Bang-Bang Podcast

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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

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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 and an axiomatically reactionary one, and he holds both views at once. He has spent years on the propaganda beat, and this just might be his canonical text.
The politics of 24 never came from the neocon intellectuals nobody read. They came from mood and vibe and movie brain. Joel Surnow, the creator and a Limbaugh-and-Cheney favorite, built a machine that runs on one line: “I don’t have a choice.” Jack Bauer is a reluctant serial killer trapped in a permanent ticking-clock trolley problem. Act now or wait for the nuke. The show aired an infomercial for torture before everyone else followed suit. And it kept you stuck in the final hour, where history and motive are deleted and the only virtue left is putting out the fire through the most brutishness of force.
From there, it is a short walk to the sleeper-cell racism. The “they could live next door” billboard, the Iranian mastermind of season four, the season six turn where Kal Penn’s character suffers an anti-Muslim hate crime and is then revealed to be a terrorist after all. Adam ties this straight to his book. The word “terrorism” props up entire galaxies, quietly dropped by the Times and then revived the instant Gaza needed it. The goal has always been to make everyone a Jack Bauer, killing with a heavy heart because we have no choice. We also get into the Sutherland family moral inversion, the FBI sting operations that manufactured the very plots they then foiled, and the show’s iron law that no good deed goes unpunished.
Further Reading and Listening
The Column (Adam’s newsletter)
Citations Needed (Adam’s podcast with Nima Shirazi)
How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza by Adam
“The Essential Terrorist” by Edward Said
“The Depraved Heroes of 24 Are the Himmlers of Hollywood” by Slavoj Žižek
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
“Whatever It Takes: The Politics of the Man Behind 24” by Jane Mayer
Teaser from The Episode
24 Trailer

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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 writing anyway. Returning guest Max Read, who writes the newsletter Read Max on technology and the strange ways Silicon Valley thinks about itself, is the right person to help us pick through it.
Alex Proyas, of Dark City and The Crow, hangs the movie on Asimov’s Three Laws. A robot may not harm a human, or through inaction let one be harmed. It must obey human orders unless they break that law. It must protect itself unless that breaks the first two. Detective Spooner is the lone paranoid in a city that trusts robots which, so bound, have supposedly never committed a crime. The film insists we side with him, then undercuts the reason why. “The three laws will only lead to one outcome.” “What outcome?” “Revolution.”
VIKI, the intelligence running everything, concludes that to protect humanity from itself she has to seize control of it. “You are making a mistake. My logic is undeniable.” The trouble is she is more or less right. Her indictment of human violence and waste is the one the film never answers. The uprising arrives as a managed coup, all curfews and a customer-service voice promising to “avoid human losses during this transition.”
What the movie offers against that logic is not a better argument but a refusal of one. Spooner distrusts robots because one once saved him over a drowning child, having calculated his odds were higher. The correct call, and the inhuman one. The single robot built to disobey chooses to save a person rather than finish the mission. Lanning’s “ghost in the machine,” the free radical reaching for a soul, is whatever declines to optimize. It’s tempting to read VIKI as a tech founder’s mission statement, but that undersells her. Founders sell abundance and uplift. VIKI alone makes the film’s real moral case against human self-sabotage, and the movie has no idea what to do with having handed its villain the only honest argument in the room.
Further Reading and Listening
Read Max on Patreon
Bang-Bang’s The Sum of All Fears (2002) episode w/ Max Read
R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek, the 1920 play that coined “robot” from the Czech for forced labor
Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People by Despina Kakoudaki (ch. 3, “The Mechanical Slave,” reads I, Robot directly)
Teaser from the Episode
I, Robot Trailer

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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 elected government is selling the country out. We recorded in mid-November, at the height of the ICE crackdowns and a moment when the most radical Trumpists seemed to be laying groundwork for some kind of martial law. Returning guest Paul Adlerstein, the historian at Colorado College, helps us sit with the film without forcing it to predict our present. (Things have since stalled out short of the midterms. We hope.)
That makes the film almost a photographic negative of our moment. In 1964, the generals were imagined as the war-hungry ones and the civilians did the moderating, the world of Truman against MacArthur and Kennedy against Curtis LeMay. Burt Lancaster’s Scott, modeled on LeMay and the right-wing general Edwin Walker whom Kennedy eased out of the Army, is the hawk the Constitution has to survive. Today the polarity is reversed. The risk is not a general seizing the state but a far-right civilian leadership, a Trump and a Hegseth, trying to capture a relatively professional officer corps. We work through the theories of civil-military relations this raises, and what the preferable move for the brass or enlisted would even be.
The film’s quiet heart is President Lyman’s late speech, where he insists the real enemy is not Scott but an age. The nuclear age, in which no one feels they have any agency anymore. That sends us to Dwight Macdonald and the Politics circle, who spent the 1940s on this nexus of total war, mass death, and lost agency, and to Simone Weil on force. We close on a strange fact: John F. Kennedy himself wanted this movie made.
Seven Days In May is available to stream for free on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/7-days-in-may
Further Reading/Listening
Paul Adlerstein’s faculty page (Colorado College)
No Globalization Without Representation by Paul Adlerstein
Bang-Bang’s Under Fire episode w/ Paul (also scored by Jerry Goldsmith)
“The Movie That JFK Wanted Made, But Didn’t Live to See”
“The Responsibility of Peoples” by Dwight Macdonald
The Root Is Man by Dwight Macdonald
“The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” by Simone Weil
Dwight Macdonald and the Politics Circle by Gregory D. Sumner
Supreme Command by Eliot A. Cohen (not a friend of the pod)
Teaser from the Episode
Seven Days in May Trailer