Unclear and Present Danger - Patriot Games (feat. Will Rahn)

Episode Date: November 12, 2021

In this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John are joined by Will Rahn of Yahoo News to talk “Patriot Games,” the second Jack Ryan movie of the 1990s and the first to star Harrison Ford. They discuss Ross Perot and the 1992 presidential election, Irish nationalism (and Irish bars), the film’s unambiguously pro-C.I.A politics, WASP triumphalism and the politics of George H.W. Bush.Contact us!Follow us on Twitter!John GanzJamelle BouieLinks from the episode!New York Times for June 6, 1992Janet Maslin’s New York times reviewRoger Ebert’s review

This won't be like anything you've ever done before, little brother. Target leaving the palace now. They're dead! From the producer of the hunt for Red October. Get down! Based on the best-selling novel, comes the summer's most explosive motion picture. Where's strong Miller?

Strong Miller. Get me hostage rescue at Quantico now. Airborne support approaching target area. Patriot Games. Welcome to Episode 2 of Unclear and Present Danger, a podcast about the movies that tell the story of America after the Cold War, and give a glimpse into its hopes, its fears, its self-confidence, and its insecurities. I'm Jamel Bowie. I'm a columnist for the New York Times opinion section. My name is John Gans.

I'm a freelance journalist. And we are joined today by Will Ron, a senior editor for Yahoo News. Hello, Will. Thank you for joining us on the podcast. Thank you. It's a pleasure. So today, as you probably guess by the opening audio, we are talking about Patriot Games, the second Jack Ryan, Tom Clancy movie of the 1990.

These. Patriot Games was released June 5th, 1992. It was directed by Philip Noyce, a director I'm not terribly familiar with. Screenplay by Donald Stewart, Peter Illif, people I don't know. Obviously, the people we all know from this are the stars. Harrison Ford as Jack Ryan in his first appearance in the role. Anne Archer as Kathy Ryan, I think is the character's name. His wife, Sean Bean, as the villain, Sam Jackson, who I forgot was. in this, James Earl Jones, et cetera, et cetera. A really stacked cast, lots of heavy hitters. The movie did very well. It grossed 18 and a half million in its first weekend. It grossed about 80 million in total off of a budget of 45 million, so totally respectable. Before we start talking further and kind of fitting the theme of this podcast, I want to take a quick look at what the New York Times page look like on Friday, June 5th, 1992.

And just pulled it up. We have the New York Times. The big, you know, in the A spot here, A1, built-aid former Soviet lands is stuck in Capitol Hill Quagmire, domestic issues and elections, black momentum by Thomas Friedman reporting on that. And then right next to it, President avoids discussing Perrault at news session. And then some stuff about gerrymandering and insider trading and NATO, you know, kind of kind of the usual stuff. The, the, um, at this point, the reason why that story, the, the parole looked like he was the, the main rival to Bush.

Uh, he was, he was looking like he could actually win. And you notice there's no story about Clinton on, oh, the story about Clinton on the front page is under the fold, which is Clinton on the Arsenio Hall show, playing the saxophone, a very famous moment for people who remember that. But he was not, you know, his campaign wasn't going terribly well at this time. No, no, that's right. Clinton was still very much behind. And I think the assumption was that barring Perrault, Bush would end up winning this, winning handily in this re-election campaign. Yeah, and Perrault dropped out not long after this, and Clinton's star sort of rose, but Perot was sucking. He dropped out in return. But Pearl was sucking up all the oxygen in the room and all the attention, and Clinton wasn't the main story at this time, as you know, you can see right here on the front page.

Yeah, and this bill to aid former Soviet lands, this was a huge issue about what to do with the former Soviet Union. And Nixon, a few months earlier, this slammed the Bush administration for not doing enough to help out. the former Soviet Union, he predicted that it would become a nationalist despotism if there wasn't more aid to protect, you know, nascent democracy in the former Soviet Union, I mean, yeah, in the post-Soviet states. So this was a big issue at the time in Congress, and, you know, people didn't really want to pay for it, but it would have been probably a good idea. But we're not here to talk about Ross Perot. We're here to talk about this movie, Tom Clancy.

Patriot games. So before we get into the plot, I just want to ask everyone, what is your experience with this movie? Will, how about you start? Have you seen this movie before? Did you have thoughts on it before? What is your experience with the movie? I've seen this movie probably about five times over the course of my life. life. Like John, I've seen this many times. I'm not sure if like John, every time I see it,

