Unclear and Present Danger - Hostile Waters

Episode Date: July 19, 2025

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched Hostile Waters, a 1997 made-for-TV movie directed by David Drury and starring Rutger Hauer, Martin Sheen and Max von Sydow. Hostile Waters — based on a real-life incident, the loss of the Soviet Navy’s K-219 — was a joint production of HBO and the BBC, released first in the United Kingdom and then the United States. It received good reviews from critics on both sides of the Atlantic. Hostile Waters takes place on October 1986, off the east coast of the United States. A Soviet ballistic missile submarine, the K‑219, collides with the American hunter-killer submarine USS Aurora. The impact ruptures a missile tube aboard the Soviet boat, triggering seawater to seep in—causing a violent chemical reaction, toxic gas buildup, and a fire that threatens the entire submarine and its nuclear warheads.You can find Hostile Waters to stream for free on YouTube, or you could rent it on Amazon Prime or Apple TV.In their next episode, Jamelle and John will watch the 1997 legal thriller Red Corner, directed by Jon Avnet and starring Richard Gere. Here is a brief plot synopsis:An American attorney on business in China, ends up wrongfully on trial for murder and his only key to innocence is a female defense lawyer from the country.And don’t forget our Patreon! In our latest episode, we watched the 1983 film Danton, a dramatization of one of the most turbulent moments in the French Revolution. You can sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com/unclearpod.

HBO Home Video presents the film based on true events. Captain two crew, silent running. They were on a routine surveillance mission. So not clear, Captain. Somewhere off the east coast of the United States. Captain, there's something behind us. Russian and American nuclear submarines. She's heading this way, Captain.

He's going to mark before we lose her. Playing a game of Cat and Mouse on the ocean floor. Increase speed to 50 knots. Increase speed. three two now one thousand yards and closing until disaster struck now a nuclear threat jeopardizes the world's safety captain we have a major leak in silos 13 it will blow any minute it's a countdown to nuclear meltdown you're too close to the reactor it mustn't spread fire cause of missiles to launch it's a definite possibility Abandoning ship, that's not enough. Open the missile hatches. They're trying to launch a goddamn missile.

They're trying to put that fire off. Evacuate the compiler. Open torpedo doors. This submarine represents a clear and present danger to this country. We've got a serious situation here. Hostile Waters, starring Rector Howard, Martin Sheen, and Max Van Seedown. Tadown. Tadage of Peru? Be ready.

Hostile Waters. Only from HBO Home Video. Hello and welcome to Unclear and Present Danger, the 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 column for the nation magazine. I write the substack newsletter on Popular Front, and I'm the author of When the Clock Broke, Conman, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, which is available now in paperback with a new epilogue and also available in the United Kingdom with a slightly different title. So, yeah, if you haven't bought it yet, please pick it up. And if you haven't read the epilogue, just buy a second copy.

Copy. Why not? On this week's episode of the podcast, we watched the film Hostile Waters. Hostile waters. I'd say, I don't know. I say hostile. That's just how I pronounce it. Hostel. I think I say hostile. In 1997 made for TV movie directed by David Drury and starring Riker Hauer, Martin Sheen, and Max von Seidau. Hostel Waters, which is based in a real-life incident, the loss of the Soviet Navy's K-Turray. 219, a nuclear submarine, was a joint production of HBO and the BBC, released first in the United Kingdom, and then in the U.S.

It received pretty good reviews from critics on both sides of the Atlantic. I think this is actually a pretty good movie. Hostile Waters takes place on October 1986 off the east coast of the U.S. A Soviet ballistic missile submarine, the K-219, collides with the American hunter-killer submarine USS Aurora, quick parenthetical here. another sub-movie that I like a lot, Hunter Killer, starring Gerard Butler. Not good, but a lot of fun.

I haven't seen that one. It's like low rent, but I, it's, I don't know. Like, for me, it's hard to make a bad movie or like a not enjoyable movie that takes place in the submarine. There's a French one called, I think, the Wolf's Call, which is, like, pretty good. I was a little disappointed with that, but still kind of had fun with it. Yeah, that's the thing.

It's, like, not perfect, but like, it's a, you know, 100 minutes. Perfect, perfect way to spend some time. Anyway, back to this movie. The impact ruptures a missile tube aboard the Soviet boat, triggering seawater to seep in, causing a violent chemical reaction toxic gas buildup at a fire that threatens the entire submarine against nuclear warheads. Captain Igor Bertana, played by Riker Hauer, surfaces the vessel and directs the crew to ventilate the missile silo, even as U.S. forces prepare to sink the K-219, fearing a nuclear detonation missile launch. The U.S. submarine captain is played by Martin Sheen. Doesn't really have a lot to do, but he does look pretty cool the whole time, should that's something. The Soviets execute a

daring maneuver, diving with the missile hatches open to flood and extinguish the fire. With the blaze out, a new emergency arises overheating reactors. Two crew members manually insert control rods into the reactor core to shut them down, sacrificing time and oxygen. I think this is a great sequence, by the way. This is when I kind of locked in. It was like, This is really well filmed, and it does a lot with very little. I think it was a great sequence. One engineer dies. He's trapped inside the reactor compartment as the submarine begins to flood.

Captain Bratanov orders them to abandon ship. The surviving crew returns to Moscow, some honored, but Bratanov is dismissed from the Navy. Washington hides public knowledge of the crisis at a fear that it would jeopardize an upcoming peace summit between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier, Mikhail Gorbachev. As the movie tells us, in its conclusion, there are still dozens of nuclear warheads and reactors lying on the seabed of North Atlantic. And I forgot to mention, Max von Seidau plays the head of the Soviet Navy. Very brief role, but Von Seidau brings so much gravitas and it's, he's fun to see. Hostile Waters, again, was a TV production and was released in the United Kingdom,

July 26, 1927 on BBC 1. The tagline for Hostile Waters was the waiting is over, the accident has happened, which sounds like what I've said about one of my children. Not a good tagline.

No. And like I said, the critical reception is actually pretty good. Yeah. This was a well-liked film I'm taking this Wikipedia. The New York Times wrote that it delivered first-rate dramatic tension. Mr. Hauer is quietly powerful as Captain Bertanov. I think that's right.

The Sunday Telegraph, it has had a terrific cast. It must have cost a fortune to make and proved to be the most gripping thing I've seen since Edge of Darkness. I will say this did seem like it was an expensive television production. Yeah, for a TV movie. Yeah, for a TV movie. I can imagine the Hollywood equivalent. which would be a little glossier. The sets would be a little bigger.

