Unclear and Present Danger - Air Force One

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John are joined by Max Read — of the Max Read Substack — to talk Air Force One, the 1997 action thriller directed by Wolfgang Petersen and starring none other than Harrison Ford as The President. Air Force One also stars Gary Oldman, Glenn Close, Wendy Crewson, Paul Guilfoyle, William H. Macy, Liesel Matthews and Dean Stockwell.In Air Force One, as I’m sure you know, the president’s aircraft is hijacked by a group of terrorists who demand the release of their country’s imprisoned dictator. Rather than flee for safety, President James Marshall decides to take things into his own hands, confronting the terrorists one by one in an attempt to retake his plane. You can find Air Force One to buy or rent on Amazon Prime and Apple TV. The tagline for Air Force One is “Harrison Ford is the President of the United States.”For our next episode, we will cover Richard Donner’s Conspiracy Theory, starring Mel Gibson, Julia Roberts and Patrick Stewart.Be sure to sign up for our Patreon, where we watch the films of the Cold War and try to unpack them as political and historical documents! For $5 a month, you get two bonus episodes every month as well as access to the entire back catalog — we’re almost two years deep at this point. Sign up at patreon.com/unclearpod. 

Tonight I come to you with a pledge to change America's policy. Atrocity and terror are not political weapons. And to those who would use them, your day is over. In a speech tonight in Moscow, the president issued a direct challenge to terrorist nations around the world. But the question remains, what are the risks involved in such a bold policy initiative? They hated your speech, didn't they? We're afraid we won't have the guts to back it up. Air Force One, clear for takeoff. Thank you for your hospitality, Moscow.

The President's Air Force One with a murderous call. Daddy! Where's my family? The President's plane, Air Force One, has been hijacked. What do they want? They want General Raddock release from prison. I will execute a hostage every half an hour. What are our airborne scenarios?

Toronto airborne scenarios. My husband will not negotiate. His wife, his daughter. I think he'll negotiate. How the hell did this happen? How the hell did they get Air Force One? Your national security advisor has been executed. He just bought you another half hour. Sir, a parachute.

I'm not leaving without my family. You know who I am? I'm the president of the United States. Jim isn't making this decision as a president. He's making it as a husband and a father. Oh! Let's not forget this president is a Medal of Honor winner. He knows how to fight.

He has no right to take chances with his life. We cannot give in to their demands. You've got a job to do. It makes me so proud, Mr. President, and you stuck with us? You know your father? He has also killed. You're nothing like my father. We're tracking six Migs. I'm sending in our F-15s to protect you.

She's in Miggs? In a war, people die. The president is up there with a gun to his head. I'll do anything sick. My family, don't ask me for something I can't care. Sir, we got one on your trails. You could finish this with one phone call. No.

This is a little air force to our brake plate! No! Welcome to Unclear and Present Danger, the podcast about the political and military dealers with the 1990s, and what they say about the politics of that decade. I'm Jamal Bowie. I'm a columnist for the New York Times opinion section. I'm John Gans. I write the substack newsletter on Popular Front. I'm a columnist now for the Nation magazine, and I'm the author of When the Clock Broke, Conmen, Conspiracists. and how America cracked up in the early 1990s. A great book that's become all the more relevant in the last few weeks. I'm very sorry to say that my book is actually pretty prescient.

Sorry. It feels like a curse. We have a guest today. I want to welcome to the show Max Reed, proprietor of the Max Reed Substack. Hello, Max. Hi, guys. Hey, Max.

Thank you for joining us. today we are discussing the 1997 action thriller Wikipedia is calling it a political action thriller I'm not sure if I would call this movie political per se but it certainly is an action thriller Air Force One directed by Wolfgang Peterson and starring Harrison Ford Gary Oldman Glenn Close

William H. Macy, Dean Stockwell and J. Procknow among many other a lot of that guys in this movie Air Force One was the fifth highest grossing film of 1997. It earned about $315 million worldwide. It actually received two Academy Award nominations for Best Sound and Best Editing, which it's a well-edited movie. I'll say that.

It's a very well-edited movie. It was shot by Michael Ballhouse. Bowhouse, Ballhouse. His name is spelled B-A-L-H-A-U-S, but it sounds like, ballhouse. That's just an unfortunate last name. He's dead, so he won't know that you're making fun of him.

I'm not making fun of him. I'm not making fun of him. I just want to get his name right. A lot of work in Germany, but he has he was a cinematographer for Martin Scorsese across multiple films. After hours, the color of money, Goodfellas,

in the Age of Innocence and Gangs of New York are all films that he shot. Oh, also The Departed. So a longtime Scorsese collaborator also shot Under the Cherry Moon, the Prince film, which I enjoy, shot the Mike Nichols film, working girls, and also shot Coppola's Dracula film. Yeah, this guy, very, very impressive working career, and I'll just ignore that he shot Wild Wild West. the legend of bagger band which in fairness

are perfectly fine-looking movies. They don't look bad. They're just terrible. And then a score by Jerry Goldsmith. Jerry Goldsmith's more score.

Apparently he wrote this score in like a week. I read Randy Newman I would love to find. So Randy Newman wrote a score for this and Wolfgang Peterson decided that it was too clown-like, I think. Well, that makes sense.

Why did they hire him? I mean, wouldn't you kill to hear the buried Randy Newman score to this? And so they called up Jerry Goldsmith, and they were like, hey, man, can you write us a score in 10 days or something? And he did. And in fact, the main theme was later used by Donald Trump himself, like, several times in his, I don't think in this camp. Maybe in the 2020 campaign, but definitely in the 2016 campaign. It is like truly the most generic. president music like in a good way like in a very like in an impressive way but like still is just like

the you know it sounds like a west wing off cut or something absolutely this is like the west wing was shooting kind of yeah yeah i mean down down to the president being like functionally one of the worst presidents i've ever i've ever had been switching of like seeing uh okay so real quick plot synopsis for air force one um the film begins with a joint operation of american and russian Special Forces, capturing General Ivan Radick, the dictator of a rogue regime in Kazakhstan that had its nuclear weapons and its threatening war. The same, or some weeks later, not the same evening. Some weeks later, the president, James Marshall, which a very generic president name, attends a diplomatic dinner in Moscow where he praises the operation and he insists that the United

States will no longer negotiate with terrorists. Him and his aides then hop on to Air Force One as they return to the United States, but also on the plane are six loyalists to Raddick, disguised as journalists and as a Secret Service agent, a mole who is working with them. They storm the plane, take it hostage, and attempt to find the president to force him to negotiate to release Raddick. President Marshall, however, is a veteran of the Vietnam War and won the Medal of Honor. And he's hiding, and he begins to systematically pick off the Radic Loyalist, the leader played by Gary Oldman. And he begins trying to make his way through and single-handedly retake the plane as this is happening. The vice president, Catherine Bennett, played by Glenn Close, is trying to determine what to do about the situation.

and her staff, the president staff, are advising her that she should invoke the 25th Amendment and become president herself in order to ensure, you know, leadership for the United States government. The situation in the plane continues to escalate as the president continues to take down these terrorists leading and eventually to a confrontation with Gary Oldman. Oh, while this is happening, there's other stuff happening. There's an attempt to force the plane to lower altitudes to be refueled so they can kind of have outside forces, do something to try to get it under control. The president's chief of staff is like murdered in cold blood. Lots of things are happening.

Radic is almost released, but the president gets control of the plane. Gary Oldman is jettisoned out of it. This gets us our great line, get off my plane. Radic is killed by Russian soldiers, and everything is resolved. The mole is also killed during a standoff with the president. The president does a lot of killing directly in this film. Air Force One crashes into the seat after everyone has gotten off and everyone escaped. and the president and its family are safe

and that's the movie. It moves pretty briskly despite its two hours. It's a pretty easy watch. Yeah, Air Force. As an action movie, it's just, it's like the peak of the sort of efficient, competent craftsman-like 90s action movies.