I watched it for the most recent time this past Sunday night. And every time I watch it, I like it a little bit less. Yeah, I guess I kind of agree with you. So I wasn't, okay, so I watched, as I discussed last time, um, uh, uh, Rundfrey, October dozens of times as a kid but Patriot and I watched clear clear and present danger the next movie a lot of times but I actually wasn't allowed to watch um Patriot games when I was super young because there was inappropriate con it was decided by my parents and sisters that it was inappropriate so I only watched this when I was a little bit older but I have seen it many many times and I maybe more than five but um I kind of agree with Will it's like I still like the movie

a lot, but maybe mostly for the nostalgia reasons, and now I see it with a more and more jaundiced eye and not that crazy about it. What about you, Jamel? Yeah, I don't remember watching this one as a kid. It's funny, these movies, this and clear and present danger in a non-clancy, Clancy movie, Air Force One, all kind of get mixed up in my head as sort of similar memories crossing streams. So I don't recall seeing this one as a kid, but I've totally watched it a bunch as an adult. And like you will, every time I watch it, I like it a little less because I kind of think of the two forwards, it might be the weakest one. It's sort of the most generic almost. And it's the one that, you know, Jack Ryan is very much a Tom Clancy kind of like, you know, fantasy for

himself like mary sue um and it's it feels the most mary sueish of all these movies uh when it comes to harrison for its characterization sort of what happens to him throughout the plot yeah you know just one thing that really kind of jumped out to me this most recent time i watched it is how thinly sketched all of these characters are uh jack ryan probably makes the most sense coming after the hunt for Red October, but what exactly is going on with this ultra-violent faction of the IRA, to use Jack Ryan's description of the people who are, well, one of them is obsessed, Sean Bean's character is obsessed with killing Harrison Ford and maybe his family because Harrison Ford killed his brother.

but the rest of them seem really okay with indulging this, even though he is screwing up all of their plans. Yeah, the motivations of the characters is a little bit thin. People complained about that in the original Hunt for October that Jack Ryan's character was a cipher, but I think maybe the characters in this movie are even, a little bit more, I don't want to say wooden because I think the acting performances are good, but not perhaps a ton of depth and motivation gets communicated.

I love Harrison Ford, but I think Alec Baldwin brought a little something extra to the role of Jack Ryan. And we also know more about Jack Ryan in that movie, because at the very least, I think it was Fred Thompson's character in Hunt for Red October tells another senior naval commander all about Jack Ryan's backstory, and we don't really have any Ryan backstory in this one, other than he loves his wife, his wife loves him, they both love the daughter, the daughter is very cute. Yeah, you know, I read when I was doing a, when I was doing research for Hunt for Red October

episode, I read an interview with McTiernan, the director of that, and he said the reason why, I don't know if this is true, but it's funny. The reason why he and Alec Baldwin didn't want to do Patriot Games is because they were Irish Americans and thought, were offended by the subject matter. There is, this is, so I read, last night I read the variety review of Patriot games from 1992, which calls it reactionary and fascistic. Fascistic is a word that is used far right wing. I think Tom Clancy had a different read on it. He thought that Harrison Ford was too liberal in it.

I don't know where that comes from other than Harrison Ford's Jack Ryan when he's recovering in the hospital. He says that he indicates that he reads Dunesbury, where I think the Jack Ryan of Tom Clancy's imagination, more of a Mallard Fillmore type guy. Right. Yeah, more Mallard Fillmore, yeah. So before we get into the movie. proper. I feel like it's worth a little background and just a quick plot, a really quick

overview. This movie, the Patriots and Patriots and Patriot games, presumably, refers to the Irish terrorist, I suppose, I don't know, who are the antagonists of the film. And the book, Clancy's novel, was published. He began writing on it in 1979, I believe, like in the late 70s, it was published in the 80s. And the book, when the book was being written, there was, I think, a bit more IRA activity happening in Ireland and in the UK, generally. There was a bombing in February, 1978. There was a bombing in August 1979, a bombing in Hyde Park in Regent High.

part in Regents Park. Sorry, I know nothing about England, so I'm just going to, I'm going to sound like a total foreigner here. Um, uh, bombing there that killed four soldiers, uh, in July 1982. So there's, I think it's very clear that this is all, this all forms the backdrop for Clancy's writing. And what's interesting about the movie, um, given when it's release, is it does feel a little bit out of place. And the same with the hunt for it, is this post-Cold War movie, kind of as the Cold War is ending Patriot Games is coming after a period of violence, but as that violence is beginning to recede, as we're beginning to get to peace of course in 1990s.

And so it feels, I can see why McTiernan or Baldwin may have found this kind of inflammatory because it does present Irish nationalists in an incredibly unflattering light at a time when, and that was probably very politically unhelpful. Yeah, there was a lot of Irish-American money, and they referred to this in the film, a lot of Irish-American money did go to the IRA. Colin Quinn had an old bit about it, about how he would go to the Norade fundraisers, the Northern Irish Catholic fundraisers, and they'd be like, well, we need money for the local orphanage outside of Ulster.

They're in desperate needs of Kalashnikovs, and some techs exploit. Uh, and I, I, I, so I have no idea what, like, Alex, if Alec Baldwin or John McKearnan were any part of that, but it's, uh, it was not totally uncommon for Irish Americans in New York and Boston to go to Sinn Féin fundraisers. Uh, you had, um, John, what's the name of the congressman from Long Island, whose, his name on Brock. John King? He's still the congressman, Pete King. He was a big norade fundraiser. Yeah. Yeah, he was a big, he would campaign in Long Island, and you'd go out there, and it's like, and I'm doing this for our sons and daughters in Ulster, which speaks to this kind of ethnic identity that really has become much more diluted, I think, over the past few decades. There's not, you don't, you don't really have that same level of, like, Irish-Americanness that I think you had in the 80s and 90s.