Like, you can see how it would look if it were made for theater, but for something made for television, it looks quite good. And again, it's stellar cast. You'll notice, if you watch it carefully, you'll see Michael Shannon show up in this movie. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

And Domah McManahan, which he'll show up, of course, as one of the hobbits in the Lord of the Rings. Oh, yeah. trilogy. He's in the background there. Oh, I forgot to mention Harris Eulin also is in the film as an American Admiral. Lots of character actors. Alexis Denizov, who you'll recognize in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

and How I Met Your Money, just like a lot of, how I met your mother rather. I think Harris Eulen, they snuck a clear and present danger reference into the script because he was in it. I don't know. Yeah, he was like, this is a clear and, yeah. I mean, they would say that in other circumstances, but I wondered if that was a little wink at the audience. Probably, yeah.

Okay, so since this was released on July 26, 1997, let's check out the New York Times front page for that day. Well, the thing that grabs my interest is this mob headline. Jurors find Gigante guilty of racketeering, not murder. Vincent Gigante, the enigmatic figure known for wearing a bathrobe and pajamas in public, was convicted yesterday of conspiring in plots to kill other gangland figures and of running lucrative rackets as the head of one of the nation's most powerful mafia families. But the jury in federal district court in Brooklyn acquitted him of ordering three gangline killings

and could not agree on charges that he ordered four of their murders. Still, federal prosecutors expressed jubilation at the outcome, which followed seven years of seemingly interminable legal disputes of whether Mr. Gigante was mentally competent to stand trial. Mr. Gigante's lawyers and weeping relatives voiced bitter disappointment. So this is Vinnie the Chin Gigante, so-called, not because he had a prominent chin, but because his mother would call from her window of her apartment, Vincenzo, Vincenzo, so his friends called him the chin. he wore a bathrobe around I think he lived in So Greenwich Village

used to be an Italian neighborhood in New York now it's very ritzie and impossible to afford an apartment there But until not too long ago It was an Italian neighborhood With a big mob presence And Vinny the Chin Was seen around the neighborhood

wearing a bathrobe And he would wear a bathrobe In part to appear a bathrobe to appear like he was insane to throw prosecutors off the case. That only worked for so long. Vinnie the Chin's brother was a very popular and prominent Catholic priest in the Bronx who was known for his charitable outreach to very poor communities there and died a few years ago. And there was a big op-ed in the Times about him, Louis Gigante.

and how much he knew about what his brother did or didn't do. So anyway, just a very colorful New York character of the kind that we don't really have anymore. I mean, was he a good presence for New York? No. But, you know, there's something kind of nostalgic, of course, about all these figures and why they become so popular here. And such fodder for the tabloids. I mean, such things are not so common anymore. Let's see what else we got here.

We have some things on some budget stuff going on. We've got a story here about exploitation of deaf Mexicans. Carolina Raid finds exploited deaf Mexicans. Federal agents rated two houses in the small blue-collar city today and found more than a dozen illegal Mexican immigrants, most of them deaf, who the agents believe were held in bondage by bosses who exploit their deafness per profit. Well, that's awful. Let's see. Anything look interesting to you? So I thought this headline was just kind of funny.

Three are found guilty of trying to extort money from Cosby. I remember this story as it was happening. Oh, I don't remember. A federal jury in Manhattan convicted. Autumn Jackson yesterday of trying to extort $40 million from Bill Cosby, the man she claimed was her father. When she is sentenced on October 22nd,

she could receive a prison term of up to 12 years for her convictions on extortion and two other charges. Ms. Jackson, 22, shook and sobbed uncontrollably after the jury returned guilty verdicts against her and two other defendants. The verdicts followed a three-week trial in which Mr. Cosby's reputation

as a symbol of dutiful fatherhood was severely tested. This hits different knowing, of course, that Bill Cosby was a prolific serial rapist who used his image of dutiful fatherhood to avoid suspicion and accountability for his heinous crimes against many women. And I kind of feel like that problem, I don't know the details of the trial, but if you told me today that there was a young woman who said Cosby was her father, and he owes her money, I would be like,

that seems probably right. Probably believable. Yeah, but back then you'd be like, well, no, never, Bill Cosby. Never,

never, Bill Cosby is such an upstanding, he's such an upstanding man and he tells all those Negroes to pull up their pants. Right. Yeah. He did do that stuff.

That was like his whole thing, or this later. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And Boris was like,

well, maybe you should shut the fuck. Yeah. Um, there is an article on page five. U.S. Link's top Bosnia Serbs to attacks warns

that any violence against NATO force will be punished so we're still in the midst of the NATO intervention in the former Yugoslavia but other than that

I think we can kind of move on to the movie yeah I mean do you want to this is you know we're we're recording this a couple days after the New York

mayoral primary and this is like not related to the movie but like let's just it's it's I feel like it seems to make sense to talk about it real quick. I thought you had a really good piece on the results. Thanks.

Yeah. So, I mean, look, I have to admit, I was pretty cynical. I mean, I think I've been a little bit in a bitter mood after the election. I was pretty cynical about Mom Dhani's candidacy, largely because I thought a lot of the smears against them in tax would work, particularly on anti-Semitism. him. And I also just thought that, you know, Cuomo's machine, so to speak, although it's not exactly like an old machine, but it has remnants of it, was strong enough to pull it out. But, you know, I was starting to kind of have my doubts about my own first reading by just the great campaign that he was running. And I think the point of my piece was just that, you know, politics is not

Obviously, if we could determine scientifically the outcome of every election with polling, I mean, there would be no politics. So, you know, campaigns count. The candidate quality matters. What they actually do matters. Like, those things make a difference. And he proved that really conclusively just by the fantastic campaign that he ran. You know, he was out there hitting the pavement, shaking hands, and also making content

on the internet. He was meeting people where they are. And, you know, Cuomo was, first of all, just. just extremely entitled, felt extremely entitled to the, to the position, just had a lot of disdain. Someone called it, I think a former aide called it a joyless and grim campaign. He also, you know, he represents an older city. I mean, both literally and in terms of institutions, like a lot of older voters went for Cuomo from name recognition and familiarity, and younger voters didn't. And they're also in different places, like both geographically in the city,

and just socially where they hang out and what civic associations are part of. Also, Momdani, you know, I think everybody thought, okay, George Floyd, anti-wokeness backlash, you know, the kind of left mobilizations we saw for Bernie, we saw for that, those things are and for pro-Palestine protests, those things are kind of been beaten down and are disorganized. But I think what he recognized was, look, there's a lot of people who are still, you know, have these views. and have these desires and are ready to be mobilized. And he brought together a lot of different constituencies that a lot of people previously, I mean, this is what every successful political, not, I won't say it's a realignment,

but it's definitely a change election. They bring together a constituency, they bring to the other coalition that people thought was kind of impossible. And everybody said, well, you know, the Bernie Bros. And the Warren Lib Leftists don't get along. I mean, I think that was a much. easier problem to solve than a lot of people thought. And immigrants, recent immigrants who are small business owners are fed up with the

wokeness shit and they don't trust socialism and so on and so forth. And he basically just proved all that kind of stuff wrong in a pretty incredible way, I think. So it's just a fascinating campaign to watch and see develop. And he's also just charismatic. My point is just, look, you know, everybody talks about technology. Everybody talks about the changing country. those things are all true.

