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. <br/><br/><a href="https://www.bangbangpod.com/s/bang-bang-podcast?utm_medium=podcast">www.bangbangpod.com</a>
Bang-Bang Podcast
Claim This Podcastby Van and Lyle are Bang-Bang
4.1(9 reviews)
73 episodes
Updated Daily
Accepts GuestsHas SponsorsLocation 🇺🇸
59
Podcast Authority
BetaFairBased on show quality, social media presence, reviews, charts, and more
Quality71
Social0
YouTube86
Engagement32
Podcast Overview
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. <br/><br/><a href="https://www.bangbangpod.com/s/bang-bang-podcast?utm_medium=podcast">www.bangbangpod.com</a>
Language
🇺🇲
Publishing Since
9/25/2024
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59
Podcast Authority
BetaFairBased on show quality, social media presence, reviews, charts, and more
Quality71
Social0
YouTube86
Engagement32
8
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Recent Episodes
June 20, 2026
I, Robot (2004) w/ Max Read | Ep. 70
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit <a href="https://www.bangbangpod.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7">www.bangbangpod.com</a><br/><br/><p>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.</p><p>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.”</p><p>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.”</p><p>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.</p><p>Further Reading and Listening</p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://www.patreon.com/cw/MaxRead">Read Max on Patreon</a></p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://www.bangbangpod.com/p/the-sum-of-all-fears-2002-w-max-read">Bang-Bang’s The Sum of All Fears (2002) episode w/ Max Read</a></p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/59112">R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots)</a> by Karel Čapek, the 1920 play that coined “robot” from the Czech for forced labor</p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/anatomy-of-a-robot/9780813562155">Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People</a> by Despina Kakoudaki (ch. 3, “The Mechanical Slave,” reads I, Robot directly)</p><p>Teaser from the Episode</p><p>I, Robot Trailer</p>
June 7, 2026
Seven Days in May (1964) w/ Paul Adlerstein | Ep. 69
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit <a href="https://www.bangbangpod.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7">www.bangbangpod.com</a><br/><br/><p>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.)</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>Seven Days In May is available to stream for free on the Internet Archive: <a target="_blank" href="https://archive.org/details/7-days-in-may">https://archive.org/details/7-days-in-may</a></p><p>Further Reading/Listening</p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://www.coloradocollege.edu/basics/contact/directory/people/adlerstein_paul.html">Paul Adlerstein’s faculty page (Colorado College)</a></p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://www.pennpress.org/9780812253177/no-globalization-without-representation/">No Globalization Without Representation</a> by Paul Adlerstein</p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://www.bangbangpod.com/p/under-fire-1983-w-paul-adlerstein?utm_source=publication-search">Bang-Bang’s Under Fire episode</a> w/ Paul (also scored by Jerry Goldsmith)</p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://boundarystones.weta.org/2014/05/13/movie-jfk-wanted-made-didnt-live-see">“The Movie That JFK Wanted Made, But Didn’t Live to See”</a></p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://archive.org/details/ResponsibilityOfPeoples">“The Responsibility of Peoples”</a> by Dwight Macdonald</p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/dwight-macdonald-the-root-is-man">The Root Is Man</a> by Dwight Macdonald</p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/simone-weil-the-iliad-or-the-poem-of-force-4.pdf">“The Iliad, or the Poem of Force”</a> by Simone Weil</p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Dwight_MacDonald_and_the_Politics_Circle.html?id=VdMzZ71r89YC">Dwight Macdonald and the Politics Circle</a> by Gregory D. Sumner</p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Supreme-Command/Eliot-A-Cohen/9780743242226">Supreme Command</a> by Eliot A. Cohen (not a friend of the pod)</p><p>Teaser from the Episode</p><p>Seven Days in May Trailer</p>
May 26, 2026
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) w/ Luke Savage | Ep. 68
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit <a href="https://www.bangbangpod.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7">www.bangbangpod.com</a><br/><br/><p>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, commanded a Royal Navy warship in the same era. The connection to this world is personal in a way it rarely is for a guest.</p><p>The film drops you into the hull of HMS Surprise during the Napoleonic Wars. Russell Crowe’s Captain Aubrey is chasing the French privateer Acheron, though in the novel the enemy ship was American. Hollywood made the swap. What survives the adaptation is Aubrey’s fixation. Paul Bettany’s Maturin, the ship’s surgeon and natural philosopher, sees it clearly enough to name it. He calls it pride. Aubrey calls it duty. “Whatever the cost?” Yes, whatever the cost. From there the Moby Dick parallel takes over. Aubrey drags his crew past the Galapagos, past reason, past a young, pampered officer named Holland who is scapegoated by a superstitious crew and eventually ties a cannonball to himself and walks off the deck. The ship reads from the Book of Jonah at his funeral. Then it rains.</p><p>Weir stages all of this with extraordinary physical detail. The amputation of a child’s arm, Maturin’s self-surgery on a beach, the violin duets between captain and surgeon. But the film is most interesting where it’s most ambivalent. Class barely registers. The violence of impressment and hierarchy gets absorbed into a story about character and fortitude. Maturin’s scientific curiosity, his blue-footed boobies and walking sticks, keeps getting sacrificed to Aubrey’s hunt. And the ending pulls a final trick. The French captain has been disguised as the ship’s surgeon the entire time. The hunt isn’t over. Like the flightless cormorant Maturin never gets to study, the thing that matters most keeps getting deferred.</p><p>Further Reading and Listening</p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://www.lukewsavage.com/">Luke Savage’s Substack</a></p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://jacobin.com/author/luke-savage">Luke Savage at Jacobin</a></p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://www.patreon.com/cw/michaelandus">Michael and Us Podcast</a></p><p>“<a target="_blank" href="https://cinephiliabeyond.org/subject-requirements-service-peter-weirs-master-commander-far-side-world/">Subject to the Requirements of the Service: Peter Weir’s Master and Commander at 22</a>”, Cinephilia & Beyond</p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://archive.org/details/marinersrenegade0000jame">Mariners, Renegades & Castaways</a> by C.L.R. James</p><p>Teaser from the Episode</p><p>Master and Commander Trailer</p>
73 total episodes available
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