for sure and i don't think anybody would refuse to do the movie well i don't think an ira person of irish descent would feel similarly as sensitive about the issues raised in the movie post good friday as they were in this movie do we do we want to go through the plot and then yeah okay yeah let's go through the pot um so the you know the basics jack ryan a former CIA analyst now. He teaches history at the United States Naval Academy. He's in London for whatever reason. I'm not sure the movie makes clear why he's in London. Maybe he was teaching. He was doing something. And on a lovely afternoon, he witnesses and stops a kidnapping incident that, you know, Sean Bean's radical IRA terrorist killed.

several royal guards, attempts to kill or kidnap a royal in his family. But Ryan, who witnesses this go down, has, you know, tells his wife and child to get down, runs over, punches a guy, shoots another guy, shoots another guy, gets shot. It's all very exciting. It's actually, it's a very well-staged action sequence, and it is, I think it shows, the movie is at its best and it's sort of doing this kind of thing. But in the process, he killed Sean Bean's younger brother who had been part of this operation. And this sort of sets off the events of the plot.

Sean Bean's character wants to kill Ryan and his family, all the while his IRA associates are still attempting to kidnap this royal for the sake of ransom for, again, a reason that isn't really fully explained or defined. It's just sort of like, well, of course they want to do this because, you know, they're Irish terrorists. And that, that more or less begins the movie. And it's, so here, to get to like a film criticism, this is a much slower movie than Hunt for Red October. So you have this kind of explosive beginning. And then it very much slows down. It becomes very talky as you're kind of moving through, moving through the plot, moving through what's happening with all the characters. We, there is a sequence.

We do learn that this attempted kidnapping was not authorized by the IRA. IRA operatives attempt to assassinate the guy who planned it, but this does not work out. They escape. And Sean Bean's character, who has been arrested at this point, is freed as he's being transported to a prison. And that, you know, that begins kind of the next phase of what's happening here. So they escaped to Libya, but he's so obsessed with the fact that Ryan, killed his brother that he convinces his comrades to go to the United States and try to kill Jack Ryan and his family. And in the process, he badly wounds, he badly wounds Jack Ryan's wife and daughter an attack on the highway and they end up in the hospital. And it looks like Jack Ryan's

daughter might die. Can we just pause real quick about that? scene which is totally crazy yeah for sure oh you mean the highway shooting scene it's pretty scary man yeah it's it's a great scene but also i've driven on that highway quite a bit i used to live in dc um i used to go uh to annapolis on occasion just you know it because it's nice on the water and everything um if i were like just driving on the highway and i saw a guy open up a van door and pull out a sub machine gun that would that would ruin my whole week Yet the rest of those DMV drivers just continue going on. It's like, you know, it's another day of Beltway traffic hell.

Exactly. Some serious road range incident. Must be late or something. Yeah, none of them stop and help, which is accurate to the Beltway. But I think that scene, I think Christopher Nolan ripped it off later in the dark night. because that's uh remember uh the joker does the same thing heath ledger's joker does uh hanging out of the side of a van oh yeah with the machine gun oh yeah i never thought about that connection yeah yeah those are the only two movies i know were a dude hangs out of a van

and traffic and tries to kill people i can't think of any others the patreon game scene is better edited though i'll say that wow they don't make them like they used to i'll just say that um so then Ryan is convinced or insists on coming back to the CIA in order to track down these terrorists and take his revenge on them, he puts pressure on the Sinn Féin's representative in the United States and eats him in a bar, an Irish bar, full of IRA sympathizers, which Will gives us to understand is not so unrealistic, perhaps. And he threatens, yeah, what were you going to say? Well, you know, there's a couple Irish bars in D.C. I was not there in 1992, but, yeah.

And he, yeah, he threatens him basically by saying, by giving the IRA bad PR by showing him his hospitalized daughter they they uh the guy actually gives him some information um about one of the members of the terrorist cell who is english and not irish so he doesn't have to feel guilty about selling out a countryman um there's a lot of betrayal in the movie there's another traitor uh there's the traitor within the royal family who's providing the information to these terrorists about how to do these attacks. And then there's also a Irish cop, not an Irish American cop, an actual Irish cop who questions Sean Miller, who's Sean Bean's character at the beginning of the movie

and is killed as a traitor by the IRA guys when they bust him out of jail. So then the CIA finds the camp in the terrorist training camp in Libya where these IRA cell is hiding. They send the SAS to go and kill them, the British Special Air Service, and there's a scene which they're watching this in CIA headquarters on a satellite. very much, I would argue, weirdly eerily pressed in about of the raid that kill bin Laden, but we can talk about that later. They actually don't get them because they left the camp a little bit before the raid. And then in order to give Ryan the medal that he deserved from rescuing the member of the royal family at the beginning, they come to dinner at Ryan's house

on Chesapeake Bay but the IRA people attack this in order to kill two birds with one stone affect the royal kidnapping and assassinate Ryan and the movie ends in a high speed motorboat chase where Ryan subdues and kills

he kills him he kills Sean Bean right right before that Sean Bean's character kills the other Irish terrorists because they all get on this motor boat chase. He kills him because he's not down with the program of getting revenge. And this guy is completely,

completely just wants revenge and has lost the political intentions entirely. Yeah, it appears that way. He just wants to kill Harrison Ford. Yeah, so it's a kind of darker movie than, um, hunt for october because of you know obviously there's a lot more just shootings and murders but the attack on his family is pretty harrowing as we've discussed the ending is pretty bloody um yeah there's a lot more there's a lot more killing and shooting which i guess makes sense because it's about terrorism but um yeah the the tone of the movie is significantly a little a little bit more

more grim than Hunt for October, I would say. I think this is still the only rated R. Tom Clancy movie. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I think the rest of them are PG or PG-13. So this movie is about terrorism, and I find, because I am a post-9-11 kid, right? I was like 13 on September 11th or 14 or Harvard I was. I still find it interesting to watch these movies about terrorism that have the Middle East as sort of a side part, right? Sort of the IRA terrorists are in Libya.

