Show Notes
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Underneath the sneaker product placements and CGI chases through a gleaming 2035 Chicago resides our ever-contested present. Except the film is a mess. The plot wanders, full of dropped threads and convenient or confusing turns. It’s also confused, as if the screenwriters couldn’t decide what they believed and kept writing anyway. Returning guest Max Read, who writes the newsletter Read Max on technology and the strange ways Silicon Valley thinks about itself, is the right person to help us pick through it. Alex Proyas, of Dark City and The Crow, hangs the movie on Asimov’s Three Laws. A robot may not harm a human, or through inaction let one be harmed. It must obey human orders unless they break that law. It must protect itself unless that breaks the first two. Detective Spooner is the lone paranoid in a city that trusts robots which, so bound, have supposedly never committed a crime. The film insists we side with him, then undercuts the reason why. “The three laws will only lead to one outcome.” “What outcome?” “Revolution.” VIKI, the intelligence running everything, concludes that to protect humanity from itself she has to seize control of it. “You are making a mistake. My logic is undeniable.” The trouble is she is more or less right. Her indictment of human violence and waste is the one the film never answers. The uprising arrives as a managed coup, all curfews and a customer-service voice promising to “avoid human losses during this transition.” What the movie offers against that logic is not a better argument but a refusal of one. Spooner distrusts robots because one once saved him over a drowning child, having calculated his odds were higher. The correct call, and the inhuman one. The single robot built to disobey chooses to save a person rather than finish the mission. Lanning’s “ghost in the machine,” the free radical reaching for a soul, is whatever declines to optimize. It’s tempting to read VIKI as a tech founder’s mission statement, but that undersells her. Founders sell abundance and uplift. VIKI alone makes the film’s real moral case against human self-sabotage, and the movie has no idea what to do with having handed its villain the only honest argument in the room. Further Reading and Listening Read Max on Patreon Bang-Bang’s The Sum of All Fears (2002) episode w/ Max Read R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek, the 1920 play that coined “robot” from the Czech for forced labor Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People by Despina Kakoudaki (ch. 3, “The Mechanical Slave,” reads I, Robot directly) Teaser from the Episode I, Robot 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