But the fact of the matter is, it's like, politics is about speaking in public. It's about public communication. And if you're talented at that, you're going to do well. I mean, you need to have a lot of other things go well for you, but, like, he's got the stuff. Now, is he going to be able to govern New York City? Who can? I mean, it's a very difficult place to govern. And an extremely, and look, there's going to be a lot of forces gunning for this guy.

for a lot of reasons and he's going to have a very hard time with the media he's going to have which is tough on everybody in new york everybody he's going to have a very hard time with the business community who's very afraid of him now his personality i think will help because i think that he's actually quite reasonable conciliatory friendly he's not um i mean he has a ran a populace campaign but he's not even as um angry as bernie sanders who's anger to me doesn't bother me, but some people find it scary. So I think that, you know, he has some talents that might help him be an effective leader. But look, governing New York City is, I think you have to be totally crazy to want this job.

So more power to him. Yeah, I mean. Yeah. Yeah. To my mind, even wanting the job, how I put this. It's a son of craziness. But if, so with Andrew Cuomo, I'll do this by pointing. comparison. Andrew Cuomo wanted to be mayor of New York to give him a stepping stone to running

for president. Very obvious that was, that's what this was about. Cuomo didn't even live in New York, no particular interest in New York as a city. And actually, I think his campaign reflected that this campaign being about kind of like symbolic questions, not so much about what is actually going on in the city, but about sort of the image of the city to people outside of it, as well as as well as particular, you know, hobby horses of his supporters. The interesting thing about Mamdani is I'm actually kind of optimistic about his ability to govern the city. Yeah.

As somebody doesn't live there. But like, I don't think, like, he wants the job for the job. Like, he wants to be mayor of New York to tackle the challenges of New York City. Yeah. And to show that his politics can work. yeah right right and so that's that that motivation like not necessarily like if he's successful will this be a stepping stone to some larger political career point beyond this although like being mayor of the nation's largest city and like one of the most important cities of the world

to my mind is like that's a fine job to have but should he want to go to national politics and he does a good job in new york will this help him do that absolutely but i kind of think that like his actual goal right now is just to be as, as effective a mayor of New York as possible. And he should. Yeah. Right. And so it's just sort of like,

it's both crazy to want the job. But I think I actually kind of think in a funny way, the fact that this is the job that he went for is itself evidence of like a good head on his shoulders, you know? Like he's not doing this. He doesn't appear to be doing this to that he might like become a senator one day. He appears to be doing this because he really,

really wants to show that people with his politics can successfully govern a city. The other thing I'd say, like, I find his campaign super interesting because it validates, it basically validates both sides of like the ideological conflict and the Democratic Party. On the one hand, centrist Democrats, you say, listen, you can't spend all your time talking about, you know, your ideological bona fides, no one cares. You can't waste all your time on symbolic issues. No one cares. You really have to listen to people and figure out what they want and what's going to respond to them and like focus on that. We're right. That's absolutely correct. And that's the campaign he won, right? Sort of if you watch any attempts to do gotchas

with him on Israel, he always pivots back to sort of like this is what I, this is what this is what this campaign's about. It's about cost of living. It's about X, Y, and Z. His policy agenda focused on sort of concrete examples of cost of living, et cetera, et cetera. And so in a lot of ways, I think he ran the kind of campaign that say, like, popularists, say you should run. And it's funny that he, I think actually David Shore is giving him credit for this, but it's interesting to see him not get credit for kind of basically doing the thing. But on the other side for the left within the Democratic Party, I think his approach of speaking to people's material concerns, not with policies that can feel abstract like tax credits or incentives, but like an actual tangible thing that you can imagine in your day-to-day life. speaks to, I think, a point that the Democratic Party left has made.

Which is that, like, you, this, this obsession with, um, avoiding the use of the, of the state to provide things, um, is in addition to not effective, like a political handicap. And so, you know, I myself, again, not a New Yorker, but as like a, as a person interesting public policy, am I like a little bit skeptical of free buses? I kind of am. Am I a little bit skeptical of sort of like the viability of a city running? grocery store. I kind of am. But on just a level of pure politics, those are actually the kind of things that you say to people and they're like, oh, you know, I ride the bus every day and it would be nice if I didn't have to, you know, what is it 250? 290. 290. It would be nice if I

didn't have to pay 290 every time. Or I don't like having to, you know, go to a local bodega, at a corner store and spend like $8 for something I could get at a grocery store for like five bucks. And so I think there's something, I think, I think like the responding to people's material concerns with like concrete things that feel tangible. And that, more importantly, have like, they have symbolic value in that like the fact that the candidate cares about bus fare and grocery stores. forces the message you keep saying in other venues and forums about being caring about cost

of living like the things have a synergy to them um also vindicates uh people within the left wing democratic party and i think if the campaign also vindicates those uh uh maybe left liberals who say listen if you want to challenge the democratic establishment you can't do so from a position of hostility to the Democratic Party. You kind of have to be an enthusiastic Democrat. Yeah, you have to be a partisan Democrat. Yeah. Yeah.

And what was interesting about the Cuomo Mondami showoff is that Mondami in a lot of ways was a much more partisan Democrat than Cuomo was. Like, Cuomo was sort of like, you know, almost embarrassed to have to be a Democrat here. Yeah. Yeah. No, those are all excellent points. And I don't have a ton to add to them. I do think, yeah, like for Mamdani.

at this point, dude, do not, I know you don't listen to this show. I'm sure he doesn't listen, but do not start doing national media. Stay local. Win your race. Stay local. Don't try to take over the Democratic Party. Do a good job as mayor. And you will help the cause of the left so much if you don't take on the superstar role.

And you just say, look, I'm the mayor of New York. it's a big job and and I've got local constituents to answer to local media which is tough to do and you know like I'm I'm I'm gonna run my town and be responsive to my town if he starts doing podcasts like now everyone's like oh he should everyone wants him to step into this role to fix the Democratic Party start doing Theo Vaughn and Joe Rogan and going on Sunday shows that's all going to be about Israel Palestine bullshit which has really nothing to do, which is a wedge issue has nothing to do with running the city. He needs to do a good job running New York. I think he could. I think the fact that he ran such a

great campaign shows that he's got a lot of practical insights. So I just hope, my only hope is like, don't take the bait and become, start to, I know it's tempting because you're kind of the hot new thing right now and everybody loves you and some people hate you. But maybe this is a little mistake aOC made or she was put into this role maybe unfairly was like being like you're the new face of democratic party and then you become the target for everything just don't do it just become the mayor of new york yeah and you'll you'll notice that aOC receded from that for some for a couple years right like she that happened like for the first six months and then she's like i'm just going to be i'm going to be a congressperson from from new york yeah and i think she's got a great

