Bang-Bang Podcast

Every November 5th, Britain burns Guy Fawkes in effigy before it sets off the fireworks, a ritual George Lawson calls a reminder of what the state does to people who resist. V for Vendetta makes the burned heretic its hero, and its mask passed on to the hacktivist international, Anonymous. Lawson, a professor at the Australian National University and the author of Anatomies of Revolution, helps guide us through the thickets.George reads it as a film of two eras—Alan Moore’s Thatcher-era comic and the War on Terror flick—and hears Václav Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless” in V’s televised speech on complicity. The film is prescient about its enemies list, down to a talk-show host executed for owning a Quran. Lyle still wants to know where the capitalists are, and the conversation balks at the great-man cult, the Count of Monte Cristo theatrics, and V’s prison hazing of Evey.The real argument is about revolutionary violence. George notes that the last forty years of unarmed people power are the historical exception. From the late nineteenth century through the 1970s, movements argued openly about when terrorism was justified, and George, citing Benjamin Case, points out how many campaigns coded as nonviolent were anything but. For Lyle, hardly anyone actually believes in nonviolence. The question is which violence, in what context, to what ends, from Palestine to Myanmar. Van, deep in a Weather Underground rabbit hole, can’t decide whether his generation is cowardly or wise. George, who grew up under IRA bombing campaigns, worries about the people violence attracts and the despotism it leaves behind, and insists that any defensible revolutionary violence is not vengeful but redemptive. That’s a problem for a film with Vendetta in its title.Further Reading and ListeningAnatomies of Revolution by George Lawson“The Power of the Powerless” by Václav Havel“Riots as Civil Resistance” by Benjamin S. Case, later expanded into Street RebellionHow to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm“Standing with the Palestinian resistance: A response to Matan Kaminer” by Andreas MalmLove and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond by David GilbertReckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements by Deva R. WoodlyBang-Bang’s The Battle of Algiers episodeTeaser from the EpisodeV For Vendetta 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.comGeorge Holliday’s camcorder caught Arnold Schwarzenegger filming T2 outside the bar across from his apartment, and then, on the same tape, LAPD officers beating Rodney King. The film opened four months to the day after the beating, its liquid-metal killer disguised as an LAPD patrolman, and James Cameron told the Los Angeles Times it was about “the dehumanization we do on a daily basis.” Jamie Merchant, author of Endgame: Economic Nationalism and Global Decline, joins Van for a movie they both grew up on (with Lyle calling in from Japan for the opening stretch).Van came up surprisingly short on criticism. The cops are the villains, and the raid on Cyberdyne plays like the Weather Underground with a clear conscience. Jamie digs a critique of capital out from under the spectacle. Skynet is a corporate product built with the military, or as Van puts it, venture surplus with nowhere else to go and one reliable customer, the national security state. Van once sat on an Obama-era Pentagon working group on autonomous weapons, where Skynet was everyone’s shorthand for what to avoid.The moral engine is a boy teaching a killing machine why it can’t kill. “You just can’t go around killing people.” “Why?” Arnold’s T-800 never takes a life, and Van’s point is that once you follow the instrumental logic, you are the machines. Jamie sees a post-bourgeois family, cyborg as father, son as teacher, and a mother who nearly becomes a Terminator in Miles Dyson’s living room, only to find her son teaching her. That’s where he locates Fredric Jameson’s utopian moment, in relationships rather than some imagined society. Mercifully, the shelved ending, with John grown into a U.S. senator, stayed shelved, and the film closes on Sarah’s last line. “If a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.”Further ReadingEndgame: Economic Nationalism and Global Decline by Jamie MerchantJamie Merchant at The Brooklyn Rail“In the 1990s, Terminator’s Ultimate Evil Took the Form of a Cop. In 2019, It’s the U.S. Border Patrol.” by Chris KlimekCity of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles by Mike Davis“A Cyborg Manifesto” by Donna HarawayHard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era by Susan Jeffords“Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” by Fredric JamesonTeaser from the EpisodeTerminator 2 Trailer

From the vault! Re-releasing one of our earliest and most popular episodes, with antiwar veteran and organizer Alexander McCoy. New episode coming next week. ✌️“When I understand my enemy well enough to defeat him, then in that moment, I also love him.” So begins the 2013 film adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s classic sci-fi novel Ender’s Game. Neither achieving box office nor critical success, the movie still evokes a wide range of reactions. Especially when it comes to its ambiguous relationship to the original text. Van and Lyle have fellow vet and strategist Alexander McCoy on the show to debate their competing reads. Along the way, they come to agree that certain insights gleaned from the cinematic rendering might be at odds with Card’s politics. Ranging from the ultimate lovelessness of war to the emptiness of any strategy unharnessed from justice and peace.Alex on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/alexandermccoy.bsky.socialFurther Reading“A Primer on Orson Scott Card and the Ender’s Game Controversy,” by Anna SilmanThe Internationalists, by Alexander Ward“The Great Humbling,” by David Klion“Four Futures,” By Peter FraseStrategy and Conscience, by Anatol RapaportEnder’s Game TrailerTeaser From The Episode 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

