Bang-Bang Podcast

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George Holliday’s camcorder caught Arnold Schwarzenegger filming T2 outside the bar across from his apartment, and then, on the same tape, LAPD officers beating Rodney King. The film opened four months to the day after the beating, its liquid-metal killer disguised as an LAPD patrolman, and James Cameron told the Los Angeles Times it was about “the dehumanization we do on a daily basis.” Jamie Merchant, author of Endgame: Economic Nationalism and Global Decline, joins Van for a movie they both grew up on (with Lyle calling in from Japan for the opening stretch).
Van came up surprisingly short on criticism. The cops are the villains, and the raid on Cyberdyne plays like the Weather Underground with a clear conscience. Jamie digs a critique of capital out from under the spectacle. Skynet is a corporate product built with the military, or as Van puts it, venture surplus with nowhere else to go and one reliable customer, the national security state. Van once sat on an Obama-era Pentagon working group on autonomous weapons, where Skynet was everyone’s shorthand for what to avoid.
The moral engine is a boy teaching a killing machine why it can’t kill. “You just can’t go around killing people.” “Why?” Arnold’s T-800 never takes a life, and Van’s point is that once you follow the instrumental logic, you are the machines. Jamie sees a post-bourgeois family, cyborg as father, son as teacher, and a mother who nearly becomes a Terminator in Miles Dyson’s living room, only to find her son teaching her. That’s where he locates Fredric Jameson’s utopian moment, in relationships rather than some imagined society. Mercifully, the shelved ending, with John grown into a U.S. senator, stayed shelved, and the film closes on Sarah’s last line. “If a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.”
Further Reading
Endgame: Economic Nationalism and Global Decline by Jamie Merchant
Jamie Merchant at The Brooklyn Rail
“In the 1990s, Terminator’s Ultimate Evil Took the Form of a Cop. In 2019, It’s the U.S. Border Patrol.” by Chris Klimek
City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles by Mike Davis
“A Cyborg Manifesto” by Donna Haraway
Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era by Susan Jeffords
“Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” by Fredric Jameson
Teaser from the Episode
Terminator 2 Trailer

From the vault! Re-releasing one of our earliest and most popular episodes, with antiwar veteran and organizer Alexander McCoy. New episode coming next week. ✌️
“When I understand my enemy well enough to defeat him, then in that moment, I also love him.” So begins the 2013 film adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s classic sci-fi novel Ender’s Game. Neither achieving box office nor critical success, the movie still evokes a wide range of reactions. Especially when it comes to its ambiguous relationship to the original text.
Van and Lyle have fellow vet and strategist Alexander McCoy on the show to debate their competing reads. Along the way, they come to agree that certain insights gleaned from the cinematic rendering might be at odds with Card’s politics. Ranging from the ultimate lovelessness of war to the emptiness of any strategy unharnessed from justice and peace.
Alex on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/alexandermccoy.bsky.social
Further Reading
“A Primer on Orson Scott Card and the Ender’s Game Controversy,” by Anna Silman
The Internationalists, by Alexander Ward
“The Great Humbling,” by David Klion
“Four Futures,” By Peter Frase
Strategy and Conscience, by Anatol Rapaport
Ender’s Game Trailer
Teaser From The Episode


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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