Bang-Bang Podcast

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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

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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

Do US troops have a threshold for the kind of unlawful order they’re unwilling to follow? If Venezuela wasn’t a breaking point, is Greenland? Can the US have mid-term elections under martial law? Will troops fire on fellow Americans if ordered? And why is the permanent war economy at the root of everything from economic insecurity to America’s imperial boomerang in the form of ICE, National Guard deployments, and militarized policing?
In this urgent behind-the-scenes episode, guest Jeremy Wattles joins Van Jackson and Lyle Jeremy Rubin to talk about all that and more. Available wherever you get your podcasts.
And be sure to check out our related work:
Our coverage of The Siege, the 1998 film about martial law in New York:
Our previous behind-the-scenes episode on America’s counter-revolutionary crisis:
Van’s latest take on ICE and civil war:


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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com

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