Unclear and Present Danger - Deep Cover (feat. Adam Serwer)

Episode Date: September 2, 2022

Jamelle, John and special guest Adam Serwer of The Atlantic watch one of the great crime movies of the 1990s — Bill Duke’s “Deep Cover” — and talk about post-Cold War anxiety over the drug trade, Black “tough on crime” politics, and the war on drugs.Connor Lynch produced this episode. Artwork by Rachel Eck.Contact us!Follow us on Twitter!John GanzJamelle BouieLinks from the episode!New York Times front-page for April 15, 1992James Forman’s book on the Black politics of the early 1990s, “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America.”“THE 1992 CAMPAIGN: Candidates' Records; Four Years of Bush’s Drug War: New Funds but an Old Strategy”

The great thing about life on the street is you know how it's going to be. It's always the same. It's always getting worse. Off of a vista! On these streets, one color rules, green. It's not 10 kilos we want, we want 20. You're taking a lot away for a guy we hardly know, John. Where are you moving this stuff?

He's going to get you busted. No, I won't. On these streets, nothing's what it's. seems to be. Is that on bust? Yeah. Or who is he? No.

Listen, John here got busted, but he kept his mouth shut. On these streets, he'd be the perfect criminal if he wasn't the perfect cop. There's no such thing as an American anymore. No blacks, no whites, no nothing. It's just rich people and poor people. Larry Fishburn. Don't blow your cover. Deep cover.

Come on. Welcome to episode 23 of 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, and I'm working on a book about American politics in the early 1990s. We also have a guest. My friend, and a great writer, Adam Serwer, who is currently a staff writer for The Atlantic and also the author of The Cruelty is the Point, the past, present, and future of Trump's America, now out in paperback. Adam, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. So today we are covering one of the great films of the 1990s, the 1992 crime thriller Deep Cover, directed by Bill Duke, who you will probably recognize from films like Predator and Menace to Society, and starring Lawrence Fispern, Jeff Goldblum, Clarence, Williams III, Victoria Dillard and Charles Martin Smith, among many other actors, black actors from the 90s who you will surely recognize if you have any familiarity with 90s film and 90s black film. Here is a short plot synopsis.

Police officer Russell Stevens applies for a special anti-drug squad, which targets the highest boss of cocaine delivery to L.A., the Colombian foreign minister's nephew. Russell works its way up from the bottom under cover until he reaches the boss. If you want to watch the film before you listen to the conversation, which is what I always recommend, it is available for rental on iTunes and Amazon. I think it is available for streaming on the Criterion channel. And if it isn't, you can just pick up the disc from Criterion. It's a recent remaster or recent restoration. And it looks great and has a lot of great supplemental material.

So I strongly recommend that criteria in disk if you are inclined to pick it up, and if you have a Blu-ray player. Before we get to the meet of our conversation, let's look at the New York Times page for the day of release, April 15th, 1992. John, please take it away. Okay, let's see what we got here. So there's some things here that are very relevant to our interests here. Sanctions on Libya begin to take hold as deadline passes. as UN seeks full isolation. Air links cut after Tripoli fails to serve their suspects and jetliner bombings.

So this was after the bombing of the jetliner by Libyan intelligence or was discovered that Lindyan intelligence blew up a Pan Am jetliner in 1988. So this is the application of sanctions on Gaddafi's Libya. Cabinet and Russia won't step down as West Watchers, ministers and deputies compromise. There was tension between Boris Yeltsin's new post-Soviet government in Russia and his cabinet and the parliament. Peru's path still terror-filled as rebels defy a crackdown. And this is the main photo above the fold, which shows police interrogating subjects. They're hunting after shining path, Maoist revolutionary group that was active and extremely violent group in Peru.

Union agrees to end strike a caterpillar. This was, I think it was a, yes, a UAW strike at Caterpillar in the 90s, early 90s. Caterpillar had been really squeezing workers, starting to move parts of its production abroad to right-to-work states, and were threatening on bringing in replacement workers, but this strike ended. Chief says panel backs court's use of a genetic test, times account, and error. Report urges strict standards, but no moratorium on DNA fingerprinting. This was the early days of DNA testing as being admissible in court. That's pretty much, that's almost all the headlines. You know, there's a lot of things that have to do with the sort of, I don't know, we've talked about like the mopping up operations after the Cold War.

So you have Sondera-Luminoso and Peru and Gaddafi as being kind of like, you know, a last holdout against America. Well, not to say this, not to compliment him too much when it last holdout against American imperialism. I'm not a Qaddafi fan. I just want to make that clear. But yeah, so there's a, you know, a lot of the kind of minor conflicts or, you know, side shows of the Cold War are still taking place or playing out here. And also the changing course of American society and labor, which, you know, the country had already gone through a great deal of deindustrialization. the 80s, the 70s and 80s, and in the 90s, it would just really accelerate even more. So yeah, an interesting front page.

There's a picture of Nathan Lane and Faith Prince and Guys and Dolls on Broadway in the middle of Front Page. And just to tell your listeners how old I am, I went to that revival of Guys and Dolls in the 90s. So I'm an old man. I remember the ads for it. My only, the only thing, you know, I did not go to any plays as a child in the 90s. I did go see Mousetrapped, starring Nathan Lane, a movie that, like, 10-year-old me thought was the height of comedy. Just, you know, because we're about a week removed at this point from Dark Brandon's student loan forgiveness plan. Just want to note quickly that there's a headline here.

City University, New York tuition plan, a big jumping cost, but a free semester. and the City University of New York is planning a major tuition increase next fall, but the rise is accompanied by a promise that a freshman make it to their senior year that may attend their last semester before graduation free. I mean, the student loan revolution, you might call it kind of really begins in the 80s, but it picks up steam in the 1990s. I think this is a good example of what that looks like. States, cities, you know, governments pulling back on their funding for higher education,

education and shifting the cost burden to individuals, part of the, you might say, neoliberalization of higher education. And it works out great. No problems there. All's well that ends well for that. Some quick production notes, as I've come to do for each of these movies. Won't spend too much time here, but I think it's always important to have a bit of context for the important people involved in this film.

