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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 Listening

Ryan Miller’s therapist profile

Combat Trauma by Nadia Abu El-Haj

“Can we heal wartime trauma without confronting the real causes of war?” by Lyle

Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks

“Colonial War and Mental Disorders” from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth

Bang-Bang’s Netflix’s Marines episode w/ Sam Carliner

Bang-Bang’s Combat Obscura episode

Teaser from the Episode

In Waves and War Trailer

A 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 Reading

Eric Stinton’s website

“Political Aspects of Full Employment” by Michał Kalecki

“In the Grip of a Permanent War Economy” by Seymour Melman

The 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 Lyle

The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy by Van

Teaser from the Episode

Canadian Bacon Trailer

In 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 Jameson

Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund by Molly Crabapple

Teaser from the Episode

Inglorious Basterds Trailer

Ryan 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 Listening

An Actor Despairs, Ryan’s podcast

Ryan’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 Capital

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

Teaser from the Episode

Ex Machina Trailer

Taps 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 Reading

God 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 Craven

Battle Borne, Jasper’s newsletter on veterans’ issues

“The Moral Equivalent of War” by William James

Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund by Molly Crabapple

Making the Corps by Thomas E. Ricks

Teaser from the Episode

Taps Trailer

Fox’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 Listening

The 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 Žižek

Manufacturing 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 Mayer

Teaser from The Episode

24 Trailer

Underneath 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 Listening

Read Max on Patreon

Bang-Bang’s The Sum of All Fears (2002) episode w/ Max Read

R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek, the 1920 play that coined “robot” from the Czech for forced labor

Anatomy 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 Episode

I, Robot Trailer

Seven Days in May imagines a four-star general nearly toppling an American president. It gets filed with the era’s paranoid thrillers, but its threat is not the Cold War’s usual one. There are no communist infiltrators, no Manchurian brainwashing. The danger is a hyper-nationalist militarist in uniform convinced the elected government is selling the country out. We recorded in mid-November, at the height of the ICE crackdowns and a moment when the most radical Trumpists seemed to be laying groundwork for some kind of martial law. Returning guest Paul Adlerstein, the historian at Colorado College, helps us sit with the film without forcing it to predict our present. (Things have since stalled out short of the midterms. We hope.)

That makes the film almost a photographic negative of our moment. In 1964, the generals were imagined as the war-hungry ones and the civilians did the moderating, the world of Truman against MacArthur and Kennedy against Curtis LeMay. Burt Lancaster’s Scott, modeled on LeMay and the right-wing general Edwin Walker whom Kennedy eased out of the Army, is the hawk the Constitution has to survive. Today the polarity is reversed. The risk is not a general seizing the state but a far-right civilian leadership, a Trump and a Hegseth, trying to capture a relatively professional officer corps. We work through the theories of civil-military relations this raises, and what the preferable move for the brass or enlisted would even be.

The film’s quiet heart is President Lyman’s late speech, where he insists the real enemy is not Scott but an age. The nuclear age, in which no one feels they have any agency anymore. That sends us to Dwight Macdonald and the Politics circle, who spent the 1940s on this nexus of total war, mass death, and lost agency, and to Simone Weil on force. We close on a strange fact: John F. Kennedy himself wanted this movie made.

Seven Days In May is available to stream for free on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/7-days-in-may

Further Reading/Listening

Paul Adlerstein’s faculty page (Colorado College)

No Globalization Without Representation by Paul Adlerstein

Bang-Bang’s Under Fire episode w/ Paul (also scored by Jerry Goldsmith)

“The Movie That JFK Wanted Made, But Didn’t Live to See”

“The Responsibility of Peoples” by Dwight Macdonald

The Root Is Man by Dwight Macdonald

“The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” by Simone Weil

Dwight Macdonald and the Politics Circle by Gregory D. Sumner

Supreme Command by Eliot A. Cohen (not a friend of the pod)

Teaser from the Episode

Seven Days in May Trailer

Jacobin staff writer and Michael and Us co-host Luke Savage joins Van and Lyle for a conversation about Peter Weir’s Master and Commander that’s also, inevitably, about Patrick O’Brian. Luke grew up with the Aubrey-Maturin novels. His father handed him the books young, and a distant ancestor, Captain John Maude, commanded a Royal Navy warship in the same era. The connection to this world is personal in a way it rarely is for a guest.

The film drops you into the hull of HMS Surprise during the Napoleonic Wars. Russell Crowe’s Captain Aubrey is chasing the French privateer Acheron, though in the novel the enemy ship was American. Hollywood made the swap. What survives the adaptation is Aubrey’s fixation. Paul Bettany’s Maturin, the ship’s surgeon and natural philosopher, sees it clearly enough to name it. He calls it pride. Aubrey calls it duty. “Whatever the cost?” Yes, whatever the cost. From there the Moby Dick parallel takes over. Aubrey drags his crew past the Galapagos, past reason, past a young, pampered officer named Holland who is scapegoated by a superstitious crew and eventually ties a cannonball to himself and walks off the deck. The ship reads from the Book of Jonah at his funeral. Then it rains.

Weir stages all of this with extraordinary physical detail. The amputation of a child’s arm, Maturin’s self-surgery on a beach, the violin duets between captain and surgeon. But the film is most interesting where it’s most ambivalent. Class barely registers. The violence of impressment and hierarchy gets absorbed into a story about character and fortitude. Maturin’s scientific curiosity, his blue-footed boobies and walking sticks, keeps getting sacrificed to Aubrey’s hunt. And the ending pulls a final trick. The French captain has been disguised as the ship’s surgeon the entire time. The hunt isn’t over. Like the flightless cormorant Maturin never gets to study, the thing that matters most keeps getting deferred.

