Bang-Bang Podcast

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Van and Lyle are joined by critically acclaimed actor Morgan Spector to revisit Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day, a film that turns planetary annihilation into a distinctly American spectacle. We spend time lingering on the movie as a shared artifact of a particular 1990s childhood. The Ray Charles warmth of its opening, the awe of its destruction sequences, and, of course, the internalization of President Whitmore’s speech—“Today, we celebrate our Independence Day!”—memorized and recited by every other boy of that era. It opens, tellingly, on the American flag planted on the moon, Neil Armstrong’s voice echoing as if the “giant leap for mankind” had always been a national possession. When the aliens arrive, they don’t just threaten Earth but a worldview in which the United States stands in for humanity itself.
What follows is less a global response than a convergence of American archetypes: The cocky Marine pilot, the underachieving Jewish technologist, the cowboy president who ultimately climbs into a jet and leads the counterattack himself. Morgan helps us think through both the appeal and limits of that fantasy. How the film captures a moment of post–Cold War confidence where disparate social types could be harmonized into national purpose. Even the technological imagination reflects that era. The aliens are defeated not through overwhelming force, but through a computer virus delivered via laptop, a pre-Internet-age fantasy of improvisation and ingenuity. We debate the film’s politics in this spirit—what’s explicit, unconscious, or just ambient—and how something that feels so unifying and fun can also encode a very particular vision of indispensability.
One of Morgan’s sharpest observations centers on Randy Quaid’s Russell Casse, the traumatized Vietnam vet turned conspiracy crank who ultimately redeems himself through a kamikaze sacrifice. And for being right in the end. The film doesn’t just tolerate him; it elevates him. That kind of crankiness, Morgan argues, was once legible, even lovable. Something you could live alongside, maybe even learn from. In a relatively stable, “post-historical” moment for the American middle class, the stakes felt low enough to allow for that kind of messy tolerance. Today, that figure reads differently. Less endearing, more dangerous, harder to absorb into a shared project. Independence Day ends with fireworks, but what lingers is something quieter. Namely, a memory of a world where you could still believe that everyone had a place in the story.
Further Reading
Morgan on American Prestige (The Nation)
Morgan’s Illustrious Wiki Page
Morgan’s spread in GQ
“A Bad Breakup” (review of Fukuyama) by Danny Bessner
“Keynote Lecture: A National Interest for Whom? Rethinking the Foundations of Peace, Democracy, and War” by Van
The End of Victory Culture by Tom Engelhardt
Marine Corps Air Station El Toro
Teaser from the Episode
Independence Day Trailer

You might know Morgan Spector as the critically acclaimed leading man in The Gilded Age and The Plot Against America. Or for his appearances in Boardwalk Empire, Suits, Homeland, How to Make It In America (one of Van’s favorites), or even as a producer on The Big Scary “S” Word. What you might not know is that Morgan is both an impressive critic of policy and an advocate for democratic socialism.
We invited Morgan on to talk about Independence Day (1996), a delicious conversation that’s next in our queue. But we also recorded an in-depth installment of “Politics Behind the Scenes,” our occasional side-convos with guests about the urgent real-world issues of the day.
In this special episode, Morgan chops it up with Van and Lyle about:
* Meaningful anti-imperialist positions on Russia’s war withUkraine;
* The illegal war in Iran is also evil;
* Nationalizing the defense industry and taking the profits out of war;
* How we might envision a peace economy;
* Why we all love Graham Platner;
* The Israel problem in US foreign policy;
* Why we’re bullish on electoral leftism; and
* How the Democratic Party has s**t the bed so bad that left populists have a real opportunity to takeover the party from within.
A lot going on here. You don’t want to miss this episode with one of Hollywood’s best political minds.


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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com

Van and Lyle are joined by Julia Gledhill (of The Un-Diplomatic Podcast and Stimson Center fame) to revisit Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry, Darling, a film dismissed by many critics as a glossy pastiche but better understood as a deliberate medley of American ideological fantasies. Set in the manicured desert enclave of the “Victory Project,” the movie opens in Ray Charles warmth before sliding into rigid choreography: Men drive off in unison, women clean in unison, then glide into ballet formation as their instructor intones, “There is beauty in symmetry… we move as one.”
The aesthetic excess isn’t accidental. The film’s kaleidoscopic dance sequences explicitly evoke Busby Berkeley, whose WWII-era aerial sensibility turned human bodies into geometric ornament. Berkeley, a former U.S. Army artillery lieutenant and aerial observer, staged dancers from a “God’s eye view,” transforming individuality into pattern. Wilde weaponizes that grammar. What once read as escapist spectacle now registers as dehumanization, a mass ornament in service of hierarchy and control.
The Victory Project’s guru, Frank, speaks the language of progress while policing chaos. “What is the enemy of progress?” he asks. “Chaos,” one acolyte responds. The rhetoric blends mid-century self-help, Cold War technocracy, and contemporary manosphere grievance. The town’s clean surfaces conceal its true engine of disaffected men plugged into a fantasy where wives are restored to compliance and breadwinning humiliation is reversed. Jack’s resentment over his surgeon wife’s success curdles into full incel submission to Frank’s digital sermons. “We are not going backward, we are pushing forward!” Frank insists, though everything about Victory is nostalgic regression. The Busby Berkeley motif returns in distorted form—tap-dancing husbands, synchronized chants of “Whose world is this? Ours.”—as if fascist aesthetics have migrated from the stage to the algorithm. The aerial shots of the town flatten it into diagram, suggesting that the entire community is just another formation viewed from above.
Margaret’s haunting question—“Why are we here?”—cuts through the symmetry. Her fate, like Alice’s suffocating plastic-wrap episode and the compression of bodies against mirrored walls, exposes how fragile the choreography really is. The film’s supposedly clichéd mashup of The Truman Show, The Matrix, and Inception isn’t laziness but design, a greatest-hits compilation of American (un)reality. When Bunny confesses she chose the simulation to recover her dead children, the film briefly complicates its villains. Desire, not only domination, sustains the system. But the closing inversion—“It’s my turn now”—underscores the central warning. A world built on submission does not dissolve into liberation but mutates. The mass ornament reshuffles. The music keeps playing.
Further Reading
Julia’s Professional Page
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” by Laura Mulvey
“Can we enjoy alternative pleasure?” by Jane Gaines
“Siegfried Kracauer’s idea of ‘Mass Ornament’” by Lesley Chamberlain
“Fascinating Fascism” by Susan Sontag
“Breaking Down the Classic Movies that Inspired Don’t Worry, Darling” by Caroline Madden
Teaser from the Episode
Don’t Worry, Darling Trailer