So the director, Bill Duke, got into Hollywood as an actor. If you have spent literally any amount of time watching movies, you have probably seen Bill Duke in a film. As I mentioned, he was in Predator. He was also in Commando in the 70s, which is going to get a start. He was in Car Wash, an American Gigolo, the Paul Schrader movie. He is an Action Jackson with Predator co-star, Carl Weathers.

he's in menace to society. He's in a lot of stuff and so on and so on. He began directing in the 80s, directing television. I was watching one of the supplemental materials on the criterion disc for the cover is just an interview with Bill Duke about his career. And he mentioned that he was the first black director on Dallas, which seems like it was probably interesting to do. He begins directing features in the 80s as well in his first film.

The Killing Floor is a really brilliant and nuanced look. look at a race and labor in early 20th century Chicago. I highly recommend it. It's a terrific film. The movie rocks. His next film is Arranging Harlem, which is an adaptation of a novel by Chester Himes. I love that movie. It's very good.

A deep cover is Duke's third film. And a thing I learned on another piece of supplemental material is that it was originally slated as a sequel to Internal Affairs, a Richard Gere and Andy Garcia crime picture that was, that it come out in 1990. That project fell apart, but the script for Maine was adapted into what would become deep cover. Also worth saying that Bill Duke's directing career continued and he directed some other crime pictures like Hoodlum. He also directed Sister Act 2. So the guy, the guy has range as director. As for the stars, Lawrence Fishburn and Jeff Goldblum are pretty much at this point like Hollywood Stowards. Like they're not huge, but they're people you will

see in movies on the regular basis. Fishburn was in Apocalypse Now in the 70s. He worked a ton, usually credited it as Larry Fishburn. Throughout the 80s, he had notable roles in the color purple, school days, red heat, a very unclear and present danger adjacent movie, King of New York, and Boys in the Hood, of course, where he gave another star-making performance. That was a big movie for him. And we could spend a whole episode discussing Fishburn's career after deep cover, but it suffices to say that the end of the 90s as big a star as any with The Matrix in his role as Morphe as another kind of, you know, huge career-making role.

Jeff Goldblum, likewise is an actor whose career goes back to the 1970s. You can spot him in Death Wish as a hoodlum. He's also in California Split and Annie Hall. He had a meaty role in the 78 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and was in movies throughout the 80s, the big chill, the right stuff, the adventures at Buck River, Banzai. And he was obviously in The Fly, a movie I saw far too young, which was one of the many things that has ruined my brain over the years. The 90s also great for Goldblum. He is in Jurassic Park. obviously, which I feel like that's where he establishes kind of the canonical Jeff

Guilipleum persona. And then he's an Independence Day, The Lost World, lots of stuff. So those are kind of the three, I think, big people worth pointing out for this movie. Like I said, it's full of stars, full of actors you'll recognize from films throughout the 90s. Clarence Williams, the third, for example, you might recognize from Tales from the Hood. He's sort of like the narrator, maestro of that movie. Anyway, Adam. I'm surprised you didn't go with Amuneguji Saka. I feel like that is the canonical Clarence Williams film.

Like if you were a kid in the 80s, that's probably the first time you saw him. Adam, do you have a history with deep cover? Have you seen this before? I actually have not seen this before, but I laughed as soon as I started watching it because this movie is like, it's sort of in the New Jack City vein of a drug thriller that is actually hiding a critique of the drug war, except this one is much more clear that it's not hiding the critique at all. I think with New Jack City, it's a little different because, you know, it's much more

of a like movie movie, and this is like a little bit more in the vein of sort of an artsy film. There's a lot of like 70s movie devices in this film, even though it takes place in the 90s. You could stage this as a play because the scenes are sort of so distinct and shot in one place. And also the actors are sort of all these, you know, even though it's like a city drug film, what you have is all these actors who are known, these sort of black character actors who are known for, you know, being on stage and stuff like that. People like Roder Guinevere Smith and Lawrence Fishburne comes up to the stage as well. And also, you know, you would recognize these guys from like Spike Lee movies.

If you know what to look for, you know you're not actually getting a flashy Hollywood New Jack City and are probably getting a much more sort of poetic artsy film just based on the casting alone, but also based on the intro, which is sort of a very weird and sort of disturbing shot of the inside of a crack house. The intro is interesting in that regard because it is sort of like the music, which is like loud and bass heavy, I think situates you like this is going to be a kind of flashy movie. But in that scene, those images you talk about are like the film saying explicitly that it's

not going to be exactly what you anticipate it being. The basics of this story are that Lawrence Fishburn plays an undercover officer. He is recruited. in the recruitment scene, there's a lot to talk about there. He's recruited to be this undercover officer to help take down this drug lord. What he discovers in the course of this

is that, in fact, the government is working with a guy at the top of the drug trade on the West Coast and that all of his sacrifice and pain has basically been for nothing. And so he decides to kind of both try to become rich and take it upon himself

to do something about this. And so the movie is sort of like his, Lawrence Fishburn's kind of like journey into the underworld and journey sort of out of the underworld and it rules it's a fucking great movie the movie starts with sort of Lawrence Fishburn's dad being killed in a failed holdup and he's like I'm never going to be that guy and from that moment you know oh well I guess we I guess we know what's going to happen in this movie right I mean it doesn't the movie it doesn't it's actually I feel like it's it's it's the film is a as a can demonstrate the virtues of actually backing away from subtlety because nothing about

it is subtle whatsoever like a lots of stuff is telegraph but but nonetheless um the power of the performances the dynamism of the filmmaking i mean you i love new jack city as much as you know anyone can love new jack city but deep cover bill duke directs the hell out of it um in in sort of like every way you can in a way that like so much of this kind of genre movie. They're not like pedestrian, but they're not nearly as dynamic as this is. But again, everything emphasizing kind of like this is, there's nothing subtle here. And there's no, there's no sort of like subtext to anything happening on screen here.