Right, right. I mean, we can talk about this later, but you compare it to something like executive decision. The movie I like, but it's not nearly as well put together. Yeah. Air Force One can be found to rent or buy on Apple TV and Amazon Prime. There's also a pretty decent 4K disc that you can buy.

That's what I watched it on. I actually watched it. And then I watched the director's commentary and learned, among other things, that a bunch of this movie was shot in Cleveland. Air Force One was released on July 25th, 1997. Oh, I almost forgot the tagline. So the poster here says Harrison Ford is the president of the United States. And the tagline for the film, why is it so hard to find these things?

There we go. So we got a couple taglines. There's one of the poster. Harrison Ford is the president of the United States, which is, it's such a funny one because it's sort of like, yeah, that's what people want to see. They want to see Harrison Ford as the goddamn president. Yeah, that's kind of a brilliant. And there's a family man, commander-in-chief, national hero. Any title worth having is never given.

It's earned. The fate of a nation rests on the courage of one man. And then Harrison Ford is the president of the United States, and he wants you off his plan. Of these three, Harrison Ford is the president of the United States. It's just the best tagline. It is the one that really works for this. Okay, movie was released on, or released the entire United States, July 25th, 1997. So let's check out the New York Times for that day.

Okay, well, let's see what we got here. So big article A1 here, William Brennan, 91 dies, gave court liberal vision. Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., a towering figure in modern law, who embodied the liberal vision of the Constitution and engine of social and political change. died today almost exactly seven years after his retirement from the Supreme Court. He was 91. Justice Brennan had been in failing health for several years. He died at a nursing home in Arlington, Virginia, where he was undergoing rehabilitation after falling and breaking a hip last November.

The court on which Justice Brennan was a pivotal force for nearly 34 years was in many respects the Brennan Court, although he never served as Chief Justice. He was the author of numerous... I didn't know that. I guess I should have. It was Warren? Yeah. Yeah, he was the author of numerous landmark opinions, and through his powers of persuasion and force of intellect,

the prime mover between behind many others, when he did not prevail his voice in dissent was strong. Named to the court by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956. Well, Justice Brennan, the New York-born son of Irish immigrants, left a legacy that is visible everywhere in a law and an American political and social life. It ranges from one person, one vote doctrine that ended the established order and the nation's legislators to the decisions that transform the Constitution's equal protection guarantees

into a weapon against sex discrimination to cases that open the federal courthouse doors to penetrating scrutiny of the quality of justice dispense at the state and local levels. Okay, well, I was taught in school to worship Justice Brennan as a god by my political science teacher who was also an Irish liberal and we read the decisions of the Brennan court in great detail and we were thought that this was the this kind of progressive constitutional jurisprudence

was the absolute height of American politics the total renaissance moment for American liberalism and Brennan was spoken of in these very hushed and hallowed tones. So much for all of that. Basically, the Brennan court has been exploded over the, you know, going back for, I guess, about 20 years now. No, yeah, 25 years now. So, yeah, I mean, the model of law and the vision of society that Brennan embodied is now being really ripped apart.

but it was, you know, when I was a kid, it seemed to be the settled state of affairs. I'm sure, Jamel, you've got a lot more to say about this. Yeah, I mean, one of the interesting things about Brennan's legacy is that although the liberal, legal, elite will happily, you know, hold up Brennan's key decisions as foundational, Bakerby Carr, which is the one person when to vote. decision, or it's the decision that kind of sets up the one-person, one-vote decision, which is Reynolds v. Sims two years later. Eisenstadt v. B. Baird, which establishes a legal right to contraception for unmarried people. Craig v. Bourne, which kind of in the wake of the, basically failure of the ERA brings sex discrimination, gives it heightened scrutiny. Intermediate scrutiny is what it's called. The government must have extremely compelling reasons to make

distinction on the basis of sex like all these things liberal legal elites i think are great but brennan's approach to jurisprudence which is not a kind of what is the original meaning it's not a sort of what does directly the text says um it is what you might call sort of like a uh an ideal reading of the constitution which is asking like what what what is the what ideals what um uh visions of society is the constitution try to trying to instantiate, and we should use that as our guiding light. That is just not something that is done anymore. It's sort of, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, legal left, by a kind of a reginalism or a kind of a textualism. Uh, the sort of the more, and you can, I mean, people have described this as legislating from the bench. I don't actually think

it is that at all because it does help you make decisions. to make distinctions, but this kind of approach to the Constitution has really fallen at a fashion. And if I were, if this were a podcast about constitutional law, I would say that Brennan is worth holding up even today for simply having a creative and expansive vision of what one can do with the Constitution in a way that I think many liberal legal elites just no longer have. Yeah. Okay. So I don't know. I think that basically everything else on this front page is very specific to the 90s. And I'm not sure. And it's very mid-90s boredom era. I mean, there's something here about the killer of Johnny Versace, Andrew Kinan, which was a big cultural phenomenon. There's something about the ex-GOP strongly. I don't know, Jamel. Is there anything else here you think is worth highlighting? What's his ex-JP chairman, Mr. Barber? Who is this?

Oh, Haley Barber. Yeah, I remember that guy. Yeah. Very, very, he looked like boss hog. Yeah, and he's got a boss-hog name. Yeah. Mississippi Republican. The only other thing here that seems interesting to me,

not interesting, but sort of it's worth noting, is $120 million damage award for sexual abuse by priests. And this is still a time when people were, like, shocked to learn. that priests sexually abused children these days this wouldn't even make this would not be below the fold it would be maybe not even in the newspaper

maybe not even the newspaper you get a quick push alert from the New York Times by the way another priest I will say hey I would just as I was flipping through on A18 there is two there are two things that are interesting

to me. First is that U.S. opposes McVeigh's bid for a new trial. So this is the Timothy McVevey wants one of the second trial after his conviction of murder and conspiracy for the Oklahoma City bombing. And he wants new trial. It's just sort of the U.S. saying this is not, he got a fair trial. The other one is World War II Memorial site is backed, but design is not. And this is a story about the design for the National World War II Memorial. Which I got to say, I don't know. I'm not going to read this entire thing to find out whether the current design is the one that was proposed. But I will say, I think it's a very ugly memorial.

Yeah, it's not great. Let's move on to the movie, Air Force One. Before we start, though, Max, you've written about the Dad movie, and you have kind of a whole theory about Dad movies. And this Air Force One is like the paradigmatic Dad movie. I mean, it really is, like, when we started this podcast, in my head was like, well, obviously, Air Force One is, it's going to be covered. Yeah. It's not even, it's not a Clancy movie, but it's sort of like it's, it is a Clancy movie in a very fundamental and elemental sense. But please, I love to hear about this theory of the dad movie.