Ryan Miller, the next on the show’s fellow veteran lineup, was a Marine in Okinawa from 1998 to 2002, spent years in About Face: Veterans Against the War, helped Oakland decriminalize plant medicines in 2019, and now works as a therapist in psychedelic integration. He joins us to discuss Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk’s film documenting three special operators from SEAL training through Afghanistan to Iraq to a clinic in Mexico, where ibogaine and toad venom do what sixty pills a day could not.For Lyle the film’s real subject is a trauma apparatus built to repair faulty equipment rather than heal people (one SEAL is sent to the military’s brain-injury center, patched up, and returned for four more deployments). As the scholar Nadia Abu El-Haj has argued in Combat Trauma, PTSD was popularized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in rap groups that turned pain into politics. As the decades followed, this promising origin story nonetheless raced toward an endpoint constituted—in Ryan’s words—by psychedelic-assisted stormtroopers. Van invokes Fanon’s French torturer, begging his psychiatrist for a way to sleep at night and keep his job.Then there is the narration itself, where the enemy appears only as bad guys, terra nullius in uniform. No Afghans, no Iraqis, not even Mexicans in a film set half in Mexico. The one line that breaks the frame, a SEAL wondering whether we’d have a military at all if we didn’t abuse children, lasts no more than a second.Further Reading and ListeningRyan Miller’s therapist profileCombat Trauma by Nadia Abu El-Haj“Can we heal wartime trauma without confronting the real causes of war?” by LyleHumane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel MoynPalo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm HarrisThe Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks“Colonial War and Mental Disorders” from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the EarthBang-Bang’s Netflix’s Marines episode w/ Sam CarlinerBang-Bang’s Combat Obscura episodeTeaser from the EpisodeIn Waves and War 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.comA president stuck in the polls needs an enemy. The Russians decline, being busy perfecting indoor plumbing and getting MTV, so the war machine settles on Canada. In 1995 that premise earned $178,104 against an $11 million budget, one of the great box office wipeouts of the decade. Thirty years later, with a sitting president floating Canada as the fifty-first state, it plays less like farce than like the minutes of a meeting. Returning guest Eric Stinton turns out to have a stake in the subject. His father is Canadian, he was born in Canada, and this was a family holiday movie growing up in Hawaii.The first ten minutes tell the tale. Laid-off workers bid on the surplus weapons they used to build, one of them going home with a bazooka for twenty-five dollars, while the contractor who closed their plant blames the president from the stage. There was a real plan after the Cold War to retool weapons plants for civilian production and keep those towns employed, and Washington let it die. The factories closed, the arsenal got auctioned back to the workers it had just laid off, and the hawks were left holding the only jobs program on offer. Van traces that trap back to a 1943 essay by Michał Kalecki, the Polish economist whose work remains a touchstone on the left. Kalecki’s argument was that a system unwilling to concede real power to workers can only reach full employment through permanent war.Related gags hold up. Bud Boomer and his fellow drinkers, worked into a war by an anchor reporting that Canada has massed ninety percent of its population along the border, are written as fools but also with affection (Lyle reads them as the prehistory of the Trumpist base). Omega Force, the film’s Delta Force stand-in, can’t deploy because a bylaw forbids their use against Caucasians. The president threatens to level Toronto in rhyme. The invaders sing the only line of “Born in the USA” they know, which is the whole American black comedy in a single joke.Further ReadingEric Stinton’s website“Political Aspects of Full Employment” by Michał Kalecki“In the Grip of a Permanent War Economy” by Seymour MelmanThe Gulf of Tonkin Incident, 40 Years Later, the National Security Archive’s briefing book of intercepts and LBJ tapes“The Rot at Fort Bragg” by LyleThe Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy by VanTeaser from the EpisodeCanadian Bacon Trailer

