Show Notes
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Ryan Perez makes his living in the industry this film is secretly about. An actor (The Gilded Age, et al.) and host of An Actor Despairs—a rueful wink at Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares—Ryan has turned hundreds of conversations with working actors into a running chronicle of Hollywood’s political economy. The first stretch of this episode is that chronicle in miniature. Streaming killed residuals, consolidation killed the middle-class actor, and it’s now cheaper to fly three hundred people to Budapest than to shoot a movie set in Los Angeles, a city Ryan calls Detroit with warmer weather. What happens to the actor class, he warns, happens to all of us. Alex Garland’s Ex Machina plays differently after that conversation. Caleb’s helicopter ride announces the plutocracy before anyone says AI (“We’ve been flying over his estate for two hours”). Nathan, the bro-god CEO Oscar Isaac plays somewhere between Sam Altman and Alex Karp, has scraped the world’s cellphones and search engines to build Ava, then built his Turing test around Caleb’s porn profile. Anticipatory barely covers it. Even the compound’s power cuts, we eventually learn, are the cost of thinking machines, a 2014 preview of the data-center strain now dimming actual grids. The conversation’s sharpest turn reads the film as empire. Nathan is the colonizer who manufactures his own colonized, the civilizing mission as domination in a lab coat. The master-slave dialectic runs the plot. Dominating a mere machine satisfies nobody, so Nathan needs Ava human enough for her submission to mean something, and once she’s human enough, rebellion follows. The real Turing test, everyone agrees, is her manipulative, cynical escape. Whether to keep rooting for her through those wordless final minutes, after she leaves the one character with a moral compass locked in to die, is the question the episode leaves standing. Further Reading and Listening An Actor Despairs, Ryan’s podcast Ryan’s website “The Life and Death of Hollywood” by Daniel Bessner “Lordship and Bondage” from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit “‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza” by Yuval Abraham “Militarism as a Province of Accumulation” from Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson Teaser from the Episode Ex Machina Trailer
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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
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
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com