Bang-Bang Podcast

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...

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

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

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,...

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

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

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 Ne...

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...

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

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 crim...

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...

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...

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—whi...

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

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

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

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...

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

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

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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com Slate culture editor Jenny G. Zhang returns to the pod for our initial foray into the first block of Andor Season 2. Van and Jenny discuss the all-too-familiar labor exploitation on the agricultural planet Mina Rau, and how it relies on illegal immigration to remain profitable; the way that the Galactic Empire offers...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com Otto Preminger’s Exodus isn’t just a sweeping Hollywood epic but a foundational text of the postwar Zionist imagination. Van and Lyle are joined by journalist David Meir Grossman to dissect the 1960 film and its enduring legacy. Together, they parse the film’s aesthetics and ideology, its thinly veiled apologetics fo...

Van (minus Lyle) is joined by historian David Austin Walsh to explore episodes 10-12 of Andor ’s first-season finale. Their conversation focuses on Andor’s embrace of revolution and the surprising political realism of the show’s portrayal of labor exploitation and social uprisings. Van and David also discuss liberalism’s failure to inspire meaningful change in the real world—why has no electoral p...

An occasional glimpse behind the curtain as Van (missing Lyle!) sits down with historian David Austin Walsh to gossip a bit about the conservative movement, far-right politics, and how Van ended up unwittingly studying at a paleocon university. David joined the Bang-Bang Podcast to discuss Star Wars’ Andor (episode forthcoming) and we were able to get some great convo before recording. Bang-Bang i...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com Van and Lyle are joined once again by historian Paul Adlerstein to delve into episodes 8 through 10 of Andor . The conversation traces the jarring split between the dystopian labor camps of Narkina 5 and the sterile dinner parties of Coruscant’s elite, two poles of the same imperial order. They examine the moral comp...