Further Reading and Listening

Luke Savage’s Substack

Luke Savage at Jacobin

Michael and Us Podcast

“Subject to the Requirements of the Service: Peter Weir’s Master and Commander at 22”, Cinephilia & Beyond

Mariners, Renegades & Castaways by C.L.R. James

Teaser from the Episode

Master and Commander Trailer

From the vault! Re-releasing one of our earliest and most popular episodes, with prize-winning journalist and best-selling author Spencer Ackerman.

Scottish filmmaker Armando Iannucci’s In the Loop, a satire about the lead-up to the Iraq War, never achieved the household success of Veep (Iannucci’s later HBO series). Yet, D.C. staffers have come to see it as a cult classic, and there is much to be gleaned from the black comedy beyond the predictable, Beltway absurdities. Van and Lyle have the acclaimed journalist Spencer Ackerman on the show to discuss his own role in the film’s creation, as all three exchange biting laughs and commentary along the way. Especially about the rotting tooth that is Washington.

Bonus: In addition to dissecting the film, the first 30 minutes of this episode are an oral history of Spencer Ackerman’s experience with the making of In The Loop.

Further Reading

“How to succeed in Hollywood without really trying” (2009), by Spencer Ackerman

“That’s Me and Him From The Sopranos” (2009), by Armando Iannucci

Reign of Terror (2022), by Spencer Ackerman

Iron Man Vol. 1 (2025), by Spencer Ackerman and Julius Ohta

Forever Wars Newsletter, by Spencer Ackerman

Perils of Dominance, by Gareth Porter

In The Loop Trailer

Comedian and podcaster Orli Matlow, who hosts War is Stupid: An Anti-War Podcast About War, joins Van and Lyle for a conversation about Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton that turns out to be less about the musical’s politics than about how three very different people found themselves in three very different relationships to it. Orli came up through musical theater and loves Hamilton. Newsiesmade her pro-union. Hair made her antiwar. For her, the show is part of a lineage of musicals that shape how you see the world, and she embraces it openly. Lyle was once a theater kid too, but Hamilton arrived when he was a disillusioned left vet who saw the production’s bootstrapping mythology and founders worship as meritocratic catnip. Van, an Obama-era Pentagon guy at the time, was probably too deep in the liberal foreign policy bubble to care much either way.

The episode lives in that gap. “In New York you can be a new man.” “I’m not going to throw away my shot.” “Look around, so happy to be alive today, in the greatest city in the world. HISTORY IS HAPPENING!” The self-starter theme runs through the musical like a pulse, and whether it reads as aspirational or as a false capitalist origin story depends entirely on where you were standing when you first heard it. The founders fetish is real. The erasure of the founders’ own radical economic views, their hostility to monopolists and wage slavery, is real. But Lyle’s critique has softened over the years, in large part by appreciating the idiosyncratic and often life-affirming reasons people like Orli appreciate the show. Sometimes the most interesting thing about a cultural phenomenon is not what it says but what it reveals about the infinite ways infinitely different people, in infinitely different passages of life, pass through it.

Further Reading/Listening

Orli Matlow’s website

War is Stupid: An Anti-War Podcast About War

Orli Matlow on McSweeney’s

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

“Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the Black Past in Hamilton” by Lyra Monteiro

“Ishmael Reed Doesn’t Like Hamilton” by Jaya Rajamani

Teaser from the Episode

Hamilton Trailer

Van and Lyle welcome back Andy Facini, Communications Director at the Council on Strategic Risks, to take on Tony Scott’s Crimson Tide. Gene Hackman’s Captain Ramsey and Denzel Washington’s Lt. Commander Hunter are locked inside an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine with enough firepower to end civilization, and the film turns their standoff into a test of everything the nuclear age is supposed to rest on: Chain of command, verified orders, rational actors.

Andy brings firsthand knowledge of the submarine world and walks us through what the film gets right about the culture and protocols, as well as what it stretches. The argument arrives early, over dinner, when Ramsey presses Hunter on Hiroshima and the two debate Clausewitz. “In the nuclear world, the true enemy is war itself,” Hunter declares. Ramsey, cigar in hand, calls himself a “simple-minded son of a b***h” and suggests the Navy wants both types. But the film’s own logic, and ours, pushes back. You don’t need the psychopath, you just need the one who thinks.

Still, Crimson Tide is smarter than a clean binary, and that’s also its problem. Ramsey is too charismatic, too commanding, and ultimately too generous, recommending Hunter for full command and conceding on the Lipizzaner stallions, to be reducible to villain. The warmth of Hackman’s performance softens a position that, followed to its conclusion, would have killed millions. Meanwhile the racial subtext hums underneath. Denzel’s Hunter is the “complicated one,” the Harvard-educated Black officer navigating a white institution, and those stallions “born black” but turning white barely qualify as metaphor. Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, scored by Hans Zimmer, and directed with Tony Scott’s signature controlled chaos, the film stages every radio crackle and depth reading with the intensity of a firefight. “We’re here to preserve democracy, not to practice it,” Ramsey tells his crew.

Released amid post-Cold War anxieties about Russian instability, Crimson Tide imagines nuclear catastrophe not as ideological failure but as crossing a thin line between procedural discipline and annihilatory madness; a garbled message, a broken radio, a system that works more or less as designed, always on the verge of destroying the world.