Yeah. So I wrote, right around the time this podcast started, so late 2021, I wrote a piece for my substack. I just started the substack. I called 90's dad thriller. and I the net test the title of the piece you can Google it and the top image is Harrison Ford in Air Force One because like you say this is sort of the movie when you imagine the idea of a 90s dad thriller like that's the this is the movie you think of and the origins of this I think there was obviously something in the air because you guys were starting this podcast but like personally I just had my wife had given birth to our son the year before and I'd spent the last you know not the entire year but much of the last year sort of like staying up late and watching movies. movies with an infant or a newborn, um, trying to figure stuff out. And I was really looking for like that sweet spot of the guys born in the 80s kind of sweet spot of like something that I'd seen before that felt quite comforting that was not going to be particularly challenging to me,

like no subtitles, nothing smart. And so I kept coming back to like Harrison Ford movies, you know, like Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger and Air Force One. And there's this whole body of 90s movie that, you know, with the benefit of kind of hindsight, that at the time was just, that was the water we were swimming in, those were just all movies, but a kind of movie that doesn't really get made anymore. And I'm not going to go too deep into it. I've got a bunch of charts up on the substack for people who are visual learners. But, you know, my sense is that this is like, it's a kind of movie that is marketed as somewhat sophisticated, like somewhat politically sophisticated, relevant, contemporary. You know, it rarely, as in the case of Air Force One,

like the politics are often only an inch deep, but they're there. It's like ripped from the headlines in a kind of funny way. You know, movies like The Peacemaker or whatever where there's like a nuclear bomb on the loose somewhere in Central Asia because of the breakup of the Soviet Union. My theory is all sort of that this is the kind of movie, like if you like an action movie, but maybe you could get your wife to watch it with you because not to be extremely gender essentialist here. You're wife of any gender to watch it with you because you can say, oh, no, it's like kind of smart and political.

And the other thing about them that I think is really interesting is that they basically always star, like the main character is almost always a professional guy. Like often he's like a family man. It's like a dad with a professional degree. He's a lawyer or a bureaucrat or like a CIA analyst in the case of, in the case of Patriot games and the Jack Ryan movies. and he is sort of going up against terrorists or bureaucracy or conspiracies of some kind. You know, they draw on the 70s conspiracy thrillers a little bit.

They draw a little bit on 80s action movies too. But, you know, for me, the turning point here is diehard, where all of a sudden you can kind of have a quote-unquote skinny guy, you know, a skinny normal guy be your main character. And I say diehard too because I think one reason Air Force One is like the apotheosis of this quasi-genre is that it takes the diehard conceit and it just makes it as sort of 90s as possible. Like it's like a liberal internationalist like neo-conservative president like, you know, young but sort of muscular and like, you know, a can do masculine guy. And all these kind of like

really insanely incoherent ideas about geopolitics that come to the four like packaged in this like beautiful diehard, you know, frame where there's just one guy alone in a, in a confined space trying to kill a bunch of terrorists. And I was going to say, unfortunately, I have not listened to your contact episode yet, but I do think that this in contact are like very good back-to-back movies to do because they both seem to me to be the movies from this broad category that we're both talking about, you know, I think that the movies you guys do on the podcast overlap with the 90s dad thriller without it being like a direct immediate like one-to-one correspondence. But Contact and Air Force One, to me, are the movies that are sort of most explicitly about America's place in the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

And like, as I think you guys talked about on the contact episode, about the end of history and what that actually sort of looks like both spiritually in the case of contact, but also like practically in the case of Air Force One. So, yeah, I mean, like I say, I put the photo of Harrison Ford at the very top of this post because this is it. This is kind of, this is, it's all downhill for the dad thriller from here. Yeah, this is the peak. No, I mean, looking at your chart here, it's pretty, it's not exactly, we haven't done 100% of these movies, but we've done most of them. And, you know, we've skipped the ones that are not as political or don't have to do with foreign relations or the military. But yeah, this is, there is a strong overlap between this category and what we're doing here for sure. John, what is your history with this movie?

I saw, I mean, I definitely saw this in theaters, probably. saw it with my dad. I think I definitely saw it with my dad. I, you know, like, this movie was not among my, I remember enjoying it, but it was not among my favorites in the way that, I don't know, Hunt for Right October Patriot games were, um, uh, or what's it called, uh, Crimson Tide. Um, but watching it again, I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. And I had a feeling for the, for the first time, we're not for the first time, but an acute feeling of melancholy also watching the movie because of the image of America and its governance that I think we'll begin to discuss probably had some deleterious effects. You know, I think, you know, we mentioned this

is sort of the West Wing with shooting. But, you know, I think it created a sense of of stability, of competence, of professionalism, of respect for the rule of law. There are all these things going on in those movies. And at the head of it is a fundamentally decent normal person, you know, in the person of Harrison Ford. Now, I think we were discussing, and I'll let you elaborate on it, but I had the same thought, which was Jamel. I'll let you take over was there's something about the depiction of the president in this movie. Oh, I, wait, before I get there, I'm just going to say two things about the depiction

of the, okay, the scenario that kicks off the movie is absurd. They, with the, with the government of Russia that kidnapped this breakaway pro-Soviet leader of Kazakhstan, okay, first of all, it would be more humiliating for the Russians than anything to like, in their own. backyard to cooperate with the United States. Never happened. Second of all, this movie benefited like Borat from no one. I mean, they're obviously supposed to be ethnic Russians in the movies, but like people from Kazakhstan don't look like that. Like this is completely just based on Americas don't know anything about Central Asia, don't know anything about Kazakhstan. So I mean, I guess they're supposed to be ethnic Russians who have like taken over Kazakhstan,

but I think the Kazakhs would have something to say about that. So anyway, yeah, this idea that there's this ultra-national state. And the other thing about it is, like, when you flip the movie on its head, essentially, like, you could understand why a Russian would, like, watch this movie and then be like, oh, well, why isn't the United States helping us get rid of Zelensky? Because, like, this is like, oh, there's this rogue, evil fascist leader on the border of what used to be part of our state and we're trying to remove him from power. Like, that's the Russian story about Zelensky in Ukraine. So this movie, you could just like twist the framing a little bit, and you're like, we helped Russia get rid of Zelensky. So those things occurred to me. And the last

thing I just want to say, and Jamel, you brought this up, and I thought it was correct, was like, in some ways this movie, in its political vision, which is very neocon, and its depiction of the president, set the world up for the election of George W. Bush. Yeah. Yeah. No, so I'll, I'll I'll comment on all of that. First, I'll say, buying true with this movie. I have a very hard time remembering when I've seen when I saw a movie like this. Like,

I know I didn't see it in theaters because I would have been a little too young, but I almost certainly saw it on VHS, right? Like once it hit the rental circuit and my parents almost certainly rented it and we watched it because I have memories of knowing about this movie quite early, and I know I've seen it a million times. I've seen it so often that I don't really need even think about what happens in it. You know, it's interesting to think about this film as, and we've talked about this when it comes to all the movies that are sort of about a president figure in this time. It's interesting to think about this movie as kind of a fantasy about the president that Americans wish they had rather than Bill Clinton.

And it's funny to say that given that it comes out a year after Bill Clinton won re-election and it's in production and post-prudgment. production during the 96 campaign, but there is this sort of sense among the public that Clinton is this sort of, you know, it's this kind of liberal weenie. And so what would it be like to have a, you know, literally muscular, um, aggressive president who also still stood for kind of liberal internationalism and all that stuff, right? Like was kind of the best of both worlds wasn't someone who was an aggressive warmonger but was like a tough war hero type john mccain but a democrat yeah exactly it's it's kind of the the fantasy here yeah and that's that's that's that's what harrison forge president is it's unclear right like to what i said he's actually a good

president which is always the funny thing about sort of fictional presidents in this way max you mentioned you know you alluded to rather jed bartlett being like a bad president And I do encourage people to rewatch the West Wing and like to actually think about what the Bartlett administration would be like if it were a real administration and it would be a nightmare. I mean, it'd be like the most. It's like the Trump administration with a nice liberal guy. Literally in the West Wing, they solve Israel Palestine by stationing American troops there for 15 years or something like that. That actually happens. And it's like, even at the time watching that, you're like, this is the most insane idea anyone's ever had. And Trump is proposing some version of it, indeed proposing the Bartlett, more or less the Bartlett plan for, you know, the West Bank and Gaza, basically. Right, right. I always think back to there's like a, there's a season four, I think the season four opener when they're campaigning for the second term and all the AIDS are like in Iowa or something and they're trying to, you know, wrangle boats or what have you. And they talk to some farmer and a diner who's having trouble, you know, paying for college or whatever.

