Bang-Bang Podcast

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We’re joined by filmmaker and returning guest Kevin Fox to discuss Mamoru Oshii’s Patlabor 2, a film that masquerades as a techno-thriller before revealing itself as a bleak meditation on peace not as the absence of war, but as its managed disappearance from view. The opening scene sets the tone: A UN-led intervention force wielding advanced technology against a low-tech but effective guerrilla resistance. It’s a distant, managed conflict, war as something conducted elsewhere, on the periphery, in the name of order. When the film shifts back to Japan, that distance becomes the problem. This is a society organized around the belief that it exists outside of war altogether.
Oshii’s Tokyo is saturated with infrastructure, surveillance, and machines that promise security while obscuring responsibility. Decision-making rises higher and higher, until reality itself becomes inaccessible, filtered through procedures and abstractions. Throughout the film, animals and machines blur together: Aircraft framed like birds, birds clustering around military hardware, pigeons, crows, ducks, and scavengers moving through the city. The recurring blimps hover like omens, ambient and toxic. Technology doesn’t eliminate violence but anesthetizes it, making the moral consequences harder to see even as they become more pervasive.
At the center is Tsuge, a traumatized veteran whose experience of war has no place in a society committed to forgetting it ever happened. His grievance is not that Japan abandoned war, but that it outsourced and erased it, maintaining a false peace that depends on violence remaining invisible. Patlabor 2 flirts with reactionary conclusions while ultimately exposing their trap: Recognizing systemic hypocrisy does not justify bringing catastrophe home, but neither does denial prevent it. The film circles a biblical question—Cain and Abel, once a family—and refuses catharsis. Peace, Oshii suggests, is not the absence of war, but the alibi that allows it to continue unnoticed.
Further Reading
Kevin’s website
The Siege (1998) episode w/ Kevin
Bring the War Home by Kathleen Belew
The Cold War’s Killing Fields by Paul Thomas Chamberlin
War and Cinema by Paul Virilio
Dreamworld and Catastrophe by Susan Buck-Morss
PatLabor 2: The Movie Trailer

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We’re joined by returning guests Sam Ratner (Win Without War) and Andrew Facini (Council on Strategic Risks) to revisit Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. So committed to its own satire that many critics in 1997 mistook it for endorsement, the film remains an unsettling case study in the very real intersection of entertainment, recruitment, and common sense. Set in a future where only those who serve in the military earn full citizenship, Starship Troopers follows Johnny Rico and his cohort of beautiful, interchangeable young people as they are fed into an endless war against an alien enemy known only as “the bugs.” The language clean, the deliveries stilted, the uniforms immaculate, the violence staggering, and the militarist logic all too familiar.
A classroom civics lesson explains how veterans took control after “saving the country.” Everyone else is just a civilian, politically inert. Verhoeven’s satire works through excess, not subtlety. We see vomit, coed showers, gruesomely botched training exercises, casual death. Children handle weapons in propaganda clips. Talk-show pundits sneer at the very idea that the enemy might think. “The only good bug is a dead bug” is not just a slogan but an axiom, reinforced by the film’s cheery and eerie “Would you like to know more?” interludes.
Then comes the churn. Buenos Aires is wiped out, and grief is instantly converted into exterminationist joy. Klendathu becomes a mass grave—“one hundred thousand dead in one hour”—and the system’s answer is not true reflection but an alternative escalation. New leadership insists the failure was hubris, not the project itself: We thought we were smarter than the bugs. The problem, as always, is framed as misguided commitment. By the end, the most damning detail is not the scale of killing but the pleasure taken in it. The Brain Bug is captured, tortured, and displayed, and the troops cheer because it is afraid. Rico, now fully transformed, rallies a new wave of recruits who look like children, repeating the same lies about training and survival. The film closes on a promise that lands like a curse: They’ll keep fighting, and they’ll win.
Further Reading
Sam’s professional page (Win Without War)
Andy’s professional page (Council on Strategic Risks)
“How ‘Starship Troopers’ Aligns with our Moment of American Defeat,” by David Roth
Fascism in Sci-Fi: “Mobilizing Passions” in Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, by Alton Ayers
Starship Troopers Trailer

Van and Lyle are joined by nuclear weapons and disarmament expert Scott Sagan to discuss A House of Dynamite, the 2025 political thriller that imagines nuclear catastrophe not as spectacle or obvious madness, but as an orderly sequence of decisions made under crushing time pressure. Structured as interlocking vignettes rather than a single command-room drama, the film moves between the White House, STRATCOM, missile defense sites, continuity bunkers, and civilian spaces, sketching a system that largely works as designed and still produces annihilation.
The film’s opening establishes its governing logic. Inclination is flattening. Timelines shrink. Judgment collapses into procedure. “Nineteen minutes to impact.” “Sixteen minutes.” “Confirm impact.” Across locations, professionals do their jobs calmly while the meaning drains out of their actions. A senior officer tells a junior colleague to keep the cafeteria line moving. A staffer compiles names and Social Security numbers for the dead. Phones come out. Final calls are made. The end of the world arrives not with hysteria, but with etiquette.
Much of the tension turns on probability. Missile defense is described as “hitting a bullet with a bullet.” Sixty-one percent becomes the moral threshold, a coin toss bought with billions of dollars. Baseball chatter at STRATCOM blends into DEFCON alerts. A Civil War reenactment at Gettysburg unfolds alongside real-time catastrophe, collapsing past and present forms of American mass death into a single frame.
Scott is critical of the film’s portrayal of nuclear command and control. He argues that its depiction of retaliatory decision-making is wrong, that no president would order nuclear strikes against loosely defined adversaries without firm attribution or confirmation, and that the film risks backfiring by encouraging faith in ever more elaborate missile defenses rather than disarmament. Lyle pushes back, questioning whether this confidence in institutional sanity is warranted, especially given the political moment. Either way, the film lands a disturbing insight. The danger is not wild irrationality, but systems that normalize impossible choices. Nuclear war here would not look like collapse. It would look like competence.
Further Reading
Scott’s Wiki page
“Just and Unjust Nuclear Deterrence” by Scott
The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons by Scott
“Thinking and Moral Considerations” by Hannah Arendt
The Soldier and the State by Samuel P. Huntington
Review of A House of Dynamite in Bulletin of Atomic Scientists by Scott and Shreya Lad
“Peacecraft and the Nuclear Policy Dilemma” by Van
“Fresh Hell: Unjust Nuclear Deterrence and Nuclear Testing” by Van
Teaser from the Episode
A House of Dynamite Trailer