Further Reading, Listening, Viewing

Andy’s professional page

Bang-Bang’s WarGames episode w/ Sam Ratner and Andy Facini

Viggo Mortensen on Charlie Rose

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser

Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom by Elaine Scarry

Teaser from the Episode

Crimson Tide Trailer

Van and Lyle are joined by writer and educator Eric Stinton, whose combat sports columns for Sherdog and essays for Honolulu Civil Beat have long explored how violence reveals deeper truths about culture, class, and masculinity. Together they take on John McTiernan’s Predator, a film that begins as a Reagan-era commando fantasy and ends as something far stranger: An inversion of the frontier myth in which the “savage” turns out to be the most technologically advanced being in the jungle.

The setup is pure covert-ops schlock. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Dutch and his squad are dropped into an unnamed Central American country on a mission dressed up as rescue but quickly revealed as assassination. “We’re a rescue team, not assassins,” Dutch insists, a line that could double as the tagline for U.S. foreign policy in the region throughout the 1980s. The banter is drenched in a period-specific bravado, from Jesse Ventura’s homophobic chest-thumping in the chopper to the iconic arm-wrestling clasp between Dutch and Carl Weathers’ Dillon, a gesture that fuses multiracial solidarity with pure masculine display. Weathers, fresh off playing Apollo Creed, was one of the few Black actors granted entry to this kind of role at the time, and his presence here rhymes with that earlier franchise. “Do you remember Afghanistan?” one of them asks early on. “Trying to forget it,” Dutch replies. In 1987, the joke writes itself. Four decades later, the punchline haunts.

Predator’s real force emerges when the squad starts dying and Dutch is forced to adapt. The guerrillas have been skinned, and the soldiers assume it’s the work of insurgents, the dehumanized enemy of every counterinsurgency manual. Except here the actual predator isn’t human at all, and is far more sophisticated than any of them. It kills not for territory or ideology but for sport, a mirror held up to the commandos’ own relationship to violence. Then there’s Sonny Landham’s Billy, the squad’s indigenous tracker who, in the film’s most loaded scene, strips himself of all weapons save a blade and cuts open his own chest, challenging the creature to single combat. It’s a sequence thick with frontier mythology, the “noble savage” facing a worthier opponent on ancestral terms. That Landham himself claimed Cherokee heritage, and later called for the genocide of Arabs on live radio before being expelled from the Libertarian Party, is the kind of life-imitates-art-imitates-empire loop this podcast was made for.

Further Reading

Eric’s website

Eric’s columns at Honolulu Civil Beat

Eric’s archive at Sherdog

“Boomerangs of Empire” by Romina Green Rioja and Sergio Beltrán-García

The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins

America, América by Greg Grandin

Teaser from the Episode

Predator Trailer

Van and Lyle are joined by critically acclaimed actor Morgan Spector to revisit Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day, a film that turns planetary annihilation into a distinctly American spectacle. We spend time lingering on the movie as a shared artifact of a particular 1990s childhood. The Ray Charles warmth of its opening, the awe of its destruction sequences, and, of course, the internalization of President Whitmore’s speech—“Today, we celebrate our Independence Day!”—memorized and recited by every other boy of that era. It opens, tellingly, on the American flag planted on the moon, Neil Armstrong’s voice echoing as if the “giant leap for mankind” had always been a national possession. When the aliens arrive, they don’t just threaten Earth but a worldview in which the United States stands in for humanity itself.

What follows is less a global response than a convergence of American archetypes: The cocky Marine pilot, the underachieving Jewish technologist, the cowboy president who ultimately climbs into a jet and leads the counterattack himself. Morgan helps us think through both the appeal and limits of that fantasy. How the film captures a moment of post–Cold War confidence where disparate social types could be harmonized into national purpose. Even the technological imagination reflects that era. The aliens are defeated not through overwhelming force, but through a computer virus delivered via laptop, a pre-Internet-age fantasy of improvisation and ingenuity. We debate the film’s politics in this spirit—what’s explicit, unconscious, or just ambient—and how something that feels so unifying and fun can also encode a very particular vision of indispensability.

One of Morgan’s sharpest observations centers on Randy Quaid’s Russell Casse, the traumatized Vietnam vet turned conspiracy crank who ultimately redeems himself through a kamikaze sacrifice. And for being right in the end. The film doesn’t just tolerate him; it elevates him. That kind of crankiness, Morgan argues, was once legible, even lovable. Something you could live alongside, maybe even learn from. In a relatively stable, “post-historical” moment for the American middle class, the stakes felt low enough to allow for that kind of messy tolerance. Today, that figure reads differently. Less endearing, more dangerous, harder to absorb into a shared project. Independence Day ends with fireworks, but what lingers is something quieter. Namely, a memory of a world where you could still believe that everyone had a place in the story.

Further Reading

Morgan on American Prestige (The Nation)

Morgan’s Illustrious Wiki Page

Morgan’s spread in GQ

“A Bad Breakup” (review of Fukuyama) by Danny Bessner

“Keynote Lecture: A National Interest for Whom? Rethinking the Foundations of Peace, Democracy, and War” by Van

The End of Victory Culture by Tom Engelhardt

Marine Corps Air Station El Toro

Teaser from the Episode

Independence Day Trailer

You might know Morgan Spector as the critically acclaimed leading man in The Gilded Age and The Plot Against America. Or for his appearances in Boardwalk Empire, Suits, Homeland, How to Make It In America (one of Van’s favorites), or even as a producer on The Big Scary “S” Word. What you might not know is that Morgan is both an impressive critic of policy and an advocate for democratic socialism.

We invited Morgan on to talk about Independence Day (1996), a delicious conversation that’s next in our queue. But we also recorded an in-depth installment of “Politics Behind the Scenes,” our occasional side-convos with guests about the urgent real-world issues of the day.