And they're, like, thinking, you know, the big policy we can propose for this campaign is tax credits for college tuition. It's like, wow, the horizons for politics in the late 90s. Not very far. No. No one's thinking pretty big. No. Tax credits for college tuition. That's going to transform the American working class.

Yeah. Jesus. There is, I mean, there is a scene in this movie where his wife, he gives this big speech in the beginning, where he announced it. is this new foreign policy where they're going to just go after any human rights violations with military force no matter what, clearly no matter what the UN says. And his wife, when she sees him after this big speech, everyone's all mad at him, you know, these feckless bureaucrats, they think he's taking a political risk. And his wife says, you're going to get yourself reelected off of this.

And, you know, knowing anything about politics and how foreign policy interacts with, you know, domestic politics in this country, like, it's hard to think of something that is less likely to move the needle up and is more likely to move the needle down and announcing that you're going to start deploying troops all over the place not for U.S. interests, but for humanitarian interests of some kind. Yeah, we will never consider the U.S. national... His speech is so stupid. He's like, we will never consider the U.S. national interest.

We will always intervene. But you know what? It's not... The thing about it... Okay, so, like, this was very much... I mean, a very, you know, some people who are swayed by neoconism who had been critics of American realist foreign policy were like, I can get down with an aggressive foreign policy so long as there is a ideological program, which seems absurd. But like, yeah, I don't think it would have won elections, but it definitely had a small and elite constituency. And then the rest of the country after 9-11 was just pissed and wanted to go punch somebody.

But like the notion that like we should be, the United States should have an ideological mission in the world and not just be about like, okay, well, U.S. interests are threatened. So we're going to send the Marines. I also think, I'll just say, I think also Hollywood in particular seemed to be at the time like a place where like an obviously liberal industry, but one where foreign policy was. in fact, like, I just were remembering, like, there was a, before 9-11, there was a whole kind of movement in Hollywood, spearheaded by Jay Leno's wife to, like, to, like, go eliminate the Taliban because of, like, human rights violations against women. And I think that there was, like, they're kind of, like, part of this elite, like, liberal hawks.

Yeah, there was, like, a lot of liberal hawks in Hollywood, or it was swimming in the air in some sense there. And so, like, like, like, you're saying, Jamel, like, obviously there was a, there's like a built-in kind of desire for this, like, you know, war hero over. version of Clinton, who also would, you know, bomb Sarajevo, bomb every Sarajevo he could possibly find. Right. Well, that was popular among liberal hawks. And the decision to do nothing in Rwanda was very, was seen as a huge mistake. It kind of goes, I just say it real quickly, I just have this very funny image in my head of Jay Leno being, doing a show and being like, so how about

that Taliban? Like, yeah, bad guys. Yeah. please continue but i just wanted to say that there was like a foreign policy cycle of intervention is bad intervention is necessary intervention is bad in the in the 90s which goes somalia well it goes it really goes back to to to to bush it goes the gulf war was good we we did a good job there we won then it goes Somalia was a disaster we're going to pull back from the world Rwanda And then we're like Okay, well we can't allow Rwanda happen

We have to intervene in Bosnia And then it kind of like goes back and forth Where the American people's appetite for intervention And then the idea of what we can do with interventions And how successful they are Or oh, we need to really consider the limits of U.S. power How many should we put troops at risk? So on and so forth

It kind of goes in this cycle And obviously 9-11 accelerates that cycle But then the cycle kind of comes back where you have Obama, who doesn't obviously roll back an interventionist foreign policy in every way, but it's definitely more of the, okay, we need to take seriously the limits of American power. Now we're in a totally different world. But yeah, this kind of cycle, I think, goes based on the success of the last, the success or failure of the last adventure abroad. And it creates the appetite for this. And yeah, this movie also, in terms of,

its capability, like its belief in American power and capabilities. Yeah, it's multilateral, so it's not exactly neocons. So we make a friendly relationship with Russia. But Russia kind of, when the war on terror started, kind of had a vision of that, of the U.S. and Russia kind of teaming up to fight terrorism. Oh, you guys finally get it. You have to be tough, et cetera, et cetera. Join us. We'll fight Islamic terror, so on and so forth. The last thing I want to say on this train of thought about the liberalism or conservatism of the movie is, you know, it's a movie of bipartisan consensus. I mean, everyone says, oh, the 90s was such a polarized time with nuking. Come on. It's a movie that there's a certain bipartisan consensus,

and that's represented in the movie by the fact that, okay, the president may be kind of a Republican or conservative Democrat, blue dog Democrat kind of figure. But then his vice president is obviously Hillary Clinton, you know? Right, right, yeah. And it's like in its person, and these fantasies underwrote, I mean, for good and ill,

underwrote a lot of the wishcasting of, I don't know, centrist never Trumpers, who their vision of what, like, the alternative to Trump, was, which was kind of an extension of the 90s by other means, which would be some kind of coalition between internationalist or neocon conservatives and some kind of, you know, institutionalist, safe establishment liberalism that also saw the wisdom in foreign intervention. That fell on its face a couple times.

Because I think, like, you know, we talk a lot of. about the movie, you know, and this is also interesting about your observations of your theory, Max, about the kind of class composition of the heroes of this movie. I think like the suburban electorate that kind of was centrist and valued competency, the performance of competency and resolve and American values in the way that these movies represented and people thought there was a real mass constituency for it was a lot smaller than it turned out to be. So I think that the kind of like, and you know, there's good and bad things about it, but

the kind of like suburban consensus liberal to center right neocon is not such a mass constituency as like the people who have fond memories of these movies may have thought is one way of looking at it yeah one thing that's sort of interesting is the way the liberal interventionism is pitched here is as a kind of populism like there's a real like oh yeah like the like the bureaucrats are holding me back the you know these Washington lifers the swamp is holding me back yeah but I'm going to do what we all really want to do which is like commit you know thousands of U.S. troops to places that that people have never heard of and have no strategic interest.

That's very neocon, to be like, to be like, we represent, we represent, actually, you know, we represent a break from the consensus of American foreign policy, which is timid, and we represent the real desire of the American people, which is to go out and kick ass, but for democracy, you know? And then, you know, a lot of commentators have noticed, you know, tried to talk about Jacksonian foreign policy, for instance, to be like, well, the neocons got it wrong people like kicking ass but not kicking ass for democracy they just want to kick ass for kicking ass sake or just to and and i think this debate has also you know people

often talked about isolationism in regard to trump that's not the right tradition or even if there is even such a tradition in the u.s it's more that there is a theory of foreign policy which is not about the united states as integrated into international agreements and having alliances but it's just about, it's often called sovereignism, or just nationalism, or Jacksonianism, which is just about the raw assertion of the United States power for its own

very narrow understanding of its self-interest. That is so distant from the vision of this movie and what I grew up in time thinking was the consensus about America's role in the world, and now it's just in

charge. So, yeah, these are the kind of feelings where I had, oh, And, okay, so we have Hillary Clinton is the vice president. We have a, you know, interesting little constitutional debate. What should we do that 25th Amendment? And is it right thing to do? And then we have like, you know, this like nice multiracial white house where, you know, there's lots of people and they're all very proud to be working for this president

who's a very decent man, you know, like, and really loved by his people and a nice guy. So it's just like these movies definitely contributed. I mean, they were taking from the world, obviously. And there's syntheses here of the way Reagan behaved and of the way Bush, H.W. Bush behaved. And of the way Clinton behaved and the White House appeared. And even Carter to a certain extent. And that just created the national consensus of what the presidency and the government of the United States would look like. And the, you know, the departure of that is radical.