But there's no real sort of discussion or interest in Libya, Libya, it's really sort of Libya as staging ground for these IRA terrorists. But beyond that, and I want to go back to this observation you made, John, about the similarities of the CIA, you know, surveillance scene to the bin Laden raid. And you found a review of the movie that made this point. This is an astoundingly pro-CIA movie, right? This is a movie that presents the CIA in America's intelligence community as being highly dedicated, highly hardworking, extremely competent. And he's so competent, right, they could find a handful of terrorists.

in the middle of the desert and then, you know, they were gone by the time they made the strike, but accurately strike their location. Have they not been gone, presumably they would have been able to stop them. And that to me, I mean, that to me captures so much of what makes this, so much of what makes it relevant as a post-Cold War film. It's really a film that that captures the just immense self-confidence to the United States had in the moment, right? Even, you know, if you personify it in Jack Ryan, Jack Ryan does not hesitate to stop his IRA terrorists. At no point does he hesitate, at no point does he really second-guess. He is righteous, and he knows he's righteous, and that leads him to victory.

Yeah, he says, like, he wasn't thinking, you know, he said when he was asked why he intervened against the terrorist attack he said it just made me mad and it kind of just like you know the sort of righteousness american decency and righteousness offended just will act immediately to do the right thing it very much uh carries that through and you know my my girlfriend pointed out this to me and i did not think about this ever before She was like, I think that the Jack Ryan movies and the Bush presidency, there's some connection, or the Harrison for Jack Ryan movies, and I was like, I've never made this connection. But in a way, like, there is certain, the George W. Bush as a figure is sort of like, definitely wants to be Harrison Ford in these movies. He's maybe not quite as bright, but I think he represents the same, you know, type of American decency and action that, that, that, uh, Bush tried to embody as a public figure. So, and, you know, he kind of is, his main, his main tool is his sincerity. You know, he's an analyst and he's smart, but he basically gets everything done through, like, his diligent application of being like, I'm really going to,

work hard on this. He's not like a mastermind. He's just like, he does a good job. He's a competent fellow. And they're so careful to Jamel's point about how good, how raw raw pro CIA this movie is.

It's where originally Jack Ryan, it's like, I think this camp might be the IRA one. And James Earl Jones is like, but you're not sure. And Jack Ryan's like, yeah. And it's like, all right, well, let's keep on thinking. Keep on looking at it. and he keeps on studying those satellite photos again and again and again and again

before he can determine with some degree of certainty that they're going to go in. Right. These are careful people. They're not just going in and blowing stuff up. No, right. And, yeah, it is very pro-CIA. It is very, well, from this article that I've read, I was mentioning to you guys that I read in the Irish Voice, which apparently

is available free in bars according to Will is this movie was taken exception to and it said in Patriot Games the Irish villains and their fellow travelers

the only kind of Irish people encountered in this movie which is true narrowly missed being given the ape-faced treatment so beloved of Punch Magazine and it's a counterpart puck and then it says

along the way Patriot Games perpetuates racist stereotypes about the Irish. And it says, among the really annoying troublemakers in this scenario is the Irish Republican Army, a deadly enemy of Britain, number one friend in the world

to America's WASP establishment. So there's a no small degree of ethnic resentment in this review, which makes some fair points about, you know, the fact that all the Irish people in the movie are presented as, as bloodthirsty in one way or the other, that one Irish cop, which this review doesn't really mention, but he's sort of a turncoat

against presumably other Irish Catholics. So this movie was not entirely warmly received by at least politically conscious Irish Americans. And, you know, this was before, I mean, the violence of the troubles had died down somewhat, but this was before the Good Friday Agreement, These issues were live. There was a good deal of sympathy in the United States for Irish nationalism, which maybe Will could speak to. Yeah, I mean, it's just so the Irish, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, who eventually betrays one of these radical IRA members, who is English, who's an English woman, which has never explained for a moment, why this English woman, A, has an Irish accent. in his B working for the IRA, the most radical wing of the IRA.

He's sort of this Jerry Adams figure. And in that scene where Harrison Ford confronts him in the bar, and he says to the guy, you know, the Jerry Adams guy, the Sinn Fane leader, he's like, listen, I'm not going to betray any of my fellow Irishmen. I think what was done to your kid was bad, but the bucks, you know, I stop at the water's edge here. I'm not going to give up a single Irish person to you.