career ahead of her but still yeah right but she reemerged as a more national figure after having like done the kind of like hard work of being a good congressperson yeah exactly so he should just be a great a great mayor and then we'll see what happens yeah you know i think i think i think i think assuming he wins in november which i think he will i think it's already clear that like the institutional democratic party has no appetite for like sanctioning any kind of like and run around his nomination obviously like new york city billionaires are like we're going to pump money in the eric adams campaign but eric adams not an especially talented politician to begin with right so like the fact that people thought he was the future of the like i don't understand how

anybody thought that he was the future of the democratic party that was so stupid to be like oh he's going to be a he's a shoeing for president have you ever seen him talk he sounds it was stupid in the moment yeah yeah so yeah i think that's good advice like yeah you're you're you're you're you'll win um there's i think there's a pretty strong chance of bradley is going to be deputy deputy mayor um be great yeah uh you assemble a strong team around you of public minded people who are ready to get things done and spend four years trying to be the best mayor you could possibly be and then when you run for re-election like running for re-election will be his opportunity to sort of like step into a national role if you wants it especially if he's done a

good job over the previous four years um but but this first four years is just sort of like, yeah, govern the city and try to be the best mirror you can be. And I'm very, I'm very interested and excited to see how it plays out from. He kind of exemplifies my bit of obsession with civic virtue. Like this is what I'm talking about. Like someone who is interested in like helping his community and is public spirited and public minded and ran a campaign not about causing divisions, but trying to get everyone on board with a common civic project and not in a kind of vapid way, but in a sort of like,

oh, we have these challenges we have to tackle and we'll have a better chance of tackling them if we do it together than at our throats. One last note, I'd say New York's ranked choice voting help contribute to this more consensus driven campaign at the very least. Yeah, I think that's true. And it's something that progressives in New York have been pushing for a reform they've been pushing for for a long time. and you can see why.

Okay. That's your, that's, that's, that's, uh, we've been discussing a politics show. That's your preview of us just talking about politics. That's a preview of what it would be like. Yes. Um, okay. Hostile Waters. You said that you've seen this before.

Yeah. Okay. So when I was a kid, I was totally obsessed with submarines and I basically just tried to watch every submarine movie that I could basically get my hands on. And I definitely watched this. So the book it's based on, which has the same title, has a preface or a foreword by Tom Clancy. And the incident in the movie is a little like the Hunt for October, and I think may have been some of the source material for Hunt for October. Some critic called this movie like Hunt for Red October meets Chernobyl disaster, and that's pretty good, accurate.

Now, so what happened in the movie is based on facts, but the movie's depiction of what happened is a little bit open to controversy. So in the film, a Los Angeles class submarine tracking the Soviet Yankee class submarine, ballistic missile submarine off of the coast of Bermuda, collides with it because it's being too aggressive. aggressive in its chase. The United States Navy denies that as they would, but apparently people in the Soviet and then the Russian Navy also said that didn't happen. And I was reading reviews that said that there was a little bit of anti-Americanism involved in the idea that it was actually the Americans that caused this disaster. A review of the Washington Post was a little bit put off by this. Otherwise, they liked the film. And the, and the captain actually sued, uh, the makers of this film for presenting him as incompetent, which I don't think it does, frankly. I think he looks, comes off pretty well. Um, but he also denied that the collision took place. Now, um, the movie, just to talk a little bit at the merits of the movie, yeah, you know, like, it was, it's got some really exciting parts and, and, and it's pretty thrilling. And, you know, it's budget is okay for a, um, for, for, for, for,

a TV movie, I just wish it had a better script. So basically, the realism of the submarine activity is something that in a submarine movie has got to feel strong. And in some points that, but sometimes I'm just like, that's not what they would say. They wouldn't use that word. And in Hunt for Red October and in Crimson Tide, like, it feels highly realistic. Now, is it fair to compare the movie with this budget to those films? maybe not but you know it's got some great actors who I think were kind of underutilized

because the script wasn't as good as it could have been like I think it had just been a tighter script and you know Rucker Hauer Maximus Sido um Martin Sheen like these are these are top tier actors and I think that they could could have like anyway it's not fair because it isn't made for TV movie of fairly high quality I'm just saying on paper you look at it and you see this movie could be awesome but and it was like yeah sometimes I didn't find the script particularly convincing. But, yeah, in terms of the action and the pacing and the drama built of the accident, I think it's quite good.

But, you know, sometimes you're just really reminded that it was a TV movie. But, yeah, no huge problem with it. I would say, yeah, the, you know, also I started to look into nuclear submarine accidents. First of all, this guy is still down there with all of its nuclear weapons. It has world-destroying power of nuclear missiles on board, and it's just down at the And it's not the only one. And also the other thing about blaming the Americans for this is I hate to say it, or I don't know if I hate to say it, but a lot of Russian submarines have been lost to sea

with nuclear reactors and weapons. And there was, you know, like, there's one off the coast of Norway that they have to go and check that its reactor is not leaking, and they put some kind of. kind of jelly over the whole wreck because it's reactor. There are a whole Wikipedia page of nuclear wrecks. It's just pretty fucking scary. I mean, like, there are, I think one, two, three, four, five in the Atlantic and three in the Arctic Sea, these are that have like, you know, a new, most of them are Russian,

but there are American ones with their nuclear reactors still on it. And I don't know about the film's representation of the dangers of a nuclear explosion because as I understand it, it is actually pretty difficult to cause a chain reaction in a nuclear missile unintentionally. But yeah, I was, look, I sent you some stuff about nuclear disasters and near misses. And like there was one, like a B-52 broke up over like Virginia and it dropped its bomb. And it was like one safety away from going on. Anyway, very scary.

We have all the, we've talked about this in Broken Arrow and in other episodes. Just nuclear, there are, I don't know, 20, 18, 20 nuclear missiles at the bottom of the, of the Atlantic Ocean. And each one of them could destroy U.S. city if it went off. I don't know. What is the seawater? I don't understand these things. And I don't really understand nuclear physics. I was trying to understand these things.

But yeah, it's very frightening in this. and the movie shows the drama of those things. Politically, I don't know. What are your thoughts? So I agree with you on your assessment of the movie. I had a good time watching it. I think I went in to it very sort of like, oh, this is going to be TV movies to be quite boring.

But even with the weaker script and the low production values, you just get a lot from having real actors on screen. Like having a full, a close-up of marketing. Martin Sheen, like your thick beard, you know, looking pensive. It's just, it just hits, you know. There's no, there's no special effect like a close up on a movie star. And, um, uh, having Rucker Hauer and Martin Sheen and Max von Seidow doing their thing just, you know, made it made it compelling. I would say that politically, so the movie takes place in 1986, or like late Cold War, we're sort of in this period where Gorbachev is in control and

trying to open up the Soviet system somewhat engaging in negotiations with the United States. And this as a, like, this strikes me as one of those movies that is almost looking back at, much like Hunford-October, actually, looking back at the recent past and kind of asking, you know, why were we so afraid of these people? You know, these sailors were just like us. These men were just like us. The Russians were just like us. They weren't necessarily like our archie antagonist. Why couldn't we approach them with a little more humanity?

