Bang-Bang Podcast

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Van and Lyle are joined by Julia Gledhill (of The Un-Diplomatic Podcast and Stimson Center fame) to revisit Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry, Darling, a film dismissed by many critics as a glossy pastiche but better understood as a deliberate medley of American ideological fantasies. Set in the manicured desert enclave of the “Victory Project,” the movie opens in Ray Charles warmth before sliding into rigid choreography: Men drive off in unison, women clean in unison, then glide into ballet formation as their instructor intones, “There is beauty in symmetry… we move as one.”
The aesthetic excess isn’t accidental. The film’s kaleidoscopic dance sequences explicitly evoke Busby Berkeley, whose WWII-era aerial sensibility turned human bodies into geometric ornament. Berkeley, a former U.S. Army artillery lieutenant and aerial observer, staged dancers from a “God’s eye view,” transforming individuality into pattern. Wilde weaponizes that grammar. What once read as escapist spectacle now registers as dehumanization, a mass ornament in service of hierarchy and control.
The Victory Project’s guru, Frank, speaks the language of progress while policing chaos. “What is the enemy of progress?” he asks. “Chaos,” one acolyte responds. The rhetoric blends mid-century self-help, Cold War technocracy, and contemporary manosphere grievance. The town’s clean surfaces conceal its true engine of disaffected men plugged into a fantasy where wives are restored to compliance and breadwinning humiliation is reversed. Jack’s resentment over his surgeon wife’s success curdles into full incel submission to Frank’s digital sermons. “We are not going backward, we are pushing forward!” Frank insists, though everything about Victory is nostalgic regression. The Busby Berkeley motif returns in distorted form—tap-dancing husbands, synchronized chants of “Whose world is this? Ours.”—as if fascist aesthetics have migrated from the stage to the algorithm. The aerial shots of the town flatten it into diagram, suggesting that the entire community is just another formation viewed from above.
Margaret’s haunting question—“Why are we here?”—cuts through the symmetry. Her fate, like Alice’s suffocating plastic-wrap episode and the compression of bodies against mirrored walls, exposes how fragile the choreography really is. The film’s supposedly clichéd mashup of The Truman Show, The Matrix, and Inception isn’t laziness but design, a greatest-hits compilation of American (un)reality. When Bunny confesses she chose the simulation to recover her dead children, the film briefly complicates its villains. Desire, not only domination, sustains the system. But the closing inversion—“It’s my turn now”—underscores the central warning. A world built on submission does not dissolve into liberation but mutates. The mass ornament reshuffles. The music keeps playing.
Further Reading
Julia’s Professional Page
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” by Laura Mulvey
“Can we enjoy alternative pleasure?” by Jane Gaines
“Siegfried Kracauer’s idea of ‘Mass Ornament’” by Lesley Chamberlain
“Fascinating Fascism” by Susan Sontag
“Breaking Down the Classic Movies that Inspired Don’t Worry, Darling” by Caroline Madden
Teaser from the Episode
Don’t Worry, Darling Trailer