It's all sort of like directly in front of you. John, history with the movie, thoughts on the movie. I watched this in high school. And I think the reason I watched this in high school is probably because I knew. that the closing credit soundtrack was Snoop Dog's first song with Dr. Dre, which was a great song. And I remember liking in high school a lot and thinking it was a lot of fun. But then watching it now, I was like, wow, this movie is really off the wall in a certain way. I mean, I, it's like a film noir movie in the sense that it has a very cynical worldview, has very lurid, dark

milieu that it's exploring. It has this voiceover of the character. and it's sort of a B movie in a way like it's kind of like shot on a low budget on a relatively modest budget but it's like dealing with the underbelly of society and a kind of subversive or you know in certain ways that are not like the official story of all of these things perhaps so I thought that was really interesting I mean it felt like really in the tradition of film noir movies I'm a huge fan of the Killing Floor, which I think is just like a movie with amazing politics. Like, aesthetically, it's great, but the politics of the movie are very intelligent about race

and labor in around the time of World War I in a stockyard in Chicago. And this movie is like, I think politically, Killing Floor is quite left wing, you know, pro-labor movie. Most of, you know, people who like it. It was recommended to me, but I think people who were literal. I mean this movie is not this movie has a certain kind of leftist politics in a certain way which we can talk about you know there's a lot of movies around this time from black directors that had radical themes but were sort of more in I you might say black nationalist tradition like in there's that in singleton's movies and in Spike Lee movies but this is kind of approaching things from a different different angle. I would say, but there is kind of a radical politics, but just not maybe in that tradition. I was wondering what you guys thought about the political stuff in the movie and kind of how it compares to other movies of its era, like Spike Lee's films.

Well, the major takeaway that this movie wants you to have is that George H.W. Bush is friends with drug dealers. I mean, I'm joking with that literally a plot point in the film is that the drug dealer that they're after is connected to a politician and he really runs the drug trade. And also he, like, goes golfing with George Bush. That's one of the lines that they have in the movie. I mean, like, look, like, this movie is basically if you took Nino Brown's big business monologue from New Jack City and made it into a movie, right? Like, the point of the movies that the war on drugs is pointless.

And it's just a way for the DEA to get lots of the federal government to get lots of money to not deal with a problem and to ruin black people's lives. like that that is that is more or less the point of the film it's radical in the sense that you know like 15 years later or whatever you know the wire happens everybody's like wow this is an incredible argument to make but there weren't other people making it you know years before not that's not to take anything away from the wire which is a great series but it's just it's sort of an example that this conversation was happening contemporaneously despite its absence in what we would consider mainstream politics. And part of the reason for its absence is Dukakis got walloped so bad in 1988 over the crime and the drug issue

that around this time when this movie comes out, Brooklyn is running explicitly on tough-on-crime themes. And there's actually, I think, what you might be interpreted as a reference to Willie Horton, where one of them says, you know, we need to get these arrests to show some black. We need to get some arrests, and the arrests need to be black. because that's what the Republicans like, because they can use it to scare white people in the suburbs. And one of the other characters is like, well, I got a black, I got a Jew, and they're all Democrats. And they're all Democrats. But she's just like, I laughed out loud.

It was a very funny line. Me too. Of course, he doesn't quite say it in that PG-13 language. But, you know, we'll probably have to get explicit later. you know, I'm assuming this is not a family podcast, but, I mean, it can be if people wanted to, but I mean, it is making the critique of the drug war, which is now standard, but at a time when it is really considered a radical critique and it's not present in mainstream liberalism. I think also that Duke is channeling some of the specifically black politics of the early 90s

as well, kind of the Clarence Williams character in my mind is very, very much represents This is sort of like, you might say like communitarian sort of like critique of the drug war and of drug dealers specifically, sort of like, it's not just that this stuff is illegal or bad or harmful, but that's particularly harming the black community. And like racial solidarity requires that you do not do this if you care about the black community. And that kind of concern with how the black community specifically or black community specifically are suffering under the drug war beyond just incarceration but kind of like a moral

corrosiveness is I think part of the part of what Duke is preoccupied with in this movie because it comes through in so much from that opening scene where this isn't the war on drugs but it's sort of like showing like the family unit being like dissolved by sort of like this contact with criminality and then going into you get other examples of exactly that not these aren't black characters, but this Hispanic woman and her son are one of the, one of the subplots in the movie is kind of what happens to them in the context of all of this. What makes that, I think, not just like, it's more than a critique of the system in that it's saying the drug war corrupts everything, but also drugs corrupt everything.

Right. The implication is that Lawrence Fishburn's father is robbing the store for drug money, and that results in him abandoning his son because he dies. And so the drug war is a corrupting force. It corrupts the government. It corrupts police. But drugs themselves also corrupt individuals. Yeah, I mean, there's parts that I guess are not conservative, but there's an interesting

part of the movie where Lawrence Fishburn is getting cynical about his role as undercover officer and his handling agent, the white FBI agent or whatever. D. No, they're D.EA. Yeah. And he, he kind of gives him a pep talk about, you know, about crack babies and saying, have you seen a crack baby? There's millions of them.

So Washington Post op-ed. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. And it's kind of like an actual scene where he gets like ideologically interpolated back into the, into the program. And he's like, well, I actually find that argument to be convincing. And he like, it kind of keeps, keeps him moving. But I think what you see in a lot of American crime movies, which I think is like what

American crime movies are always kind of playing. with is like what's the difference between the exterior society and the criminal society and this movie makes that point very explicitly by showing at the top they're identical because Bush is friends with this high-ranking Latin American official who's behind the drug, you know, cartels and stuff like that. And I think that there is just like, yeah, the corruption is an extremely good term because I think that the movie tries to point out that there's really no dividing walls between

these different parts of society anymore. I mean, Jeff Goldblum begins is he a lawyer? He has some professional job at the beginning. He's kind of, you know, like a, as a respectable professional. Can we talk about that scene for a second? Because that scene has a lot going on. Like the scene when we first need Jeff