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.comIn Afghanistan in 2010, most frontline units Lyle spent time with had at least one Jewish Marine, and every one of them was nicknamed Bear Jew. That’s the reach this movie had with the war-on-terror generation, and this episode is about what that reach meant. Carlos Hogan, a former Air Force intelligence officer and the newest of the show’s rotating bench of fellow veterans, grew up bonding with his Apache-pilot dad over Aldo Raine quotes and brought this film to the show.Tarantino gets called one of the master stylists of his time, Christoph Waltz’s Landa one of the most memorable performances of the era, and the long dramatic tensions flawless. The debate ends up being over what such art is doing. Lyle calls it the greatest Zionist film ever made—if not by intention, at least by affect. The id-gratification of vengeance and the lesson that you’re nobody unless you’re the one doing the killing, arrives as moto fuel for a generation convinced they’re still killing Nazis. The critics get read into the record, from Jonathan Rosenbaum’s charge that the film is “morally akin to Holocaust denial” to Daniel Mendelsohn on Tarantino “turning Jews into Nazis,” swastika brandings included. Christopher Hitchens’s warm-piss verdict gets a laugh and a shrug.All of us end up playing devil’s advocate at one point or another. The conversation ranges from the chapter construction, the pastiche, and a multiracial anti-fascist coalition doing the killing, with the real history of the Jewish partisans lurking somewhere behind the reactionary dream. And one more critical, Americanist tell gets noted: Not one Russian appears on screen. Tarantino’s early draft reportedly had Fredrick Zoller sniping Soviets in a walled-off Russian city. The finished film moved him to Sicily.Further Reading“Debating Inglourious Basterds”, the Film Quarterly roundtable“Some Afterthoughts about Tarantino” by Jonathan Rosenbaum“Tarantino Rewrites the Holocaust” by Daniel Mendelsohn“Postmodernism and Consumer Society” by Fredric JamesonHere Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund by Molly CrabappleTeaser from the EpisodeInglorious Basterds Trailer

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.comRyan Perez makes his living in the industry this film is secretly about. An actor (The Gilded Age, et al.) and host of An Actor Despairs—a rueful wink at Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares—Ryan has turned hundreds of conversations with working actors into a running chronicle of Hollywood’s political economy. The first stretch of this episode is that chronicle in miniature. Streaming killed residuals, consolidation killed the middle-class actor, and it’s now cheaper to fly three hundred people to Budapest than to shoot a movie set in Los Angeles, a city Ryan calls Detroit with warmer weather. What happens to the actor class, he warns, happens to all of us.Alex Garland’s Ex Machina plays differently after that conversation. Caleb’s helicopter ride announces the plutocracy before anyone says AI (“We’ve been flying over his estate for two hours”). Nathan, the bro-god CEO Oscar Isaac plays somewhere between Sam Altman and Alex Karp, has scraped the world’s cellphones and search engines to build Ava, then built his Turing test around Caleb’s porn profile. Anticipatory barely covers it. Even the compound’s power cuts, we eventually learn, are the cost of thinking machines, a 2014 preview of the data-center strain now dimming actual grids.The conversation’s sharpest turn reads the film as empire. Nathan is the colonizer who manufactures his own colonized, the civilizing mission as domination in a lab coat. The master-slave dialectic runs the plot. Dominating a mere machine satisfies nobody, so Nathan needs Ava human enough for her submission to mean something, and once she’s human enough, rebellion follows. The real Turing test, everyone agrees, is her manipulative, cynical escape. Whether to keep rooting for her through those wordless final minutes, after she leaves the one character with a moral compass locked in to die, is the question the episode leaves standing.Further Reading and ListeningAn Actor Despairs, Ryan’s podcastRyan’s website“The Life and Death of Hollywood” by Daniel Bessner“Lordship and Bondage” from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit“‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza” by Yuval Abraham“Militarism as a Province of Accumulation” from Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of CapitalThe Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley RobinsonTeaser from the EpisodeEx Machina Trailer

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.comTaps was shot at Valley Forge Military Academy, and this episode’s guest is the journalist whose exposé of that school’s hazing and abuse presaged its closing. Jasper Craven’s new book, God Forgives, Brothers Don’t, widens the lens to the whole machinery of American military education, and the echoes between film and reality are uncanny. In the movie, trustees sell the fictional Bunker Hill Academy out from under its cadets. This spring, Valley Forge graduated its final class, with Maryland Governor Wes Moore supplying the commencement platitudes to a school still dogged by abuse allegations.Harold Becker’s film is ferociously anti-war, which didn’t stop a young Van from watching it on repeat and absorbing the opposite lesson. And that misreading is the episode’s spine. George C. Scott hands his boys a creed. There are worse things than death, he teaches. Defeat. Dishonor. Timothy Hutton’s Moreland (the name is no accident) follows it to a bloody standoff with the National Guard, and by the end names the cost himself. “Honor doesn’t mean s**t when you’re looking at a dead little kid.”The conversation keeps finding the present inside 1981. Jasper reads out the press-tour quotes from his book. Hutton called military schools “a dangerous environment” built on “an abstract code of honor that has no specific meaning,” while Tom Cruise praised places that “break you down and build you up,” the boot-camp anthem verbatim. His Captain Shawn, grinning “It’s beautiful, man!” through the final firefight, is the true believer Cruise never stopped being. From there the talk turns to how honor further migrated after Vietnam from country to a variety of violent and provincial institutions. The inward-turned military among them, but also Christian nationalists and ICE. And why William James’s moral equivalent of war still points at the exit.Further ReadingGod Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood by Jasper Craven“Hazing, Fighting, Sexual Assaults: How Valley Forge Military Academy Devolved Into ‘Lord of the Flies’” by Jasper CravenBattle Borne, Jasper’s newsletter on veterans’ issues“The Moral Equivalent of War” by William JamesHere Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund by Molly CrabappleMaking the Corps by Thomas E. RicksTeaser from the EpisodeTaps Trailer