In this special episode, Morgan chops it up with Van and Lyle about:

* Meaningful anti-imperialist positions on Russia’s war withUkraine;

* The illegal war in Iran is also evil;

* Nationalizing the defense industry and taking the profits out of war;

* How we might envision a peace economy;

* Why we all love Graham Platner;

* The Israel problem in US foreign policy;

* Why we’re bullish on electoral leftism; and

* How the Democratic Party has s**t the bed so bad that left populists have a real opportunity to takeover the party from within.

A lot going on here. You don’t want to miss this episode with one of Hollywood’s best political minds.

Van and Lyle are joined by Julia Gledhill (of The Un-Diplomatic Podcast and Stimson Center fame) to revisit Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry, Darling, a film dismissed by many critics as a glossy pastiche but better understood as a deliberate medley of American ideological fantasies. Set in the manicured desert enclave of the “Victory Project,” the movie opens in Ray Charles warmth before sliding into rigid choreography: Men drive off in unison, women clean in unison, then glide into ballet formation as their instructor intones, “There is beauty in symmetry… we move as one.”

The aesthetic excess isn’t accidental. The film’s kaleidoscopic dance sequences explicitly evoke Busby Berkeley, whose WWII-era aerial sensibility turned human bodies into geometric ornament. Berkeley, a former U.S. Army artillery lieutenant and aerial observer, staged dancers from a “God’s eye view,” transforming individuality into pattern. Wilde weaponizes that grammar. What once read as escapist spectacle now registers as dehumanization, a mass ornament in service of hierarchy and control.

The Victory Project’s guru, Frank, speaks the language of progress while policing chaos. “What is the enemy of progress?” he asks. “Chaos,” one acolyte responds. The rhetoric blends mid-century self-help, Cold War technocracy, and contemporary manosphere grievance. The town’s clean surfaces conceal its true engine of disaffected men plugged into a fantasy where wives are restored to compliance and breadwinning humiliation is reversed. Jack’s resentment over his surgeon wife’s success curdles into full incel submission to Frank’s digital sermons. “We are not going backward, we are pushing forward!” Frank insists, though everything about Victory is nostalgic regression. The Busby Berkeley motif returns in distorted form—tap-dancing husbands, synchronized chants of “Whose world is this? Ours.”—as if fascist aesthetics have migrated from the stage to the algorithm. The aerial shots of the town flatten it into diagram, suggesting that the entire community is just another formation viewed from above.

Margaret’s haunting question—“Why are we here?”—cuts through the symmetry. Her fate, like Alice’s suffocating plastic-wrap episode and the compression of bodies against mirrored walls, exposes how fragile the choreography really is. The film’s supposedly clichéd mashup of The Truman Show, The Matrix, and Inception isn’t laziness but design, a greatest-hits compilation of American (un)reality. When Bunny confesses she chose the simulation to recover her dead children, the film briefly complicates its villains. Desire, not only domination, sustains the system. But the closing inversion—“It’s my turn now”—underscores the central warning. A world built on submission does not dissolve into liberation but mutates. The mass ornament reshuffles. The music keeps playing.

Further Reading

Julia’s Professional Page

“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” by Laura Mulvey

“Can we enjoy alternative pleasure?” by Jane Gaines

“Siegfried Kracauer’s idea of ‘Mass Ornament’” by Lesley Chamberlain

“Fascinating Fascism” by Susan Sontag

“Breaking Down the Classic Movies that Inspired Don’t Worry, Darling” by Caroline Madden

Teaser from the Episode

Don’t Worry, Darling Trailer

Van and Lyle are joined by historian Graeme Pente to revisit Roland Emmerich’s The Patriot, a Revolutionary War epic that filters eighteenth-century civil war through the moral grammar of Braveheart-era melodrama. Mel Gibson’s Benjamin Martin begins as a wary antiwar planter—“Why should I trade one tyrant 3,000 miles away for 3,000 tyrants one mile away?”—only to be pushed into righteous vengeance by British atrocity.

The film’s structure is simple: Reluctant hero, violated hearth, purified violence. But as Graeme helps unpack, the simplicity comes at a cost. The real war in the Carolinas was brutal, intimate, and frequently indistinguishable from banditry. The movie knows this just enough to gesture at it (hangings, burnings, neighbor against neighbor) before smoothing the rough edges into nationalist myth.

Much of our discussion turns on the figure Martin is loosely based on: Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox.” The film recasts him as a tormented but noble patriarch, haunted by a single episode of past excess. History is less forgiving. Marion was a slaveholder who participated in campaigns against the Cherokee and whose conduct, like that of many irregular fighters on both sides, blurred the line between resistance and reprisal.

The Patriot stages atrocity as a tragic rite of passage. Good men do terrible things, feel remorse, and are absolved by history. That structure mirrors a broader American habit whereby violence becomes regrettable but necessary, morally metabolized through individual guilt rather than collective reckoning. At the same time, the film’s most revealing line—Cornwallis blaming Tavington’s brutality for creating “this ghost”—captures how repression manufactures insurgency.

We also linger on what the film erases. Its fantasy of harmonious plantation life, its depiction of enslaved people as effectively free laborers, its climactic embrace of conventional battlefield glory after two hours of guerrilla tactics. The Battle of Cowpens becomes a redemptive tableau, with Martin hoisting the flag as if the war’s contradictions can be unified by sheer will. In the final scenes, a formerly enslaved man cheerfully returns to help “build a new world,” a gesture that reads less like reconciliation than wish fulfillment. For all its bombast and bloodletting, The Patriotoffers comfort: Empire is bad when British (or fill in the blank), virtuous when American.

