Unclear and Present Danger - Broken Arrow

Episode Date: December 2, 2023

On this week’s podcast, Jamelle and John watched the legendary Hong Kong director John Woo’s 1996 action thriller “Broken Arrow,” starring John Travolta, Christian Slater, Samantha Mathis, Delroy Lindo and Howie Long.In “Broken Arrow,” a rogue pilot, Air Force Major Vic Deakins, played by Travolta, steals two nuclear weapons with the intent to sell them back to the United States government for a profit. His co-pilot, Captain Riley Hale, played by Christian Slater, is left for dead during the theft of the weapons. When Hale is found by park ranger Terry Carmichael, Samantha Mathis, the two race to stop Deakins, who eventually decides that he is going to detonate one of the weapons and irradiate the Southwest. The tagline for “Broken Arrow” was “Prepare to go ballistic.”You can find “Broken Arrow” to rent or buy on Amazon and iTunes.Our next episode will be on the 1996 drama “City Hall.” Connor Lynch produced this episode. Artwork by Rachel Eck.Contact us!Follow us on Twitter!John GanzJamelle BouieUnclearPodAnd join the Unclear and Present Patreon! For just $5 a month, patrons get access to a bonus show on the films of the Cold War, and much, much more.

They are America's first line of defense. Best of friends. Ready, Captain. Snap of the Earth. Here we go. Fierce competitors. Very nicely done. Almost as good as me.

Ready to protect our nation against any threat. Carrying the nukes. You love having the power of God at your fingertips. Not tonight, buddy. But what if the enemy is one of them? What hell are you doing? We got pilots down? We got ourselves a broken arrow.

A broken what? It's what we call it when we lose a nuclear weapon. I don't know what's scarier. Losing nuclear weapons, but that happens so often there's actually a term for it. The only thing more dangerous than what he knows. They believe they've got an exposed car. They've got to send in a nuclear emergency search team.

By the time they find us, we'll be gone. Is what he's prepared to do. $250 million by 0,900, Utah, time. If you have not... Good God. I don't know what the big deal is. I really don't. But there's one thing...

Smile, boys, we're about to retire. He didn't count on. I know his mind works. You've got to let me go after. Hell, that's the spirit? Would you mind not shooting at the thermonuclear weapons? And what are we doing? The end of the wrong code three times.

The Nucco's dead. Unless, of course, I already thought of that ahead of time. You just activated a nuclear warhead, my friend. Care for a Coke or something? John Travolta. You lose. Christian Slater. You're out of your mind.

Ain't it cool? a John Wu film Welcome to A unclear and present danger A podcast about the political and military thrillers of the 1990s and what they say about the politics of that decade I'm Jamel Bowie. I'm a columnist for the New York Times.

Opinion section. My name is John Gans. I write a substack newsletter called Unpopular Front and I'm the author of the forthcoming book when the clock broke and still very forthcoming June. But if you want to pre-order it, again, much appreciated. It'll be here soon enough. So please pre-order at your local bookshop, Barnes & Noble, what have you. Thank you. Yes. For this week's episode of the podcast. We watched John Wu's 1996 action thriller Broken Arrow, named after the loss of a nuclear weapon. I don't know if that's a real thing. Starring John Travolta, Christian Slater, Samantha Mathis, Delroy Lindo, and Howie Long. Got to shout out Howie Long being a guy who still lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. Howie Long, noted Charlottesville.

Um, I'll say, John, it was the last time I saw this movie was like six or seven years ago, but the one image I have in my head is of how long being kicked out of that train at the end. And then like there's a Wilhelm screen. Oh, yeah. Yeah. He's such a face from that from that era kind of. He really is. Yeah. But I have that like image in my head because it's very funny than me. Uh, okay. So broken arrow in broken arrow, a rogue pilot, Air Force major Vic Deacons played by Travolta. It's such a very, it's a very, it's a very, Vic Deacons, he goes by Deke in the film, played by Travolta, steals two nuclear weapons with the intent to sell them back to the government for a profit. It's co-pilot Captain Riley Hale, played by Christians later, is left for dead during the theft of the weapons. When Hale is found by Park Ranger Terry Carmichael, that's played by Samantha Mathis, the two race to stop Deacons, who eventually decided.

that he's going to detonate one of the weapons and destroy the Southwest. The tagline for Broken Arrow was prepare to go ballistic, which is fine. You can find Broken Arrow to rent or buy on Amazon and iTunes. I think, you know, we'll get into this a little later, but I think the first time I saw this, I did not like it. This time I saw it, I was like, oh, this rules. So I think you should watch it. It's really fun.

I just put it back on, just on the side here just to have it, you know, playing. And it starts with a ridiculous boxing match between Christians later and John Travolta. I mean, it's just foreshadowing, really, what the whole film is about. It's so silly. And we'll talk a little bit about John Wu style. Because I think that part of why John Wu, because this was the second American movie, It's first was hard target from 93. Okay.

And I think that part of why John Wu did not necessarily translate all like super well to American sensibilities is that like his style is like very heightened and emotional and operatic and it just like it's just like really over the top like in an intentional way. But I'm not sure it kind of works for what Americans are going for in their action movies. Anyway. Yeah. Broken Arrow was released on February 9th, 1996.