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Van and Lyle are joined by writer and journalist Joe Allen to discuss Tigerland, Joel Schumacher’s 2000 film about a group of young men cycling through an infantry training camp in Louisiana in the final years of the Vietnam War. Shot in a loose, almost documentary style and anchored by a breakout performance from Colin Farrell, the film treats Tigerland (the “stateside of Vietnam”) as a pressure cooker where class, race, masculinity, and empire collide long before anyone reaches the battlefield.
We focus on Private Roland Bozz (Colin Farrell), a troublemaker less defined by idealism than by a corrosive honesty that makes him impossible to discipline. Bozz doesn’t reject the war with slogans but punctures it by refusing to perform its rituals straight. He mocks the “war is hell” pieties, questions authority just enough to expose its incoherence, and helps fellow recruits game the system. Not out of solidarity with Vietnam’s victims, but because the machine grinding them down is so obviously fraudulent. Tigerland is full of these destabilizing moments: Officers warning recruits they’re headed for a “two-way firing range,” torture instruction folded into training banter, and soldiers explaining their own conscription through warped moral arithmetic. “If I don’t go, someone else takes my place,” one insists. “And if they die, they died for me.” It’s not conviction so much as displacement, a way to survive guilt by outsourcing it.
Joe helps situate Tigerland alongside Matewan, Amigo, and other working-class critiques of American violence and oppression, but what stands out here is how little romance Schumacher allows the rebellion itself. The Army’s hunger for bodies collides with young men who are alternately patriotic, broke, insecure, chauvinist, scared, and cruel. Hazing becomes psychological warfare, masculinity curdles into humiliation and sexualized dominance, and open bigotry is tolerated, even rewarded, when it serves discipline. Bozz’s quiet victory isn’t resistance so much as attrition, in part by coaching others out on psych evals and revealing that the system doesn’t need heroes but compliance or exhaustion. What Tigerland offers, then, is not a coming-of-age story but a bleak anatomy of how war prepares itself by breaking people just enough to make them usable.
Further Reading
Joe’s Wiki page
Bang-Bang’s Full Metal Jacket episode
The Short-Timers by Gus Hasford
Dispatches by Michael Herr
Stiffed by Susan Faludi
Teaser from the Episode
Tigerland Trailer


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Van and Lyle are joined by returning guest Sam Carliner to take on Marines, Netflix’s new 250th-anniversary docuseries, an unmistakable propaganda piece (it’s literally featured on the official Marine Corps website) that nonetheless reveals more candor than the institution intended. Directed by Chelsea Yarnell, whose style veers into Riefenstahl-lite, the series moves through the familiar mythology: Marines as the “meanest, baddest motherfuckers,” war as manhood, China as the next “bloody” proving ground. But between the clichés, something truer keeps slipping out.
The Marines themselves come across not as caricatures but as young people grasping for purpose. Some raised amid violence, poverty, absent fathers, and broken homes; others from supportive families, following beloved relatives into the Corps, seeking adventure, education benefits, or what they sincerely understand as patriotic duty. Some speak with chilling bravado about killing; others struggle openly with faith, family, and the sense that combat is the only place they’ll ever feel whole. A sniper mourns the disbanding of scout-sniper platoons as if losing a piece of himself. A Huey pilot wonders how to make “non-emotional decisions” when his whole life has been shaped by emotion, and a mother tries to bless a choice she privately cannot support.
And despite itself, the series also exposes the machinery surrounding them. Deployments that make no sense. A surreal shipboard announcement about Yemen, where Houthi attacks are called “unprovoked” with no mention of the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza driving them, all delivered in a breezy “Good morning, Team America” tone. Marines saddled with the weight of great-power delusions they never chose. The political culture is bankrupt, but the individuals inside it are often heartbreakingly earnest. That tension, between Yarnell’s promo frame and the unfiltered vulnerability of the people she films, turns Marines into something worthwhile. Even in its worst moments, the series forces a deeper question: What happens when a society offering so little to its young men teaches them that violence is the only stable form of meaning?
Further Reading
USMC press release on the docuseries
Sam’s Substack
The Rivalry Peril by Van and Michael Brenes
Pain is Weakness Leaving the Body by Lyle
Gangsters of Capitalism by Jonathan M. Katz
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges
Marines Trailer


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