Goldblum is hilarious. He's at home with his wife? He's at home with his wife and his wife is like super blonde. Yes. And so, super well and he's like but and I'm kind of more like are they trying to make like Jeff go is he supposed to be like Swedish or something no they're very explicit like about he's Jewish yeah and that he's very specific that he's Jewish he like he went to like some socialist summer camp in upstate New York or some shit like that like it's very like

he and then of course he has like a taste for black sex workers secretly he's cheating on his super blonde like there's a lot of um he makes reference to like Jews being slaves in Egypt like there's a lot going on with this like he is like a kind of corrupt Jewish liberal yeah you know what I mean like in any weird civil like perverse uh rendition of the civil rights alliance that is Lawrence Fishburn and Jeff Coleman in this movie he's like the perverse interpretation of like the Jewish civil rights liberal where he's like you know he's like kind of progressive but also kind of racist right and he's not sure where he involves in American society like he's like i'm white but i'm also like i mean he is he's racist but he's also like

feels this attraction or solidarity with the black characters in the movies and doesn't feel he like he feels like slightly alienated by the white society or obviously doesn't feel totally at home in it and like views the square society that he's kind of successfully integrated in as as like hypocritical and still feels like he wants to be involved with something more real or whatever It's interesting how his character is racialized as people say now because he's like not he's not just white like the movie makes pains to be like he's a Jew and he slowly goes from like his like whole aesthetic changes like he starts like slicking back his hair and he wears like a leather trench and he starts like smoking so it's it's it's if you want to see like evil Jeff Polk this is the movie for you I know speaking that I when he were like oh I've got a way that's like when they were like oh I've got this new drug that's better than cocaine I really thought they were going to go with and it's meth but it was like it's like a fake sign a fake cocaine right whatever that's

it was it's a it's a they make some synthetic drug which is a mixture of cocaine and heroin or something like that right it was it was a little bit like that see those scenes from a walk hard the Dewey Cox story where Tim Robertson's like, I got this drug. It'll make you feel good. Is it addictive? Not at all. Does it have any?

Does it give you a hangover? Not one bit. No, so the thing about Goldblum's character, and this is something that I think is throughout the movie, both visveh, him and Fisburn and then the D.A.

Chief in Fisburn. So this is the line early on in the movie where Goldblum says the Fisburn, how come I like bawling black chicks so much and Fishburn's character says I don't know, maybe you feel like you're fucking

a slave. And throughout this movie and I think this is like a Bill Duke kind of like, you know, racial critique happening is like there's a way in which the black characters are like vicarious vessels for the white characters.

The DEA chief is clearly living vicariously through Fish Burns character. He wants to hear the details. He wants to know everything. It's so wants everything to be alert as possible. In the same way, Goldman's character seems to be living vicariously through all of this. And there is part of the drug work critique here seems to be also not just that this is corrupting, if this is bad policy or whatnot, what not, but also sort of like observing

something about the way that white America is consuming black criminality, or at least images of black criminality, and how that is as much a part of this as anything else. Which, you know, one could argue that this movie is a part of, and also the music of the time, which the movie includes, is a part of. But I guess it has a slightly subversive note about that. There's, like, the lurid, voyeuristic attraction of the white characters to it. I mean, and Jeff Goldblum, like, wants to get involved for reasons that are not totally clear because it seems like he has money, you know, like he seems he has a stable life. Like, why is he chasing after this drug dealer, you know, drug dealing life? Jeff Goldblum is missing, feeling like a real man.

Right, right, exactly. That's his relationship to black culture and the drug trade through the movie is like he can put on this masculinity. In this like sort of vaguely homerotic way, he's like, he makes it clear that this is what he's doing with hanging out with Lawrence Fishmore. He's like, you're like a beast. You're like a magnificent beast. Yeah. And they're like weird. Yeah.

Weirdly. I just like, I love how, like. Like, I'm not going to lie, like, Lawrence Fishburn is acting his ass off in this movie. And Jeff Goldblum is doing something completely different, which is he is, like, doing Jeff Goldblum to, like, turning the Jeff Goldblum up, dial up to, like, 10%. And it's amazing. I think that Jeff Goldblum may have actually been on cocaine, which made it all the real. I think, yeah, that's, there is that, that he's obviously. or some kind of masculinity that he doesn't have access to.

I love my favorite character in this movie as an actor and performance is that is like the mid-level drug dealer Felix Barbosa. That actor just puts on a very wild performance and is a blast to me. For reasons unclear, he humiliates Jeff Goldblum's character. And that's like a key point in the drama that things start to turn is that Jeff Goldblum like needs to avenge himself of being of being humiliated in this fashion it's not just like him after money he's he's he's in search of in search of respect or a certain type of recognition or counter recognition if you're denied the recognition of society it has its own like

adverse forms of recognition that it can confer in terms of like you know being being brave or masculine or like tough and so on and so forth so he kind of like abjures for whatever reason the suburban normal path of recognition and goes into the it goes into the underworld but I guess the movie kind of tries to point out that there's a deeply hypocritical thing going on here because some people are you know like once you get to the very top the the line between criminality and and being conventional or, you know, mainstream or whatever is not existent. And, you know, well, it's a question of power.

Right. Yeah, it's whoever is at the very top, those sorts of distinctions stop making a difference. And that's also kind of almost populous thing of this era, which is, you know, the people on top are real crooks and so on and so forth. I mean, since this is, you know, this is a podcast. about post-Cold War politics, it is worth putting this all in the context of both the wind down of conflict with the Soviet Union, but then the winding up of sort of conflict along within sort of the traditional American sphere of influence.

And so, you know, the political context for this film, 1992, 91 when it was filmed, 1990 when the script was written about that time, is sort of the ramping up of the drug war by President George H.W. Bush. I'm reading right now a piece from 1992, kind of middle of the campaign piece that is about how, you know, the federal anti-drug budget doubled since Bush took office. There's obviously the intervention in Panama. There is the capture of Norie. There's all this stuff happening with regards to the drug war and the attempt, I don't know if it's explicit, but it's sort of like to situate the war on drugs and the war on drug traffickers as kind of like the next great sort of like political military struggle in the United States. So now that we've vanquished our foreign enemy, we have to turn on tension back to our domestic adversaries, among them being, you know. Black people.

Well, I think it's important to remember, like, it's like a, it's, the Cold War was, was not exclusively a foreign thing, right? It was also a domestic thing. The drug war takes a sort of cultural political place of the Cold War in sort of American politics, which is then replaced by the war on terror later, where it's a way to have both a foreign enemy and a reason to engage in certain forms of repression at home. And, and, you know, I guess, you know, Part of the weirdness of our era is that we don't have that really. Like bin Laden's dead, Zawahari's dead. The sort of war on Islamo-fascism thing is not primarily at the center of the right-wing imagination anymore. Now it's primarily a war against domestic Americans in name only. Like it's the internal enemies. And everybody. Yeah, liberals and everybody who doesn't, you know, agree with, you know, Donald Trump on everything.

