imperial boomerang in the form of ICE, National Guard deployments, and militarized policing? In this urgent behind-the-scenes episode, guest Jeremy Wattles joins Van Jackson and Lyle Jeremy Rubin to talk about all that and more. Available wherever you get your podcasts.And be sure to check out our related work:Our coverage of The Siege, the 1998 film about martial law in New York:Our previous behind-the-scenes episode on America’s counter-revolutionary crisis:Van’s latest take on ICE and civil war: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.bangbangpod.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.comWe’re joined by filmmaker and returning guest Kevin Fox to discuss Mamoru Oshii’s Patlabor 2, a film that masquerades as a techno-thriller before revealing itself as a bleak meditation on peace not as the absence of war, but as its managed disappearance from view. The opening scene sets the tone: A UN-led intervention force wielding advanced technology against a low-tech but effective guerrilla resistance. It’s a distant, managed conflict, war as something conducted elsewhere, on the periphery, in the name of order. When the film shifts back to Japan, that distance becomes the problem. This is a society organized around the belief that it exists outside of war altogether.Oshii’s Tokyo is saturated with infrastructure, surveillance, and machines that promise security while obscuring responsibility. Decision-making rises higher and higher, until reality itself becomes inaccessible, filtered through procedures and abstractions. Throughout the film, animals and machines blur together: Aircraft framed like birds, birds clustering around military hardware, pigeons, crows, ducks, and scavengers moving through the city. The recurring blimps hover like omens, ambient and toxic. Technology doesn’t eliminate violence but anesthetizes it, making the moral consequences harder to see even as they become more pervasive.At the center is Tsuge, a traumatized veteran whose experience of war has no place in a society committed to forgetting it ever happened. His grievance is not that Japan abandoned war, but that it outsourced and erased it, maintaining a false peace that depends on violence remaining invisible. Patlabor 2 flirts with reactionary conclusions while ultimately exposing their trap: Recognizing systemic hypocrisy does not justify bringing catastrophe home, but neither does denial prevent it. The film circles a biblical question—Cain and Abel, once a family—and refuses catharsis. Peace, Oshii suggests, is not the absence of war, but the alibi that allows it to continue unnoticed.Further ReadingKevin’s websiteThe Siege (1998) episode w/ KevinBring the War Home by Kathleen BelewThe Cold War’s Killing Fields by Paul Thomas ChamberlinWar and Cinema by Paul VirilioDreamworld and Catastrophe by Susan Buck-MorssPatLabor 2: The Movie Trailer

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.comWe’re joined by returning guests Sam Ratner (Win Without War) and Andrew Facini (Council on Strategic Risks) to revisit Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. So committed to its own satire that many critics in 1997 mistook it for endorsement, the film remains an unsettling case study in the very real intersection of entertainment, recruitment, and common sense. Set in a future where only those who serve in the military earn full citizenship, Starship Troopers follows Johnny Rico and his cohort of beautiful, interchangeable young people as they are fed into an endless war against an alien enemy known only as “the bugs.” The language clean, the deliveries stilted, the uniforms immaculate, the violence staggering, and the militarist logic all too familiar.A classroom civics lesson explains how veterans took control after “saving the country.” Everyone else is just a civilian, politically inert. Verhoeven’s satire works through excess, not subtlety. We see vomit, coed showers, gruesomely botched training exercises, casual death. Children handle weapons in propaganda clips. Talk-show pundits sneer at the very idea that the enemy might think. “The only good bug is a dead bug” is not just a slogan but an axiom, reinforced by the film’s cheery and eerie “Would you like to know more?” interludes.Then comes the churn. Buenos Aires is wiped out, and grief is instantly converted into exterminationist joy. Klendathu becomes a mass grave—“one hundred thousand dead in one hour”—and the system’s answer is not true reflection but an alternative escalation. New leadership insists the failure was hubris, not the project itself: We thought we were smarter than the bugs. The problem, as always, is framed as misguided commitment. By the end, the most damning detail is not the scale of killing but the pleasure taken in it. The Brain Bug is captured, tortured, and displayed, and the troops cheer because it is afraid. Rico, now fully transformed, rallies a new wave of recruits who look like children, repeating the same lies about training and survival. The film closes on a promise that lands like a curse: They’ll keep fighting, and they’ll win.Further ReadingSam’s professional page (Win Without War)Andy’s professional page (Council on Strategic Risks)“How ‘Starship Troopers’ Aligns with our Moment of American Defeat,” by David RothFascism in Sci-Fi: “Mobilizing Passions” in Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, by Alton AyersStarship Troopers Trailer

