Bang-Bang Podcast

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 Even sex has been replaced by sanitized, techno-sensory simulation.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