Bang-Bang Podcast

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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

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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.
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.
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.
Further Reading and Listening
Luke Savage’s Substack
Luke Savage at Jacobin
Michael and Us Podcast
“Subject to the Requirements of the Service: Peter Weir’s Master and Commander at 22”, Cinephilia & Beyond
Mariners, Renegades & Castaways by C.L.R. James
Teaser from the Episode
Master and Commander Trailer

From the vault! Re-releasing one of our earliest and most popular episodes, with prize-winning journalist and best-selling author Spencer Ackerman.
Scottish filmmaker Armando Iannucci’s In the Loop, a satire about the lead-up to the Iraq War, never achieved the household success of Veep (Iannucci’s later HBO series). Yet, D.C. staffers have come to see it as a cult classic, and there is much to be gleaned from the black comedy beyond the predictable, Beltway absurdities. Van and Lyle have the acclaimed journalist Spencer Ackerman on the show to discuss his own role in the film’s creation, as all three exchange biting laughs and commentary along the way. Especially about the rotting tooth that is Washington.
Bonus: In addition to dissecting the film, the first 30 minutes of this episode are an oral history of Spencer Ackerman’s experience with the making of In The Loop.
Further Reading
“How to succeed in Hollywood without really trying” (2009), by Spencer Ackerman
“That’s Me and Him From The Sopranos” (2009), by Armando Iannucci
Reign of Terror (2022), by Spencer Ackerman
Iron Man Vol. 1 (2025), by Spencer Ackerman and Julius Ohta
Forever Wars Newsletter, by Spencer Ackerman
Perils of Dominance, by Gareth Porter
In The Loop Trailer


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Comedian and podcaster Orli Matlow, who hosts War is Stupid: An Anti-War Podcast About War, joins Van and Lyle for a conversation about Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton that turns out to be less about the musical’s politics than about how three very different people found themselves in three very different relationships to it. Orli came up through musical theater and loves Hamilton. Newsiesmade her pro-union. Hair made her antiwar. For her, the show is part of a lineage of musicals that shape how you see the world, and she embraces it openly. Lyle was once a theater kid too, but Hamilton arrived when he was a disillusioned left vet who saw the production’s bootstrapping mythology and founders worship as meritocratic catnip. Van, an Obama-era Pentagon guy at the time, was probably too deep in the liberal foreign policy bubble to care much either way.
The episode lives in that gap. “In New York you can be a new man.” “I’m not going to throw away my shot.” “Look around, so happy to be alive today, in the greatest city in the world. HISTORY IS HAPPENING!” The self-starter theme runs through the musical like a pulse, and whether it reads as aspirational or as a false capitalist origin story depends entirely on where you were standing when you first heard it. The founders fetish is real. The erasure of the founders’ own radical economic views, their hostility to monopolists and wage slavery, is real. But Lyle’s critique has softened over the years, in large part by appreciating the idiosyncratic and often life-affirming reasons people like Orli appreciate the show. Sometimes the most interesting thing about a cultural phenomenon is not what it says but what it reveals about the infinite ways infinitely different people, in infinitely different passages of life, pass through it.
Further Reading/Listening
Orli Matlow’s website
War is Stupid: An Anti-War Podcast About War
Orli Matlow on McSweeney’s
Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow
“Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the Black Past in Hamilton” by Lyra Monteiro
“Ishmael Reed Doesn’t Like Hamilton” by Jaya Rajamani
Teaser from the Episode
Hamilton Trailer

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Van and Lyle welcome back Andy Facini, Communications Director at the Council on Strategic Risks, to take on Tony Scott’s Crimson Tide. Gene Hackman’s Captain Ramsey and Denzel Washington’s Lt. Commander Hunter are locked inside an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine with enough firepower to end civilization, and the film turns their standoff into a test of everything the nuclear age is supposed to rest on: Chain of command, verified orders, rational actors.
Andy brings firsthand knowledge of the submarine world and walks us through what the film gets right about the culture and protocols, as well as what it stretches. The argument arrives early, over dinner, when Ramsey presses Hunter on Hiroshima and the two debate Clausewitz. “In the nuclear world, the true enemy is war itself,” Hunter declares. Ramsey, cigar in hand, calls himself a “simple-minded son of a b***h” and suggests the Navy wants both types. But the film’s own logic, and ours, pushes back. You don’t need the psychopath, you just need the one who thinks.
Still, Crimson Tide is smarter than a clean binary, and that’s also its problem. Ramsey is too charismatic, too commanding, and ultimately too generous, recommending Hunter for full command and conceding on the Lipizzaner stallions, to be reducible to villain. The warmth of Hackman’s performance softens a position that, followed to its conclusion, would have killed millions. Meanwhile the racial subtext hums underneath. Denzel’s Hunter is the “complicated one,” the Harvard-educated Black officer navigating a white institution, and those stallions “born black” but turning white barely qualify as metaphor. Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, scored by Hans Zimmer, and directed with Tony Scott’s signature controlled chaos, the film stages every radio crackle and depth reading with the intensity of a firefight. “We’re here to preserve democracy, not to practice it,” Ramsey tells his crew.
Released amid post-Cold War anxieties about Russian instability, Crimson Tide imagines nuclear catastrophe not as ideological failure but as crossing a thin line between procedural discipline and annihilatory madness; a garbled message, a broken radio, a system that works more or less as designed, always on the verge of destroying the world.
Further Reading, Listening, Viewing
Andy’s professional page
Bang-Bang’s WarGames episode w/ Sam Ratner and Andy Facini
Viggo Mortensen on Charlie Rose
Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser
Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom by Elaine Scarry
Teaser from the Episode
Crimson Tide Trailer