But, but, yeah, I mean, I think you're right that, I mean, part of what's happening here is like a transition between, you know, the Cold War ending and the drug war becoming that domestic, that political thing that justifies a certain kind of. Which makes it all the more striking, as you pointed out, Adam, that this kind of critique emerges basically at the exact. same time. Obviously, the drug war has been going on for years before then, before now. But it is, it is nonetheless striking that this is, I mean, this is not an indie picture. This is a Hollywood picture by a mainstream director. Bill Duke is not someone who is like shut out of mainstream Hollywood. Making this case that, you know, this conflict we're embarking on that we have embarked on is, is complete and total bullshit and, and will do nothing to solve. the problem of drugs such that it is and will enrich like the worst possible people on the

planet. It comes close but stops short at the kinds of, I don't know if you want to call them conspiracy theories because there's maybe something to them. The sorts of things about, you know, the CIA being involved in cocaine importation because of Iran-Contra and so on and so forth. It doesn't quite say that the government is, well, in order for him to raise money to move up, in his deep cover operation to get closer to the high-ranking members of the organization. He, they just tell him to deal drugs. They're like, we can't provide this kind of money. You just, so he's like, you're a drug dealer, deal drugs.

And then they tell him, spend money, be flashy, act like a drug dealer. And the movie, you know, makes a lot of this and is fueled by this, is that he just becomes a drug dealer. And the government is the person telling him to become a drug dealer. As you guys said, not terribly. all the time this movie, but it's interesting that, you know, basically the government is a person that makes him into a powerful drug dealer and puts him in this role. And the only thing that he does differently is he makes a decision not to go along with the system. And he kind of makes a political move or at the end by giving, you know, the video of the drug lord who's friends with George W. Bush at his

trial and makes deal of it. But he's left at the end of the movie. This is like where, it's kind of what I like to call 90s leftism, which is like based on these kind of like anti-establishment gestures, but has no movement behind it. Like at the end of the movie, he's like, I did this move, but I don't know where I am now. Like, where do I exist within this system? I'm without solidarity. I have no movement. Like, it's not like he, he's just sort of alienated, isolated individual at the end of it, which, you know, I think spoke to the kind of feelings of hopelessness about politics at that time or transformative politics at that time, which was just like, yeah, you can like make these gestures and point out that it's messed up, but ultimately

there's very little you can do. And the public, like, people won't rally to you. And so he ends up, he ends up isolated, which I thought was an interesting instead of like being kind of like reintegrated into some other social movement or society, you know. I actually think it's a little bit of a cop out. I mean, when you think about noir films, usually the protagonist goes out and some sort of, he has some sort of ignoble death. And in this way, not only does he get away with it all. And so to end up with a happy ending, I mean, he, you know, he ends up with the money launderer and like they take in the kid who his mom was a crackhead. They reconstruct a family. You know what I'm saying? So, and then he gets to, he gets to tell the federal government, fuck you,

in front of Congress on national television and screw over the DEA on their deal that they had together and then just gets to like walk out of that. And so he walks out of everything. He walks out of everything he's done and he gets to live like happily at Raft. And that is very un-noyar.

Like it's a bit of a cop-out to give him that happy ending. Is it happy? He seems like kind of like he's pretty insecure at the end. I mean, he definitely gets away with it. Yeah. I think it's definitely happy. And I'll tell you why.

Because you have, you have, you know, the cop who's like, oh, you know, I'm a Christian. And when a Christian sins, he has to atone. And so he has sinned the entire movie. And the implication is that he can, he is atoning for what he's done, which like, he can't really do. You know, I mean, he's, he's, like, murdered a lot of people at this point. He's sold a lot of drugs.

But, but the point is, you know, he, it, noir is usually end in, like, a really bleak way, like traditionally. And this one, it doesn't end in a hopeful way. in terms of the system like this is the movie is very clear that there's probably no solving this but for the the protagonist i mean he wins right um he gets his soul back yeah he he he implicates the racist d a agent he tells the u.s government to fuck off and and now everybody knows george hw bush is friends as a drug dealer so you know and then he walks off with a family like it is it is it is a bit too neat well that's that is sort of the 90s left as i'm talking about which

you can also see in sneakers where it's like, you know, you can still be an individual, you be an individual, you tell the system to fuck off, and then you go off and do your own thing. And you don't have to, like that's sort of a typical, like, it's almost like a new left thing, which is like, I'm not, I'm going to tell the bureaucracy that they're, I'm going to tell the man, the bureaucracy and all the big shots that they're really the real. drug dealers here, man, but like, and then you kind of are just like go off and live your life happily ever after secure an American society in some way or another. Like, but you've made your noble, you've made your noble statement against the system. And then you've returned to middle

class life in some way. So yeah, I think that that's very different from the politics of, well, the killing floor ends on a kind of down note where the union kind of gets busted at the end. And it was made during the 80s, you know, during a period of rampant union busting, but it was very like showed that the, the labor, organized labor had lots of challenges and, and difficulties, but, you know, it was a very pro-labor movie. And this movie is like a radical critique or radicalism, but without a movement and without, like, an infrastructural anything. It's like work within the system, I feel like as a huge post-new left 90s, I guess, I

ideal is like, I'm going to work within the system and reform it from the inside. How does this movie answer that? Does it saying, yes, you can? And he does do that and he's able to successfully do that. Are you saying even that he makes a kind of gesture, but it's really not going to change anything? Part of me wants to say, you know, it is quite norish. Even though he kind of gets away with it, it is ending on it.

There's something futile. I guess existentially, as you're saying, it's good for him. And he kind of makes Christian amends. but I'm wondering how much does it is it really going to, does the movie suggest it's going to change? I mean, my read is that when he, you know, he unveils the tape, he says it's been sent to the media,

but the lawmakers are immediately like, we got to shut this down. Right. The one lawmaker is like, I want this tape seeds. And so my sense is that, you know, the movie doesn't really think this is going to make much of a difference in the scheme of things. It really is for Fispern's characters,

edification. as sort of a human being, that he is, he's able to do this. And he gets over his traumatic childhood, witnessing his father being killed. He recreates a family. He kind of recognizes this father figure at the last minute in the, in the person of this police officer who you were mentioning have this kind of communitarian black politics. Yeah. Yeah.