Like that to me seems really to be the point of these sorts of stories focusing on. the experiences of the Soviet military. Sort of simultaneously, it's simultaneously a triumphalist thing. Like, listen, these submarines barely work. Right. These Soviet, you know, as much bravery and valor as the sailors showed,

they obviously were working in a broken system and there's no way they could prevail over the United States. And sort of, it puts that, that's like, that's, that's front and center. in the messaging. And then from there it asked, well, if that's true,

why were we so afraid of these people? And I think it's, I think this movie's interesting as a sort of like an example of that kind of entry, of the sympathetic view of the Soviet soldier, Soviet sailor,

and of an almost sort of less, a less panicked view of the Soviet Union. Because you'll know that there, there's a scene, later in the movie where you have a U.S. naval officer insisting that they have to take an aggressive posture with the submarine because, you know, the Soviet Union was the evil empire in the sympathetic, and this is Martin Sheen is one of the more, is presented as a sort of like a suspicious and prone to wanting to use, wanting to just go ahead and fire on

the ship. And the sympathetic hero American naval officer is very much of the, you know, these people are just trying to make the best of a bad situation. They're facing a crisis and we can't, we can't, it would be wrong for us to attack them. And that to me seems to be kind of like the, he, it's like the viewpoint of the film with regards to its perspective on the Soviet sailors. Yeah, I mean, it's the same plot in a certain way as October and Crimson Tide on some abstract level, where it's like the main characters in all those movies or the heroic characters in all those movies

realize that there's a lack of hostile intent, right? So like, you know, Jack Ryan realizes this sub is actually trying to defect. You know, Denzel's character realizes that they should not launch their nuclear weapons, you know, that the situation doesn't call for it. And this, the, you know, first officer says, look there's another interpretation of this that is not hostile um so kind of funny name for it that

it's hostile wars but a lot of these sub movies are like which are don't take place during war or about avoiding war and obviously a big Cold War theme but just kind of empathizing with the opponent and understanding that their behavior might not well it could be per it could be interpreted as hostile you actually see it if you have a more nuanced analysis you could see it as being like, well, they're just trying to do something here. They're trying to escape. They're trying to defect. They're trying to.

Or we received a incomplete message. You know, so I think that that's an interesting thing in all these kind of post-Cold War subfilms is just like, let's not jump to conclusions, especially because, you know, the stakes are so high because we're carrying this is the most destructive thing ever. I mean, the nuclear ballistic missile submarine. as a concept is so insane, you know, basically, so what, you know, maybe not everybody is as big a nerd as you or I who's listening to this. What it is, is, well, probably not far off, but, you know, it is a way to hide ballistic missiles, intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear

warheads, each one of these ships, of which the United States, I think, has close to two dozen, or boats, you know, carries enough missiles on it to destroy the world, essentially. And it's to guarantee that if there was a nuclear attack, it's a deterrent. So if there was a nuclear attack, they're not going to be able to get all your submarines before they can launch back. I mean, it is wild that these things are out there. And I don't think a lot of people understand that who are not like military nerds or politics nerds. Like, do you, do most people understand what a, what a nuclear ballistic missile submarine is and

what its purpose is? I don't think so. I'm not, I'm not sure. I don't think they do. I think, I mean, I think, I think people generally think of the entire nuclear arsenal, both the U.S. and now the Russian Federation as being, oh, everything launches at once. But the way it's supposed to work is that there are first strike weapons and there are secondary strike weapons. And the ballistic submarines, the B-52 bombers, are designed to basically be for retaliatory strikes. If either side launches a first strike, you still have the capacity to launch a strike of similar destructive power on your opponents.

And the submarines in particular, because they can get so close to the mainland and they can move, it's difficult to predict from whence the strike is going to come. So, yeah, I mean, ultimately, ultimately, as we've discussed on at least a Patreon episode before, the upshot of all of this is like, if this were to happen, you know, the world is gone. But there's strategic thinking involves here. I think, yeah. I mean, it's interesting to talk about this in the wake of another political event, which is our attempt supposedly on paper to get rid of Iran's nuclear threat.

I mean, the lesson of nuclear strategy is basically, if you have a nuclear weapon, you're insulated from a lot of political consequences and geopolitical consequences. And if you don't, you're kind of fucked. Like anybody, like, you know, Libya, Saddam, a lot of places didn't really pursue their nuclear weapons program. And they, you know, eventually we got around to getting rid of them. because why not, you know? So it's especially dangerous if you're trying to pursue one and you're not quite there yet. But, you know, I mean, the obvious lesson in Ukraine to a certain example, too, I mean, I don't know if they really ever had the capacity to use the warheads that were on Ukrainian territory.

I think that the command and control was still centralized in Russia. Who knows if they could have reversed engineered it, again, not an expert in nuclear weapons. but the lesson is kind of like, you know, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons with a security agreement. And the lesson of that is you really can't do that because there is nothing to prevent somebody attacking you if you don't have a nuclear weapon. If a nuclear power attacks a non-nuclear power, they're not helpless. I mean, Ukraine is doing a fine job defending itself on the circumstances, but their allies can't just give them total carte blanche to launch devastating strikes in reverse to fight off the invasion because they're worried about

antagonizing a nuclear power. So nuclear weapons, I mean, really give an enormous amount of strength. It's not just that they prevent wars. They can actually create wars when there's this, a sense. symmetry, you know, when a non-nuclear power is basically just like, look, we don't have, we're never going to be have a conventional deterrent to the United States military. The only thing we could possibly do is, also, I don't think Iran, like, okay, it's one thing the Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear warheads and ways of delivering them.

What's Iran's best hope is that it could make some ballistic missile that could reach Tel Aviv or something like that? they're not going to, even if they had a submarine, they're not going to have the kind of advanced quiet, nuclear ballistic missile submarine that could make Iranian nuclear weapons. Like, Pakistan and India have nuclear weapons, but they don't have nuclear weapons in the same way that Russia and the United States do. France has nuclear weapons, but they don't have nuclear weapons in the same. I mean, they're closer, or the United Kingdom, closer in terms of technology, but it's like, there's deterrence and there's deterrence. It is a genuine, it's both a genuine feat

of engineering and resources to be able to produce intercontinental ballistic missiles or nuclear submarines or any of this, that most of the states other than the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which have nuclear weapons, have short-range weapons designed to reach relatively nearby targets. As you said, an Iranian nuclear weapon would probably be targeted at Tel Aviv. And the reason for preventing Iran-picking nuclear weapon isn't because they would just hand it off to some non-state actor because they aren't insane. they would use it basically as a security guarantee to prevent Israel from challenging its, meaningfully challenging its attempts at regional hegemony.