Van and Lyle are joined by nuclear weapons and disarmament expert Scott Sagan to discuss A House of Dynamite, the 2025 political thriller that imagines nuclear catastrophe not as spectacle or obvious madness, but as an orderly sequence of decisions made under crushing time pressure. Structured as interlocking vignettes rather than a single command-room drama, the film moves between the White House, STRATCOM, missile defense sites, continuity bunkers, and civilian spaces, sketching a system that largely works as designed and still produces annihilation.The film’s opening establishes its governing logic. Inclination is flattening. Timelines shrink. Judgment collapses into procedure. “Nineteen minutes to impact.” “Sixteen minutes.” “Confirm impact.” Across locations, professionals do their jobs calmly while the meaning drains out of their actions. A senior officer tells a junior colleague to keep the cafeteria line moving. A staffer compiles names and Social Security numbers for the dead. Phones come out. Final calls are made. The end of the world arrives not with hysteria, but with etiquette.Much of the tension turns on probability. Missile defense is described as “hitting a bullet with a bullet.” Sixty-one percent becomes the moral threshold, a coin toss bought with billions of dollars. Baseball chatter at STRATCOM blends into DEFCON alerts. A Civil War reenactment at Gettysburg unfolds alongside real-time catastrophe, collapsing past and present forms of American mass death into a single frame.Scott is critical of the film’s portrayal of nuclear command and control. He argues that its depiction of retaliatory decision-making is wrong, that no president would order nuclear strikes against loosely defined adversaries without firm attribution or confirmation, and that the film risks backfiring by encouraging faith in ever more elaborate missile defenses rather than disarmament. Lyle pushes back, questioning whether this confidence in institutional sanity is warranted, especially given the political moment. Either way, the film lands a disturbing insight. The danger is not wild irrationality, but systems that normalize impossible choices. Nuclear war here would not look like collapse. It would look like competence.Further ReadingScott’s Wiki page“Just and Unjust Nuclear Deterrence” by ScottThe Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons by Scott“Thinking and Moral Considerations” by Hannah ArendtThe Soldier and the State by Samuel P. HuntingtonReview of A House of Dynamite in Bulletin of Atomic Scientists by Scott and Shreya Lad“Peacecraft and the Nuclear Policy Dilemma” by Van“Fresh Hell: Unjust Nuclear Deterrence and Nuclear Testing” by VanTeaser from the EpisodeA House of Dynamite Trailer This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.bangbangpod.com/subscribe

Van and Lyle are joined by writer and journalist Joe Allen to discuss Tigerland, Joel Schumacher’s 2000 film about a group of young men cycling through an infantry training camp in Louisiana in the final years of the Vietnam War. Shot in a loose, almost documentary style and anchored by a breakout performance from Colin Farrell, the film treats Tigerland (the “stateside of Vietnam”) as a pressure cooker where class, race, masculinity, and empire collide long before anyone reaches the battlefield.We focus on Private Roland Bozz (Colin Farrell), a troublemaker less defined by idealism than by a corrosive honesty that makes him impossible to discipline. Bozz doesn’t reject the war with slogans but punctures it by refusing to perform its rituals straight. He mocks the “war is hell” pieties, questions authority just enough to expose its incoherence, and helps fellow recruits game the system. Not out of solidarity with Vietnam’s victims, but because the machine grinding them down is so obviously fraudulent. Tigerland is full of these destabilizing moments: Officers warning recruits they’re headed for a “two-way firing range,” torture instruction folded into training banter, and soldiers explaining their own conscription through warped moral arithmetic. “If I don’t go, someone else takes my place,” one insists. “And if they