I think that the might hit that's, that, that actually, was not expecting Clarence Williams's character to be that character. It's kind of interesting that he is the most sympathetic character in the film because you almost kind of expected, and maybe I should not have because this is the early 90s, but I almost kind of expected him to be like an extremely racist cop, like black cop, you know what I'm saying? Like I expected him to be a foil to Lawrence Fishburn, not in the way that he was, which is just sort of, he has a moral core and he's like genuinely seeking a sort of community rather than, you know, trying to be the kind of person who would impress the DEA.

I assume that that was what his character was going to end up being. And instead, you know, he is the person who really is trying to, he's incorruptible, ultimately, to the point of sacrificing his life to prevent a drug trade in a market system that is simply like, it will make no difference. If he does anything, and he's even told, like, when he's calling for backup, and he says they're a diplomatic place, they're like, well, we basically won't be able to do anything. He's like, well, I'm not going to let them get away with it. He loses his life because he is an idealist.

He's the most idealistic person in the film, which I was not really expecting based on his, the initial character set up for him. And I don't necessarily think that that character, like, if you were making this movie today, I'm not so sure that that would be the character in whom you would nest those communitarian politics. I don't mean, sorry, just to clarify, I don't mean in which if I were making the movie, I don't know that I would make the cop the communitarian. I mean, I just mean, if someone was making that movie today, I'm not sure if the politics of today would be conducive to that, that kind of character in the same way. And that's, that's what makes, I mean, for me,

that's what makes Clarence Williams character so interesting in the context of the politics to the movie because it feels a very specifically early 1990s thing. That these new black cops are like a representation of like a hopeful change within the system whereas like now people don't feel that way. Right. And also sort of how that character alludes to what is happening in larger black politics in the moment, which is sort of like there's this concern with crime which, you know, in today's politics we hear constantly sort of like black voters are concerned with crime,

et cetera, et cetera. but as has been pointed out often today and it was certainly the case then that concern of crime wasn't necessarily a concern with punitiveness it wasn't necessarily about sort of like putting the um the boot on people's faces it was as much about trying to figure out ways sort of like improve the community through investment through jobs and that kind of thing and so like that that Clarence William character we don't get that much from but like the the sense I get just from the from how Williams plays it, the characterization, is that to me it feels like this allusion to this

sort of tough on, this like black tough on crime politics, which is at once, wants to clean up the streets, but doesn't like only want to clean up the streets. It's like that's not the entire, you know, horizon of what the vision is. I have, I have Foreman's book on my desk right now locking up our own, which is sort of like, yeah, phenomenal book that's all about this this era of black politics and black and black tough on crime politics. I think, you know, I think it's interesting because when you look at Clarence Williams' character, you know, the first time we see him, obviously, he's busting Lawrence Fishburn, who's been given up by Roger Gunaver Smith.

But, you know, he, his ultimate goal is not, I want to put Lawrence Fishburn in jail forever. Like, he is like, I want you to walk away. I want you to make the decision to walk away from the drug trade because that is the right thing to do. He wants to save his soul in like a very explicit way. He doesn't want to simply, you know, he doesn't want an excuse to shoot him down on the street. Yeah, I mean, I know from doing research about L.A. around the time of the riots, you know, was that the high crime situation kind of really, even though they didn't do a very good job controlling it, re-legitimize the LAPD because a lot of community leaders were desperate and we're like, well, look, the situation is so bad.

We know the LAPD is racist. We know Gates is racist. But what choice do we have? You know, this situation has become so, you know, terrible. We have to basically cooperate with this because we don't really know what else to do. And you read, if you read the black press of that time, there's editorial. would basically say that. They're like, look, I'm not, I'm a huge critic of the LAPD. I'm a huge critic of Gates, but like I just don't, like, we have very few friends in this, in this fight. And

the only visible state apparatus that we can see that is doing something about this is the police. And, you know, obviously in counterproductive in ways. But, you know, the cops, you know, who are, who were their own political force got an enormous amount of boost. out of this because suddenly they said, look, you know, people are, are asking for us. And then it sort of allowed them to, you know, pursue more and more aggressive behavior until that finally exploded. But yeah, this, the high crime period was was a political boon to police, even though you would think it showed a lack of capacity to control the situation and incompetence. In fact, it made them appear to be absolutely necessary part of the system.

So they kind of pursued theatrical policing of extreme, you know, militarized raids that made them look very tough, but were actually not very effective because the festering, not to say that they were intentionally allowing it, but maybe they kind of were. I think they definitely let the L.A. riots get out of control. the festering situation benefited them politically. It made them look like an absolutely central part of society. And it convinced, you know, even parts of the communities that they were brutalizing that they were a necessary part of the society. There's also just a weird time in police politics because you had the police very strongly supportive of gun control because there was a feeling that they were outgun by, to put

bluntly, people like Lawrence Fishburn's character in this movie. And so, you know, there was, the police were politically conservative in this era, but they were also politically much more bipartisan than they are now. There were a lot more Democrats in the police. They were conservative Democrats. They had the same views that, you know, police tend to have today, with the exception of the fact that they were, you know, very much willing to work with people like Joe Biden, to pass big crime bills that both, you know, made, gave harsher sentences for certain crimes and gave funding to police,

but also banned assault rifles. And I think today, you know, you have a, the politics of police and their advocacy organizations is, you know, not necessarily politically more conservative, but certainly politically more partisan than it was at the time. I think that, you know, there were parts, there was a conservative response,

older members of the black community, especially who felt very alienated and frightened of young people or young people who really had no future, that there was a generation gap. And that kind of played into police politics, too, because there was a feeling that, you know, a younger generation was basically not being socialized and getting out of control and like they were just sort of felt completely at a loss and the only solution that some people could come up with was um you know uh was policing well i think it was the only solution that was politically feasible only solution that was politically feasible you couldn't get you know you you had the democrats running on cutting welfare uh but what you could get was more

yes yeah there was there was a big backlash against welfare at the time which made a lot of the only thing that was really politically tenable. Exactly. Like I said, it was the only resource. And there's a little bit of that in this movie. Yeah. I don't know if you remember the crackhead mother is like,

oh, you know, I was going to, I was late to the welfare agency and that's why my kid had to eat ding-dongs. And there's sort of like, I mean, the movie has a contempt for her.