There's a conversation to have about, you know, who would you prefer to have regional hegemony in the Middle East, Israel, Iran, or say, Saudi Arabia. The Obama administration clearly its thinking was we'd rather integrate Iran into the global economy and begin building a relationship with the Iranian government, however much of, we find it distasteful because some of the alternatives are not great, right? Like compared to Saudi, maybe you'd rather have a relationship with Iran. Even compared with like a right-wing Israeli government, you know, maybe you want to have some kind of working relationship with Iran. Iran hawks in the United States and in Israel, of course, think very differently. And sort of our current situation is downstream of the Trump administration in its first term,

up the nuclear agreement that Iran and the Obama administration struck. But yeah, all this is to say that- They're also obsessed with Qatar now. They're like Qatar is the real evil power in the world. Even Iran, Qatar is pulling the strings. Qatar is brainwashing everybody. But we have a U.S. military base on Qatar. I mean, they're obviously not that powerful against the U.S. interests or they have

their own. So, yeah. The Iran-Hawks stuff is just like, dude, this is not. And they're kind of a paper tiger. Like they've kind of folded under military pressure. Yeah. Their only hope now is to get nuclear weapons. Right.

That's going to be irony of all of this is that it's been revealed that like, right, the Iranian military capacity is just not that, not that great. And that, you know, part of the reason it was relying on non-state actors is precisely to account for the fact that It really didn't. It doesn't have that much direct power to ability to project power. And so it's incentivized an Iranian nuclear device even more. But just to get back to your point, yeah, this is the first that most countries that have nuclear weapons do not really have the ability to deliver them all that far. But second, yeah, I mean, what we're seeing decisively is that not having a nuclear weapon, leaves you vulnerable to more aggressive states. If you mentioned Ukraine, gave up its nukes for security guarantees, and now, you know,

the Russian invasion and kind of the sick irony is that opponents of assistance to Ukraine will cite Russian nuclear weapons as a reason to not give assistance to Ukraine. You don't want to start World War III because who knows what they'll do with those nukes. Libya, Iran, Iraq. North Korea, the reason why North Korea can sit, you know, secure is that they have a nuclear program and the ability to deliver nuclear weapons at least to Seoul and Tokyo. China obviously has, you know, a nuclear arsenal. So if you have a nuclear arsenal, you have, you know, enough to turn.

current ability to prevent any incursions on your territorial integrity. And this, I mean, I think, I think one of the consequences of having Trump in office these eight years total, hopefully, is that it's going to be a new age of nuclear proliferation, that the consequence of Trump sort of might makes right, bullies can do what they want, vision of the world is that everyone with the capacity to develop a nuclear weapon is going to try to do it. Yeah, I agree with you on that. And I think that, yeah, and why shouldn't they? There's no security otherwise. I was just going to say, like, you know, everyone's like, Iran is an ideological regime. Do we really trust them with nuclear weapons? I don't fucking eatamar

Ben-Gavir and these crazy settler nationalists in Israel. Like, the way Israel is going, do we trust them with a nuclear weapon? I mean, we have to ask these questions. Like, they are not, everyone's like, oh, only democracy in the Middle East. Yeah, it's not the same, not that they didn't do bad things then, but they're not run by these like, oh, secular socialists anymore who basically are just like, you know, have, they're run by Looney Tunes. And, and, you know, I don't, like, you're going to have someone who with apocalyptic views, um, having atomic weapons. And everyone used to say that about Muslim fundamentalists.

They're like, we don't, we don't want Muslim fundamentalists. But I mean, like, I don't want any kind of fundamentalist having nuclear weapons, you know? So I just think it's like the radicalization of regimes in the Middle East does make nuclear proliferation possible, but we have an unstable country, frankly, that already has nuclear weapons, and it's Israel. I mean, I don't, you know, like their politics are getting more and more frighteningly right-wing. And then, you know, with people who have very violent and apocalyptic views about the nature of the state and this destiny on the planet. And if, let's say Israel becomes isolated and then some kind of hyper-nationalist comes to power in his prime minister, like Itemar Ben-Gavir-type person as prime minister,

they have this, you know, if you want to talk about ideology, this kind of hyper Zionism, which is basically they don't even care, they don't care about alienated the United States because they believe that Israel can stand alone because it has God on its side. I mean, and then if they're in a situation where they feel panicked and they have that kind of mentality, they could use nuclear weapons in an irresponsible way. So I just feel, I mean, I think it would probably cause kind of weird civil war in Israel. if that happened. I'm just saying, it's scary to me that, I mean, even the United States, look at the president we have now. You never know the political leadership of places can change and their possession of nuclear weapons goes from being like, well, okay, we can pretty much predict what they'll do from that to, my God, we might have a madman on our hands. So, yeah, nuclear weapons very scary deterrence so far has worked uh it's possible that it won't in the future um it used to scare me give me nightmares but now it's one of those things where i'm just like well hey you know if it happens it happens there's no point in being anxious about it yeah i mean

that's the thing you know nothing you can do about it uh yeah um nuclear war there's nothing you can do about it that's the message of our podcast no i think it's it's it's to go to like return back to the mindset in 1987 there wasn't like I think among obviously security experts there's still this concern about the use of a nuclear device but not the kind of mutually assured destruction that the film is that's the world of the film the world of the film is one where oh a Soviet submarine is coming to launch depth you know we have to we have to sink it right this could this could be the first shots in a war at the time be the fear as proliferation was of the lack of a stable state in the former Soviet Union

incentivizing the proliferation of weapons, not through states building their own weapons, but by non-state actors of various stripes, getting their hands on a nuclear weapon. It was just, you know, it's been darkly funny observing the, the unsuccessful, I should say, campaign from the current administration to drum up support for its attack on Iran. And so much of that has been, you know, rehashing the language of the war in Iraq, of the run up to that war. And I was just, I was thinking about, you know, when kind of leads to Rice and meet the press said, you don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. In that, that image of, you know, a nuclear device going off, you know, in a random American city put there by terrorists.

It was like the thing that was on people's minds. And notably, you know, one of the, one of the, a film that we will cover on this podcast, the sum of all fears, that is the scenario, a nuclear device going off in Baltimore, placed by a non-state actor that took it from a Russian stockpile. I was watching something recently where this was a plot point as well, you know, of non-state actors, purchasing nuclear weapons. So maybe it was, it's a pop point in, in the peacemaker, there we go. So that was the fear there then. And it's interesting to think that we're kind of in a different world now.

We're not so much worried about proliferation by non-state actors as much as we are by states, deciding to shut up nuclear programs. And the thing about, I mean, the thing about this is that in the case of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union basically took a couple of decades. it's to work out a way of communicating that lowered the chances of any kind of exchange, right? Like you need to be able to have open lines of communication, your respective officials need to know each other, you know, you need to have these face-to-face. You need to do this stuff to reduce the levels of paranoia and fear that might lead to an exchange. And one of the

the legitimate serious dangers of nuclear proliferation in the current moment, it's just that you don't have that. You don't have relationships between leaders and diplomats and everyone who might be involved, military officials, everyone who might be involved. And without the relationships and in a kind of like fog of war kind of situation, the odds of use just go up. And even if it's, you know, one of these devices being used for any reason risk like a cascade. It's like unacceptably dangerous.