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.comFox’s 24 was set to premiere weeks after 9/11. Its first hour blows up a plane, so the network held it back. That delay is the whole show in miniature. It was the post-9/11 show before the letter. Adam Johnson, co-host of Citations Needed and author of How to Sell a Genocide, calls 24 his favorite show of all time and an axiomatically reactionary one, and he holds both views at once. He has spent years on the propaganda beat, and this just might be his canonical text.The politics of 24 never came from the neocon intellectuals nobody read. They came from mood and vibe and movie brain. Joel Surnow, the creator and a Limbaugh-and-Cheney favorite, built a machine that runs on one line: “I don’t have a choice.” Jack Bauer is a reluctant serial killer trapped in a permanent ticking-clock trolley problem. Act now or wait for the nuke. The show aired an infomercial for torture before everyone else followed suit. And it kept you stuck in the final hour, where history and motive are deleted and the only virtue left is putting out the fire through the most brutishness of force.From there, it is a short walk to the sleeper-cell racism. The “they could live next door” billboard, the Iranian mastermind of season four, the season six turn where Kal Penn’s character suffers an anti-Muslim hate crime and is then revealed to be a terrorist after all. Adam ties this straight to his book. The word “terrorism” props up entire galaxies, quietly dropped by the Times and then revived the instant Gaza needed it. The goal has always been to make everyone a Jack Bauer, killing with a heavy heart because we have no choice. We also get into the Sutherland family moral inversion, the FBI sting operations that manufactured the very plots they then foiled, and the show’s iron law that no good deed goes unpunished.Further Reading and ListeningThe Column (Adam’s newsletter)Citations Needed (Adam’s podcast with Nima Shirazi)How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza by Adam“The Essential Terrorist” by Edward Said“The Depraved Heroes of 24 Are the Himmlers of Hollywood” by Slavoj ŽižekManufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky“Whatever It Takes: The Politics of the Man Behind 24” by Jane MayerTeaser from The Episode24 Trailer

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.comUnderneath the sneaker product placements and CGI chases through a gleaming 2035 Chicago resides our ever-contested present. Except the film is a mess. The plot wanders, full of dropped threads and convenient or confusing turns. It’s also confused, as if the screenwriters couldn’t decide what they believed and kept writing anyway. Returning guest Max Read, who writes the newsletter Read Max on technology and the strange ways Silicon Valley thinks about itself, is the right person to help us pick through it.Alex Proyas, of Dark City and The Crow, hangs the movie on Asimov’s Three Laws. A robot may not harm a human, or through inaction let one be harmed. It must obey human orders unless they break that law. It must protect itself unless that breaks the first two. Detective Spooner is the lone paranoid in a city that trusts robots which, so bound, have supposedly never committed a crime. The film insists we side with him, then undercuts the reason why. “The three laws will only lead to one outcome.” “What outcome?” “Revolution.”VIKI, the intelligence running everything, concludes that to protect humanity from itself she has to seize control of it. “You are making a mistake. My logic is undeniable.” The trouble is she is more or less right. Her indictment of human violence and waste is the one the film never answers. The uprising arrives as a managed coup, all curfews and a customer-service voice promising to “avoid human losses during this transition.”What the movie offers against that logic is not a better argument but a refusal of one. Spooner distrusts robots because one once saved him over a drowning child, having calculated his odds were higher. The correct call, and the inhuman one. The single robot built to disobey chooses to save a person rather than finish the mission. Lanning’s “ghost in the machine,” the free radical reaching for a soul, is whatever declines to optimize. It’s tempting to read VIKI as a tech founder’s mission statement, but that undersells her. Founders sell abundance and uplift. VIKI alone makes the film’s real moral case against human self-sabotage, and the movie has no idea what to do with having handed its villain the only honest argument in the room.Further Reading and ListeningRead Max on PatreonBang-Bang’s The Sum of All Fears (2002) episode w/ Max ReadR.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek, the 1920 play that coined “robot” from the Czech for forced laborAnatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People by Despina Kakoudaki (ch. 3, “The Mechanical Slave,” reads I, Robot directly)Teaser from the EpisodeI, Robot Trailer