Further Reading

“The Swamp Fox” by Amy Crawford

The Counter-Revolution of 1776 by Gerald Horne

The Internal Enemy by Alan Taylor

The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood

The American Revolution by Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein

Teaser from the Episode

The Patriot Trailer

Van and Lyle are joined by film historian Matthew Ellis to revisit Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows, a spare, rain-soaked chronicle of the French Resistance that refuses both triumph and sentimentality. From its opening march beneath the Arc de Triomphe—German boots echoing under imperial stone—to its epigraph welcoming “unhappy memories,” the film situates resistance not as romance but burden. Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) moves through Vichy France like a man already half-absent, assembling a network of communists, aristocrats, schoolteachers, barbers, and couriers whose patriotism is less theatrical than procedural. The roll call of prisoners, the Phony War backdrop, the portrait of Himmler looming over interrogations, all of it underscores a world where power operates bluntly, but resistance must operate quietly.

Melville’s great subject is not sabotage but moral cost. The execution of the traitor unfolds with excruciating hesitation: The gun too loud, the knife unavailable, the final strangling improvised and intimate. A young militant weeps. Cyanide capsules are distributed as standard equipment. “We’re not an insurance company,” one quips, since risk here is existential rather than actuarial. Torture is never shown, only its aftermath. Heroism is never declared, only endured. The barber who silently provides a disguise, the aristocratic “baron” who aids the republic he once opposed, Mathilde juggling clandestine logistics while raising children who know nothing of her work… these gestures accumulate into something sturdier than spectacle. Even the attempted hospital rescue of Félix fizzles into grim realism. Often, nothing happens, and that nothing is the point.

The film resists easy sanctification. De Gaulle appears, medals are awarded, but Melville withholds catharsis. Gerbier writes to London, “I kid myself that I am still of some use,” surrounded only by the books of his mentor Luc Jardie. When Mathilde is arrested after the fatal mistake of carrying her daughter’s photograph, the movement faces its most devastating calculation. Loyalty demands cruelty. The final drive toward the Arc de Triomphe lands not as closure but as recurrence: Shadows defined by more shadows. Army of Shadows may be the definitive Resistance film, but it is also an anti-myth that is less about liberation than about what solidarity requires and what it destroys.

Further Reading

Matt’s faculty page

“Army of Shadows (1969)” by Brian Eggert

“Resistance is Futile” by Jonathan Rosenbaum

“Army of Shadows and Lacombe, Lucien”

Is Paris Burning? by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre

Teaser from the Episode

Army of Shadows Trailer

Van 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 Reading

Danny’s website

American Prestige

The 1984 Ad for Apple

“Conservative’s Dystopia” by Lee Kepraios

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Teaser from the Episode

Demolition Man Trailer

Van 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 / Viewing

Matt on Twitter

Matt at the Center for International Policy

“Overmatched: America’s Military Is No Longer the World’s Best”

Bland Fanatics by Pankaj Mishra

The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins

Teaser from the Episode

Three 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:

We’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 Reading

Kevin’s website

The Siege (1998) episode w/ Kevin

Bring the War Home by Kathleen Belew

The Cold War’s Killing Fields by Paul Thomas Chamberlin

War and Cinema by Paul Virilio

Dreamworld and Catastrophe by Susan Buck-Morss

PatLabor 2: The Movie Trailer

We’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 Reading

Sam’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 Roth

Fascism in Sci-Fi: “Mobilizing Passions” in Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, by Alton Ayers

Starship 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 Reading

Scott’s Wiki page

“Just and Unjust Nuclear Deterrence” by Scott

The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons by Scott

“Thinking and Moral Considerations” by Hannah Arendt

The Soldier and the State by Samuel P. Huntington

Review 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 Van

Teaser from the Episode

A House of Dynamite Trailer

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 Reading

Joe’s Wiki page

Bang-Bang’s Full Metal Jacket episode

The Short-Timers by Gus Hasford

Dispatches by Michael Herr

Stiffed by Susan Faludi

Teaser from the Episode

Tigerland Trailer

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 Reading

USMC press release on the docuseries

Sam’s Substack

The Rivalry Peril by Van and Michael Brenes

Pain is Weakness Leaving the Body by Lyle

Gangsters of Capitalism by Jonathan M. Katz

War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges

Marines Trailer

Van 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 Reading

Paul’s website

No Globalization Without Representation, by Paul Adlerstein

Blood of Brothers: Life and War in Nicaragua by Stephen Kinzer

National Security Archive, Nicaragua Collection

Sandino’s Daughters: Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle by Margaret Randall

Under the Shadow by The Real News Network and NACLA

Teaser from the Episode

Under Fire Trailer

Van 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 Reading

George’s writings on the Slant Books website

“Turning Hitler into Art?” by George

Until the Final Hour: Hitler’s Last Secretary by Traudl Junge

The Führer Bunker: The Complete Cycle by W.D. Snodgrass

“Fascinating Fascism” by Susan Sontag

The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze

Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt

Behind the Scenes from the Episode

Downfall 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.

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 Reading

Sam’s professional page

Andy’s professional page

“Strategy & Conscience (The Book Review We Need),” by Van

Telehack, a retro internet simulator recommended by Andy

The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, by Sharon Weinberger

The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America, by Paul N. Edwards

The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, by Daniel Ellsberg

Teaser from the Episode

WarGames 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 Reading

Sam’s professional page

Andy’s professional page

“Strategy & Conscience (The Book Review We Need),” by Van

Telehack, a retro internet simulator recommended by Andy

The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, by Sharon Weinberger

The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America, by Paul N. Edwards

The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, by Daniel Ellsberg

WarGames Trailer

Van 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 Cohn

The End of Victory Culture by Tom Englehardt

War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination by H. Bruce Franklin

Teaser from the Episode

Dr. Strangelove Trailer

Artist 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 Reading

Eli’s website

“Steven Spielberg’s unforgivable sin”, by Eli Valley

Michael Oren interview on Munich

“What ‘Munich’ Left Out,” by David Brooks“Israeli consul attack’s Spielberg’s Munich as ‘problematic’,” by Gary Younge