Now, the cynical Sam Moinian view of that would kind of smirk and say, well, you know, it was all bullshit anyway and maybe we're all better off without those illusions. I don't quite agree, obviously. I think that, like, the kind of even weak and hypocritical notions of decency that are. reflecting these movies are there's a reason people are nostalgic for them because they were it was better uh and they provided some real boundaries um and weren't just purely ideological cover that's my interpretation of i don't know if you guys agree i think that's right um i mean i think we're experiencing what it looks like when that idealized goal when sort of like those values are abandoned outright, right? And there is no kind of even hypocritical commitment to a larger set of liberal

values. We're not getting, we don't get in that world, you know, President Punch, who while, you know, personally aggressive is, is committed to upholding some kind of international order. We get instead kind of, you know, we get a Trump, we get kind of a venal, self-interested, hypernationalist, but not even a hypernationalist, sort of just a personalist who is only really concerned with their own immediate interest, not even really the national interest.

I mean, one thing I would note, like, I'm not, I could be sympathetic to a sort of, as you put it, John, like a Moynihan critique of this movie in that sort of in the narrow sense that like literally every single choice they make is the wrong one and illegal. Like they send a bunch of

SOF forces to kidnap the sovereign, like the head of state of somewhere else, which is also like, I think that's an interesting, one of the- That's more Trumpian than anything. Yeah, I mean, they just grab the guy. They just send a bunch of Navy SEALs to grab the guy, which is also, like, one thing I track, one thing that I notice as I have watched through all these 90s movies, I don't know if you guys have been noticing this too, but like, the move from like troop deployments, like actual armies to like SOF and like, you know, tier one.

operators like starts sort of in the set like in the movie sense starts in the 70s and then by the time like the born movies come out and we actually are are back in Iraq and Afghanistan it's like there's no armies it's all just like big bully bearded guys in Oakley in Oakley's like shooting Arabs or whatever right and this I just I was so I was like keyed into the sort of like he's not actually sending like you know a huge deployment to to like wage war in Kazakhstan he's this this fantasy that you can just send in 15 guys from the lioness squad to like kidnap this guy as though as though the as though the Kazakhs don't have like you know service to air missiles to blow up the fucking helicopter no that's like one thing that the Soviet Union like built very well and a lot of was surface to air missiles so they they kidnap they kidnapped this guy they refused to invoke the 25th amendment which is like this it's hard to think of a more obvious situation yeah and they make the people who want that look like bad guys yeah and then and then and then when when the guy when they finally release the guy they just execute him in the courtyard of the prison like watching that I felt like I wanted to go on Russia today.

Like, I wanted to be on gray zone or something. I was ready to decry the, like, the running dog, fascist Americans, like, shooting this fucking unarmed guy in the back while they, after they had just released him from prison. I can't think of anything that's more illegal than that. And in that sense, I'm sort of like, damn, like, okay, I see where Trump gets it. Like, Trump is basically, like, you know, setting aside the liberal commitments or whatever, like, if you watch that and you're a moron, like, let's pretend that Trump watch that and, like, has the Swiss cheese brain that he has, you're thinking, oh, yeah, this is actually.

what is good and it's like it's good for me it's good for everybody to just like kidnap and murder as many heads of state as I as I possibly can that's made more the Suleimani approach that the yes and that was also part of the neocon mentality which was just like we don't need to care about international agreements like the United States is good and he he just drops the United States is good thing he says well we're whatever we're just doing like you know yeah I think that's exactly right it is crazy the the pure abuse of like And also it's just like the, again, like just talking about the Zelensky thing, like, the movies just don't have a concept of like the politics of like the way that international regimes are depicted and like this that they're going to be fought about domestically. Like I'm sure there would be like international and domestic protests being like you can't just take the head of state of another country even if he's like literally Hitler. Like, you know, there's there's some sort of, you know, process here that has to be in place. But, yeah, I think that's right.

And I do think that these movies, you know, very easy to be like, okay, well, these films have a very sunny picture of what the presidency is like. But everyone projects their own things onto it. Like, you know, I go, I'm sure that George W. Bush voters and conservatives saw these movies and they're like, we need a president like that. And he's like that. And then liberals watched it and were like, I wish we had a president like the guy in the movie. and then probably some Trumpy type spirit was I wish we had a president like a guy in the movie and they're all watching the same movie

they're just taking away radically different readings of it because they're like we're looking at it and be like oh isn't he such a nice and liberal president who upholds ideas and the neocons are like they're doing what we're spreading democracy and we're going to do the right thing and kick ass doing it and then the Trump version of his like

yeah we should just shoot that guy And they're all just different aspects of it. And I think there is something sometimes, and I try to be reflective of this, which is, you know, would liberals mind like some of these foreign policy decisions if it was just like said in more polite tones? And there was like a state department spokesperson who didn't sound like a complete idiot, you know, saying those things. So it didn't offend their sensibilities that much. And, you know, sometimes that's fair. But I do believe that those norms, I hate to be the norms guy, but the norms are valuable because they, you know, they create a sense of right. And if you have no sense of right, even if it's a hypocritical and a bad one, then there's no sense of right. Like, it's just anything goes. You get a lawless, you got an essentially lawless situation. So I don't know. I'm torn and I can see both interpretations and I'm sympathetic at different times to both interpretations. But I do believe it's funny that, yeah, you can definitely see a Trump idiot watching or Trump himself watching this movie and taking very different conclusions than we do.

The danger of these films and the fantasies that they create is also of, you know, I talk about this every other episode was like, my fantasy the night of 9-11 was we're going to, like in this movie, send in little special forces. And eventually we did to bin Laden, but we're going to do that within like 24 hours, 72 hours. of 9-11 and i think they give like a misleading idea of um america's power that i think that trump has this very movieish understanding he's like we got missiles that can go inside of Putin's like you know house and have camera you know he's got this like childish view of this stuff which definitely comes from his brain being melted by movies like this like we watch them as adults and we're like, oh, well, you know, like, this is not really real life and isn't it interesting how it shapes political discourse? He's not looking at movies like that. He's like,

yeah, let's do what they do in the movie. You know, like, and, you know, we all are to a certain extent, but it's not that these movies necessarily reflect a different time exactly. He's just like watching them in a dumber and more or less. There's no, like, frame of irony or frame of like critical viewing or anything. He's just like, yeah, helicopter. send guy to shoot people. So, yeah, I think that's a really good observation that, like, okay, you can just, we can, we can do a Trumpian, and maybe we should do that with more of these films, because we often do a conservative and a liberal reading of the films, but maybe we'd be like,

what's the Trumpian vision of this movie, which is just like. The dumbest guy possible. Yeah, what's the lowest common denominator, which is just like, oh, well, we should just blow up guys whenever we want to. Also, there is no escape pod in Air Force. no, there's no, like, mid-air, anti-missile countermeasures. That's definitely something. I 100% of sure Trump thinks there is.

There is. But there are not. He's like, I would talk about it and be like, they've got an amazing escape pod. And they tell me, Mr. Sir, sir, sir, please go to his skate pod. And they're, okay. Yeah. Yeah, I think that like, that's true. That they're, they're, they're, this movie, these movies also be as, as mass are, are, are reaching different publics.

and different publics are responding to them in different ways and have different responses. And, yeah, I'm sure, like, a highly sensitive left liberal reading of this movie could just be like this movie's fascist, you know? As a lot of people, as a lot of left-wingerers complained about, I mean, I think less so than the Reagan era action movies that we've sometimes talking about. But, like, movies, these movies, like, set up a notions of American power

an assertion that we're ultimately really harmful for the country of. No argument there. I got it. I get it. They set it up, but I mean, they also do reflect a kind of sense, I think, among many Americans. Like a sense that, you know, we are so powerful, we are so big, we do have so much strength. Why don't we just act? Right. Autonomously. Why don't we just do what we want to do irrespective of anyone else? I mean, part of, to go to the dumb guy reading, the Trumpian reading, I mean, so much of Trump's message in both campaigns is both sort of the America is weak and falling apart, but also we're so strong and we're so powerful. So we should just take what we want. I don't know if you guys remember during the 2016 campaign, he had this town hall with Matt Lauer.