And Harrison Ford starts yelling at him. It's like, well, I'm going to invite all of the news cameras in to my daughter's hospital room and show them what your money does, what this dirty gun money of yours does. Right. He says, I'm going to stop your gun money. And he storms out. He's got Samuel Jackson with him, his buddy, and they storm out of the bar. And you see a big picture of Jerry Adams on the side of the bar.

And so, I mean... Oh, I miss that. Yeah, no, there's a big portrait of Jerry Adams as they storm out. And so that was, so it was, you know, Jerry Adams and, you know, it's, it's, there's still, I guess, some debate over, you know, what his involvement was with the IRA. Some journalists have said that he was a top IRA official, that he was on their top war council. He's always. That's absolutely true. You're right.

Okay. So, but he's always denied it. And there was this sense back then among certain Irish Americans. And we can get into this later. It was really up, I would argue, until probably around 9-11. Jerry Adams was seen by Irish Americans as kind of like their sort of Mandela figure, that he was like, okay, he has like, you know, he's like a militant, but for like a good cause and he's essentially a political actor.

and I don't think that that idea of Jerry Adams really bears scrutiny in the end and a lot of the journalism that's come out. Sinn Féin, they always tried to create public distance between themselves and the IRA, but like as it's shown in the movie, they were also to some extent IRA apologists. And they could say it's like, oh, well, you know, our IRA, the IRA just is like a bit of background. So the IRA splits up constantly throughout the history of the IRA,

and it gets confusing. because every IRA just calls itself the IRA. These would be the provos in the 90s, who were the main figures during the Troubles, who had split off from the official IRA in the 1960s, who had themselves split off from Michael Collins' IRA in the earlier part of the 20th century. And, you know, since the peace process,

there's been, you know, continuity IRA, real IRA. They're called, you know, other IRA groups. Which it's kind of implied that this group in the movie is sort of like, it's a splinter group. But they're called the Ulster Liberation Army, which is what, yeah, which, yeah, but that seems like bullshit to me because most of the loyalist Protestant side things used Ulster in their names, not the nationalist side. That seems a little bit, yeah.

Yeah, it makes it sound like a Protestant group. fucked up tom clancy do you know in the book um so in the in the movie they go to libya in the book they make contact with black militant with a black left wing militant group in the u.s which is completely nuts but but makes only makes slightly more sense when you consider it this was first written in the 1970s and not in the late 80s or or 90s But, yeah, that was, like, their way, like, into the U.S. as they made contact with this group called The Movement, which is, you know, supposed to be, I guess, I don't know,

some kind of, like, Stokely Carmichael-inspired group. But that is so fascinating. Instead, in the movie, Sean Bean and the other radical IRA guys, just kind of travel back and forth willy-nilly between Libya and the United States. never explained how or why. Well, we know the why, which is they want to kill Harrison Ford's family, but he's just going back and forth, presumably, I guess, because we don't have a TSA at the time, and you just

walked onto a plane. But it's never explained. He's like, he's in Maryland one moment. He's back in Libya, and it's like, oh, look, now they're back in Maryland, where this royal figure who's already survived an IRA assassination plot and Jack Ryan's family, who who have already survived an IRA assassin's plot, are apparently protected by, like, nobody, by, like, a handful of, like, Maryland State Troopers.

I want to go back a little bit to the observation about Bush, not George W. Bush, but just H.W. Bush. Because that's who I thought you were talking about initially. Uh-huh. No, no, I was talking about W.W. But, yeah, let's talk about H.W. Bush. As we said at the beginning, this is, we're in campaign season right now. But it's, Jack Ryan's very much, very clearly kind of a pappy Bush Republican and sort of his bearing, sort of his attitude, sort of his general open-mindedness, but still sort of like hard-nosed Americanness. And I think it's worth saying, right, that we're not even a year, maybe we're a little more than a year removed from the end of the Gulf War in 1991.

And so this is also a moment of real American triumphalism, right? The Gulf War, I mean, if you go back to news coverage of the end of the Gulf War, it is this weird kind of like America's back baby attitude from the media, right? You know, we bomb this country into the Stone Age and look how advanced our weaponry is, look how talented our military is, look how talented generalship is, James Earl Jones character, you know, cannot help but remind one of Colin Powell. uh who was whose who's who star was very high at the time colon pal who recently passed away yeah um and so just watching it with that in the back of my mind right it is this it is this thing of the united

states having defeated its primary ideological adversary is now turning you know in its vision is now turning its expertise and its strength to all all, you know, little, we ignore all these little problems, but now we're going to take care of them. We're going to mop up all the sloppy imperialist conflicts that are going on, all the details of it. Yeah. Yeah, I think there's a lot to that. And I think that, you know, okay, what's really interesting about this moment by 1992,

and, yeah, this, you're absolutely right. This is like the, like, these movies in a way, maybe not the third one, but, but these, movies are like H.W. Bush republicanism with their, you know, internationalism and, you know, their kind of hints of making gestures towards racial inclusiveness and, you know, their worship of, like, expertise and, you know, competent officials. Yeah, this is really like the ideology of the H.W. Bush years insofar as there was one. But, you know, it's crazy how quickly America soured. Like, you know, these movies communicated kind of almost a kind of nostalgic feeling for that. Like, yeah, there's like, you know, we want, we handily won the Gulf War. And we showed America's

