Show Notes
Van and Lyle are joined by critically acclaimed actor Morgan Spector to revisit Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day, a film that turns planetary annihilation into a distinctly American spectacle. We spend time lingering on the movie as a shared artifact of a particular 1990s childhood. The Ray Charles warmth of its opening, the awe of its destruction sequences, and, of course, the internalization of President Whitmore’s speech—“Today, we celebrate our Independence Day!”—memorized and recited by every other boy of that era. It opens, tellingly, on the American flag planted on the moon, Neil Armstrong’s voice echoing as if the “giant leap for mankind” had always been a national possession. When the aliens arrive, they don’t just threaten Earth but a worldview in which the United States stands in for humanity itself. What follows is less a global response than a convergence of American archetypes: The cocky Marine pilot, the underachieving Jewish technologist, the cowboy president who ultimately climbs into a jet and leads the counterattack himself. Morgan helps us think through both the appeal and limits of that fantasy. How the film captures a moment of post–Cold War confidence where disparate social types could be harmonized into national purpose. Even the technological imagination reflects that era. The aliens are defeated not through overwhelming force, but through a computer virus delivered via laptop, a pre-Internet-age fantasy of improvisation and ingenuity. We debate the film’s politics in this spirit—what’s explicit, unconscious, or just ambient—and how something that feels so unifying and fun can also encode a very particular vision of indispensability. One of Morgan’s sharpest observations centers on Randy Quaid’s Russell Casse, the traumatized Vietnam vet turned conspiracy crank who ultimately redeems himself through a kamikaze sacrifice. And for being right in the end. The film doesn’t just tolerate him; it elevates him. That kind of crankiness, Morgan argues, was once legible, even lovable. Something you could live alongside, maybe even learn from. In a relatively stable, “post-historical” moment for the American middle class, the stakes felt low enough to allow for that kind of messy tolerance. Today, that figure reads differently. Less endearing, more dangerous, harder to absorb into a shared project. Independence Day ends with fireworks, but what lingers is something quieter. Namely, a memory of a world where you could still believe that everyone had a place in the story. Further Reading Morgan on American Prestige (The Nation) Morgan’s Illustrious Wiki Page Morgan’s spread in GQ “A Bad Breakup” (review of Fukuyama) by Danny Bessner “Keynote Lecture: A National Interest for Whom? Rethinking the Foundations of Peace, Democracy, and War” by Van The End of Victory Culture by Tom Engelhardt Marine Corps Air Station El Toro Teaser from the Episode Independence Day 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
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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