The gender politics of this film are not tremendously progressive. There's a lot of little conservative things in the movie. Yeah. There's a lot of little, And one of them is that, you know, we see, we see obviously crack dissolving, well, not crack, but heroin, I think, dissolving paternal bonds between the father and son, you know, when Lawrence Fishburn is a child, but you also see this, like, this echo of this happening again. But he immediately identifies what's happening between this mother who is smoking crack and her kid who is like his, his neglect is dramatized by his plane. game boy, and then by the fact that she cannot even feed him because she cannot tear

herself away from doing drugs enough to go to the welfare agency to get food for her child. So I think, you know, this is not a film that is particularly, you know, while it is like very concerned with like, you know, Lawrence Fishmeran's moral struggle and his deal is not very interested in humanizing the struggles of people around, the other women around him in the film, certainly. This movie feels to me to have this sort of this like this edge of the as I said before like tough on crime black politics of the period sort of like it seems to really embody so much of what's going on there in both its contempt for uh it's contempt for drugs it's sort of contempt for drug users. It's sort of like skepticism of law enforcement, sort of like reliance

on law enforcement. There's like a lot of things happening there that I think encapsulate sort of like this era of urban black politics. And the politician that has sort of came of age and was a real exemplar of this time and now his political career matured is Eric Adams, who has this both, this politics of both radical, one might almost say paranoid style, populist rejection of the establishment and also a real hugging to certain parts of it like the police are feeling that, you know, in order to make changes, you have to integrate into the police and take over these, these apparatuses of violence and control. But he also, you know, during his career was a was a sort of dissident police officer and had a you know was always

kind of a problem and presented himself so you got a you get a politics from him which is quite contradictory which is on the one hand um its critique is is radical or its vision is radical in how deep the problems go but its solutions are quite conservative um it's saying look it's a totally fucked up situation, and that is why we need more cops. It's just, you get a very contradictory politics out of it. Well, it's, it's black conservatism. Yeah. Which is, you know, it is, you know, it's just like black tough on crime politics is not like

traditional tough on crime politics because it has within it a critique of the system that would be considered radical by the mainstream. And even black conservatism may, you know, in some cases, you know, promote black capitalism or something. You know, it has arguments and solutions that may look like mainstream conservatism, but are not because it contains that critique. And it's not expressed in the same language and does not take the same view of black people that the mainstream versions of it do.

Right. We talked about this a little bit in a previous episode that what is, what continues to be confounding to mainstream white commentators about black politics broadly is sort of like there's an assumption there's an assumption that sort of like within black politics people are also pathologizing black people but that's like not necessarily happening and so black like black conservatism um uh as distinct from sort of like republican black people um if that makes sense sort of as distinct from sort of like your your

Candace Owens's, those types sort of like the more like homegrown organic black conservatism like you said Adam may look at times like mainstream conservatism but this well I mean Lewis Farrakhan I mean like in the 90s like this is the heyday you know 1992 like this is a no Louis

Farrakhan is sort of at the height of his influence around this time. And he's like telling people, get married, don't sell drugs, don't engage in crime or killing your community, get married, raise your kids. You know, it is very, it is like a culturally conservative message, but is not coming from a place of condescension. Clarence Williams' character would have gone to the Million Man March. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And as I mentioned before, a lot of films of this era contained elements of that. Singleton, Lawrence Fishburn's character kind of gives his son a black conservative or even

black nationalist speech and in Spike Lee movies, this stuff is really present. I thought this movie was maybe a little bit more left wing, but now that we're discussing it, maybe we're kind of coming to the conclusion that it also has a lot of conservatism going. its cultural politics are very conservative and its systemic critique is not, is left wing. And I think that is, you know, pretty standard for a lot of black politics. Yeah. You know, that is just not, that is just not unusual in a political community where the churches are often the leadership. So, I mean, I think it reflects, I mean, again, you know, the complexity of that tough on crime politics that also has a critique of the system.

Like, Bill Duke does not actually want, he is not tremendously sympathetic to the people who are doing drugs in this movie. He, you know, he wants them to cut that shit out. And in some sense, like, his voice comes through Clarence Williams, Clarence Williams' character as to, like, what people should do individually, even as he's saying, you know, but this whole system is really terrible and it's not innocent in what has happened. happening, what you're saying. Right. I mean, I think, I think to maybe put a pin on this because we're reaching time, the concluding scenes or the climax of the film on the dock is both the

part of the film where Clarence Williams sort of makes his hopeless stand against the drug trade. And also when Goldman's character says, I think you know that there's no such thing as an American anymore. No Hispanic, no Japanese, no blacks, no whites, no nothing. It's just rich people and poor people. The three of us are rich, so we're all on the same side. Okay. Finally, yeah, that was very explicit. Finally, there is a touch still there of some Marxism. Yeah. We found it. We found it. Final thoughts. Final thoughts. Really interesting conversation that we had about this movie. There's a lot going on there. It's a wonderful movie. movie for entertainment value for how kind of, you know, he has, this director has a really

characteristic style, which calls upon a lot of like Hollywood stuff. It calls upon film noir, calls on exploitation movies. And it's a Hollywood movie, but it's done in a slightly offbeat way where makes it, as Adam was saying, kind of an arts movie. So it kind of straddles those lines in ways that make it a lot of fun to watch where it's just like there's some there's stylistically aesthetically compelling stuff thematically there's interesting things to think about but it's still kind of like a Hollywood kind of sleazy B movie at the same time so like yeah it's kind of kind of in a in a cool tradition so I enjoyed watching it again Adam yeah look I really enjoyed this movie I generally love 90s movies there there's something

about them I can't really explain I mean like these this movie's aesthetic has I said this before we started but this movie's aesthetic is very like long 80s you know it's the early 90s so you still have like an overlap of fashion trends from the 80s that are very distinct in terms the way people dress. You know, I just think it's a, you know, if as far as, I think it's a pretty good film noir, and I think it's, you know, in some ways it's, it has much more interesting critique, political critique than some of its contemporaries that are sort of trying to aim for the same thing. And I think, you know, it has a lot of great actors showing scenery, which is always delightful.