die, they died for me.” It’s not conviction so much as displacement, a way to survive guilt by outsourcing it.Joe helps situate Tigerland alongside Matewan, Amigo, and other working-class critiques of American violence and oppression, but what stands out here is how little romance Schumacher allows the rebellion itself. The Army’s hunger for bodies collides with young men who are alternately patriotic, broke, insecure, chauvinist, scared, and cruel. Hazing becomes psychological warfare, masculinity curdles into humiliation and sexualized dominance, and open bigotry is tolerated, even rewarded, when it serves discipline. Bozz’s quiet victory isn’t resistance so much as attrition, in part by coaching others out on psych evals and revealing that the system doesn’t need heroes but compliance or exhaustion. What Tigerland offers, then, is not a coming-of-age story but a bleak anatomy of how war prepares itself by breaking people just enough to make them usable.Further ReadingJoe’s Wiki pageBang-Bang’s Full Metal Jacket episodeThe Short-Timers by Gus HasfordDispatches by Michael HerrStiffed by Susan FaludiTeaser from the EpisodeTigerland Trailer This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.bangbangpod.com/subscribe

Van and Lyle are joined by returning guest Sam Carliner to take on Marines, Netflix’s new 250th-anniversary docuseries, an unmistakable propaganda piece (it’s literally featured on the official Marine Corps website) that nonetheless reveals more candor than the institution intended. Directed by Chelsea Yarnell, whose style veers into Riefenstahl-lite, the series moves through the familiar mythology: Marines as the “meanest, baddest motherfuckers,” war as manhood, China as the next “bloody” proving ground. But between the clichés, something truer keeps slipping out.The Marines themselves come across not as caricatures but as young people grasping for purpose. Some raised amid violence, poverty, absent fathers, and broken homes; others from supportive families, following beloved relatives into the Corps, seeking adventure, education benefits, or what they sincerely understand as patriotic duty. Some speak with chilling bravado about killing; others struggle openly with faith, family, and the sense that combat is the only place they’ll ever feel whole. A sniper mourns the disbanding of scout-sniper platoons as if losing a piece of himself. A Huey pilot wonders how to make “non-emotional decisions” when his whole life has been shaped by emotion, and a mother tries to bless a choice she privately cannot support.And despite itself, the series also exposes the machinery surrounding them. Deployments that make no sense. A surreal shipboard announcement about Yemen, where Houthi attacks are called “unprovoked” with no mention of the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza driving them, all delivered in a breezy “Good morning, Team America” tone. Marines saddled with the weight of great-power delusions they never chose. The political culture is bankrupt, but the individuals inside it are often heartbreakingly earnest. That tension, between Yarnell’s promo frame and the unfiltered vulnerability of the people she films, turns Marines into something worthwhile. Even in its worst moments, the series forces a deeper question: What happens when a society offering so little to its young men teaches them that violence is the only stable form of meaning?Further ReadingUSMC press release on the docuseriesSam’s SubstackThe Rivalry Peril by Van and Michael BrenesPain is Weakness Leaving the Body by Lyle Gangsters of Capitalism by Jonathan M. KatzWar Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris HedgesMarines Trailer This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.bangbangpod.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.comVan and Lyle are joined once again by historian Paul Adlerstein to revisit Under Fire, Roger Spottiswoode’s gripping and often overlooked drama about the final days of the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua. The film follows three American journalists (Nick Nolte, Joanna Cassidy, and Gene Hackman) as they navigate the moral terrain of reporting on a revolution in real time. What looks at first like a conventional political thriller unfolds into something more complicated: A story about solidarity and betrayal, the ethics of witnessing, and the impossible pressures revolutionaries face when the entire world is watching.We trace the film’s ambivalent but unmistakably anti-imperialist edge—the way Under Fire indicts U.S. policy without turning the Sandinistas into caricatures—and talk through the moments where its politics strain against its Hollywood framing. Paul walks us through the historical context of Somoza’s downfall and the Sandinista movement, while