This is the film that made Vince Vaughn a household name, that predestined major directorial futures for Doug Liman and Jon Favreau, that launched Ron Livingston into his cult-classic role in Office Space. Before everyone involved here was rich and famous, they were dumb guys muddling through dumb stuff in a dumb period of life. And they made a really well-crafted, really insightful film about it. Revisit the movie behind the movie behind the movie.

Music credit: Mr Smith, "Hellafunk"

Celebrate Michael Bay's coming out party as Hollywood's preeminent pyrotechnical stylist as Ethan Hutt helps us remember the epic car chase that we had both forgotten, as well as all the great lines that we had not. More seriously, we wonder why the moral demand that Ed Harris's character makes on his national security bosses -- for recognition of the mortal sacrifices his covert operatives have made on the nation's behalf over the decades -- is both understood to be reasonable and legitimate, and also needs to be obliterated. The only real question is whether to bomb the threat out of existence or send in the Seals. What in the name of Zeus's butthole, indeed?

Music credit -- Mr Smith, "Hellafunk."

Guests: Penny von Eschen and Elisabeth Anker

What are we doing, exactly, rewatching the awesome movies of our childhoods, and why bother?

This introductory episode lays out the point of a project like this, which is mostly nerdy and nostalgic fun, a chance to spend time with people and movies we like. But it's an oddly worthwhile thing to be thoughtful about in our politically tumultuous times, when the prevailing feeling across the spectrum seems to be that "this is not who we are, or who we ought to be." The substance of that inkling is very different on the left and on the right. But a sense of having taken a wrong turn somewhere is palpable and shared. For people of a certain age, like ourselves, who were around for the end of the cold war but too young to be fully conscious of what it all meant, the awesome movies of our childhoods helped shape our sense of what good and evil look like, of what kinds of peace are worth desiring and what kinds of violence are necessary to achieving those, of whom to trust and what to fear.

In this episode we talk to two prominent experts who spend a great deal of time thinking about the way movies and popular media both shape and reflect the political imaginations of world-historical actors. These conversations lay the groundwork for understanding the world to which these movies were responding and the nature of the political work that art can do.

Music: Mr. Smith, "Hellafunk"

References:

Rita Felski, Hooked: Art and Attachment (University of Chicago Press, 2020)

Penny von Eschen, Paradoxes of Nostalgia (Duke University Press, 2022)

Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (The New Press, 1992)

Naoki Sakai, The End of Pax Americana (Duke University Press, 2022)

Elisabeth Anker, Ugly Freedoms (Duke University Press, 2022).

Elisabeth Anker, Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom (Duke University Press, 2016).

Colleen Derkatch, Bounding Biomedicine (University of Chicago Press, 2016)

Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan The Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (UC Press, 1988)

Elizabeth Hinton, America on Fire (Liveright Press, 2021).