So what does in your times look like for that day, John? Well, it's pretty boring. I've got to tell you, Jamel. Let's say, let's see, this is really, we're really right in the 90s. Let's see what we got here. Communications bill. I'm just going to read some headlines and then maybe go into one if it sounds interesting. Communications bill signed and the battles begin anew.

public employees vote five-year deal in New York City. Medicaid plans ease fiscal ills for New York. In deal-ending takeover effort, Chrysler to sell non-auto lines. The chess world braces for one landmark match. Texas caters to a demand around the U.S. for jail cells. This is actually interesting because it tells you something about mouse incarceration in the 90s. after tripling the size of its prison system in five years

and clearing out a huge backlog of inmates held in county jails, Texas has embarked upon an improbable correctional venture. It has become the nation's leading importer of prisoners from other states. Many state prison systems are packed at dangerous levels. On average, their populations are 17% above attending capacity, according to the latest

United States Justice Department figures. But in Texas, even as the state's new prisons fill up with its own inmates as fast as they open. There are 20,000 beds in county jails that are at least temporarily empty. Many county officials are competing with one over contracts or prisoners from other states. This is extraordinarily grim and like has serious slavery vibes. I mean, they're importing people in captivity for money. So far, 11 states, as far away as Hawaii, Oregon, and Massachusetts sent 3,776 prisoners to Texas jails, and brokers who arrange such deals say that without

the state boarding cheaper than prison construction, there are many more in the works. But the transfers have raised a tangle of legal issues, one would hope, concerning the prisoners civil rights, especially since the moves sharply limit their ability to have family visitors confer with lawyers or range for where they will live and work upon their release. I can't imagine that this is even a little bit constitutional. Was there any kind of ruling on this? Do you know anything about this? This sounds absurd. I don't know anything about this. This is genuinely insane. Yeah. I can't imagine you can just cart somebody off. You know, like law enforcement is largely local in the United States. You can't just cart somebody off to another jurisdiction. I don't know how this is possibly legal, possibly legal. And it's just so bizarre. But it tells you something about, you know, mass incarceration was a real thing in the 90s. It was so. ideologically accepted, and now in retrospect with scholarship and with, you know, the way we've

come to look at it, it looks a lot worse than it did at the time. It was sort of like, oh, yeah, you know, we had a crime problem. This is how we're dealing with. And now it looks like, you know, a massive kind of racialized violation of the constitutional rights and the civil rights of a huge section of the American population. But, you know, these are the kinds of things that were going on. And this is, you know, preposterous. if you think it just doesn't sound legal or constitutional to me, but what else? This is

kind of interesting. Memories of wartime brutality revive Czech German animosity. In his book line study here, Yvonne Klima, the Czech author, recalls the days a half century ago when surviving Jewish families like his fled, the concentration

camps to find their land awash and killing in chaos. He was then 14 years old and even in the final days of the Second World War he said so many Czechs were shot by their Nazi occupiers for nothing, the humanity seemed lost. Karl Heinz Wunderlich, a psychologist from the ethnic German minority in Czechoslovakia, remembers that period too.

In his mind's eye, he still sees the Czech soldiers who, when he was eight, came to his family store and what was in the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, which Hitler had it next in 1938. Now living in Mainz, Germany, Dr. Wunderlich recalls how Czechs toting some machine guns loaded people into freight trains, the lucky ones that it is, who endured what he called ethnic cleansing rather than what he called,

rather than massacres, the Czechs purged their land of three million Germans. Between them, the two men represent the emotional pose of a crisis between Germany and the Czech Republic that has burst forth virulently one of the most corrosive disputes in Central Europe since the fall of the Iron Curtain. It is a conflict over dark and tangled past that can hinder Czech ambitions to be included in the European Union and the North Atlantic Alliance did not in retrospect and evokes the same mutually canceling visions of history and collective guilt in Central Europe as bedeviled the Balkans. Well, not quite. But, you know, this is very interesting. There were population transfers

after the war. There were, you know, atrocities committed after the closing of hostilities of the war, which are not well known about. I don't want to say that the mass deportation of the sedate in Germans was good or the right thing to do. But you have to remember that this population was extremely enthusiastic about welcoming Hitler and the Czechs, you know, the Czechs lost their country through Hitler's, you know, this really was the kicking off of hostilities in the same. Second World War in a sense.

And, you know, the feelings of bitterness are understandable. But, yeah, there were lots of areas in Central Europe that were majority German, lots of areas, even very far east in Europe that had a lot of German populations and they were moved westward. And there were lots of areas, but, you know, there were lots of areas where a lot of people used to live and now they don't live there anymore because the Nazis killed them. So, you know, it's a sensitive history, but, you know, obviously, you know, the Second World War was such a horrible conflict and so, it is so, such a horrible conflict that the more you learn about it and so many people died and so many atrocities were committed, it's just you learn something new about it. If you look into the war and you're like, oh, just another completely insanely horrible thing, like learning about Stalin's population transfers and so on and so forth.

So good to remember, World War II, bad time for humanity. But yeah, I think that's pretty much it that interests me here. I don't know about you, Jamel. There's nothing really. I mean, this is very hard of the 90s. Yeah. No, no great apparent crisis. This is interesting.

Apple computers or Apple valves to go to loan. Apple computer pledged to remain an independent company. under its new chairman, saying that it was not currently in merger discussions with any other company. Is this post? I think this is post Steve, pre-steve. You know what I mean? Yeah, I think this is before he comes back. Yes. And they tried to like make, I find this fascinating. I like old computers for some reason. Oh, they meet. Yeah. And I like these weird, They tried to, like, make Apple computers that were, like, IBM compatible computers. You know, there's, like, Dells and whatever and Sony's.

They tried to do that for apples. So there's, like, these Motorola Apple Power Macs, but they're still out there, which I think is kind of cool. It didn't work. It wasn't. And that was, like, one of the first thing that Steve Jobs, when he returned, like, put an end to because he was like, we have to do everything in-house and proprietary, which is as a business design concept, he was right.

But, yeah, I always thought those were kind of neat. There's a review here, a broken arrow in this issue of the Times. Jen and Madslin, it's a pretty positive review. The final, well, not the final sentence, but it's sort of the thing that kind of ties together. She describes an insane situation in the movie and says, except this as feasible and you should have no problem swallowing the rest of the plot. She praises the physical performances of Slater in Mathis, in particular, praises Travolta's turn as a villain, and is, yeah, she's pretty positive on the film. So it's basically sort of like this is a fun time at the movies, kind of.

