Bang-Bang Podcast

About Bang-Bang Podcast

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 (https://www.bangbangpod.com/s/bang-bang-podcast?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Van and Lyle are Bang-Bang

Category

tv & film · tv & film

Language

en

Explicit

Yes

First episode

25 Sept 2024

Latest episode

29 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

79 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   29 Sept 2026

   In Waves and War (2024) w/ Ryan Miller | Ep. 76

   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 (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists/ryan-p-miller-berkeley-ca/1532339) Combat Trauma (https://www.versobooks.com/products/994-combat-trauma?srsltid=AU7gw4UX4zO71aPo5W9gl9XO6WBjUA6QyEgvcKWBu-GEkJCJmPn92Ntg) by Nadia Abu El-Haj “Can we heal wartime trauma without confronting the real causes of war? (https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/12/13/combat-trauma-book-review-ptsd/)” by Lyle Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (https://www.versobooks.com/products/2893-humane) by Samuel Moyn Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/malcolm-harris/palo-alto/9780316592031/?lens=little-brown) by Malcolm Harris The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Will-to-Change/bell-hooks/9780743456081) by bell hooks “Colonial War and Mental Disorders (https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/2274-colonial-violence-and-mental-disorders-an-extract-from-frantz-fanon-s-the-wretched-of-the-earth)” from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth Bang-Bang’s Netflix’s Marines episode w/ Sam Carliner (https://www.bangbangpod.com/p/netflixs-marines-2025-w-sam-carliner) Bang-Bang’s Combat Obscura episode (https://www.bangbangpod.com/p/combat-obscura-2018-ep-1-bang-bang) Teaser from the Episode In Waves and War 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 (https://www.bangbangpod.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

2. 

   7 Sept 2026

   Canadian Bacon (1995) w/ Eric Stinton | Ep. 75

   This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com (https://www.bangbangpod.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7) 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 (https://ericstinton.com/) “Political Aspects of Full Employment (https://pluto.huji.ac.il/~mshalev/ppe/Kalecki_FullEmployment.pdf)” by Michał Kalecki “In the Grip of a Permanent War Economy (https://www.economicreconstruction.org/sites/economicreconstruction.com/static/SeymourMelman/archive/war/in_the_grip_of_permanent_war_economy.pdf)” by Seymour Melman The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, 40 Years Later (https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/index.htm), the National Security Archive’s briefing book of intercepts and LBJ tapes “The Rot at Fort Bragg (https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/seth-harp-fort-bragg-cartel/)” by Lyle The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy (https://www.amazon.com/Rivalry-Peril-Great-Power-Competition-Threatens/dp/0300272898/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2URAORDB00HU&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Jh1ubnQsTabJWIhX1107S9_T9RZtSnkI8NKhA5_vngWs3PDvR7pVpo4iM27MmcSDgDMX1Lfr4I9lVSjiY_gbxtMTgMhkcCgwU1uz_vW3sbZtbu8dODZNkqRTex0bSNsn3eU8ZPW1EUxQshw7fmc76G5vVheuQCgVe3JMkwuZvmQI2bMencpO8SVIUTOCfEwgytTSZ-abbLSX_bUqhHFLROmf-_mdyuufASFTcrmjpYQ.AkpbDvauIU0RK4_qtZTKjxeimbHOFG2V_KvL0UontPs&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+rivalry+peril&qid=1788765211&sprefix=the+rivalry+peri%2Caps%2C353&sr=8-1) by Van Teaser from the Episode Canadian Bacon Trailer

3. 

   22 Aug 2026

   Inglourious Basterds (2009) w/ Carlos Hogan | Ep. 74

   This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com (https://www.bangbangpod.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7) 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 (https://filmquarterly.org/2009/12/01/talking-point-debating-inglorious-b******s/)”, the Film Quarterly roundtable “Some Afterthoughts about Tarantino (https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2023/07/16606/)” by Jonathan Rosenbaum “Tarantino Rewrites the Holocaust (https://www.newsweek.com/tarantino-rewrites-holocaust-79003)” by Daniel Mendelsohn “Postmodernism and Consumer Society (https://analepsis.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/jameson.pdf)” by Fredric Jameson Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/646320/here-where-we-live-is-our-country-by-molly-crabapple/) by Molly Crabapple Teaser from the Episode Inglorious Basterds Trailer

Who has been a guest on Bang-Bang Podcast

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• George Dardess
• Paul Adlerstein
• Matt Duss
• Jonathan M Katz
• David Klion

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

255,911

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

4.1 / 5

9 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 59 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

71

Social presence

0

YouTube

86

Engagement

32

Contact Bang-Bang Podcast

Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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Questions about Bang-Bang Podcast