Fürstenfeldbruck 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 Reading

Adrian Horton’s writing at The Guardian

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s “Torture Report”

The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda, by Ali Soufan

Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump by Spencer Ackerman

Teaser from the Episode

The Report Trailer

The 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 Reading

The 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 Conflict

Roger 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 Gopal

Teaser from the Episode

Lone Survivor Trailer

Osita 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 Reading

Osita’s website

Osita’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 Muhanna

Lawrence 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/Listening

Remember Shuffle Podcast

The Rivalry Peril by Van and Michael Brenes

The Cold War’s Killing Fields by Paul Thomas Chamberlin

“The Lethal Crescent: When the Cold War Was Hot” by Daniel Immerwahr

Van and Lyle’s Appearance on Remember Shuffle

Teaser from the Episode

The Hunt for Red October Trailer

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 Reading

El Chapo by Noah Hurowitz

Noah at The Intercept

Jackal by John Follain

Abu Nidal by Patrick Seale

Teaser from the Episode

Carlos Trailer

Van and Lyle are joined by Sandipto Dasgupta—legal scholar, political theorist, and possessor of an encyclopedic knowledge of Congolese politics, the Non-Aligned Movement, and postcolonial political economy—to discuss Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’État. The film blends archival footage, radical history, and one of the most inspired uses of diegetic sound you’ll ever encounter, tracing the assassination of Patrice Lumumba against a global backdrop of jazz diplomacy, Cold War intrigue, and the contested promises of decolonization.

Sandipto walks us through the tangled histories of the Congo’s natural resources, the role of Dag Hammarskjöld (depicted here as something of a willing instrument of U.S. imperial aims), and the African musicians whose performances frame the story. The conversation threads Lumumba’s fate through the rise of the Non-Aligned Movement, Third Worldism, and the New International Economic Order, in turn connecting the film to works like Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking After Empire and Vincent Bevins’s The Jakarta Method. Together, they explore how Soundtrack captures both the intoxicating possibilities of cultural exchange and the brutal realities of a world order determined to foreclose them.

Further Reading

Sandipto’s Website

The Jazz Ambassadors – PBS

Worldmaking After Empire by Adom Getachew

The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins

My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria by Andrée Blouin

Teaser from the Episode

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat Trailer

In this episode, we discuss Costa-Gavras’s State of Siege, a tightly constructed political thriller based on the real-life kidnapping and execution of U.S. police advisor Dan Mitrione by Uruguay’s Tupamaros guerrillas. Set in early 1970s Uruguay but filmed in Allende-era Chile just before the coup, the film dramatizes how U.S. “public safety” programs—nominally about technical assistance and crime prevention—became tools of Cold War counterinsurgency, helping repressive regimes police and suppress political dissent.

With scholars Stuart Schrader (Badges Without Borders) and Alex Aviña (Specters of Revolution), we explore the intersections of U.S. empire, global policing, and revolutionary resistance in the Southern Cone, and reflect on what it means to live in a world still shaped by these Cold War legacies.

Further Reading

Specters of Revolution, by Alex

“When NACLA Helped Shutter the U.S. Office of Public Safety,” by Stuart

“From Police Reform to Police Repression,” by Stuart

Twitter thread on Dan Mitrione by Stuart

Badges Without Borders, by Stuart Of Light and Struggle, by Debbie Sharnak

“The Long Arm of the Law,” by Lyle

Latin America’s Radical Left, by Aldo Marchesi

“Revolution Beyond the Sierra Maestra,” by Aldo Marchesi

Becoming the Tupamaros, by Lindsey Churchill

National Security Archive: The Dan Mitrione File

Teaser from The Episode

State of Siege Trailer

Van and Lyle are joined by historian and Slate Senior Editor Rebecca Onion to talk through the entire 28 Days Later trilogy, from its early aughts origins to its apocalyptic present. Together they explore the first film’s anti-militarist edge, arriving just as the War on Terror began to unfold, and how its disaffected rage gave way to the bombastic sensibilities of the 2007 sequel.

If the original cast British soldiers as the truest threats to civilization, the second leans into Global War on Terror aesthetics, gathering around a Delta Force commando as protagonist. Then again, it still preserves a kernel of the earlier critique: That security operations have a way of turning from containment to extermination.

The group breaks down this shift through a striking bit of dialogue from Rose Byrne’s Army medical officer, which lays out a three-stage process—identify the infection, contain the infection, and when the containment fails, exterminate all the brutes—that mirrors countless historical escalations, from Cold War brinkmanship to post-9/11 imperial overreach to the genocide now unfolding in Gaza.

They debate whether 28 Weeks Later offers any coherent politics at all, or simply mirrors our own contradictions. They also reflect on the beauty of Cillian Murphy, the chemistry between Murphy and Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson’s wrenching turn, and the creative imprint of Danny Boyle and Alex Garland; clearly felt in the first and final films, and sorely missed in the second. Most of all, they dig into the wild third installment—28 Years Later—and how its mystical, cosmic pivot late in the film, when Ralph Fiennes assumes center stage, reorients the entire franchise around memory, mourning, and what it means to love in a world on fire.