But we seem to be going back. We seem to be approaching a role of just greater, greater proliferation. And that's just going to be inherently, inherently more dangerous, especially when coupled with the collapse of basically sort of like international law as a thing. And the collapse of any kind of any kind of commitment to preventing aggressive war. Yeah. There's some school of realism that says if everybody has nuclear weapons, it will actually lower wars because the deterrence principle will just be spread across a broader set of horizons. But to me, it just raises the odds that one will go off. Right. That feels like that feels like a version of the thing here with the gun debate.

Like, you know, an armed society is a polite society. Yeah, exactly. Which misses the fact that if everyone has guns, then that makes everyone paranoid. right like the politeness the security guarantee isn't we have come to some sort of equilibrium where we know how to like talk to each other it is I am afraid that you're going to use it first it's fear yeah and paranoia and that that the only place that can lead is someone pulling the trigger yeah and it also create it makes people insane because they get paranoid like there's a lot of paranoid people in the United States unfortunately who have guns and right

And then they sometimes, you know, what's the, we don't, what's the boundary line between, you know, a quirky set of beliefs in paranoid schizophrenia, maybe a few bad days, you know, like a drug addiction, a divorce, a breakup, you know, like, you know, and then suddenly this person goes from an eccentric, everybody said, oh, they just have these views and then suddenly they're shooting up their neighbors, you know? So I just think it's, you know, it's too risky. people are crazy I mean it's amazing to me in the United States I mean look we have horrible gun violence but considering how crazy people are in the United States it's amazing we kind of don't have more

and it's in New York some people complain we don't we have or gun laws are too strict are you joking we live in there's first of all there's a million crazy people in New York and then we live in extremely close proximity to each other and we're often

very irritated with each other and then you're going to introduce guns it's not a good idea you know like no i just think that yeah arming yeah i just think that arming like guns don't make anybody relaxed you know if if you see somebody with a gun generally you're like this amplifies the stakes of the situation uh immensely so yeah i i always hated that idea and i hated the idea of turning society into kind of armed camps and paranoid groups. And there's a, there's a, there's a gun, there's a gun dynamics, um, analog to what might happen in the international stage.

So there's, you know, a couple years ago, there were a couple in like rough succession of people, like homeowners with guns, shooting at people, knocking on their doors or pulling into their driveways because they have to make a turnaround or something. And it's clear that what's happening, those dynamics is that you have the homeowner, older in both cases they believe obviously very paranoid worried about theft or some kind of violence to them and they see something unusual happen someone they don't recognize on the doorstep or in the driveway and then they they shoot a warning shot either to scare the person away in one case and they killed the person or they just killed the person not right better safe

than sorry kind of thing and it's not hard to imagine the situation right where you know two neighboring states have had tensions in the past, and one of them, maybe is doing basically innocuous exercises on their border, right? But no one bothered to tell the other people. No one bothered to give any alert to the other side. And so they're doing their military exercises. The other side sees this, and they go, what's going on? Are they getting ready to attack us? Is there going to be a strike? And in the absence of any kind of communication or any kind of standards or anything that could, like, deescalate, you have there the perfect, the perfect conditions for some kind of exchange.

Anyway, I feel like, you know, hidden, hidden waters, I'm not sure there's that much relevance about, you know, nuclear submarine accidents these days, but the underlying concern about nuclear weapons about proliferation is, you know, all the, even more relevant, I'd say these days in a way that I'm not sure a lot of Americans appreciate anymore. I think we've been through this like, you know, almost 30 year period where people kind of kind of just stopped thinking about nuclear weapons in a real way. There was the WMD interlude in the 2000s, but since then it's not like in front of mine, right? Like it's not, it's not part of the political conversation. But I think we're approaching a world where, you know, what do you plan to do about nuclear proliferation is going to be a live issue again, unfortunately.

We were making progress. We were making progress. Yeah, many things. And then kind of stupid people took it away. But who knows, maybe there's a better future now that's where our mom, Donnie, is the mayor's going to be mayor of New York. He's going to fix everything, folks. Okay. I think this is a good place to wrap up.

Any recommendations for the movie? I think it's, you know, if you're a big fan of the genre and a completionist, check it out. If you're looking for an entertaining flick and you're not as big a sicko as me or Jamel, you might get a little bored of this one. but it's decently entertaining. And if you're into this kind of movie, you're going to be into it. That's my exact take. Like, if you are not a sicko, maybe you can skip it. But if you are a sicko, please watch it.

It's pretty good. It's 90 minutes, easy to knock out pretty quickly. I think it's available to stream in all the usual places. I think I rented it for $4 off of Apple TV. And it was a good transfer, too. It looked good on my computer. So, I mean, on my computer on my TV. So I would say check it out.

uh it's it's a bit it's a little bit like a hidden gym honestly uh it's good it's you know great actors worth your time um i kind of wish they'd bring back the tv movie rather than rather than you know eight episode seasons that don't have time to do anything i agree just give me like give me like a two hour tv movie that uh that uh that is a bit more tighter more structured um but yeah let's uh i think i think i think if you watch it you'll probably enjoy it okay that is our show thank you for listening as always uh you can find this wherever podcast are found uh that's google uh spotify uh apple of course you can leave a review on the apple page to let us know how you think we're doing and it does help people find the show you can also reach out to us

at unclear and present feedback at fastmail dot com in this week for this week in feedback we have a couple emails that I'm going to bring in the first is Kyle I loved your discussion of night moves and the attendant discussion of film noir protagonist this is on our patron episode on night moves directed by Arthur Penn star in jean hackman I wonder if you buy the idea of a discrepancy between the film noir and the hard-boiled genres. I don't usually find much value in genre pedantry, but John's numerous caveats about the Code of Honor that motivates film noir detective characters of whom Philip Marla was mentioned quite a bit are sometimes classified in a different genre, the hard-boiled. Anyway, I've been listening

to since the first episodes and hope to keep supporting your work in the future. Thank you, Kyle. I also don't have much time for genre pedantry. So I mean, my inclination would be the same. What's the difference? You know, hard-boil, like, noir's... People in some situations. Right. And Hardboiled is like a tough guy. Yeah. Specifically detectives.

So like double indemnity doesn't involve a detective, right? Right. It is a noir. It's not a detective. Not a private detective. Yeah. Not a private eye. Yeah.