In its mindless, consciousnessless momentum and its emphasis on steady, frantic activity, broken error had less to do with storytelling than with video games. So that's a good transition to the movie, because I kind of actually disagree with that. And this will get into discussing this film as a John Wu film. So John Wu, for those listening who are not familiar, which I imagine is very few of you, is sort of a famous legendary Hong Kong action director, a director of kind of a bunch of bona fide classics in the genre of action film. There's a better tomorrow, I think a bullet to the head is what's called, and then kind of, you know, hard-boiled, which is sort of the one that if Americans have seen, it's hard-boiled. And he's known in his films for sort of this, I used the word operatic earlier, it's really operatic violence, it's sort of swelling, high-motion violence, usually with guns, sometimes with explosions. occasionally with martial arts, his muse of sorts with the actor Chaliyon Fatt,

who was great and had a bit of an American turn later in the 90s, showed up into an American movies. But part of what Wu does in his films is the violence, not unlike a musical. I feel like that's what I would compare John Wu films to, like musicals, and that like the violence and the action sequences express emotional states in the characters. They have to tell you something about the emotion happening on the screen. And so as things get more emotionally intense, as the character's sense of the stakes heightens, so does the violence, so does the stylization of the violence.

So it kind of moves in tandem. That is present in his first American picture, which was Hard Target in 93, starring Jean-Claude Van Dyme. Now, that's, I got to say, I don't think we cover that. for this podcast because it doesn't really fit. But that's a movie I love. I fucking love Hard Target. It's dumb as hell. But it's a lot of fun.

It's a lot of fun. But that fits Hard Target. His one big, like, mega hit in the United States was face off with Travolta and Nick Cage. And that movie, I think, really captures exactly woo's sort of like style as an action. director it's like it's the face off feels the most Hong Kong to me of Wu's movies

Mission Impossible 2 is another John Wu film one that people don't like as much Mission Impossible films but also John Woo films but I think it also has all of his hallmarks so Broken Arrow which is a second, Wu's second American, second

Hollywood film is that it is this very high energy, high octane action film that has this kind of sweeping, soaring, ridiculous violence. Right now, I'm looking over, it's a scene where they're fighting in the stealth plane where Travolta is about the, you know, take control of everything. And it's like, you know, I don't have the volume up, but you can tell the score is like swelling right now.

It's like that's, you know, the Travolta and Slater have these insane looks on their face. So it's like, that's the whole kind of vibe with the movie. Score by Hans Zimmer. Very good score, actually. Yeah, it's good. And yeah, the plot, as I mentioned, is that Travolta is stealing two nuclear weapons and he wants to sell them. Doesn't necessarily, not at this start, it's not trying to sell them abroad. And this is what I find, you know, the movie comments on the fact that if what he wanted to do was steal nuclear weapons, he could go to some.

European country and buy it for the cost of a BMW is I think the exact line. But he's stealing these nuclear weapons to sell back, or to ransom back to the United States government for funds. And so to me, if we're going to move into talking about the politics of this movie a little bit, it's very much of a piece with sort of like the general fear of like loose nukes throughout the 90s. It's like a loose nuke movie. unusual in that it takes place in the United States. It's not about loose foreign nukes, it's about a loose American nukes.

But that's sort of its big concern. And obviously in the context of the movie, this is just sort of like this is the excuse for lots of action, exploding planes, exploding caves, exploding trains. Yeah, lots of explosions. Lots of gunplay,

lots of cuts to Del Vary Lindo playing. a beleaguered U.S. Air Force officer trying to get control of the situation. Kurt Wood Smith as sort of like an amoral political, I think the chief of staff I think is what he's playing. So a lot of fun faces, but that's that's the movie. John, have you seen broken arrow and what did you think? I saw broke. I think I've seen it more than once. I think I saw it. When I was a kid, like I was, I loved this movie. It was something I rented for sure. And I think that, you know, I don't, I liked the, I liked military thrillers. I liked, you know, airplanes.

So I was into it, the stealth bomber and everything. That was pretty neat. The whole idea of the movie was cool to me. But I think that watching again, it didn't quite hold my interest the way I did when I was a kid, although I was like, this is a pretty good action thriller and like not like a cheapo one at all. And I could see, you know, like the Wu stuff. stuff that I do like.

I just want to like, I think a kind of interesting context for this movie, speaking of John Wu, is that there was a lot of interest, like especially, well, in, in Asian cinema in the 90s and Asian culture in general, the 80s had been pretty in part of the early 90s. American attitudes towards Asia were pretty fucking racist. And then there was kind of a turnaround where there got to be a lot of like interest in in Asian cultures. There's a lot of interest in Hong Kong, a lot of interest in Tokyo, a lot of interest in anime, that's kind of when anime craze started in the U.S. I guess that goes back to the 80s a little bit. But, you know, these things kind of dated from the, there was a kind of like, I think maybe

as part of the whole end of history moment, a kind of cosmopolitan feeling and an interest in what was going on in other parts of the world. And Hong Kong cinema was like, you know, something that if you were a culture, cool person, like you kind of had opinions on, like you knew about Chow Yun Fat movies, you know, like Quentin Tarantino was really into him and instrumental and like popularizing them in the United States, you know, so it was like kind of a hip thing. So that's kind of interesting context for John Wu, you know, coming over and making movies in America and like interest in that whole stuff. But yeah, you know, like it was a, it was a, it's a pretty, pretty good, solid action thriller. You know, obviously it has some unbelievable, I mean,

you just have to laugh just like unbelievably cliched lines like when the guy's like sometimes you scare me and the other guy goes sometimes I scare myself sir it's just like you're like oh my god who wrote this script but you know that's not why you watch it for and I do think as you were saying yeah there's this is like loose nuke's I think these movies obviously exaggerated the degree to which nuclear weapons were easy to get on the black market like all these movies like give the impression that if you have like a hundred thousand dollars you could go to like Kazakhstan and get a nuclear weapon, which... Yeah, like at a market or something.