You know, I think the next time I watch this movie, I'm going to try to watch it with my parents. I would be kind of fascinated to see what my mom and dad think about this movie because they are about Lawrence Fishburn's age. Like, this is like a movie made kind of for their cohort of black people. So I'd just be curious I want to watch it again I always do this with my parents When they visit them and I'm always like What movie can I pull out

That will get my parents To either say something interesting Or they'll be like What the hell is wrong with you And I think this is gonna be more on the See if they have anything interesting to say about this What do you think they're gonna say? I have no idea

It's always a little unpredictable We watched Black Dynamite recently And they were My mom was like appalled my dad was like this is the funniest thing I've ever seen I think I also think like we could definitely use a little more of the noir genre oh absolutely yes like I just feel like you know and we do have some of it I mean like you see some of these TV series

like you is obviously you know I haven't watched it but it's obviously like a bit of a noir thing that um a berry is obviously like a little bit but I just mean like it's just a straight like 90 minute 100 minute neat noir film that wraps up and you're done with it we can use some more of those.

There was no sudden move which is a Sodaboro. Oh, I remember that. Which was pretty good. I think you're right Adam. There's not just sort of like for the sake of having shorter movies but I think

watching noir like I think the benefit of watching noir is that it can make you comfortable sort of like moral ambiguity in story. telling and I think that's a thing that's sort of like kind of needed right now. I think this movie being so straightforward is great. Um, uh, but, but it's, it's, the, the moral ambiguity that it does have, I think is, is, is, it works well. And I think the best more is really kind of like, they lean into it. And there's a level of sort of like moral didaticism in a lot of

films these days. I just find, you know, I don't like it personally. And I also just find it like aesthetically bad. Like it just sort of, it encourages bad habits of watching and of thinking about movies. I think noir is a genre sort of like tailored made to counteract exactly that. Well, it also shows it's in its very plot structure of things kind of falling apart. It almost has like a tragic. It's not exactly tragic because they tend to be a little, They do have kind of, even though there's more ambiguity, they tend to be a little melodramatic, like the bad people, bad things happen to bad people. But like, it does show kind of a density and, you know, the unintentioned consequences, this sort of dense, complicated texture of a seedy side of life and the, and the unfortunate mistakes and disasters that can happen there that you don't see that much. anymore storylines are kind of really straightforward and not so, I don't know,

labyrinthine or something like that. And I think that goes along with your point about more of the Dachnicism. On the formal, that's like the content side. This is kind of the formal side of that. Yeah. Yeah. And one last point on this, there is a recent movie Emily the criminal with Aubrey Plaza that is very much in the kind of style we're talking about, like in a good way, right? Kind of noirish, you know, straightforward, very kind of morally ambiguous, very interesting the CD side of life and people making mistakes and all that stuff, which I would strongly recommend. Okay, that is our show.

If you're not a subscriber, please subscribe. We're available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, Google Podcasts, and wherever else podcasts are found. If you subscribe, please leave a rating and a review. It helps people find the show, pushes us up on the rankings. You can reach out to all of us on Twitter. I am at Jay Bowie. John, you are...

I'm at Lionel underscore trolling. And Adam, you're on Twitter as well. Your handle is. Unfortunately. Yeah, I'm just Adam Serrwards. It's my name. And you can follow the podcast. We're at UnclearPod.

I've been using the podcast to handle the, you know, share upcoming stuff, schedules, and comment on movies. So more stuff happening on the Twitter page. We'll kind of get that into more usage as time goes on. You can reach out to us over email at Unclear and Present Feedback at Fastmail.com. For this week in feedback, we have an email from Joseph commenting on our recent Die Hard 2 episode. Joseph writes, at one point, John McLean says to a police officer, that punk pulled a Glock 7 on me. You know what that is? It's a porceling gun made in Germany.

It doesn't show up in your airport x-ray machines. And it costs more than you make here in a month. None of that quote is true. There are no Glock 7s. Glock's were made in Austria, may have steel and plastic. They were detectable by X-ray machines, and they were very affordable compared to the competition. But Glock Hysteria had been building since the mid-1980s, and Die Hard 2 may have been the first big movie or TV show to use one. The negative publicity around the pistol brand contributed to it being so sought after by the public,

and it eventually became the most popular pistol in the U.S. in both the law enforcement and civilian markets. The book, Glock, The Rise of America's Gun, by Paul M. Barrett, an excellent study of how Glock took over the gun market. There is ruthless marketing, bucking the gun industry, the groundbreaking use of exotic dancers at gun shows, that is something, some very shady corporate moves, and even an attempted murder by a hitman that was ex-French Foreign Legion. My apologies for the long email.

I just thought those lines were a perfect summary of the national attitude towards Glock's just before everything flipped 180 degrees and high-capacity handguns sadly became commonplace. Yeah. I remember that shit. I remember all that. People, like, that was like a little boy piece of lore was that Glock's couldn't be picked up by, were made out of plastic and couldn't be picked up by metal detectors, which in retrospect, yeah, it's nonsense. But that was like, I remember the Glock's being like an object of fascination among young guys at that point. And I guess this was the beginning of that cultural shift towards them. Yeah, that's funny. talking about a perfect storm of like 90s anxieties die hard too wow there's like there's like the air traffic controllers there's like there's like American foreign policy there's there's military drug lords in Central America it's it's an incredible movie sorry I know you guys no no it's okay it's you're kind of getting into thinking about it is like it is kind of a perfect movie for the podcast

but as I've said I said on our Twitter account recently it's sort of of the most mediocre movies. I mean, Deep Cover's a bit of an exception to this, but generally speaking, the more mediocre movie is the actual more continent has for discussion because it can still tap in to like all of these. It's more zeitgeistee. Yeah, it's much

more zeitgeist. They're dated and therefore have more obvious things to pull out about what was going on at the time. Right. It's going to be fun in like 30 years when it was like we're watching all the superhero movies. Oh yeah. And they're like this is this is what This is what these movies were saying about American society at the time.

It's not going to be me on that podcast. Thank you, Joseph, for the note. And again, you can reach out to us over email at unclear and present feedback at fastmail.com. Episodes come out just about every other Friday. So we'll see you in two weeks with White Sands. Here's a quick plot synopsis. A small southwestern town chair finds a body in the desert with a suitcase and a half million dollars. He impersonates the man and stumbles into an FBI investigation.

White Sands is available for rent on Amazon and iTunes, and I think it's also streaming on Amazon Prime. Our producer is Connor Lynch, and our artwork is from Rachel Eck. For John Gans and Adam Serwer, I'm Jamel Bowie, and this is unclear and present danger. We'll see you next time. I'm going to be able to be.