Yeah. I got you what you're saying. It's not about a private eye, right? Like it's, it's, um, but it, like the Philip Marlowe character. Yeah. It's hard boy. Or, or, uh, what's the word what's uh hammer uh the you know like hammer the other yeah he's like another

yeah who plays him robert mitcham uh yeah um that's that well philomarlow played robert mitcham plays philip marlowe uh of course it is but mitcham's so good i know um Ellie gold He'll play them, of course, too. I can't believe anybody playing Humphrey, Philip Marlowe than Humphrey Bogart. I know that there was that good one with Iliott Gould. I just, and it's kind of fun, but can't do it. Liam Niece apparently played Marlowe recently.

Interesting. I'm going to say no to that. Maybe I'll check it out, but it's got to be bogey or nobody. But that's, I think that'd be the distinction there. That's the distinction. I don't know. Okay. I mean, I get it.

I think some noir's are a little bit more, yeah, without the private eye kind of navigating through the world. It's sort of a drama of people in a kind of morally meaningless world. And none of them really have a moral code per se, and there are noirs like that, or just an extremely, yeah. So I get the distinction. I just don't think it's that important. And I think a lot of the things about, you can say about noir as would apply to both. both. So, yeah, I don't know.

Yeah. I would have to, if I, I would maybe read an essay on it, but it sounds a little bit like too funny of a distinction to me. Yeah, I mean, it's, yeah. I would, I mean, the way I would think about it is that like the hard boiled is like a subgenre of the noir, but not like its own, its own separate thing. Okay, that was one. Thank you, Kyle, for the email.

The next one was just funny to me. and that is from Miranda. And Miranda says, I was so sure John Gans was black this whole time. What? Okay. Thank you. Wow.

That's just very funny to me. No, Jamel is black. I am white. I'm black. I'm notably. I'm notably a black American. Although I will say there's often some confusion about whether I am of immigrant. extraction. And I'm not. I am the, in a lot of ways, the most plain vanilla black guy you

can imagine. I'm a black guy from the South. Jamel is pretty much one of the most American people you could have possible. We're all American. Citizenship, we equally share. But Jamel is very amazing. Yeah. I just said that was funny. It's a compliment. Thank you. I take it as a compliment. Actually, you know what? It's been said before, I think, because of the swarthy, I don't know how racial we want to get here. Because of the Mediterranean side, let's say, I have actually people who've seen me have asked or commented, do you have a relative who, my grandfather on my mom's side is Sephardic and was extremely dark skin and actually was mistaken for being a black person and called

slurs. So, you know, I'm, I don't know where it came from, but it's been, it's been said before. Yeah, I mean, and that all just gets to like the silliness of race the end of the day, right? That like, that like people, especially in the United States, people are all kinds, have all kinds of, uh, of ethnic and national backgrounds, you know, and, and yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, there's no, there are no, there are no hard. boundaries, really. But anyway, race is a fiction, folks. Race is a fiction.

I'm just going to complain real quick about something. I won't TikTok too much, as you know, as listeners may know. And on sort of the black TikTok, there's this whole thing that people really believe, and they're like, they refer to people as either like monoracial or biracial. And it's like if you're monoracial, it means you have two black parents.

And insane people will be like, well, only if your mom is black, then you're black. What, like Jewish? That's amazing. And every time I see this, I'm sort of like, okay, first of all, virtually every single black American in the United States has some degree of European ad mixture, just like straight up. Like, if the idea there's such a thing as like a pure black person, you're just looking in the wrong place. Like this is not the, even even, even I'm very. dark skinned and have like strong African features. If I were to do a DNA thing, I'm actually

reasonably sure I'd have probably about like 10% European ad mixture because my mom is lighter skinned, not light skin, but like lighter skin. Her mother was quite light skinned. Um, uh, uh, I think my my dad's parents are both pretty dark skin. But like as you go further back, they're like very light skin people. So just like through through how genetics work, I, I'm not visibly. I don't have any visible European features, but if you're, I guarantee that on a genetic level, some non-trivial portion of genetic markers I have would lead back to Western Europe. And that's the case for, and that's the case for every single Black American. I think, I think on average, the typical Black American, it has like 25% European ad mixture,

like something very high. And it's just like, it's, this, this thing, which is an attempt to draw boundary. right to sort of like say that like we can say these people are black and these people are not for the sake of some sort of like preserving the culture it's just like a recapitulation of like white supremacist logic it's just like it's just like the inverse one drop rule and i think it's very silly yeah don't do race science on yourself right and i think that i mean in fact one of the great things about like the black community in the united states is precisely how like fluid and open it has been like everyone from red-haired malcolm x or fair-skinned Walter White, to Marcus Garvey, has been a part of it and considered to be a part of it. One of the great black Americans, one of the great Americans of all time, Frederick Douglas, was mixed race. And it's sort of like, if your criteria for blackness excludes Frederick Douglass, it's stupid. Right.

Yeah, that's an excellent boy. Yeah. That's just my rant. No, it's a cult. You know, this happens all the time. You know, it's a cultural, it's a cultural and ethnic community, and then it tries to be reified with race, and that's usually pretty harmful to everybody involved. And when you just think about it more as a historical community that's existed and been shaped by historical circumstances and events, it's a much healthier way of looking at things, and there's eternal racial essences driving people. It's usually a pretty horrible way of looking at the world and yourself.

It's going to fuck you up. Right. Right. There's no, there's no, there's no essence of blackness. It's just, yeah, you're right. Historical community is like the best way to put it. Like by, by kind of historical circumstance, this collection of people are considered themselves like a community. But the, the key thing is like historical circumstance, similar cultural background, you know, that kind of thing, not some kind of like genetic marker. And I think it's, I mean, It's interesting that that is the turn that people make towards trying to create boundaries. There must be something biological, and it can't be something cultural or social or historical. It seems like it seems like that's just a feature of like Western modernity that you have to resist. Anyway, that's my rant. That's my little rant. Get that off my chest.

Episodes come out every two weeks or so. So our next main feed episode is going to be on Red Corner, a movie I've never heard of. Directed by John Avnet, a director I've never heard of as well. It looks like he directed 88 Minutes, which is a movie with 2007 movie with Al Pacino that I have no knowledge of. He directed Uprising. That's a film I do.

know about a 2001 film about the Warsaw Ghetto. It's a TV movie, I think was on HBO. I remember that. I feel like I watched that in like history class. Anyway, Red Corner stars Richard Gere. Here's a brief plot synopsis. An American attorney on business in China ends up wrongfully on trial for murder and its only key to innocence is a female defense lawyer from the country. so this is very much a you know America China type movie which would be interesting because this is

this is the prime period for American anxieties about China really coming to the forefront yeah so that's our next episode on the Patreon we have by the time you hear this will be an episode on the Tan Danton the Polish film

about the French Revolution And then after that, we're going to do the Carlos miniseries. I have my Criterion Blu-ray set ready to go. And so sign up for the Patreon to listen to those episodes and everything before that. The three years at this point of Patreon content, $5 a month, access to all of it, plus a little chat that I pop into from time to time. So sign up for the Patreon, support us there. We really appreciate it.

And that's it for this week's episode. For John Gans, I'm Jimal Bowie, and we will see you next time.