we dig into the film’s extraordinary craft: Jerry Goldsmith’s score (one of his best), the whistling motif in the church-tower firefight, the almost Carpenter-like chase sequence with the TV news van, and the unnerving tonal shifts as journalists move from observers to participants in the struggle.The conversation also turns to Under Fire’s prescience. How its critique of Cold War binaries (“the world isn’t East and West anymore… it’s North and South”) feels even sharper today, and how its depiction of journalists wrestling with complicity, responsibility, and power resonates in an era where war reporting, propaganda, and revolutionary movements remain entangled.Further ReadingPaul’s websiteNo Globalization Without Representation, by Paul AdlersteinBlood of Brothers: Life and War in Nicaragua by Stephen KinzerNational Security Archive, Nicaragua CollectionSandino’s Daughters: Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle by Margaret RandallUnder the Shadow by The Real News Network and NACLATeaser from the EpisodeUnder Fire Trailer

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.comVan and Lyle are joined by the literary critic George Dardess to talk about Downfall (2004) and its grim mirror, Triumph of the Will (1935). Where Leni Riefenstahl turned the Nazi project into divine spectacle, an ecstatic choreography of power and obedience, Bernd Eichinger and Oliver Hirschbiegel stage its total collapse. The conversation moves from the bunker’s suffocating intimacy to the ruined streets of Berlin, tracing how Downfall strips away the mythic machinery of fascism and leaves only exhaustion, delusion, and death.They linger on the film’s most shattering scenes: Hitler’s tender affection for his dog Blondi, Eva Braun’s manic dances above the bombs, Magda Goebbels forcing cyanide into her children’s mouths, and the “Albert Speer myth” of the good technocrat who resists too late. In contrast to Triumph of the Will’s mobilized masses (“You are not dead. You are Germany!”) Downfall exposes fascism’s inner logic from purity as self-destruction to discipline as despair. It’s not redemption or sympathy the film offers, but a study in the banality of evil, the smallness that remains when the spectacle ends.Further ReadingGeorge’s writings on the Slant Books website“Turning Hitler into Art?” by GeorgeUntil the Final Hour: Hitler’s Last Secretary by Traudl JungeThe Führer Bunker: The Complete Cycle by W.D. Snodgrass“Fascinating Fascism” by Susan SontagThe Wages of Destruction by Adam ToozeEichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah ArendtBehind the Scenes from the EpisodeDownfall Trailer

This is where the liberal resistance people were always right.The US is an insane nuclear power. How do you revolt against that?If change is going to come, it’s going to come from the periphery of the world-system, not the American core.The majority of the people in the military…do not actually want a civil war.There’s two ways that this gets resolved. There’s going to be a clash of forces, which is actual violence, which sucks…or we’re gonna do a general strike, finally, and we’re gonna shut this s**t down and we’re gonna have a critical mass of people withdraw their labor. Politics behind the scenes! A rare glimpse behind the curtain as Van, Lyle, and guest Andrew Facini got together to record an episode on Crimson Tide (coming in due course!). As sometimes happens, their conversation took a massive detour into the politics of the day, and it was urgent enough to share now as its own episode:* The folly of investing in nuclear “deterrence” while America makes an authoritarian turn; * The politics of emergency that Trump is mobilizing to deploy the US military in US cities;* Why a general strike in America is both inevitable and impossible;* What it means that MAGA is a counter-revolutionary force;* Why civil war depends on whether the military follows/keeps following unlawful orders;* Why Trump’s unlimited national security powers have everything to exaggerating the China threat; and* Why MAGA intellectuals are bad military strategists.For only $2 per week, you can access our vast (and growing) archive of anti-imperialist film conversation and much more. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.bangbangpod.