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Van and Lyle are joined by historian Graeme Pente to revisit Roland Emmerich’s The Patriot, a Revolutionary War epic that filters eighteenth-century civil war through the moral grammar of Braveheart-era melodrama. Mel Gibson’s Benjamin Martin begins as a wary antiwar planter—“Why should I trade one tyrant 3,000 miles away for 3,000 tyrants one mile away?”—only to be pushed into righteous vengeance by British atrocity.
The film’s structure is simple: Reluctant hero, violated hearth, purified violence. But as Graeme helps unpack, the simplicity comes at a cost. The real war in the Carolinas was brutal, intimate, and frequently indistinguishable from banditry. The movie knows this just enough to gesture at it (hangings, burnings, neighbor against neighbor) before smoothing the rough edges into nationalist myth.
Much of our discussion turns on the figure Martin is loosely based on: Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox.” The film recasts him as a tormented but noble patriarch, haunted by a single episode of past excess. History is less forgiving. Marion was a slaveholder who participated in campaigns against the Cherokee and whose conduct, like that of many irregular fighters on both sides, blurred the line between resistance and reprisal.
The Patriot stages atrocity as a tragic rite of passage. Good men do terrible things, feel remorse, and are absolved by history. That structure mirrors a broader American habit whereby violence becomes regrettable but necessary, morally metabolized through individual guilt rather than collective reckoning. At the same time, the film’s most revealing line—Cornwallis blaming Tavington’s brutality for creating “this ghost”—captures how repression manufactures insurgency.
We also linger on what the film erases. Its fantasy of harmonious plantation life, its depiction of enslaved people as effectively free laborers, its climactic embrace of conventional battlefield glory after two hours of guerrilla tactics. The Battle of Cowpens becomes a redemptive tableau, with Martin hoisting the flag as if the war’s contradictions can be unified by sheer will. In the final scenes, a formerly enslaved man cheerfully returns to help “build a new world,” a gesture that reads less like reconciliation than wish fulfillment. For all its bombast and bloodletting, The Patriotoffers comfort: Empire is bad when British (or fill in the blank), virtuous when American.
Further Reading
“The Swamp Fox” by Amy Crawford
The Counter-Revolution of 1776 by Gerald Horne
The Internal Enemy by Alan Taylor
The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood
The American Revolution by Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein
Teaser from the Episode
The Patriot Trailer

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Van and Lyle are joined by film historian Matthew Ellis to revisit Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows, a spare, rain-soaked chronicle of the French Resistance that refuses both triumph and sentimentality. From its opening march beneath the Arc de Triomphe—German boots echoing under imperial stone—to its epigraph welcoming “unhappy memories,” the film situates resistance not as romance but burden. Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) moves through Vichy France like a man already half-absent, assembling a network of communists, aristocrats, schoolteachers, barbers, and couriers whose patriotism is less theatrical than procedural. The roll call of prisoners, the Phony War backdrop, the portrait of Himmler looming over interrogations, all of it underscores a world where power operates bluntly, but resistance must operate quietly.
Melville’s great subject is not sabotage but moral cost. The execution of the traitor unfolds with excruciating hesitation: The gun too loud, the knife unavailable, the final strangling improvised and intimate. A young militant weeps. Cyanide capsules are distributed as standard equipment. “We’re not an insurance company,” one quips, since risk here is existential rather than actuarial. Torture is never shown, only its aftermath. Heroism is never declared, only endured. The barber who silently provides a disguise, the aristocratic “baron” who aids the republic he once opposed, Mathilde juggling clandestine logistics while raising children who know nothing of her work… these gestures accumulate into something sturdier than spectacle. Even the attempted hospital rescue of Félix fizzles into grim realism. Often, nothing happens, and that nothing is the point.
The film resists easy sanctification. De Gaulle appears, medals are awarded, but Melville withholds catharsis. Gerbier writes to London, “I kid myself that I am still of some use,” surrounded only by the books of his mentor Luc Jardie. When Mathilde is arrested after the fatal mistake of carrying her daughter’s photograph, the movement faces its most devastating calculation. Loyalty demands cruelty. The final drive toward the Arc de Triomphe lands not as closure but as recurrence: Shadows defined by more shadows. Army of Shadows may be the definitive Resistance film, but it is also an anti-myth that is less about liberation than about what solidarity requires and what it destroys.
Further Reading
Matt’s faculty page
“Army of Shadows (1969)” by Brian Eggert
“Resistance is Futile” by Jonathan Rosenbaum
“Army of Shadows and Lacombe, Lucien”
Is Paris Burning? by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre
Teaser from the Episode
Army of Shadows Trailer