strength after the, what Bush called the Vietnam, well, others, but he called the, the Vietnam syndrome. And, but the country had soured on that so quickly after the Gulf War. By this time in 1992, which is, you know, just after the chapter that I'm working on, my book I'm up to about May of the year, April, May, March, is that the country could not care less anymore about the success of the United States in the Cold War. And through these movies, perhaps it could kind of escape. But the main story, you know, the stories about, and there were other good things going on in the world. But the, like, you know, there was, there was an agreement to have a, no, it actually happened. There was a referendum to end apartheid or to negotiate

an apartheid that passed. Yeltsin and Bush jointly declared the end of the Cold War officially. And, you know, the public was just so disillusioned already with the Cold War that this just didn't really have a lot of effect on people. What's interesting is like, and it makes sense that this movie was successful because it kind of could make that go a little farther and make people kind of believe still more and say, okay, well, where are we going to turn now? We could defeat terrorists and so on and so forth. But it's clear that, like, you know, the politics of that were more complicated because, like, this made, you know, I don't think that there were no, there were very few left-wingers who

were, like, offended by Reagan-Europe depictions of the Soviet Union. But there were actually Irish Americans who are like, you know what, fuck Patriot games. Like, I don't like this. It's like, I don't like the way this portrays, you know, my people and our political problems. So the politics of it were more complicated. And I think that this line of the, this line of the negative review by Patrick Farreley in the Irish voice, where he says, the IRA, the deadly enemy of Britain number one friend in the world to America's Wast's establishment, is that in a way, like the H. the H.W. Bush presidency was the last hurrah of the WASP establishment, and it was already sort of, like, losing its grip on the country and its ideological conceits about our international role and was being taken less seriously. And this movie was like, no, like, we can do it.

We can keep it going. Like, we'll keep on defeating the bad guys. like we will keep continuing to be the most competent power in the world. But I don't know how much Americans really believe that anymore. I mean, you know this because you're writing about it in your book. Just a month or two after this movie comes out, Pat Buchanan gives his convention speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention, and that is a speech. I mean, look, from the perspective of 2021, that's a speech that's sort of very prescient

about where American politics are headed. But even in the moment, it kind of does reflect this intense discontent with the state of the nation, and this is the nation vis-à-vis the rest of the world as well. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And I just think, like, what's incredible to me about this moment was the absolute triumph and collapse of this, I want to just call it ideological. universe of Pappy Bush internationalist Wasp Republicanism, which

was just like, yeah, we won the Cold War. I mean, Reagan, you know, was there for a lot of the military buildup, but they're like, we won the Cold War. The United States ended its greatest peril for 50 years. And, you know,

but the country was in recession and nobody cared. And people felt the ugly, what this movie It's interesting, even though it deals with nationalism. It doesn't really deal with the, it doesn't, as we say, like the motivations are sort of not that well fleshed out. But, you know, nationalism was considered correctly to be the next thing. And this movie is about nationalism. It's called Patriot Games and it deals with, you know, hypernationalism and the violence that it could inspire. So in a way, like, yeah, it showed the U.S. as a hyper-competent power, but it deals with, you know, hyper-nationalism and the violence that it could inspire. So in a way, like, yeah, it showed the U.S. as a hyper-competent power, but it kind of showed the next threat. In this case, it's the kind of nationalism that was maybe fading a little bit by this time, but still had, you know, a romantic appeal to a lot of Americans and especially Irish Americans. But, yeah, I mean, by this time, Sarajevo had been besieged,

and there was a very nasty war going on between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and there had suddenly become a lot of interest and concern about the rise of nationalism. And in a way, this movie reflects that, even though it's not that sophisticated about the way it deals with it. When I think of George H.W. Bush losing, I was losing the election in 1992. I always think a little bit about Winston Churchill losing in 1945 in the British election, that the people on the ground were kind of eager to lose the page. because it's a really remarkable political fall for George H.W. Bush, because, you know, Jamel noted this right after the Persian Gulf War, the first Persian Gulf War, where George H.W. Bush's approval ratings were through the roof.

And it was right after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The movie tries to deal with that in what I thought was kind of an amusing little moment where you have Jack Ryan giving his speech to all of these British people at the beginning. And, you know, they're all looking with rapt attention at this man. And he gets up there and he says, well, given what happened in the Soviet Union, we have no idea what's going to go on with the British fleet, with the Soviet fleet. And they all like break out into applause like, oh, what a brilliant observation you made saying, oh, I have no idea what's going to happen next. In fairness, though, in the movie, he did tell his wife the night before that he was just going to wing it. But I feel like in the 90s, in a lot of these movies, it was sort of America searching for what the enemy was going to be because we had lost the great kind of Cold War foil.