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.comVan and Lyle are joined by Sam Ratner, Policy Director at Win Without War, and Andy Facini, Communications Director at the Council on Strategic Risks, to discuss WarGames, John Badham’s Cold-War techno-thriller that accidentally foresaw the age of algorithmic warfare.What begins as a teenage prank—Matthew Broderick’s David Lightman breaking into what he thinks is a computer game—quickly becomes a meditation on automation, deterrence, and human judgment in systems built to annihilate. Together, the group unpacks how WarGames’ “WOPR” supercomputer prefigures today’s AI decision-making, where machines learn to “take men out of the loop.” They trace how the film’s closing revelation (“The only winning move is not to play”) echoes across four decades of nuclear strategy and modern debates over escalation, autonomy, and control.The conversation ranges from NORAD and machine learning to the moral limits of deterrence, the psychology of Cold-War adolescence, and the comic absurdity of believing one can win an unwinnable game. Like Dr. Strangelove before it, WarGames shows us a military machine that runs on fear, faith, and code, and a civilization learning to live with its own programmed self-destruction.Further ReadingSam’s professional pageAndy’s professional page“Strategy & Conscience (The Book Review We Need),” by VanTelehack, a retro internet simulator recommended by AndyThe Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, by Sharon WeinbergerThe Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America, by Paul N. EdwardsThe Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, by Daniel EllsbergTeaser from the EpisodeWarGames Trailer

Van and Lyle are joined by Sam Ratner, Policy Director at Win Without War, and Andy Facini, Communications Director at the Council on Strategic Risks, to discuss WarGames, John Badham’s Cold-War techno-thriller that accidentally foresaw the age of algorithmic warfare.What begins as a teenage prank—Matthew Broderick’s David Lightman breaking into what he thinks is a computer game—quickly becomes a meditation on automation, deterrence, and human judgment in systems built to annihilate. Together, the group unpacks how WarGames’ “WOPR” supercomputer prefigures today’s AI decision-making, where machines learn to “take men out of the loop.” They trace how the film’s closing revelation (“The only winning move is not to play”) echoes across four decades of nuclear strategy and modern debates over escalation, autonomy, and control.The conversation ranges from NORAD and machine learning to the moral limits of deterrence, the psychology of Cold-War adolescence, and the comic absurdity of believing one can win an unwinnable game. Like Dr. Strangelove before it, WarGames shows us a military machine that runs on fear, faith, and code, and a civilization learning to live with its own programmed self-destruction.Further ReadingSam’s professional pageAndy’s professional page“Strategy & Conscience (The Book Review We Need),” by VanTelehack, a retro internet simulator recommended by AndyThe Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, by Sharon WeinbergerThe Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America, by Paul N. EdwardsThe Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, by Daniel EllsbergWarGames Trailer This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.bangbangpod.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.comVan and Lyle are joined by historian Dan Borus, Professor Emeritus at the University of Rochester, to discuss Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, a film that continues to define political satire as much as it mocks the very impulses that make satire necessary. The conversation revisits the Cold War’s toxic blend of paranoia, sexual repression, and bureaucratic madness, drawing from Borus’s essay “The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name in the War Room.” Together they trace how Kubrick and screenwriter Terry Southern transformed the age of McCarthyism and “moral hygiene” into a Freudian nightmare of militarized masculinity, nuclear brinkmanship, and closet panic.What does it mean that the “rational men” who planned for nuclear annihilation also spoke in the language of purity, fluids, and perversion? How does Dr. Strangelove turn Cold War homophobia back on its accusers? And what do the film’s grotesque sexual metaphors—its refueling scenes, cowboy bombs, and “ten women per man” survival plan—tell us about a society that loves peace through domination?Further Reading“The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name in the War Room,” by Dan“The Dark Satire of Pete Hegseth’s Quantico Speech,” by Lyle“Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals,” by Carol CohnThe End of Victory Culture by Tom EnglehardtWar Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination by H. Bruce FranklinTeaser from the EpisodeDr. Strangelove Trailer