You're just like going down the street. It's like fireworks stands in South Carolina. Yeah, exactly, but they're Soviet-era nuclear weapons. A lot of movies have remarks like that. And I think that was just, you know, what people thought of the post-Cold War chaos. I think there's a few tropes here that we can recognize from previous movies. Obviously, the cynical, political, military political establishment. you have you know hardworking and trustworthy middle ranking officers and then you have

you know a kind of cynical and exhausted and no longer believing in things person who goes out on their own and out of a sense of obviously money but it's almost beyond that it's almost this kind of like I desire for excitement and a you know like life seems to be meaningless to them and you know because there's no you know the cold wars off the table so it's almost like the loose nuclear weapon and the loose subject that's no longer ideologically you know fits into the world properly or kind of um you know analogs in a certain way so it's like yeah there's a kind of world which no longer makes sense and then you have you know Christian slater who's just doing his duty and and then the park ranger character this is like one of those

movies where like a low a high B um you know military or police figure like teams up with a low B one and like that's like a park ranger and like they're both like really committed to doing their duty properly um but not they're not overly serious or uptight so yeah so like there's a lot of like well you know it may not the Cold War may be over it may be unclear what we're doing with these nuclear weapons, but we just kind of got to do the right thing anyway. And I think also what's interesting with this movie, I think the Zimmer score, well, it's not Zimmer who made the score. I kept on thinking about Hunt for Red October while watching this movie because they had the same

thing in this movie, this thing that they did where they, when the focus of the camera is on the nuclear weapons, the score kind of like goes into this like almost religious choral music, which is kind of like, I think I love, maybe just because of movies from this era, but it's almost like giving the nuclear weapon this kind of like aura of religious of God or something like that or something truly sublime and terrible, which, you know, there's an argument to be made. I think Oppenheimer gets into that territory, obviously. But like, you know, yeah, I thought that that was interesting and it was something I noticed. I was like, oh, they're kind of like pulling that effect, if you will, that aesthetic effect from Hunt for Red October,

like the choral music really swells when the nuclear weapon is in the shot. But yeah, you know, I think like it's a silly movie in many ways, but it definitely tries. It definitely has these little kind of ideological theme running throughout it. And yeah, and I think it's pretty enjoyable. did I do I like this as much as one of the kind of more cerebral thrillers that we do?

No. But I can watch it without feeling unhappy. You know, like it's a fairly well made put together Hollywood movie of this type. And like the action sequences are good and they're kind of like wild, but they're not so,

well, you know, this is pre-CGI. So they're kind of pretty exciting. still. You know, they don't feel like, oh, there's no friction here. You know, this is a knot. So, yeah, I'm pro broken arrow. It's, as I like to say, you know, like the 90s are a decade of sublime mediocrity, and this is just right there. Yeah. I think sublimely mediocre is exactly the way to describe this movie. It's just the, I'm sort of interested. So the, The fear of loose nuclear weapons was widespread.

Another movie we will do later in the podcast is the sum of all fears, which is sort of like kind of the first of the post-Harrison Ford Tom Clancy, Jack Ryan movies. And then that one kind of like the event that kind, that doesn't kick off the plot, but the event that sort of like, you know, shapes the plot is the theft of a loose nuclear weapon from the former Soviet Union. And I'm not, I'm actually not entirely sure of how, like, was there, was this like a, like a thing that showed up in American politics, right? Is it simply sort of, you know, found in fears as expressed through popular culture, or is this like a live topic of discussion in American politics. What can we do to secure Russian nuclear

materials or former Soviet nuclear materials? A little bit, yeah. I mean, it was definitely part of the foreign policy, like nuclear proliferation was definitely part of the foreign policy discussion. I think it was a fear that came up in, you know, of course, like foreign policy debates are never, you know, what people really vote on in a certain way, you know, well, that's not true. but their relationship to what really drives voters as complicated. And it was, yeah, it was a topic, I think, of genuine political concern. I think it's something more that kind of took place on the committee and think tank level than was something that was like, you know, maybe politicians would bring it up in a speech.

But I don't think anyone ran for office on the sole, on like, with their signature issue being, we're going to secure the nukes of the, of the former Soviet Union. but it was definitely, you know, a live topic in politics and definitely a live topic in international discussions of politics. And it has huge effects because, you know, the Russia was declared the successor state of the Soviet Union and, you know, got all the nukes. But the nukes were spread out. I mean, like Ukraine had some.

Kazakhstan had some because, you know, they were spread all over the Soviet Union when it fell apart. And they didn't have necessarily. the launch infrastructure to use them, but, you know, something probably could have been developed. Anyway, the world in which, which seemed like a good solution to have a single inheritor, I mean, it probably was in a certain way. A single inheritor of the USSR's nukes, you know, could have been a lot different. We could have a lot more nuclear proliferation, which is frightening. I think, you know, obviously, the more countries that have them, the more likelihood is that they are used.

you know this movie sort of wants to kind of imply that they can be contained like you know they blow one up you know they blow one up in a mine shaft and this is a thermonuclear weapon I don't think that that would you know from the standard bomb that the U.S. loads into a B2 I don't think that that mine shaft would have been sufficient to really like not cause more problems than it does. But yeah, the movie's kind of implication is that, you know, although there are cynical people, you know, and political actors who can't be trusted, ultimately, you know, there are good upstanding Americans upon whom you can count that will bring such things in

hand. And that's like almost every movie like we watch. It's like, you know, and that's like the, that's like if I had to, if I had to like identify the single ideological tendency of almost every movie we watch in this thing is, yes, bad guys are out there in the government and our society is cynical now and we don't know what to do, but there are still some decent guys. And no matter what happens, it's going to be okay because those decent guys will come through. And then, you know, I think this is sort of what shook everybody up or made everybody very nervous around Trump or around everything that's going on now is like, well, you know, everyone wants to know where these kind of movie good guys are. You know, where is Christian Slater and, you know, and Harrison Ford and or the characters from the West Wing, you know, and then, you know, we move into a world where it doesn't quite look the way, you know, we were prepared. by these movies that, you know, went from showing the world as being, oh, we're going to be on the verge of nuclear apocalypse and the things are tested with the Soviet Union, which is into, no, the United States is peopled with a fundamentally

competent and virtuous, you know, they're everywhere, you know, there's decent guys everywhere and they're going to come through and they're going to get the job done. And, you know, that's the movies, right? Right. it's not even like they're that heroic they're like there's a lot of in these movies jack ryan's a hero well that also stretches back to the cold war jack ryan's a hero but in this movie these these people are like just kind of um heroes of competency you know like this guy's just like a captain i mean i guess he's kind of elite she's just a park ranger you know

