Show Notes
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Artist and writer Eli Valley joins us to wrestle with Steven Spielberg’s Munich, the director’s retelling of the 1972 Olympics massacre and Israel’s subsequent campaign of assassinations. The film is meticulously crafted, humanizing Avner and his team while layering in hesitation, doubt, and the weight of family. It also dramatizes Palestinian lives with unusual care for Hollywood, even if the balance tilts toward Israeli perspectives and familiar tropes about “moral” violence. We talk through its most affecting set-pieces—the aborted bombing when a child answers the phone, the grotesque mix of mazel tovs and murders, and Avner’s paranoia in New York—while asking what it means to live inside this endless dialogue of revenge and reprisal. Our conversation with Eli traces the film’s political afterlife: the fury it provoked in Ariel Sharon’s government, the defenses mounted in the American press, and the broader struggle over how violence is represented on screen. We also reflect on its haunting aesthetics, from Spielberg’s chilled tones to the intimacy of family meals punctured by death to the final cut of the World Trade Center. And how these choices underscore the film’s central verdict about vengeance corroding all. Whatever its blind spots, Munich remains one of Spielberg’s most morally serious films, a rare Hollywood attempt to stage the derangement of “tribal” obligation while still respecting the humanity of all involved. Further Reading Eli’s website “Steven Spielberg’s unforgivable sin”, by Eli Valley Michael Oren interview on Munich “What ‘Munich’ Left Out,” by David Brooks“Israeli consul attack’s Spielberg’s Munich as ‘problematic’,” by Gary Younge Fürstenfeldbruck 1972 police operation (Official history and documents) Munich 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