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.comArtist and writer Eli Valley joins us to wrestle with Steven Spielberg’s Munich, the director’s retelling of the 1972 Olympics massacre and Israel’s subsequent campaign of assassinations. The film is meticulously crafted, humanizing Avner and his team while layering in hesitation, doubt, and the weight of family. It also dramatizes Palestinian lives with unusual care for Hollywood, even if the balance tilts toward Israeli perspectives and familiar tropes about “moral” violence. We talk through its most affecting set-pieces—the aborted bombing when a child answers the phone, the grotesque mix of mazel tovs and murders, and Avner’s paranoia in New York—while asking what it means to live inside this endless dialogue of revenge and reprisal.Our conversation with Eli traces the film’s political afterlife: the fury it provoked in Ariel Sharon’s government, the defenses mounted in the American press, and the broader struggle over how violence is represented on screen. We also reflect on its haunting aesthetics, from Spielberg’s chilled tones to the intimacy of family meals punctured by death to the final cut of the World Trade Center. And how these choices underscore the film’s central verdict about vengeance corroding all. Whatever its blind spots, Munich remains one of Spielberg’s most morally serious films, a rare Hollywood attempt to stage the derangement of “tribal” obligation while still respecting the humanity of all involved.Further ReadingEli’s website“Steven Spielberg’s unforgivable sin”, by Eli ValleyMichael Oren interview on Munich“What ‘Munich’ Left Out,” by David Brooks“Israeli consul attack’s Spielberg’s Munich as ‘problematic’,” by Gary YoungeFürstenfeldbruck 1972 police operation (Official history and documents)Munich Trailer

The Guardian arts writer Adrian Horton joins us to discuss The Report, Scott Z. Burns’s dramatization of Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones’s investigation into the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program. We follow the film’s flashbacks and committee-room battles, tracing how “enhanced interrogation” was engineered by Air Force psychologists Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, sanitized by lawyers like John Yoo, and sold to White House officials while the FBI’s Ali Soufan was proving rapport-based interrogation actually worked. The movie captures both the bureaucratic slog—“just the facts” over years of reading transcripts—and the political cowardice that let CIA leaders lie to presidents of both parties, cover up deaths like Gul Rahman’s, and spin torture as having led to bin Laden.Our conversation with Adrian turns to how the film frames institutional failure and accountability: John Brennan’s CIA spying on Senate staff, Obama’s refusal to pursue prosecutions, and the spectacle of Feinstein, Udall, and McCain trying to salvage transparency while the agency rebranded its crimes. We talk aesthetics, too, including the film’s cool tones, Adam Driver’s restrained performance, and how it stages the clash between truth-seeking and “middle ground” politics. At stake, then and now, is whether brutality gets buried by euphemism and liberal adulation of “patriotic” spies, or confronted for what it is.Further ReadingAdrian Horton’s writing at The GuardianThe Senate Intelligence Committee’s “Torture Report”The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda, by Ali SoufanReign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump by Spencer AckermanTeaser from the EpisodeThe Report Trailer This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.bangbangpod.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.comThe combat journalist Wes Morgan joins us to unpack Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor—a film that packages “victim-hero” mythology in SEAL-recruiting gloss—alongside John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968), a studio-era propaganda relic made with heavy Pentagon help and shot largely at Fort Benning. We track shared tropes: the “good foreigner/child,” the moral theater around killing noncombatants, and how both movies swap unsavory political histories for clean, consumable heroism. From Lone Survivor’s Pashtunwali turn to Green Berets’ cartoon villainy, we ask what these stories make both legible and invisible.Wes brings the granular Afghanistan context that Hollywood blurs: the Pech/Kunar campaigns and how special-operations logic, local powerbrokers, and U.S. prerogatives collided on the ground. And we contrast the films’ PR-friendly aesthetics with reporting on how the war was in fact fought, and what that meant for Afghans and Americans alike.Further ReadingThe Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley by Wes Morgan“Marcus Lutrell’s Savior, Mohammad Gulab, Claims ‘Lone Survivor’ Got It Wrong,” by R.M. Schneiderman“Exception(s) to the Rule(s): Civilian Harm, Oversight, and Accountability in the Shadow Wars,” by the Center for Civilians in ConflictRoger Ebert’s review of The Green Berets (1968)No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes, by Anand GopalTeaser from the EpisodeLone Survivor Trailer