like and they're just doing their jobs and like christian slater isn't presented as like an exceptional pilot or an exceptional member of the United military. Right. He is, he is just yeah, he could be anybody anybody in that position. Right. And certainly for, for the

park ranger character. She's just like, she's just like practically anonymous. Yeah. And like they don't know each other. They don't have names to each other until the end of the movie. And it's just like, yeah, kind of cooperation between these decent people and then Um, you know, it's just, uh, you know, they, they get the job done. And it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a kind of nice message. And these movies are comforting not only because of, you know, they're just being reliably decent, but because of like the messages that they have, which is like, you know, like there's going to be a good guy. And, you know, he might not look like much or might not. I mean, he's a matinee idol. I mean, like, you know, you know, like, you know, he's a. I mean, like, you know, you know,

know, Slater. But you know what I mean? Like, they may not be the most important or the most heroic hero in the world, but they'll come through. And, uh, they'll always be a John Wu film or some kind of basic. That's the other thing about, I think about people's, especially people who are our age and older about coming into the world of today, which granted is, is, I think one could say is worse in certain ways. The, is the expectation that not only the world of this movie would continue, but the movies themselves would continue. And I think a lot of Gen Xers in particular have had trouble with the kind of ideological

world and the imaginative world of the 1990s coming to a close. And not to say that this movie is like indicative perfectly of all the things, but I think it's enough. And you're like, yeah, well, you know, like, I bet if you watch, I bet if I, a hundred percent guarantee if you go into the YouTube comments of Broken Arrow, the comments are all going to be, this is when they used to make good movies. This is when they used to make good movies. And there's a lot of heartbreak and nostalgia. I mean, every generation probably experiences this, but there's a lot of heartbreak and nostalgia for these things, which, you know, we're taking care of them, I suppose, in our way. But they're unexceptional

products of culture like these are not high pieces of art but like the availability of these decently good hollywood movies is something that i think people deeply miss and i don't blame um that makes me curious so i have two thoughts but the first thing i'm kind of curious about um is just what came out this weekend as well because that's always a good glimpse and just sort of like what what the movie um landscape look like so number one at the box off office this weekend was Broken Arrow. Then we have Mr. Holland's opus, a movie I remember. We have Black Sheep, which was a, what's his name? Oh, Chris Farley. Chris Farley. It was a Chris Farley vehicle. Yeah. Of course. Huge film. This in Black Sheep and Tommy Boy were just

like huge movies. Yeah, they were massive hits. The juror, which I don't know what that is. Okay, so here we go. The juror is, it's not a Grisham. It is a legal thriller based off of a novel by George Dawes Green, stars Demi Moore and Alec Baldwin. It stars Demi Moore as a single mother pick for jury duty for a mafia trial and Alec Baldwin as a mobster sent to intimidate her. Oh, yeah. I think I may have seen this on TV or something. This doesn't seem very good.

So the juror is next. And they may have leaving Las Vegas at number five spot. Yeah. Oh, there's a lot of movies. I think that, I mean, I assume from this year, we're going to probably do executive decision, right? Yes. And we're doing city hall.

Are we doing city hall? Are we doing city hall? That's right. Yeah. That's cool. So, yeah. And are we doing courage under fire or no? I believe so.

Okay. Yeah. I mean, like, these are pretty, you know, Dunston checks in. I love that movie when I was a kid. There is a whole monkey movie. movie thing in the mid-90s. Like, why don't we get there some monkeys back in the movies? Yeah, it's like almost like something like movies from the 30s or 40s where they would do stuff like that.

It was like, yeah, it was almost like a second studio period in a weird way. Yeah. But the thing is, yeah, I think that like 1997 obviously was just a huge year for great movies. But yeah, I think like this going to the movies was also just part, much more a part of like the the leisure culture of the United States or the entertainment culture of the United States. It was something. Yes. It was interesting this past summer with the Barbenheimer, Barbie and Aralbohenheimer thing.

That was like a throwback to how people used to engage with movies. Not maybe with as much as sort of like the fandom thing, but the idea that everyone would go to see a movie. The movie would come out and everyone would go see it and then everyone would talk about it the Monday afterwards. That was like if that used to be a thing. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I just, and also, you know, rentals and so on and so forth. I think that basically like, yeah, I, I, it's, it's interesting like how the anxieties of these periods also, this is not something I worry about at all anymore. I mean, maybe I should. Loose nukes?

Yes. It's, I mean, I worry more about a country setting. I think we're more back to a more Cold War framework where I worry about countries setting them off and shooting them at each other. It's almost like a return. History's back, you know? Yeah. I think that's like the difference between history and the end of history is, is there a chance of global thermonuclear war?

Is there a reasonable chance of global thermonuclear war between like ideological opponents? I think, yeah. so it's difficult like you know some of the movies that we do are so incredible like we focus almost exclusively on movies of a genre and of an era and like this movie and usually sometimes when they're just the normiest movies possible you can pull a lot out of it but this movie is almost like what else can we i just don't know what else we can squeeze out of this one like it's a Yeah. No, one thing I thought was interesting is so the villain, so John Travolta is like the main antagonist and he's sort of like without ideology. He's kind of in it for the money. But the guy who's bankrolling him who shows up the first two-thirds in the movie then is like unceremoniously killed for the final act. He also is just a guy who wants to make money. Like this is this, the the antagonist in this film don't have any grand ideological. purpose. Like, they're not stealing these nukes to prove a point. They're not stealing them to

extract concessions or anything. It's purely sort of like, I want to make more money. And this is sort of like, this is maybe the easiest way. But this is a way to make a ton of money in very short order. And I find that, I find I find I find the lack of any ideology here very interesting. Like Travolta at most is just resentful of like a lack of, Accomplishment. Yeah, he's bored. He's like a bored guy. And he has no purpose, right? And we see this in a lot of movies. And he has this almost like sociopathic Nietzschean desire to express himself in some way or to do something. You know, he's a military guy. Like it's a supposed should have been an adventurous life of glory and so on and so forth. And he's kind of doing training missions and so on and so forth. And, you know, it's not the life he envisioned. And I think that that's, you know, that was a concern. I think, that's literally like kind of in Fukuyama's essays like you know there's not going to be a lot to strive for in the end of history people are going to be bored it's going to be sad time he said the end of history will be a sad time and people boredom and lack of meaningful things is going

to set off its own problems right and the the hunt for you know for things that satisfy the human urges for glory, honor, you know, meaning so on and so forth are going to kind of be let loose like nuclear weapons and, you know, cause social problems in one way that he thought it might manifest itself, which doesn't really take a genius to see because it was already on the horizon, was, you know, new forms of nationalism. Lots of movies have fears of transitional criminal syndicates, you know, things like that. And like there would be some new form of human self-assertion that would be unconnected to a larger project and therefore extremely threatening to, you know, everything.