Further Reading

Rebecca’s Website

Rebecca’s Author Page at Slate

“28 Years Later and the Social Life of Catastrophe,” by Eileen Jones

An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

“Illusions of Containment,” by Tom Stevenson

Teaser from the Episode

28 Days Later Trailer

Van and Lyle are joined by journalist Sam Carliner to unpack Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant, a 2023 entry into the Afghanistan war movie canon. Together they examine how the film reinforces the myth, heavily circulated in the wake of the 2021 U.S. pullout, that American troops and Afghan interpreters were bonded as brothers in arms, fighting a noble, shared war against evil. While the film’s central relationship between Master Sergeant John Kinley (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his Afghan interpreter Ahmed (Dar Salim) is marked by quick banter and trust, the reality on the ground was often far icier; mutually suspicious relationships shaped by Islamophobia, infiltration, coercion, and years of betrayal.

The conversation digs into the emotional beats of the film and what they obscure. Kinley and Ahmed each risk their lives to save the other, and their intertwined fates become the “covenant” of the title. But rather than offering a serious reckoning with U.S. violence, the film functions as a feel-good fable of reciprocal loyalty, centering a “Good Muslim” who rescues his “Good American” friend, only to be rescued in return—with the arrival of private contractors cast as a climactic moment of salvation rather than as mercenary forces profiting off the neo-colonial periphery. The backdrop of a 20-year U.S. occupation and a 40-year civil war, both shaped and fueled by American policy, is left untouched.

The film doesn’t argue the U.S. should have stayed in Afghanistan, but it’s steeped in post-withdrawal melancholia, more interested in soothing American audiences than engaging historical truth. And yet, in its final scene, Kinley and Ahmed staring blankly from the cargo bay of a C-130, the production evokes an eerily similar ending to Zero Dark Thirty: The protagonists afloat in transit, surrounded by machinery, without any real sense of where they’re going or why.

Further Reading

Sam’s Substack

No Good Men Among the Living by Anand Gopal

The Fort Bragg Cartel by Seth Harp

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim by Mahmood Mamdani

Bang-Bang doing Zero Dark Thirty

Teaser from the Episode

Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant Trailer

Politics behind the scenes: A rare glimpse behind the curtain as Van, Lyle, and guest George Dardess talk about about memoir and stories of conversion. They discuss their own experiences relating to Monterey, California and the Defense Language Institute before getting into personal radicalization, the art of close reading, and the question of conscience that looms louder until it consumes you—which side are you on?

This conversation took place prior to recording a forthcoming episode about the film Downfall (although we’re releasing a few episodes ahead of Downfall). Good thing the mics were on, because this conversation has haunted Van (in a good way) ever since.

Further Reading

Lyle’s memoir

Colette’s memoir

A selection of George’s writing

Traudl Junge’s memoir

The next episode to drop: Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant!

In this finale to our Andor series, Van and Lyle are joined by returning guest Paul Adlerstein and—making his first appearance on the pod—Matt Duss, former foreign policy advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders and current executive vice president at the Center for International Policy.

The conversation spans the closing arc of Andor Season 2 and Rogue One, treating them as one long meditation on revolutionary grief, sacrifice, and strategy. We reflect on Kleya Marki’s backstory, Deedra Meero’s karmic consignment to the labor camps, and the quiet closure of Bix Caleen’s journey from warrior to survivor, cradling new life in a liberated field.

We also discuss Cassian’s confrontation with the rebel leadership and his scathing defense of Luthen Rael. Namely, his accusation that those who sit in safety have committed only a fraction of the sacrifice they demand of others. As well as Bail Organa’s (wink wink, nod nod) “May the Force be with you, captain,” sealing the fate of Cassian’s transition from hunted thief to selfless insurgent.

In our Rogue One discussion, we note the apocalyptic awe of Krennic’s “Oh, it’s beautiful” as he watches Jedha obliterated, a moment that recalls the real-world language of U.S. reporters and officials after Hiroshima.

Further Reading

Matt on Twitter

Center for International Policy

Matt’s other podcast (with Van)

Paul’s website

“Witnessing the A-Bomb, but Forbidden to File,” by David W. Dunlap

“Andor Is the Best Star Wars You Will Ever See,” by David Klion

Project Fulcrum: Nemik’s Weekly Manifesto

Teaser from the Episode

Andor Season 2 Trailer

This is Part III of our three-part series covering the Battle of Chile (itself a trilogy). Check out Part I and Part II!

Van and Lyle are joined by journalist and historian Jonathan M. Katz to discuss Patricio Guzmán’s seminal Battle of Chile trilogy—widely regarded as one of the greatest political documentaries ever made—alongside its 1997 epilogue, Obstinate Memory. Our conversation was recorded mostly in the weeks after Trump’s reelection but before his inauguration, and the urgency of that moment colors much of our analysis. At the heart of it: What can the Chilean road to socialism and its systematic destruction teach us about the slow corrosion of democratic institutions in the U.S. and elsewhere? And how might the fates of Salvador Allende, the Popular Unity coalition, and Chilean workers help illuminate the emerging dynamics of the global far right?

We dig into the paradoxes and possibilities of the Allende years: the failed balancing act between revolution and legality; the coordinated resistance from business owners, professionals, and the military; the question of whether a peaceful transition to socialism was ever possible. We examine how The Battle of Chile dissects the infrastructure of counterrevolution—economic pressure, street violence, parliamentary sabotage, and media warfare—and what it means to rewatch these films in our current moment. And we talk about the strength and tragedy of mass mobilization, the unarmed marches and factory occupations, and the fateful decision not to arm the people.

Further Reading

The Racket, Jonathan’s newsletter

Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire, by Jonathan Katz

America, América: A New History of the New World, by Greg Grandin

“Defending Allende,” by Ariel Dorfman

Teaser from the Episode

Battle of Chile Trailer

This is Part II of our three-part series covering the Battle of Chile (itself a trilogy). Check out Part I!

