Bang-Bang Podcast

Every November 5th, Britain burns Guy Fawkes in effigy before it sets off the fireworks, a ritual George Lawson calls a reminder of what the state does to people who resist. V for Vendetta makes the burned heretic its hero, and its mask passed on to the hacktivist international, Anonymous. Lawson, a professor at the Australian National University and the author of Anatomies of Revolution , helps g...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com George Holliday’s camcorder caught Arnold Schwarzenegger filming T2 outside the bar across from his apartment, and then, on the same tape, LAPD officers beating Rodney King. The film opened four months to the day after the beating, its liquid-metal killer disguised as an LAPD patrolman, and James Cameron told the Los...

From the vault! Re-releasing one of our earliest and most popular episodes, with antiwar veteran and organizer Alexander McCoy. New episode coming next week. ✌️ “When I understand my enemy well enough to defeat him, then in that moment, I also love him.” So begins the 2013 film adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s classic sci-fi novel Ender’s Game . Neither achieving box office nor critical success, t...

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...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com 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 p...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com 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...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com 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 fi...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com 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 an...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com 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 a...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com 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 w...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com 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...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com 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, comm...

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 b...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com 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 relationship...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com 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...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com 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 comm...

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...

You might know Morgan Spector as the critically acclaimed leading man in The Gilded Age and The Plot Against Americ a. 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 social...

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...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com 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 mile...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com 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...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com 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...

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 reade...

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...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com 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 interventi...