Cuckoo guys running around. I mean, you see those in movies before the Cold War, but usually. you know, they have some connection to some fight in the Cold War or, you know, they're plugged into that, those coordinates somehow. But you get the opposite too, right? Because we see people, we see these movies that show people who are kind of independent contractor, so to speak, and have small businesses, so to speak, as the people who are like solving the problems, right? So in sneakers, like it's this like hip Silicon Valley, X boomer, X, uh, weather underground kind of guys, SDS boomer idealists who form a very cool business and with a lot

of oddballs. And, you know, that's like what we're hoping the world will kind of be saved by, you know, a cool, cool businesses like that essentially. That was a real hope in the 90s was like the cool, cool businesses. and some people still kind of hang on to that. Lots of Gen X people. I mean, to that point, I mean, that's sort of Silicon, to the extent that Silicon Valley once is like doing ideological work, right? Like trying to convince people with utility.

It's all about sort of like, oh, we are the businesses that are going to save the world. Right, exactly. So much so that, like, you know, my view is they have to manufacture things for the world to be saved from, such as evil AI to kind of like get the public on board. Right. You know, that's a good point. Well, they're creating their own villains all the time. Yeah, no, I think, and also they're creating, I think that like what's, you know, interesting about that is just like they have a very limited imagination of what a good future would be like. And it's based on what they think is like a convenient and good life. And they're like, well, I would want like some kind of thing to do this. And you're like, dude. that's your particular thing because, like, you have a lot of different weird interests. And it's just like they're shaping, it's shaping the world according to the needs of, you know, a pretty specific class of people in one part of the country.

And that's, you know, something that I guess suppose always happens, you know, designers and industrialists, you know, always. kind of stamp their products with their own needs, our own vision for the world. But I think in the case of how prevalent everything in Silicon Valley is, and how universal it is, it starts to become particularly monotonous. And I think that those people don't understand why people are angry at them or find them frustrating or find the world they've created to be depressing and bad. Yeah. And they're like, why? But we're creating all these wonders. And you're like, well, it kind of sucks. And then like, then you look at the 90s. I think the United States throughout its history as an industrial power, people thought I can get a pretty good deal, right? You know, I can go to a decent Hollywood movie. I can drive a Ford. I can drive my GM car to the movies.

And, you know, these things are all industrial produced, but they're of a reliable quality. And now the quality is a little bit shakier and, you know, on all parts of industry. And I think people are not so happy and they have memories of a time, not to say these memories are necessarily true. I mean, everyone prefers the world of their youth for many reasons. But memories of times when things felt better built, you know? Not to say, or just more built to last. And things seem so evanescent and meaningless in the world of technology that I think that's what depresses people.

And that's why it's funny to us, I think, when we look back at movies like this one. And they seem like such, you know, like, it's so strange to see the 90s, which seems to us such a banal time to become the subject of intense longing. You know, like when there's like, there's like these memes about. out of, you know, oh, you're at your parents' basement playing Sega Genesis or like renting VHS tapes. And you're like, dude, it was so boring. You know, like it wasn't like, like these things are so basic. And you're like, dude, are you really pining for the time of those things? Like, is that nostalgia so meaningful for you? But I think it's, yeah, it's interesting that that seems

almost utopian to people now like those those those that world seems utopian obviously it was not but like it that that's a strange thing with 90s nostalgia which I think you know we're here to sort of pop the bubble of a little bit but you know we also can understand it I guess what I find so strange about 90s nostalgia is the generation of kids it's hitting right like I don't think of very many people our age is being nostalgic for the 1990s. It's all people younger than us that I see as being quite nostalgic for the 90s. People who wouldn't really have experienced the 90s. Like, I'm 36, and I'm sort of like in the youngest, among the youngest people who could

have, like, had any kind of memory of the 90s, right? Like, I was 10 in 1996. So, like, you know, I can kind of remember some stuff. But, like, a kid who's, like, 26 and nostalgic for the 90s, like, was born. born in 96 or born in 97 yeah yeah it's true i i mean i mean that happens a lot where these decades appear like something you've lost or you never experienced you know when you look you look at a world of the grownups and you you know this also happened i felt this way about the 80s when i was younger which in retrospect is stupid but like um now that i know more about it

yeah talks about a shitty decade oh boy oh boy but like the the thing is it's not a crappy cultural products and stuff from the 80s too. I think the 90s, I do feel there are things about the 90s that I understand being nostalgic for, but I think when you're young, you want to live in the world that the grownups live in, you want the things that the grownups have when you were a kid, right? So you want to live in a world where like, you know, oh, all the cool things when I was young are still cool. And I think that contributes to some nostalgic return of stuff, which is like, oh, I want to live, I want to go back to then and be an adult when I was a kid, when I

first started developing longings for adult things for an adult life. And it wasn't available. And I think that goes even for younger people where it's just like a kind of a mystical world of possibilities that's now been closed to you. So you kind of have this yearning for the magical objects of that. It's interesting how people relate to this. the culture of the past like that. Like these decades, even thinking about decades, right? Like, which we routinely do in American cultural history is like each decade is a, and this is false, but the different is like a totality, right?