And Matt Lauer asked him about sort of foreign policy about Iraq. And Trump was like, yeah, we should have taken the oil. Yeah. And that's both like, it's a dumb guy statement, but also I do have very strong memories of like hearing adults in 2003 say things like, yeah, we should go in and take the oil, right? Like it reflects a sort of sense that the United States can be sort of like, you know, not not the world's policeman, but the world's bully and take and take what it wants. And that, I mean, it's sort of like there's, there's, that's, that's the dumb guy version. There's a conservative version of this. And there's even sort of a liberal version of this, a liberal sense that why, you know, with all of the power of the federal government, with all the strength that the country has, why can't we just do things directly? And to the extent, you know, looking back at Trump, to the extent that there was any kind of, at least in 2016, 2017 initial sort of like, well, maybe Trump might won't be so bad,

it was about the idea that maybe he'll just sort of allow us to just do things again. and this desire to do things again I think is really I think this movie really captures what if we had a president who just didn't think but like Merck two guys who were on his plane without any hesitation

I mean I think one thing to consider about that reading is like this is coming so distinctly like at the end of history you know it's 97 so China hasn't China hasn't emerged as another poll in the power scheme and Russia is still pretty weak and we're looking, you know, sort of collectively the elite class, the politics class is sort of looking at a unipolar world and trying to figure out what we're supposed to do and feeling, you know, the neo-conservatives certainly were, but I think a lot of people were feeling sort of hemmed in

by all these international laws that we had been instrumental in setting up and that now we no longer really needed to follow because there was no particular there was nobody threatening us on the world stage and i think like i have an allegorical reading of one of the scenes of the movie so like you know in the very beginning they um the terrorists grabbed the plane and the pilots try to land it and they get all the way down on the runway and then um gary oldman and uh ilia baskin his his who's the actor who plays his second command who's like just a one of every movie that has a Russian in it that guy is there somewhere in the background. If you picture Hollywood Russian, that's that guy.

And they're trying to, like, take the plane right back off the runway. And it's this great, is a really well-directed and edited, extremely tense scene that does that funny thing in a Hollywood movie where, like, theoretically, you're supposed to be rooting for them to fail and for the plane to stay on the ground and the president to be rescued. But this is happening like 20 minutes into the movie. and you know, as a viewer, as somebody getting entertained, that, like, that's the end of the movie. So you get put in this funny position of, like, from a narrative perspective, like, rooting for the bad guys to succeed. And I think a lot of what goes into, like, I've been puzzling over a little bit, like, why they felt the need to put this speech at the beginning of the movie. Like, this movie doesn't actually need to have these liberal internationalist humanitarian intervention politics we're talking about at all. Like, it would be very easy to set up die hard in Air Force, die hard in a plane.

the guy is the president without having to discuss without Kazakhstan even entering the picture. But I think that there's a, I think that like the reason that there, that, that hovers in the background is a sort of subconscious wrestling with the, the strange way in which like if you, you have to sort of like root for continued strife and violence and cruelty

in order to give America like a role on in the world stage that like, you're rooting for the bad guys in some funny sense both like in this literal scene in the movie but also in this kind of you know hazy sense on you know in actual politics because only in so far as like bad things are still happening out there does that give us a reason to have a nuclear arsenal to maintain our huge army to like continue to act as we believe is you know as we believe is fit you know you know in geopolitics and so I think that like as you know this all these sort of thoughts and feelings get carried forward and much different ways 30 years later when we're talking about, like when you can more plausibly sort of be like, oh, we need to have a really strong defense establishment and we need to do the things we want to do because we've got China on one end and Russia on the other end and, you know, we're like no longer as close to the European Union and all these things. And at the time, it just feels much less like a kind of, you know, we'd have to make serious decisions about what our foreign policy looks like going forward and a lot more like the sort of petulant, like a petulant sort of boredom,

like a kind of let's go shoot some guys because like what the fuck else are we going to do like why not like sure let's go and like I know that they have like in the movie the Kazakhs they have nuclear weapons I think and there's like this sort of vague sense that I don't I don't know that they actually get into whether or not

Radic is like a communist because they actually sort of national he's like a neo I mean as you say John it's like insane to make these like obviously ethnic Russians like Kazakh iridentists or whatever they're supposed to be I guess they wanted to take over the like reassemble the Soviet Union I mean, why not just, I mean, is Hollywood

just make them communists that they need to like, I don't know, it's like, I just think that the incoherence of the politics of the movie are about, like, reflective of a set of anxieties that like liberal elites, liberal hawks were having about the place of the U.S. and the world in the same way that I think sort of contact

has this hanging in the background, like what do we do? Like, what's next? What's the next thing we're supposed to do? And I think it's something we return to on our podcast all the time. It's like a lot of these movies just propose different force projection of America. Are we going to dedicate ourselves to some huge scientific project? Are we going to make the world safe for democracy? What are we going to do next?

And then it turns out we're going to totally destroy our manufacturing base and get a kind of. I know we don't hear much about the president's domestic policy. Yeah, never. Of course not. It's like because that'll take care of itself. No, he's got to get home so he can sign welfare reform. Yeah, exactly. He's ready to get up and like give a big speech about welfare queen. and like, you know, gut, gut social services. That's what's going to win him re-election. Yeah.

So I just think, like, the, I mean, the other thing is, like, there's a certain reading of American politics that was popular among the left in the Bush era, which was that foreign policy was like a almost theater of distractions, right? To entertain the American people. It didn't have direct extract.

active goals or imperialist goals. It was a theater to make American people feel good about being American and living in a big, powerful country. I think that there's something to that and there's still something to that where some of that, and definitely Trump understands an enormous amount in the way he carries out his foreign policy moves is like, look, a lot of this is signaling to the American public and making them feel good about being American. Obviously, like, it's not like we have no international rivals now and we're the only superpower

and we don't have actual, you know, national interests to pursue or try to pursue, but there is a degree to which, and it's not pretty, but I think it's real. some moves in American policy are meant to not exactly distract from American domestic problems, but to create the sense of a strong national polity in the absence of any kind of vision for what the country is going to transform itself into over the next few years. And, you know, some of that has to be, you know, I think that that that, goes back to some people made that wag the dog. I mean, that's a movie we're probably

going to get to wag the dog about the Clinton administration. But yeah, there is a certain degree to which I think maybe Trump is the first person who's self-consciously and openly doing it that there's some American foreign policy adventures are done for theater,

a certain kind of political theater for the American people. I will say one thing that... So they're like these movies. Well, I was going to say, like, we don't have a Hollywood monoculture in the same way we do it more. You can't get your fix of Harrison Ford as the president in the movie theater in the same way. And so like to some extent what Trump does is like step in as the movie president to make you feel good about being an American. Right.

To make you like see what the movie president is doing. Like maybe we just need a huge like a huge like what Soros needs to do is start funding Air Force One type movies again so that we get our fix of that kind of president. Well I totally agree. A normal one again. We agree on this podcast. I mean, I think you should do that regardless, just for the, just for me. Yeah. I think it would be good for the nation to get more of this out in entertainment. Why doesn't you just make movies instead of trying to run? Yeah.

