Bang-Bang Podcast

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