Bang-Bang Podcast

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 Iraq to a clinic in Mexico, where ibogaine and toad venom do what sixty pills a day could not.
For Lyle the film’s real subject is a trauma apparatus built to repair faulty equipment rather than heal people (one SEAL is sent to the military’s brain-injury center, patched up, and returned for four more deployments). As the scholar Nadia Abu El-Haj has argued in Combat Trauma, PTSD was popularized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in rap groups that turned pain into politics. As the decades followed, this promising origin story nonetheless raced toward an endpoint constituted—in Ryan’s words—by psychedelic-assisted stormtroopers. Van invokes Fanon’s French torturer, begging his psychiatrist for a way to sleep at night and keep his job.
Then there is the narration itself, where the enemy appears only as bad guys, terra nullius in uniform. No Afghans, no Iraqis, not even Mexicans in a film set half in Mexico. The one line that breaks the frame, a SEAL wondering whether we’d have a military at all if we didn’t abuse children, lasts no more than a second.
Further Reading and Listening
Ryan Miller’s therapist profile
Combat Trauma by Nadia Abu El-Haj
“Can we heal wartime trauma without confronting the real causes of war?” by Lyle
Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn
Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris
The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks
“Colonial War and Mental Disorders” from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth
Bang-Bang’s Netflix’s Marines episode w/ Sam Carliner
Bang-Bang’s Combat Obscura episode
Teaser from the Episode
In Waves and War Trailer



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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 president floating Canada as the fifty-first state, it plays less like farce than like the minutes of a meeting. Returning guest Eric Stinton turns out to have a stake in the subject. His father is Canadian, he was born in Canada, and this was a family holiday movie growing up in Hawaii.
The first ten minutes tell the tale. Laid-off workers bid on the surplus weapons they used to build, one of them going home with a bazooka for twenty-five dollars, while the contractor who closed their plant blames the president from the stage. There was a real plan after the Cold War to retool weapons plants for civilian production and keep those towns employed, and Washington let it die. The factories closed, the arsenal got auctioned back to the workers it had just laid off, and the hawks were left holding the only jobs program on offer. Van traces that trap back to a 1943 essay by Michał Kalecki, the Polish economist whose work remains a touchstone on the left. Kalecki’s argument was that a system unwilling to concede real power to workers can only reach full employment through permanent war.
Related gags hold up. Bud Boomer and his fellow drinkers, worked into a war by an anchor reporting that Canada has massed ninety percent of its population along the border, are written as fools but also with affection (Lyle reads them as the prehistory of the Trumpist base). Omega Force, the film’s Delta Force stand-in, can’t deploy because a bylaw forbids their use against Caucasians. The president threatens to level Toronto in rhyme. The invaders sing the only line of “Born in the USA” they know, which is the whole American black comedy in a single joke.
Further Reading
Eric Stinton’s website
“Political Aspects of Full Employment” by Michał Kalecki
“In the Grip of a Permanent War Economy” by Seymour Melman
The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, 40 Years Later, the National Security Archive’s briefing book of intercepts and LBJ tapes
“The Rot at Fort Bragg” by Lyle
The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy by Van
Teaser from the Episode
Canadian Bacon Trailer

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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 the newest of the show’s rotating bench of fellow veterans, grew up bonding with his Apache-pilot dad over Aldo Raine quotes and brought this film to the show.
Tarantino gets called one of the master stylists of his time, Christoph Waltz’s Landa one of the most memorable performances of the era, and the long dramatic tensions flawless. The debate ends up being over what such art is doing. Lyle calls it the greatest Zionist film ever made—if not by intention, at least by affect. The id-gratification of vengeance and the lesson that you’re nobody unless you’re the one doing the killing, arrives as moto fuel for a generation convinced they’re still killing Nazis. The critics get read into the record, from Jonathan Rosenbaum’s charge that the film is “morally akin to Holocaust denial” to Daniel Mendelsohn on Tarantino “turning Jews into Nazis,” swastika brandings included. Christopher Hitchens’s warm-piss verdict gets a laugh and a shrug.
All of us end up playing devil’s advocate at one point or another. The conversation ranges from the chapter construction, the pastiche, and a multiracial anti-fascist coalition doing the killing, with the real history of the Jewish partisans lurking somewhere behind the reactionary dream. And one more critical, Americanist tell gets noted: Not one Russian appears on screen. Tarantino’s early draft reportedly had Fredrick Zoller sniping Soviets in a walled-off Russian city. The finished film moved him to Sicily.
Further Reading
“Debating Inglourious Basterds”, the Film Quarterly roundtable
“Some Afterthoughts about Tarantino” by Jonathan Rosenbaum
“Tarantino Rewrites the Holocaust” by Daniel Mendelsohn
“Postmodernism and Consumer Society” by Fredric Jameson
Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund by Molly Crabapple
Teaser from the Episode
Inglorious Basterds Trailer