Anyway. Have there, I'm trying to think, have there been any movies recently with like a fictional president type? Oh, there's this, I haven't watched it yet, but there's this new show they're advertising on the subway with James Marsden as the president and Sterling K. Brown as a secret service agent. It looks like a kind of conspiracy. thing but that's i haven't watched it and that's the first one i can think of in a while where there's been like a oh wait there was you know what there was is um i watched part of this similarly kind of like stupid liberal hawk hollywood politics uh the diplomat these are not movies sorry so it probably doesn't even count for what you're asking jemel but the diplomat um uh which is a netflix show

with um carrie russell and uh where she plays like the u.s ambassador to England, who gets, who is like maybe in line to become the vice president of like a Trump-like figure. It's very stupid. And I watched like half of it. And I mean stupid in a good way. That's like a non-derogatory stupid. It's like stupid in the way that the West Wing is stupid, like fun, well-made entertainment. But it's all in TV now, I think.

There's not a lot of movies where there's presidents in them. The only two, the two I immediately thought of were 2013's White House down, which has a kind of, I mean, feels actually of a peace with Air Force One. The precipitating incident is a guy trying to get revenge for, against Jamie Fox, the president, for a botched mission in Iran. And part of the movie begins with the president, President James Sawyer signing a peace agreement in the Middle East. So it's sort of like, it feels sort of similar sort of like, you know. We have this liberal black president who then also in the course of the movie shows his action hero chops. Kind of like, what if Obama were president punch with the White House down?

And then Olympus has fallen a couple years later where the president played by, I believe, Morgan Freeman. No, isn't it Aaron Eckhart? And the president? Morgan Freeman's like the Secretary of State or something? He's the Speaker of the House. That's right, yeah. Which I got to say, Aaron Eckhart and James Marsden, especially, too pretty to whoever get elected president. Yeah.

Aaron Eckhart has a, you know, he's just got that chin. Like, you just want him to be in charge of something. Just he's like, oh, damn, that chin. He's got to run something, doesn't he? They'll cast a bunch of Aaron Eckhart clones for some sort of military propaganda film next year or something to demonstrate America's strength, now that we've gotten rid of DEI. The thing about those two movies Are also Air Force One movies because they're diehard movies It's just diehard but in the White House

Both of them I think are that Which is a funny like I guess there's a funny like What's the word like I'm not quite sure what to make of it But like that we keep returning to the presidency To remake our diehards like We really love the idea of the president being trapped somewhere Having to like kill a bunch of terrorists in his own

Maybe it speaks to like our latent populism And our belief that the president is being hamstrung, you know, our bonapartism, like he's being hamstrung by all these aides in the White House or in Air Force One, and he just needs to kill them and demonstrate his manhood and take charge as a leader or something. That's a preliminary reading. I'll work on that one. But no, I think you're right to sort of zero it on the Bonapartism. It does seem to course through American political life, like a desire for the president to kind of act as both an embodiment of the national, to act as an embodiment of the national will who just is not

bound by anything, who can sort of can do for the people what needs to be done without, without worries of Congress or ordinary laws, or even the Constitution, really, just kind of a pure straightforward man of action, which, you know, we're, hey, looks like it's happening. You got it. We got it. We got a guy who body with the American National Will. I do like, I will just say it is really funny to imagine Trump as an action. Like nobody is less well equipped on like an athleticism level to be an action hero.

It's like a great stage like made for DVD. and streaming segal movies where he's like sitting in a he's like sitting in a chair and like doing doing judo yeah exactly

or geyser teaser yeah that's basically what we've got which is basically where the country's at I mean you know like I don't want to all right we lost China one

okay let's face it hey how my exactly and now No, and they're probably laughing so hard that we, they're like, oh, yeah, they elected an idiot again. That's why we don't have a democracy. So we put it like, we don't do that.

Like the party chooses like the toughest motherfucker who built his way up through this system. Anyway, that's just my little dumer moment. But I think America will come back and be greater than ever before. I can't say that with a straight face. But yeah, I mean, if I were going to try to make. that case, it would just be that the U.S. is too big and too wealthy to not matter, you know? Right, of course.

We're not going to not matter. We're just going to, like, be maybe more like we were in the 19th century than the 20th century. And the 19th century, everyone's like, oh, big commercial country, very powerful, like potentially very powerful. And then the 20th century everyone was like, oh, like,

America's the future. But maybe now America's a little bit the past. Yeah. I'm surprised there should be more, I mean, like if I was going to make a president, like a president action movie, I think you could do it like you need to have Elon Musk as the villain and he's like trapped like a techno oligarch has like trapped the president in a new smart house white house or something and he's filled it with like, you know, those dog robots, those like Boston Dynamics robots. And the president has to like escape and kill

all of them while the techno oligarch has like deep faked him on the national news to like, you know, give him a tax break or something like that. I'm just spitballing here, you know, but this is something a pitch I think we could develop and bring to Hollywood and make a lot of money off of. It sounds great. But it had to be like a different president than, it can't be a Trump analog.

No, no. And it can't be a Biden analog either. I don't know who it is. You know who would produce this movie is Steve Bannon. Yeah, you can make it. Old man action is in. It can be a Biden analog. That's true.

We could just get Alec Baldwin to do it. He's definitely his work right now. I mean, I was thinking, you know what I've noticed in in I've been watching this is only tangentially related but I've been watching this terrible um god what the fuck is that guy's name the um the landsman uh cicario screenwriter hell or high water screenwriter uh Tyler sheridan yeah so i've been watching the Tyler sheridan show lioness, which only total perverts should watch. Like, it's just an absolutely just politically disgusting show. But, like, so, if that's the kind of thing that, for whatever reason you feel compelled to watch, it's so good.

And all of the leads in that movie, in like what to me is like a very apropos kind of move by somebody who clearly has his finger on the political pulse in some sense are Latina lesbians, basically. And I don't mean that in like a sexy way, though they are sexy. It's more like, you know, he knows that he can only, the most important way to, like, this kind of concert like sort of reactionary like border invasion garbage is through like queer latinas more or less it's like it's like a bizarre kind of conservative identity politics which is all a long way of saying i think zoe saldana as the president would be like a really good

like uh we we have her killing i don't know who plays the the techno oligarch i would almost say harrison forward but he's much too old but anyway i'm just you know again i think this is something we could you can just throw jessie eisenberg in there he'd be yeah did you see he just gave him you just gave an interview he's like i really don't want to be associated with Mark Zuckerberg anymore. Poor Eisenberg. All right, let's wrap up. Any final thoughts on Air Force One?

No, I think I got to all my thoughts. I enjoyed the movie watching it again. I was like, this kind of kicks ass, but I was also at a moment of melancholy longing for what things once were like. I have some trivia that I didn't get a chance to share, which is the... Oh, please share trivia.

The woman who plays the... girl who plays his daughter in this movie is J.B. Pritzker's cousin is a Pritzker heir, and she was in Alfonso Quaron's Little Princess, which is a favorite movie of my wife's, of my wife's when she was a kid that we have rewatched since, and it's actually pretty good, especially if you like Quarone. Anyway, she started those two movies. She's been in these two movies, and then she just went, and if you want to get into it, there's a Vanity Fair article about she and her younger brother sued all of their cousins, including I'm pretty sure J.B., because they were, because all the cousins were trying to cut them out of the Pritzker fortune.

And I think she won. And now she just is like a philanthropist in Boston. So I don't know, that's a little bit, I couldn't quite get the cork board out for that one. But if J.B. Pritzker becomes president, then I think we can really like elaborate that as a conspiracy. J.B. Pritzker. Also not really an action hero. He's like a Scorsese movie guy, I would say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's much more, yeah. He looks like, he looks like a mob enforcer. Which is to his political credit These days, that could probably mean he could win

If we still have a lot I think on look alone J.B. Pritzkriek could become president Yeah. Oh yeah. Just get to feel like Who's running against Trump especially? You could be like This fake mob boss is not going to do anything for you. Look at me. I'm like actually fat and I'm like actually got the slick back there. And he's much richer too.

