Show Notes
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com
Van and Lyle are joined once again by historian Paul Adlerstein to revisit Under Fire, Roger Spottiswoode’s gripping and often overlooked drama about the final days of the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua. The film follows three American journalists (Nick Nolte, Joanna Cassidy, and Gene Hackman) as they navigate the moral terrain of reporting on a revolution in real time. What looks at first like a conventional political thriller unfolds into something more complicated: A story about solidarity and betrayal, the ethics of witnessing, and the impossible pressures revolutionaries face when the entire world is watching. We trace the film’s ambivalent but unmistakably anti-imperialist edge—the way Under Fire indicts U.S. policy without turning the Sandinistas into caricatures—and talk through the moments where its politics strain against its Hollywood framing. Paul walks us through the historical context of Somoza’s downfall and the Sandinista movement, while we dig into the film’s extraordinary craft: Jerry Goldsmith’s score (one of his best), the whistling motif in the church-tower firefight, the almost Carpenter-like chase sequence with the TV news van, and the unnerving tonal shifts as journalists move from observers to participants in the struggle. The conversation also turns to Under Fire’s prescience. How its critique of Cold War binaries (“the world isn’t East and West anymore… it’s North and South”) feels even sharper today, and how its depiction of journalists wrestling with complicity, responsibility, and power resonates in an era where war reporting, propaganda, and revolutionary movements remain entangled. Further Reading Paul’s website No Globalization Without Representation, by Paul Adlerstein Blood of Brothers: Life and War in Nicaragua by Stephen Kinzer National Security Archive, Nicaragua Collection Sandino’s Daughters: Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle by Margaret Randall Under the Shadow by The Real News Network and NACLA Teaser from the Episode Under Fire Trailer
More from Bang-Bang Podcast
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