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Van and Lyle are joined by historian Graeme Pente to revisit Roland Emmerich’s The Patriot, a Revolutionary War epic that filters eighteenth-century civil war through the moral grammar of Braveheart-era melodrama. Mel Gibson’s Benjamin Martin begins as a wary antiwar planter—“Why should I trade one tyrant 3,000 miles away for 3,000 tyrants one mile away?”—only to be pushed into righteous vengeance by British atrocity.
The film’s structure is simple: Reluctant hero, violated hearth, purified violence. But as Graeme helps unpack, the simplicity comes at a cost. The real war in the Carolinas was brutal, intimate, and frequently indistinguishable from banditry. The movie knows this just enough to gesture at it (hangings, burnings, neighbor against neighbor) before smoothing the rough edges into nationalist myth.
Much of our discussion turns on the figure Martin is loosely based on: Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox.” The film recasts him as a tormented but noble patriarch, haunted by a single episode of past excess. History is less forgiving. Marion was a slaveholder who participated in campaigns against the Cherokee and whose conduct, like that of many irregular fighters on both sides, blurred the line between resistance and reprisal.
The Patriot stages atrocity as a tragic rite of passage. Good men do terrible things, feel remorse, and are absolved by history. That structure mirrors a broader American habit whereby violence becomes regrettable but necessary, morally metabolized through individual guilt rather than collective reckoning. At the same time, the film’s most revealing line—Cornwallis blaming Tavington’s brutality for creating “this ghost”—captures how repression manufactures insurgency.
We also linger on what the film erases. Its fantasy of harmonious plantation life, its depiction of enslaved people as effectively free laborers, its climactic embrace of conventional battlefield glory after two hours of guerrilla tactics. The Battle of Cowpens becomes a redemptive tableau, with Martin hoisting the flag as if the war’s contradictions can be unified by sheer will. In the final scenes, a formerly enslaved man cheerfully returns to help “build a new world,” a gesture that reads less like reconciliation than wish fulfillment. For all its bombast and bloodletting, The Patriotoffers comfort: Empire is bad when British (or fill in the blank), virtuous when American.
Further Reading
“The Swamp Fox” by Amy Crawford
The Counter-Revolution of 1776 by Gerald Horne
The Internal Enemy by Alan Taylor
The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood
The American Revolution by Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein
Teaser from the Episode
The Patriot Trailer

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Van and Lyle are joined by film historian Matthew Ellis to revisit Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows, a spare, rain-soaked chronicle of the French Resistance that refuses both triumph and sentimentality. From its opening march beneath the Arc de Triomphe—German boots echoing under imperial stone—to its epigraph welcoming “unhappy memories,” the film situates resistance not as romance but burden. Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) moves through Vichy France like a man already half-absent, assembling a network of communists, aristocrats, schoolteachers, barbers, and couriers whose patriotism is less theatrical than procedural. The roll call of prisoners, the Phony War backdrop, the portrait of Himmler looming over interrogations, all of it underscores a world where power operates bluntly, but resistance must operate quietly.
Melville’s great subject is not sabotage but moral cost. The execution of the traitor unfolds with excruciating hesitation: The gun too loud, the knife unavailable, the final strangling improvised and intimate. A young militant weeps. Cyanide capsules are distributed as standard equipment. “We’re not an insurance company,” one quips, since risk here is existential rather than actuarial. Torture is never shown, only its aftermath. Heroism is never declared, only endured. The barber who silently provides a disguise, the aristocratic “baron” who aids the republic he once opposed, Mathilde juggling clandestine logistics while raising children who know nothing of her work… these gestures accumulate into something sturdier than spectacle. Even the attempted hospital rescue of Félix fizzles into grim realism. Often, nothing happens, and that nothing is the point.
The film resists easy sanctification. De Gaulle appears, medals are awarded, but Melville withholds catharsis. Gerbier writes to London, “I kid myself that I am still of some use,” surrounded only by the books of his mentor Luc Jardie. When Mathilde is arrested after the fatal mistake of carrying her daughter’s photograph, the movement faces its most devastating calculation. Loyalty demands cruelty. The final drive toward the Arc de Triomphe lands not as closure but as recurrence: Shadows defined by more shadows. Army of Shadows may be the definitive Resistance film, but it is also an anti-myth that is less about liberation than about what solidarity requires and what it destroys.
Further Reading
Matt’s faculty page
“Army of Shadows (1969)” by Brian Eggert
“Resistance is Futile” by Jonathan Rosenbaum
“Army of Shadows and Lacombe, Lucien”
Is Paris Burning? by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre
Teaser from the Episode
Army of Shadows Trailer