Yeah. I mean the other thing. He just needs to like twist his pinky ring a little bit. To be to be a bit cynical about it, he can plausibly portray himself as like people may read him as being racist and sexist in a way that they wouldn't like a Gavin Newsom you know what I'm saying yeah like they're like he's a he's a down-home guy even though he's a total a huge billionaire like you look at him you're like you've made some racist there's no way you haven't made some racist jokes I can tell from your skull like your skull shape is indicating to me you're doing like racism race I am

even even if he's woke as hell he can do identity politics for bigots because it's sort of like yeah that guy yeah that guy obviously obviously drops a couple hard hours and he's watching like a bears game no offense to J.B. Pritzker

We don't think that J.B. Pritzker actually said the N-word. Nor would we support that. I mean, okay. Would I support that, though, if it meant like the presidency? I'm not going to say no. I do like LBJ. You would support him saying that would you say, would you, would you?

This is like the questions that all the right-wing tech guys ask, open-end. Yeah, exactly. If you could, if J.B. Britsker could say the N-word one time and be instantly president, would you support that? I'll bring him the microphone, baby. Yeah, this is like the, it's like, well... The most popular episode of this podcast. It's two minutes long. It's just Jamel introducing and then giving him the mic.

Jamie Pritzker. Okay, I think he could say some softer slurs. I'm definitely sure, but I don't know if I would go that far. Anyway, our next president of the United States, J.B. Pritzker. All right. That's her show. If you're not a subscriber, please subscribe. We're available on iTunes, Spotify, and Google Podcasts,

and wherever else podcasts are found. If you do subscribe, please leave a rating and a review. It does help people find the show. And you can reach out to us on social media if you like. I'm Blue Sky. I'm just Jamelboewey.net. And there's also an unclear pod, Blue Sky. And we're also trying a thing where we may post some episodes on YouTube,

so you can look out for those. If you want to reach out to us over email, you can do so at unclear and present feedback at fastmail. for this week and feedback we have an email from i just had this up uh from eric titled contact and carl sagan i got to say contact episode got a lot of feedback from you guys a lot of people wanted to reach out to us about our thoughts on contact were they mad that i didn't like it no no no it just lots of just interesting commentary about like about the movie i think i think contact is one of those movies that i didn't actually anticipate this but i think contact one of those movies

that, A, lots of people saw and that plenty of people just have like kind of fond memories about, you know? And so they just want to talk about it. Okay, here's Eric. Hi, guys, long time listener and a recent subscriber to the Patreon. Thank you. I'm a big fan of your work, both individually,

and together. I pulled myself away from Bellatro. I got a Balatro Atro here. Oh, me too. To offer. It seems like to become, like, overnight, like everybody's addicted to this game. It is shockingly addictive.

Yeah. I'm staying away from it literally because I had like a bad heartstone situation and like doing something that's even less sort of. Yeah, Max, you would totally get sucked into it immediately. I would die. Yeah. I pulled myself away from Belatra to offer a couple thoughts on contact. You touched briefly on Carl Sagan's authorship and I wanted to go a little deeper in a couple regards. First, the didacticism of the film.

This is definitely on par with the novel where there are endless pages of expository dialogue, which purpose is to explain scientific concepts and then the operative. is an example of this. It's interesting to reflect on contact as Sagan's only major work of fiction. By this point in his career, his pop culture contributions, nonfiction writing for general audiences, and especially Cosmos, the landmark TV series, had long since shadowed his scientific ones. I wonder whether he had any mode other than didactic. This also sheds light on the juxtaposition between 2001 in contact, as viewed through their contributing authors Arthur C. Clark and Sagan. Clark is one of the dominant boys.

in imaginative science fiction in the mid-20th century, while Sagan was a nonfiction writer and documentarian. It's hardly surprising that 2001 is artistic and imaginative will contact his didactic. Second, the relationship between religion and science, and Sagan's somewhat inconsistent metaphysics. As part of its career popularizing science, Sagan built a secondary platform fighting against what he articulated as the sloppy thinking that comes from religion. In works like the demon-haunted world, science is a candle in the dark, Sagan explicitly critiqued not just organized religion, but also various forms of superstitions, pseudoscience, and uncritical thinking.

Because of this, Sagan consistently invited attacks from the religious right, who characterizes views as scientism, the view that empirical science is the most authoritative and only justifiable worldview. We can see contact as both the response and capitulation to that criticism. As sort of, I don't hate all religion, I just hate yours. He paints collective human endeavor, even the ecstatic experience of the sublime, as righteous when stemming from science, but backwards when stemming from organized religion. In this light, it's worth recapping a scene from the book that Sagan chose not to include in the movie. Ellie receives a revelation from the aliens.

There's a hidden message encoded in the ditches of pie. Because pie is a foundational mathematical constant, a property of the universe, this proves that the universe had some, quote, intelligent design underlying it. At the culmination of a novel and career built on anti-religious dogma, Sagan introduces a mathematical, Jesuitical proof of the existence of God. Thanks as always for your great work, and can't wait for you to get to The Matrix, back to working the purple steak. Eric, thank you, Eric, for the feedback and the interesting note about the end of the novel. Yeah.

Episodes come out every two weeks, and so in two weeks, we will have two weeks from whenever you hear this. We'll have an episode on conspiracy theory, a 1997 film directed by Richard Donner. I wasn't expecting that. Starring Mel Gibson, it doesn't include his favorite conspiracy theory, but I guess we can talk about that.

Starring Mel Gibson not ranting about the Jews. And at least not on camera. And Julia Roberts, a man obsessed with conspiracy theories become to target after one of his theories turned out to be true. It would be so funny if this was a very anti-Semitic movie

I mean it's probably what you want I mean maybe they can make it now they probably could yeah when I made this when I made this movie back in the 90s they didn't let the real conspiracy be the protocols yeah yeah

it was produced by Joel Silver you know those people a man obsessed with conspiracy theories becomes a target after run of his theory has turned out to be true unfortunately in order to save himself he has to figure out which theory it is this seems dumb as hell

I gotta be honest I've never seen this I saw it in the theaters I'm pretty sure I remember almost nothing about it sorry just you know my personal memory of conspiracy theory

is that there is one on letterbox it has like it's like the majority of the ratings or a third of them but a majority are in the three two and a half to three to half star range wow I don't remember

being that bad so it's it seems to be just perfectly mediocre. Okay. Which is good, good fodder for us. That's our, that's our sweet spot is mediocrity. Uh, so, uh, main feed conspiracy theory. Uh, Patreon, uh, as always, Patreon, uh, every two weeks as well, episodes on the films, thrillers of the Cold War, our most recent episode is on the sweet smell of success. And we'll have an episode coming up on, uh, Elmer Gantry, kind of a Bert Lancaster double feature here, um, uh, which is very

much a, you know, 1960s, religious demagogues are bad kind of film, somewhat of a piece with facing the crowd, which I think we have an episode on if you want to check out the archive on the Patreon. So that's next up on the Patreon. Max, do you have anything you want to plug? I just encourage people to visit my substack, max reed.substack.com. You can find links to the 90s dad thriller piece, which I suspect any listener of this podcast. would enjoy and thank you guys for having me on thank you for coming on real pleasure i just will say it is a great substack if you want to follow tech which is an extremely important beat right now i don't think there's really any better journalists doing that than max and i love

i appreciate that john thank you yeah but just be aware that this week's newsletter is about benson boone the mormon singer who was on the gramees so it's only a little bit about tech tech and culture tech and the weirdest cultural things are going on right now which is lot of fun to read about. All right. That is that for John Gans and Max Reed. I'm Jamel Bowie and we'll see you next time.