It's so informed, like the James Bond movies and, you know, all of our espionage movies and things like that. And so you have this kind of steady progression to your, like, nationalist point. A few years after this, we have the Air Force One, which is Kazakh Nationalists, and where Harrison Ford is president. And he's basically Jack Ryan as president in Air Force One. And he begins the speech with this kind of, it begins the movie with this, basically the speech that could have been written by Paul Wolfowitz saying that if you have terrorists in your country, the U.S. is going to come and just mop you up. And he gives this to

like the Russian Duma and all the Russians jump up and say, yay, America's going to clean up the world. We're totally in support of that. So it's kind of this mixture of this like utopian new world order in the Bush sense of like the U.S. is the preeminent superpower, you know, just not even preeminent. Just the only one. No other game in town. We don't know who our enemies are. And so these movies are kind of trying to figure out, is it drug cartels? Is it these like ethnic nationalist groups in Europe. And you take that all the way to the Owen Wilson movie Behind Enemy Lines, which actually came out after 9-11, but does basically the Serbian conflict as our next big enemies.

Yeah, you're giving away our entire podcast. But that's, but you're absolutely right. Yeah, I think, I think you're right. And I don't know that the country, I mean, that the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, reviews the movie was a moderate success and the reviews were pretty friendly but i don't know if people like how much this movie really captured people's imaginations they're like that was a good thriller but they weren't they weren't like this movie changed the way we think about culture and like is a it wasn't like a jaws moment where it's like ah jaws what is it about you know like it's like oh

yeah Patriot games that's that's that's a pretty good it was a pretty good movie but it was also it was the kind of movie that i mean like we don't really make anymore uh because you know because it does exist in the real world with real world enemies just when you know jack ryan is looking at the map of of libya and all the terror groups there yeah and they're trying to figure out which one is this which and he's like well we know this one is plo we know this one is is uh shining path we don't know what this one is i mean you were able to talk about geopolitics in these movies in a real sense whereas now i mean i'm a fan of the mission impossible series, but they are not grounded in any kind of reality, as this movie, to its credit, is to some

extent. And I think actually a little bit more than maybe the novel was. But, but yeah, I agree. I mean, I'm a defender of all these movies. I think, or a qualified defender of all these movies. There is, there is something to the fact that they're based in, yeah, it's to their credit that they're based in geopolitical reality and you know that that that adds a level of complexity and understanding to them that's lacking in you know movies with totally fantastical enemies or doesn't talk think about doesn't even have any entry to think about politics or the world um but yeah i think you know what's an interesting little moment in the movie that just occurred to me when we were talking about um how the movie is dealing with like the

post-Cold War moment is that at one point he's giving it yeah I absolutely agree with you well your your little observation about his little speech I thought that too I was like he's giving this like completely bland speech about like the post-Soviet moment where he's like well given what's happening like we really can't predict and he gets this rapturous applause I just thought that was a really funny moment in the movie it's just like a filler scene and another filler see that has like a weird um piece of content that i don't quite know what to make of is when he's teaching his enapolis class and he's teaching them like pal the i think he's teaching them lucidity that's exactly what he's teaching them yeah and he's like you know he's trying to get them

to like think deeper about his students think deeper about the text and like his student is like oh the real reason they got involved in the world was pride and that was a like they lost the real battle and then it doesn't it cuts off from there but it's like oh like that's a classic of imperial overreach and it's funny that he was teaching that you know the actual the title patriot games it comes from this irish poem uh slash song that i think dates back to the civil war um and i i which civil war uh the irish civil war okay sorry not the american civil areas yeah my My brain was like, huh, I wonder one of the 1860s that was, that was written. And I believe it opens.

I mean, it's kind of an ironic song in that kind of like Irish way. It's like a pro-IRA ballad, but kind of like bitter and tragic. I'm doing this from memory, but I think it goes, come all you young rebels enlist while I sing, the love of one's country is a terrible thing. It banishes fear with the speed of a flame, and it makes us all part of the Patriot game. yeah and there's nice recordings of that yeah yeah i mean it's just it's interesting that

if the if the title is taking from this sort of ironic song and the movie is does sort of posit nationalism as the the next you know great threat to america's interest it also is itself a very nationalistic movie it's sort of it's sort of you know it's that little internal contradiction um there to to go back to to clancy himself itself, it is this sort of, it's this very chauvinistic kind of our nationalism because it's based off presumably higher values is, is good. It is a good force in the world against these other, you know, lesser nationalisms. You mentioned John earlier that in the novel, the Irish terrorists make their way to the U.S. with the help of black radicals, which is still

the funny thing ever heard in my life. Right. But there again, you have an instance, right, sort of this is the dangerous nationalism. This is a sectarian nationalism. This is an ethnic nationalism against our patriotic nationalism. And of course, the patriotic nationalism here is represented by, you know, the boomer wasp, basically. It's not really a fully American thing. It is itself very narrow in particular, but has the.

the patina of something more universal. Tom Clancy was an Irish Catholic guy and Jamansy mentioned that this is a character like this is clearly the idealized version of Tom Clancy that's in the Jack Ryan character

and they don't make any big deal of it in the movie I don't think it's even mentioned but Jack Ryan obviously that's an Irish Catholic name. Tom Clancy was an Irish Catholic guy they make him totally white in the movie in the sense that like they don't deal I think they don't deal don't deal with his Irish Catholicism at all, or it doesn't give him any kind of