Van and Lyle are joined by journalist and historian Jonathan M. Katz to discuss Patricio Guzmán’s seminal Battle of Chile trilogy—widely regarded as one of the greatest political documentaries ever made—alongside its 1997 epilogue, Obstinate Memory. Our conversation was recorded mostly in the weeks after Trump’s reelection but before his inauguration, and the urgency of that moment colors much of our analysis. At the heart of it: What can the Chilean road to socialism and its systematic destruction teach us about the slow corrosion of democratic institutions in the U.S. and elsewhere? And how might the fates of Salvador Allende, the Popular Unity coalition, and Chilean workers help illuminate the emerging dynamics of the global far right?

We dig into the paradoxes and possibilities of the Allende years: the failed balancing act between revolution and legality; the coordinated resistance from business owners, professionals, and the military; the question of whether a peaceful transition to socialism was ever possible. We examine how The Battle of Chile dissects the infrastructure of counterrevolution—economic pressure, street violence, parliamentary sabotage, and media warfare—and what it means to rewatch these films in our current moment. And we talk about the strength and tragedy of mass mobilization, the unarmed marches and factory occupations, and the fateful decision not to arm the people.

Further Reading

The Racket, Jonathan’s newsletter

Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire, by Jonathan Katz

America, América: A New History of the New World, by Greg Grandin

“Defending Allende,” by Ariel Dorfman

Teaser from the Episode

Battle of Chile Trailer

Van and Lyle are joined by journalist and historian Jonathan M. Katz to discuss Patricio Guzmán’s seminal Battle of Chile trilogy—widely regarded as one of the greatest political documentaries ever made—alongside its 1997 epilogue, Obstinate Memory. Our conversation was recorded mostly in the weeks after Trump’s reelection but before his inauguration, and the urgency of that moment colors much of our analysis. At the heart of it: What can the Chilean road to socialism and its systematic destruction teach us about the slow corrosion of democratic institutions in the U.S. and elsewhere? And how might the fates of Salvador Allende, the Popular Unity coalition, and Chilean workers help illuminate the emerging dynamics of the global far right?

We dig into the paradoxes and possibilities of the Allende years: the failed balancing act between revolution and legality; the coordinated resistance from business owners, professionals, and the military; the question of whether a peaceful transition to socialism was ever possible. We examine how The Battle of Chile dissects the infrastructure of counterrevolution—economic pressure, street violence, parliamentary sabotage, and media warfare—and what it means to rewatch these films in our current moment. And we talk about the strength and tragedy of mass mobilization, the unarmed marches and factory occupations, and the fateful decision not to arm the people.

Further Reading

The Racket, Jonathan’s newsletter

Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire, by Jonathan Katz

America, América: A New History of the New World, by Greg Grandin

“Defending Allende,” by Ariel Dorfman

Teaser from the Episode

Battle of Chile Trailer

The Death Star was born in blood well before it ever came into existence. In episodes 7-9 of Andor, we see just how much blood, and why. A false-flag operation to secure critical minerals. A French-resistance style sub-plot involving infiltration by an ambitious order muppet. Genocide of the Ghormans—an affluent middle-power planet. And a Galactic media that pretends to be the arbiter of truth while merely manufacturing consent for empire.

These are among the many thrills of a story whose politics evoke our own. You don’t want to miss Senator Mon Mothma’s daring, radical speech on the Senate floor, followed by Andor’s equally daring exfiltration of Mon Mothma to the Rebellion-held planet Yavin, where she comes home to herself.

Writer David Klion and historian David Austin Walsh rejoin the pod to discuss episodes 7-9 of Andor Season 2—the most-action packed and emotionally charged arc of not just Andor but perhaps any TV show.

Further Reading

David Austin Walsh on Twitter

David Klion on Twitter

“Andor Is the Best Star Wars You Will Ever See,” by David Klion

Project Fulcrum: Nemik’s Weekly Manifesto

The Romance of American Communism, by Vivian Gornick

Teaser from the Episode

Andor Season 2 Trailer

An occasional glimpse behind the curtain as Van (missing Lyle!) sits down with writer David Klion and historian David Austin Walsh. Their candid convo ranges from the politics of liberal Zionism to personal radicalization and the history of the United States as the world’s most successful (but ultimately failed?) settler-colonial project founded on genocide.

You can catch this chat wherever you listen to podcasts, and the full video version is included as an unlisted YouTube link, below.

Look for David and David as recurring guests on our Andor mini-series.

Van and Lyle are joined by journalist David Klion and returning guest Paul Adlerstein to unpack Episodes 4 through 6 of Andor Season 2, when the slow-burn tension of the early arc erupts into full-fledged moral crisis.

They discuss how Ghorman—rendered with a kind of haute-bourgeois, French fusion aesthetic—is not only targeted by the Empire’s military clampdown, but also by its Fox News–style media wing, and fashion becomes a proxy for disloyalty. Meanwhile, Mothma’s effort to secure a de-escalation vote in defense of Ghorman is met with apathy or cowardice by her Senate colleagues, nominal liberals who fold in the face of imperial momentum.

The group also notes Bix’s PTSD, a trauma-riddled silence that now borders on suicidal despair, as well as Luthen and Saw’s parallel unraveling. One hides behind charm, the other behind mania, but both embody the same truth, that revolution is not for the sane.

“Do you think I’m crazy?” Saw asks. “Yes, I am. Revolution is not for the sane.” And Luthen proves it, growing impatient with Mothma’s delays and willing to let Ghorman burn to protect the long game.

Further Reading

Paul’s website

David on Twitter

“Andor Is the Best Star Wars You Will Ever See,” by David Klion

Project Fulcrum: Nemik’s Weekly Manifesto

The Romance of American Communism, by Vivian Gornick

Teaser from the Episode:

Andor Season 2 Trailer