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Van and Lyle are joined by historian and American Prestige co-host Danny Bessner to revisit Marco Brambilla’s Demolition Man, a silly 1993 action movie that doubles as a surprisingly sharp meditation on liberal order, technocratic repression, and the thin line between utopia and dystopia. Released at the tail end of the Cold War, the film belongs to a broader golden age of dystopian cinema—alongside RoboCop, Total Recall, Blade Runner, The Running Man, and Gattaca—that all seemed to anticipate the coming post-ideological world. Set in a pacified, hyper-managed Los Angeles, Demolition Man imagines a society that has solved violence and sex by regulating them out of existence. Or so it tells itself.
The film’s joke, which Danny helps unpack, is that utopia and dystopia are not opposites but partners. San Angeles is clean, safe, polite, and utterly incapable of handling conflict. Its police officers are untrained for real violence; its elites speak in moralizing euphemisms while outsourcing brutality; its culture has been flattened into wellness slogans, museum exhibits, and Taco Bell. Simon Phoenix, Wesley Snipes’ flamboyant villain, is not an aberration but a product of the system, unleashed when elites decide they need “an old-fashioned criminal” and therefore resurrect “an old-fashioned cop.” Stallone’s John Spartan is less a hero than a reminder of what this world has repressed, from messiness to physicality to desire. Even sex has been replaced by sanitized, techno-sensory simulation.
Beneath the jokes (three seashells, the Schwarzenegger Presidential Library, Denis Leary’s sewer populism) the film lands on a bleak insight. The real antagonists aren’t Phoenix or the underground “scraps,” but figures like Dr. Cocteau and Chief George Earle. That is, snobbish, managerial liberals who confuse control with peace and civility with justice. Demolition Man suggests that a society allergic to disorder will reproduce violence in more dangerous forms, while congratulating itself for having moved beyond it. The solution it gestures toward is clumsy but telling. Not a return to barbarism, but a reckoning with conflict as unavoidable and political. Somewhere between clean and dirty, Spartan says, “you’ll figure it out.”
Further Reading
Danny’s website
American Prestige
The 1984 Ad for Apple
“Conservative’s Dystopia” by Lee Kepraios
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Teaser from the Episode
Demolition Man Trailer

Van and Lyle are joined by returning guest Matt Duss—former foreign policy advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders and current executive vice president at the Center for International Policy—to revisit Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor, a paranoid thriller that captures a vanishing moment when American institutions still feared exposure. Robert Redford’s Joe Turner is no action hero but a reader, an analyst, a man whose job is to interpret texts rather than enforce power. When his CIA front office is wiped out in broad daylight, the shock is not just the violence, but how casually it is absorbed by “the community,” a euphemism so bland it becomes obscene. This is a film less about rogue evil than about bureaucratic normalcy, where murder is a logistical inconvenience and accountability a procedural error.
What gives Condor its present-day melancholy is its faith that truth, once surfaced, still matters. The film’s final wager rests on the idea that the press, embodied by The New York Times, might still function as a check on clandestine empire. “They’ll print it,” Turner insists. The ending leaves that faith unresolved, but history has not been kind to it. We contrast the film’s hopeful premise with the Times’ recent “Overmatched” series on U.S. military power and China, which dresses escalation in the language of sober realism. Rather than interrogating militarism, the series laments America’s supposed weakness while advocating more spending, more production, and deeper entrenchment in a defense-industrial oligopoly. Condor imagined exposure as a threat. Today, exposure is often indistinguishable from advocacy.
The conversation widens to the economic and ideological machinery behind permanent war: Consolidation among defense contractors, the fetishization of exquisite platforms over mass production, and the quiet assumption that U.S. global dominance is both natural and necessary. Where Condor traces an oil conspiracy hidden just beneath the surface, our present feels almost worse, one in which the logic of empire no longer requires secrecy at all. Joubert’s cold observation that he only cares about “how much” now sounds less like villainy than candor. In that sense, Three Days of the Condor is not cynical enough. Its tragedy lies in believing that revelation alone could still interrupt the system it so clearly understood.
Recommended Reading / Viewing
Matt on Twitter
Matt at the Center for International Policy
“Overmatched: America’s Military Is No Longer the World’s Best”
Bland Fanatics by Pankaj Mishra
The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins
Teaser from the Episode
Three Days of the Condor Trailer


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