It's got a style. It's got it, it's got, it's like its own zeitgeist. It's got a, it's got its style, certain concerns, you know, obviously these change, but, you know, it has a certain essence. And like people kind of yearn for the essences of these previous eras. And I don't have any explanation for why that is or what do people do that. It's just something we do as Americans particularly where you're like, oh, and then these decades kind of come in and out of style where suddenly it becomes the 90s are back or the 80s are back or the 70s are back. And it was like something about that time signifies lost possibilities or hopes or unrealized.

dreams for people and they want to delve back in it and live as if they were there and go into the things. I can, I get it. Like I, you know, we were talking about old computers. Like, stuff from when I was very young and probably barely conscious of the stuff, it has a strange almost emotional pull for me. Like if I'm in a, there's like a video game store here in New York City, which is like all old systems that they don't make anymore and stuff like that. It's all like deprecated systems and computers and things like that. That's like a wonderful place. Like it's like this weird, you know, cabinet of dreams and possibilities of being a small

child. It's like, I guess, the way people used to look at toys from their childhood. You know, it brings up your imagination again. So I understand these things. It's interesting how we relate as an imaginative people back in time and kind of think of these time periods as coherent entities when you know that's what we're doing on our show like we think that the i mean an assumption of the show is that there's something coherent about like what we're talking about i mean yes obviously we would discover changes too and and remark on them but

we we continue i think we continually do discover something coherent about it and you know that's the assumption is that there's some kind of coherence to the artist underlying coherence to movies made between this year and this year yeah I think that's right. Underlying thematic coherence, ideological coherence, stylistic coherence. I think it's very much the case. We should begin wrapping up. I feel a little bad.

We can talk too much about broken error. I want to mention a couple things about the movie. Sorry, I just want on a tangent there. No, no, that's okay. People like tangents. This movie, we've watched, this is another second movie we've watched in this podcast where someone falls out of a car and then gets promptly run over by the car. this happens in this movie

I really like this trope and if I were director I would bring it back I think it's very funny because it becomes a showcase it does something it doesn't because you can use it to display character right you're one of the minions falls out of the car

or the truck and then the boss and this gives you the antagonist driving it or in the passenger seat sees it and then it runs him over anyway because he's so driven to get his target like it tells you something about your antagonist that he does not care about human life whatsoever so much so that he would just like run over one of his old minions but also it just looks funny when it happens yeah um so i wanted to point that out it's yeah it's kind

of a gag you you can see a very like explicitly comical version of it in a robocop there's a scene where, towards the end, where one of, uh, one of Kurtwood Smith's gang, um, I think it's a guy who falls into the toxic waste. Uh, and he, uh, he's trying to, he's moving towards Kurtzmith's car and then courtsman kind of just runs him over. Um, and it's like played for, it's a little bit played for laughs. Uh, but it's, it's a thing. Anyway, I just, that came up on, on, as it's playing here. So I just wanted to remark. on that. One remark on Trevolta as well. It's just sort of, he's kind of in this revitalization of his career. I think what Pulp Fiction is two years earlier, um, Pulp Fiction's, I mean, he's in movies

in the 80s, but they're kind of like, he's in family-friendly movies. They're sort of like low rent, not big budget films. And Paul Fiction obviously kind of sends him like, you know, completely revitalized his career. He wins an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. I think he wins that Oscar that year for that movie. And then he's just like he's back in stuff all through the 90s. He kind of becomes a big name again. And this is one of his big films.

He obviously works with Wu again with Face Off, a movie I'm not sure really works for the podcast, but a movie I love and have very vivid memories of seeing as a kid. You know, I've never still seen it. You've never seen Face Off. No, I know, I know it's crazy. Yeah, but Jamel, you've never seen. Desperato. I've ever seen Desperado. I've ever seen Desperado. Okay. All right. Um, which I have it on my list of things to watch this week. Please watch it. I will,

I will watch Desperado this week. Uh, so Travolta, this is, and Travolta got praised for this performance here for being like a good kind of over the top movie villa. Um, so, but I will say, I will say that you can kind of, like these days Travolta, like I saw him in, uh, I rewatched recently Tony Scott's remake of the Taking Appellum one, two, three. Um, a movie, um, a movie that's fine. But Travolta plays the villain

in that version and he's kind of like a self-parity in a lot of ways and you can kind of see that beginning of that in this in this a bit

Travolta kind of like leaning into maybe some of his worst instincts. So it's sort of similar to how Al Pacito kind of really became you know,

Pacino. Right, right, right. After a scent of a woman. Yeah, too much yelling. So that's that's that's broken arrow. A fine, a fine hour and 40 minute to spend watching the movie. Yeah.

Samantha Mathis is good in this. I don't really know. She's not super. Yeah, I thought so too. She has a career. I just don't know a ton about her career. Yeah, but she was good. Oh, she was, she was in the Super Mario Bros. movie in 93, not the recent one, the one from our childhood with Bob Hoskins and John Likizamo. Oh, that's cool. That is Broken Arrow and that is our show. If you're not a subscriber, please subscribe are available on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and wherever else

podcast are found. I was recently informed that Stitcher Radio no longer exists. So we're not there. But we're everywhere else. If you subscribe, please leave a rating and a review so people can find the show. You can reach out to us over email at unclear and present feedback at fastmail.com. For this week and feedback, we have an email from Joe's feedback on our Hidden Assassin episode called generational changes. Hi, hello, Joe. I'm an ex-annial born in 1979 with three Gen Alpha children. I don't know what Gen Alpha is.

Is that just the youngest kids? As the youngest kids who are not conscious, I mean, I don't know. Your kids, I guess, are Gen Alpha. I suppose so. Yeah. But my kids are going to have a very weird relationship to media. Your kids are going to be like, basically have grown up in the 1990s. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. On your Hidden Assassin episode, you went down a very nostalgic rabbit hole of the comfort of the 90s with all the VHS tapes and now classic movies being released seemingly weekly. Then in your letter section, a writer mentioned about how in the 50s and 60s, if you missed a movie at the theater, it might be years before you could see it again. I had a recent revelation centered around both of these points. My kids, six, seven, and nine, I guess my oldest is Janelle for them, have grown up on Netflix and Disney Plus. They have favorite movies, but they tend to go in short phases and they never get obsessed with any movie for longer than a couple weeks. But then again, why should they? They have thousands of movies at their fingertips, so it's great.

something new, right? Putting aside that they are, of course, more interested in watching seven-minute episodes of Bluey, the 90-minute movies, ain't that the truth. I, naturally, have been comparing their childhood with mine in the 80s and 90s, when we had a drawer full of VHS tapes,

of movies recorded it from TV, which we watched dozens of times. For years, memorizing every line, I can still recite most or all of Back to the Future, Goonies, the Karate Kid, Airplane, Crocodile Dundee, and more, because I watch them countless times to define my childhood. I have specific memories attached to each of them.

