Bang-Bang Podcast

Van and Lyle are Bang-Bang
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A show about war movies, with an anti-imperialist twist. Hosted by Van Jackson and Lyle Jeremy Rubin--military veterans, war critics, and wannabe film critics. www.bangbangpod.com

  1. Army of Shadows (1969) w/ Matthew Ellis | Ep. 60

    10H AGO

    Army of Shadows (1969) w/ Matthew Ellis | Ep. 60

    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 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

    14 min
  2. Demolition Man (1993) w/ Daniel Bessner | Ep. 59

    FEB 9

    Demolition Man (1993) w/ Daniel Bessner | Ep. 59

    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 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

    13 min
  3. Three Days of the Condor (1975) w/ Matt Duss | Ep. 58

    FEB 2

    Three Days of the Condor (1975) w/ Matt Duss | Ep. 58

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

    17 min

  4. JAN 25

    The Military is Trapped Between Fascism and Civil War | Ep. 57

    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: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.bangbangpod.com/subscribe

    26 min
  5. PatLabor 2: The Movie (1993) w/ Kevin Fox | Ep. 56

    JAN 22

    PatLabor 2: The Movie (1993) w/ Kevin Fox | Ep. 56

    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 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

    13 min
  6. Starship Troopers (1997) w/ Andrew Facini and Sam Ratner | Ep. 55

    JAN 6

    Starship Troopers (1997) w/ Andrew Facini and Sam Ratner | Ep. 55

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

    17 min
  7. A House of Dynamite (2025) w/ Scott Sagan | Ep. 54

    12/19/2025

    A House of Dynamite (2025) w/ Scott Sagan | Ep. 54

    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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.bangbangpod.com/subscribe

    56 min
  8. Tigerland (2000) w/ Joe Allen | Ep. 53

    12/14/2025

    Tigerland (2000) w/ Joe Allen | Ep. 53

    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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.bangbangpod.com/subscribe

    1 hr
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Ratings & Reviews

4.5
out of 5
8 Ratings

About

A show about war movies, with an anti-imperialist twist. Hosted by Van Jackson and Lyle Jeremy Rubin--military veterans, war critics, and wannabe film critics. www.bangbangpod.com

Information

  • Creator
    Van and Lyle are Bang-Bang
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    62
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Van Jackson and Lyle Jeremy Rubin
  • Show Website
    Bang-Bang Podcast

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