Bang-Bang!

Announcing a new show about war movies, with an anti-imperialist twist!

I’ve been in the lab for several months, quietly cooking up something special with my friend, Lyle Jeremy Rubin. It’s taken a surprising amount of restraint not to mention it until now. Very shortly, we’ll be debuting Bang-Bang—a show about war movies, with an anti-imperialist twist.

I started out professional life in the US Air Force before serving as a Pentagon strategist in the Obama administration. Lyle served in the US Marine Corps and authored the award-winning memoir, Pain is Weakness Leaving the Body: A Marine’s Unbecoming.

We both came of age during the “Global War on Terror”…regrets, we’ve had a few. We both also came to develop a principled anti-imperial critique of war—an enterprise that always benefits elites, always sacrifices working folks disproportionately, and only sometimes benefits the nation. That most of our wars have been waged on dubious analytical grounds, and without a realistic accounting of the damage they’ve caused…it ain’t right.

But we’re not just veterans against war; we also exist in the culture of bros of a certain age…and that means, paradoxically, we can’t quite shake our fetish for war movies! We know a lot of other people feel the same way. So in every episode, we grapple with the pain, humor, and contradictions of our war-addled culture. Our medium for that exploration happens to be war films that many of us know and love (and sometimes hate); stuff that made the culture, or still lives on in it.

In addition to cracking each other up, sharing our (anti)war stories, and pushing the boundaries of what counts as a “war movie,” we’re interested in a series of questions (we’re both PhD-havers, after all):

• What, if anything, can war movies teach us?

• How do they function as propaganda?

• How realistic are they?

• To what extent do they reflect our own experience in camo?

• What’s the antiwar critique discoverable in many war films?

• How do sex, masculinity, or misogyny color the story?

• And what do these movies say—both about the historical moment in which they were made and about the politics of militarism today?

We’re not film critics—we’re war critics who happen to love film. We’re hoping the alchemy of love and criticism can do its bit to counter-program a sick, violent, hyper-masculine society. And if it can’t, well, we’re gonna have a lot of fun chopping it up anyway.

To catch every episode, you can subscribe at www.bangbangpod.com. Video clips and teasers will hang at https://www.youtube.com/@Bang-BangPodcast.

To launch with a bang (puns used to be the highest form of humor), the first episodes will be released on a weekly schedule starting next week:

• Ep. 1: Combat Obscura (2018)

• Ep. 2: War Machine w/ Brad Pitt (2017)

• Ep. 3: Jacob’s Ladder (1990)

• Ep. 4: Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

This is just the beginning. Our “magazine depth” is in the hundreds—Full Metal Jacket, Starship Troopers, In the Loop, A Few Good Men, G.I. Jane, Tropic Thunder, 1917, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, The Hunt for Red October…you name it, we’re probably gonna cover it. You can check out the running list at Letterboxd.

Our list of films: https://letterboxd.com/bangbangpod/list/bang-bang-podcast/

Our plan is to drop at least two deep-dive episodes every month, and if you can afford to support us financially (the price of a cup of coffee), you’ll be part of the Bang-Bang tribe. That means you’ll get:

• Access to full video and audio content for every episode;

• Voting rights to determine which movies we’ll cover;

• Invitations to occasional livestreams, which *might* have the ability to chat with us in real-time;

• Posting rights in the Notes and Chat sections of our site, where you can continue the conversation;

• Reading lists (not required), for those who want to go deeper on the history, culture, and geopolitics associated with each film;

• Access to the full archive of episodes; and

• Other perks as we think of them. We want to make it worth your while!

These two teasers give a sense of our vibe.

And if you want to become a founding member of Bang-Bang, we’ll send you your choice of merch! The short-sleeve tees are triblend, the long-sleeve tees and hoodies are Ascolour, (a pretty fancy merch brand).

Subscribe today: www.bangbangpod.com. Anyone already subscribed to Un-Diplomatic can claim a 20% discount on their Bang-Bang subscription by using this link.

Bang-Bang! ✌️