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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 first stretch of this episode is that chronicle in miniature. Streaming killed residuals, consolidation killed the middle-class actor, and it’s now cheaper to fly three hundred people to Budapest than to shoot a movie set in Los Angeles, a city Ryan calls Detroit with warmer weather. What happens to the actor class, he warns, happens to all of us.
Alex Garland’s Ex Machina plays differently after that conversation. Caleb’s helicopter ride announces the plutocracy before anyone says AI (“We’ve been flying over his estate for two hours”). Nathan, the bro-god CEO Oscar Isaac plays somewhere between Sam Altman and Alex Karp, has scraped the world’s cellphones and search engines to build Ava, then built his Turing test around Caleb’s porn profile. Anticipatory barely covers it. Even the compound’s power cuts, we eventually learn, are the cost of thinking machines, a 2014 preview of the data-center strain now dimming actual grids.
The conversation’s sharpest turn reads the film as empire. Nathan is the colonizer who manufactures his own colonized, the civilizing mission as domination in a lab coat. The master-slave dialectic runs the plot. Dominating a mere machine satisfies nobody, so Nathan needs Ava human enough for her submission to mean something, and once she’s human enough, rebellion follows. The real Turing test, everyone agrees, is her manipulative, cynical escape. Whether to keep rooting for her through those wordless final minutes, after she leaves the one character with a moral compass locked in to die, is the question the episode leaves standing.
Further Reading and Listening
An Actor Despairs, Ryan’s podcast
Ryan’s website
“The Life and Death of Hollywood” by Daniel Bessner
“Lordship and Bondage” from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
“‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza” by Yuval Abraham
“Militarism as a Province of Accumulation” from Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Teaser from the Episode
Ex Machina Trailer

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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 and reality are uncanny. In the movie, trustees sell the fictional Bunker Hill Academy out from under its cadets. This spring, Valley Forge graduated its final class, with Maryland Governor Wes Moore supplying the commencement platitudes to a school still dogged by abuse allegations.
Harold Becker’s film is ferociously anti-war, which didn’t stop a young Van from watching it on repeat and absorbing the opposite lesson. And that misreading is the episode’s spine. George C. Scott hands his boys a creed. There are worse things than death, he teaches. Defeat. Dishonor. Timothy Hutton’s Moreland (the name is no accident) follows it to a bloody standoff with the National Guard, and by the end names the cost himself. “Honor doesn’t mean s**t when you’re looking at a dead little kid.”
The conversation keeps finding the present inside 1981. Jasper reads out the press-tour quotes from his book. Hutton called military schools “a dangerous environment” built on “an abstract code of honor that has no specific meaning,” while Tom Cruise praised places that “break you down and build you up,” the boot-camp anthem verbatim. His Captain Shawn, grinning “It’s beautiful, man!” through the final firefight, is the true believer Cruise never stopped being. From there the talk turns to how honor further migrated after Vietnam from country to a variety of violent and provincial institutions. The inward-turned military among them, but also Christian nationalists and ICE. And why William James’s moral equivalent of war still points at the exit.
Further Reading
God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood by Jasper Craven
“Hazing, Fighting, Sexual Assaults: How Valley Forge Military Academy Devolved Into ‘Lord of the Flies’” by Jasper Craven
Battle Borne, Jasper’s newsletter on veterans’ issues
“The Moral Equivalent of War” by William James
Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund by Molly Crabapple
Making the Corps by Thomas E. Ricks
Teaser from the Episode
Taps Trailer