And I often temporarily, I often temporarily, locate periods of my childhood based on which movies I was obsessed with at the time. And somehow I have been attaching some kind of virtue to this act of having a relatively small staple of movies that could be played at any time is if that's the way things are supposed to be. But my kids, they've gone through their frozen, Moana, and Canter, phases, but once the next movie drops, they have no interest in me visiting those older movies anymore, then they are done that, what's next? This was making me sad because

none of these movies are childhood defining for them, but recently I realized my boomer parents didn't have childhood movies or shows. They saw movies at the theater, then maybe never again. They didn't have tapes or recordings of anything. So while modern kids are the opposite of boomer kids and that they have the ability to watch anything and everything whenever they want, Gen X and Millennials, growing up in the mid-70s through the early 2000s, were actually unique in that we had access to rewatchable media at home for the first time ever, but it still wasn't all media nor on demand, which created a situation where we could have childhood-defining movies. So we were the first and maybe last generation for that to happen.

Overall, it was just a reminder of how quickly things change and how there's no right way to grow up because every generation is different. Looking forward to the next episode, thanks. Thank you, Joe. I have a related observation about how the absence of or the presence of on-demand media for just people basically born, people who grew up from like, you know, 2005 onwards doesn't just change a relationship to media, but changes a relationship to previous generations of Americans. I think one thing that is underrated and thinking about how generational knowledge is transferred

is just the fact of reruns on television. Yeah. And of being like, if you're television watching being structured entirely by what was on at the moment. Yeah. Right. And so it's like I have memories

of being like eight years old and watching reruns, like syndicated reruns of the in the heat of the night television. show and like designing women and mash well of course mash and all in the family and and you know samper and son colombo like all of these things that really run the gamut in terms of when they originally aired from like the 60s like sundays after church i'd go home and be cleaning my room and there'd be like the andy griffith show would be on right so i watch a lot of the indy griffith

store i watch a lot of matlock on like you know rainy saturday so it was just on Gilligan's Island The Twilight Zone There'd be these Twilight Zone marathons Over the holidays And yeah you would just You had nothing to do You just sit down and watch the Twilight Zone for two hours

And on the one hand It's like that's sort of funny But like it creates It creates like cross-generational knowledge Like I know things about pop culture Of the 50s and 60s and 70s Just because I watched I watched a lot of that stuff

And I've always sort of was interesting how, like, that doesn't really exist anymore. Yeah, sad. Another thing to be sad about. Maybe to be sad about it. I kind of wonder what the effect is going to be. Like, I wonder, I wonder, I don't know, I wonder about that. I think that's what's wrong with the world, Jamel today. Is that, no, I mean, you know, there's no, no one understands each other because we don't have the same, you bring up, you reference Colombo, kids, they don't know what that means anymore, you know? I will say there's the other element of this is that you had the people making media

for like kids in the 90s where people who had grown up right in the 60s and 70s and maybe even have been professionally trained by people who had grown up in the 40s and 50s. So I always think about this with like Tiny Tune Adventures or. Or all those like, you know, Warner Brothers cartoons in the 90s, but you're like heavy on references. It's like Clark Gable and Orson Wells and like, you know, the Hollywood are the 30s and 40s. Part of this is because of the Warner Brothers properties.

But I think also just like that isn't another way of like trans, like, you know, cross-generational knowledge transfer so that like you watch, you know, you watch pinky in the brain obsessively as a kid. And then you see... Right. And then you see... Or some... Yeah, you see Citizen Kane and film...

In a film class in college. You're like, oh, I know who that guy is. Right. And the animaniacs were the Marx brothers. Right. Why don't they do that anymore? They've got to bring back this stuff. It's interesting to me that that like that like kind of mechanism for transmitting, you know,

culture through references. The Simpsons has tons of those references, tons and tons and tons of references to older popular and culture. The first time I, speaking of Citizen Kane, the first time I'd ever heard the word Citizen Kane was an episode of The Simpsons when they go to a planet Hollywood. And Homer goes says, hey, that's the cane from Citizen Kane. And Lisa says, there was no Cain and Citizen Cain. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's very funny. But yeah, like, yeah, a lot of those jokes and, you know, the writers were all pretty

smart and, like, kind of like sneaking those references in because they made him feel clever and, you know, that stuff, you know, I think, you know, it had its, it had its place. Yeah. Okay. Episodes come out every two weeks, and so we will see you in two weeks with. a movie we mentioned on this podcast with City Hall directed by Harold Baker

a brief plot synopsis the accidental shooting of a boy in New York leads to an investigation by the deputy mayor and unexpectedly far-reaching consequences at stars Al Pacino Whoah! John Cusack, Bridget Fonda,

Danny Iello, Martin Landau, and David Pamer. Also, Richard Schiff is in there. John Slattery, a lot of people in this movie. So we'll check that out. It's available for rent or purchase on Amazon and Apple or iTunes, rather. So you should check that out.

And on our Patreon, we watched actually not a mid-century movie. We watched Jay Edgar, Clint Eastwoods, 2011, Jay Edgar Hoover Biopic. We had Beverly Gage author of G-Man, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book. It's not really a biography, Hoover. It's just a book about Hoover on as a guest. we've released an episode in the main feed, so you should be able to listen to it. And if you like that, please subscribe for the Patreon for $5 every month. You get two episodes on, generally speaking, the movies of the Cold War.

And I think that is it for this week. So thank you for listening. And for John Gantz, I'm Jamal Bowie, and this is unclear and pressing danger. We'll see you next time. Thank you.