Schlock and Awe

A few weeks after 9/11, director Steven Soderbergh sent Stephen Gaghan, who’d written the screenplay for Soderbergh’s Traffic, a copy of former CIA officer Robert Baer’s memoir, “See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the C.I.A.’s War on Terrorism.” What followed was a tour d’horizon of the Middle East for Gaghan, led by Baer, and the movie Syriana, which Gaghan wrote and directed. Released in November 2005, Syriana was the first U.S. motion picture to grapple with the full complexity of the forces America was manipulating and contending with in the Middle East as the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan turned into occupations. There was oil, of course, and much money to be made, but ideology was also at work on all sides, from the hearing rooms of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (in Syriana, the Committee to Liberate Iran) to the ramshackle extremist religious schools of the Gulf. Even the most powerful nodes in these webs often had little idea what was really happening on the ground, or how their decisions might reshape the region. Like Traffic, Syriana makes the complexity of the situation its defining principle and cynicism its philosophical outlook. Viewed 20 years later, it nevertheless stands out for its attempt to explain and critique, a stance that GWOT films would come mostly to drop, falling into either the trite jingoism of American Sniper or the nihilistic realism of Warfare. Jack, Evan and Imran discuss Syriana’s many strong points — including Robert Elswit’s sneakily impressive cinematography — where it fits into the long lineage of conspiracy films, and just how Gaghan would end up going from this to Dolittle. Be sure to follow Imran: https://x.com/i_zzzzzz Evan: https://x.com/evanhill And Jack: https://x.com/jscros Produced by: https://x.com/notoriouslghtng

Evan and Jack are joined by Aaron and Carlee from the Hit Factory podcast to discuss Michael Bay's 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, the 2016 film that sent John Krasinski off on an action hero deployment from which he has yet to return. The story of a group of GRS security contractors hired to protect US diplomats and CIA operatives in Benghazi, two of whom were killed in an insurgent attack on September 11, 2012, Bay's 13 Hours is, like many of our films, a tall tale only partially based in the dirty truth. Jack, Evan, Aaron and Carlee look at how GWOT cinema refashions the warfighters of the post-9/11 era into modern day working class heroes, hard men doing hard jobs that few understand, struggling against a thickheaded bureaucracy and lacking union protection. Bay's talents shine in the economy of action and quick characterizations, but his purposeful lack of context elides the Punisher culture politics that arose from Obama-era deployments abroad and pervaded the real-world fallout from Benghazi. Be sure to follow Hit Factory here: https://x.com/HitFactoryPod

Schlock and Awe is back. Evan and Jack are home from the wars (their day jobs) with a look at Ang Lee’s 2016 adaptation of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, a coming-of-age movie set during one heady day at the Dallas Cowboys stadium, as an army unit is pulled out of their deployment to Iraq to do a propaganda tour in order to support a flagging occupation. Joining us is podcaster, writer and Army veteran Nate Bethea, who shared his experiences managing large numbers of 19 year old Army infantrymen. The lads dive in to a muddled, chaotic film that succeeds as much as it fails, and does both in spectacular fashion, encapsulating some of the most surreal moments of the Global War on Terror and a B-plot love triangle between a brother, a sister, and a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader.

The boys are joined by writer Séamus Malekafzali, who's too young to remember 9/11 but old enough to stand face-to-face with director Peter Berg and challenge him to a blinking contest. Séamus, Evan and Jack take on Lone Survivor, Berg's 2013 sufferpalooza, which heavily fictionalizes a real-life and extremely unsuccessful Navy SEAL counterterrorism raid in Afghanistan in 2005. The boys examine Berg's Americana fetish, how the Friday Night Lights creator valorizes combat as a form of extreme sports, and the way Lone Survivor — like many a GWOT film — lies about what happened to create false stakes for its characters.

The boys swoop in on Zero Dark Thirty like modified Black Hawk helicopters with guest Spencer Ackerman, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. Kathryn Bigelow's 2013 torture fest earned major critical plaudits for its unflinching view of the GWOT's dark side, but was it all in service of an enormous lie — that torture got Osama Bin Laden? 

We tackle the biggest totem in the War on Terror's cinematic canon — American Sniper. Clint Eastwood's surprise blockbuster brought out the masses for a post-9/11 war movie by fictionalizing the already mythological autobiography of Chris Kyle, one of the deadliest snipers in history. We talk American Sniper's dehumanization of Iraqis, its deliberate mischaracterizations of the Iraq War, its superficial treatment of PTSD, and whether the movie counts as a Western.