Show Notes
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Jacobin staff writer and Michael and Us co-host Luke Savage joins Van and Lyle for a conversation about Peter Weir’s Master and Commander that’s also, inevitably, about Patrick O’Brian. Luke grew up with the Aubrey-Maturin novels. His father handed him the books young, and a distant ancestor, Captain John Maude, commanded a Royal Navy warship in the same era. The connection to this world is personal in a way it rarely is for a guest. The film drops you into the hull of HMS Surprise during the Napoleonic Wars. Russell Crowe’s Captain Aubrey is chasing the French privateer Acheron, though in the novel the enemy ship was American. Hollywood made the swap. What survives the adaptation is Aubrey’s fixation. Paul Bettany’s Maturin, the ship’s surgeon and natural philosopher, sees it clearly enough to name it. He calls it pride. Aubrey calls it duty. “Whatever the cost?” Yes, whatever the cost. From there the Moby Dick parallel takes over. Aubrey drags his crew past the Galapagos, past reason, past a young, pampered officer named Holland who is scapegoated by a superstitious crew and eventually ties a cannonball to himself and walks off the deck. The ship reads from the Book of Jonah at his funeral. Then it rains. Weir stages all of this with extraordinary physical detail. The amputation of a child’s arm, Maturin’s self-surgery on a beach, the violin duets between captain and surgeon. But the film is most interesting where it’s most ambivalent. Class barely registers. The violence of impressment and hierarchy gets absorbed into a story about character and fortitude. Maturin’s scientific curiosity, his blue-footed boobies and walking sticks, keeps getting sacrificed to Aubrey’s hunt. And the ending pulls a final trick. The French captain has been disguised as the ship’s surgeon the entire time. The hunt isn’t over. Like the flightless cormorant Maturin never gets to study, the thing that matters most keeps getting deferred. Further Reading and Listening Luke Savage’s Substack Luke Savage at Jacobin Michael and Us Podcast “Subject to the Requirements of the Service: Peter Weir’s Master and Commander at 22”, Cinephilia & Beyond Mariners, Renegades & Castaways by C.L.R. James Teaser from the Episode Master and Commander 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