Show Notes
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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
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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