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.comOsita Nwanevu joins us to revisit David Lean’s epic with an eye toward empire’s soft power: the seductive aesthetics that make conquest look noble, even as the film telegraphs its own critique. We track Lawrence’s zigzag between identification and revulsion—his “It’s clean” quip about the desert; the Deraa trauma; the “no prisoners” massacre—and the way racism on the British side (“bloody wogs”) refracts his alienation back home. Along the way we talk casting (Omar Sharif’s indelible Sherif Ali, Alec Guinness as Prince Faisal), the brittle politics of the Arab National Council, and how Sykes–Picot shadows the dream of independence that flickers and fails in the final act. Osita helps us tie the film’s Orientalist grammar to real-world partition and mandate politics without losing sight of media incentives: the American reporter’s hunt for a marketable hero mirrors the alliances Faisal seeks and the headlines the West wants. (On Osita’s work and his new book framing a more democratic American project, see below.)If the movie flirts with myth, the history complicates it: wartime bargains that prefigured the French defeat of Faisal’s forces by 1920 and the rechanneling of Hashemite rule, the contested record on Deraa, and the indispensable (if compromised) architects of a new Middle East. We sit with the film’s ambivalence—how it both glamorizes and subverts the imperial gaze—and ask what a less self-exculpatory storytelling tradition might look like, on screen and in policy.Further ReadingOsita’s websiteOsita’s debut book“The True Story of Lawrence of Arabia,” by Scott Anderson“What Gertrude Bell’s Letters Remind Us About the Founding of Iraq,” by Elias MuhannaLawrence of Arabia Trailer

Van and Lyle are joined by Ben and Jordano from the Remember Shuffle podcast to take on The Hunt for Red October (1990), John McTiernan’s Cold War submarine thriller packed with an all-star cast. Sean Connery’s Ramius may be the most Scottish Russian ever put on screen, but the real star is the film’s endless roll call of talent and character actors—from Alec Baldwin and James Earl Jones to Sam Neill, Tim Curry, Stellan Skarsgård, and Courtney B. Vance—each grounding a plot that often becomes too convoluted for its own good. The trio unpacks how these performances and sharp writing moments (like the recurring teddy bear motif) elevate the film into its iconic status.At the same time, the conversation digs into the politics underlying the spectacle: the film’s inflation of the Soviet threat, its naturalization of U.S. military dominance, and its childlike portrayal of Cold War geopolitics as a cat-and-mouse (eagle-and-bear?) game. By the film’s end, this game seems less about preventing nuclear Armageddon than about obscuring the everyday violence and exploitation guaranteed by imperial competition, particularly in waters and shores well below the Northern Hemisphere.Further Reading/ListeningRemember Shuffle PodcastThe Rivalry Peril by Van and Michael BrenesThe Cold War’s Killing Fields by Paul Thomas Chamberlin“The Lethal Crescent: When the Cold War Was Hot” by Daniel ImmerwahrVan and Lyle’s Appearance on Remember ShuffleTeaser from the EpisodeThe Hunt for Red October Trailer This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.bangbangpod.com/subscribe

In this episode, Van and Lyle are joined by journalist and author Noah Hurowitz (El Chapo) to discuss Olivier Assayas’ Carlos, the sweeping 2010 miniseries about the infamous Venezuelan militant Ilich Ramírez Sánchez. The conversation explores how Carlos’ life story illuminates both the allure and the pitfalls of revolutionary violence: how genuine struggles for liberation can attract both the most earnest and courageous fighters, as well as opportunists like Carlos who drift into becoming hired guns for despots and intelligence services. Along the way, we talk about the film’s depictions of groups like the PFLP, Black September, and the German Revolutionary Cells; Carlos’ entanglements with figures from Saddam Hussein to Muammar Gaddafi to Nicolae Ceaușescu; and the moral contrasts between Carlos and comrades such as Hans-Joachim Klein (“Angie”), who ultimately chose conscience over bloodshed. The miniseries captures both the romance and disarray of internationalist militancy, while reminding us why the long-term task must be to build societies—and a global order—where such violence is no longer called into being.Further ReadingEl Chapo by Noah HurowitzNoah at The InterceptJackal by John FollainAbu Nidal by Patrick SealeTeaser from the EpisodeCarlos Trailer This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.bangbangpod.com/subscribe