feeling of mixed feelings about the IRA or anything. He's just, he has no, like, he has, and I don't think in the book either. He's just like, there's just no, like, eh, you know, I think the IRA is bad, but I can sympathize a little bit with, you know, anti-British imperialism. It's just like he is just an American. He's completely assimilated to, you know, Um, you know, as this review puts it, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, that this reviewer somewhat conspiratorially says spreads from from, from Britain to, between Britain and D.C. Um, and, but, but, but we know for a fact that, you know, that's a little bit of a simplification, because there's still, as you, as you, as you pointed out earlier, like, there was an ethnic identity of Irish Americans, that wasn't, just like, yeah, we're white Americans. They had their own identity and they had their own politics. And they were different from the U.S. foreign policy. They, you know, often sympathized

with what were labeled terrorists. And I think some of them, some of them. It's not, but that was a significant, it was significant enough to be an important source of funding for the IRA. Peter King, a Republican, a conservative Republican congressman was, you know, a huge backer of these kind of pseudo-Marxist rebels in Northern Ireland. Yeah, exactly. He, yeah, so it was enough of a thing. But it's interesting to me that that just doesn't really, I mean, the movie hints at American sympathies for the IRA, but, but, but it's, it's strange, it's, I wonder if the end of the troubles has, done something to irish ethnicity in the you know i'll i will say there's the end of the troubles and i mean i sort of subscribe to the theory that you occasionally see voice that um that the troubles

really ended with 9-11 because it meant the complete evaporation of money um money uh coming from boston to new york to belfast in northern ireland um And then just speaking of movies, then you have in the years after that, in the odds, we had what I kind of think of as the mixploitation wave of the departed and then a bunch of knockoffs of the departed. And you had like the boondock saints and stuff like that. And a lot of like before Southie just became sort of another neighborhood in Boston, you know, that sort of like particular. rambunctious whitey bulger Irish violence wrapped up in church traditions

and tragedy and fatalism and storytelling and all of those kind of stereotypes but I feel like that was sort of like that last gasp of that Irish identity that has become it doesn't really exist in the same way anymore

yeah it's it's strange to see something that you know as a kid was such a thing and now it's not such a big thing. Yeah, I mean, like Irish stuff, it's like very kitschy. It's not, you know, people aren't, you know, beating their chests and you know, sobbing as they talk

about the Kennedys. No. Yeah. All right, well, with that said, I think this is a good time to wrap up. Any final thoughts on Patriot games from either of you? It's not that great, but it's still worth watching.

And I Oh, hey, I have one last thought. You know how I said that there's a secretly, there's a secretly pro-communist message in Huntford October? I think there's a secretly pro-IRA message in Patriot Games, and it's communicated through the music. It's that sad, Celtic kind of synthesizer music that they play over the movie adds a romantic patina to Ireland.

Irish nationalism, which the movie has to admit exists even when it's against it. Yeah, they mentioned in passing, I guess Jack Ryan is like looking through Sean Bean's file and he was like, oh, his dad was killed by the RUC, which at the time was the British police force in Northern Ireland that would battle with the IRA. And before Sean Bean gets released, you have the good Irish cop, the Irish turncoat cop, and he looks at Sean Bean, and I'm not going to attempt the accent, but he looks at it and just like goes. It's like, I know where the hatred comes from. Right. We don't talk about where the hatred comes from. You know, it doesn't go into it, but it acknowledges that something bad happens

there. I will say for my part, and we can consider this my final thought, that whatever I do delve into the history of sort of Ireland and British colonialism, imperialism, and Ireland, I become extremely sympathetic to Irish nationalists. Like, on kind of a, on kind of a deep, level sort of like I get I get it yeah it's pretty it's it's it's it's a I mean not saying I sympathize with any specific political tendency but it is one of the classics of wars of liberation and will remain so by the end of the 90s it got really really bad yeah and before that even like in the 1980s you know they try to I think he'll blow up Thatcher, and they killed several people while doing it.

And, you know, if you're like a Tom Clancy, like, Irish Republican in the GOP sense, you probably lost your sympathy for the IRA. I don't know, somewhere around then. Probably. Yeah. All right, that is our show. Thank you, Will, so much for joining us to talk about this movie. Yeah, thanks, guys. Really appreciate it.

This was fun. For your listeners, if you are not a subscriber, please subscribe. we are available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts, and wherever else podcasts are found, your favorite podcatcher, I mean, anywhere, we're everywhere now. If you subscribe, please leave a rating and a review. It does help people find the show. You can reach out to both myself and John on Twitter. I am at Jay Bowie. John, you are...

At Lionel Trolling. At Lionel underscore Trolling. Lionel underscore Trolling. Um, I think that's a very fun, uh, handle. Uh, and we have, we have a feedback email for those of you who want to reach us. The feedback email is, uh, unclear and present feedback at fastmail.com. That's fastmail.com. Unclear and present feedback at fastmail.com. Send us a message, send us a note. Um, if there's a movie you think we should watch, let us know. Um, it's, it's for

to use. Episodes come out every Friday, so we will see you in two weeks after this release. Our next movie will be our namesake, Clear and Present Danger, which is my favorite of the Harrison Ford Jack Ryan movies. It's really terrific, and I'm excited to talk about it. For John Gans, I am Jamal Bowie, and this is unclear and present danger. We'll see you next time. I'm boy cherish the year

that I need you're young, y'allai singean. Falka do, falla day. Falka do, Falka day. Falk do, Fowlady. My angel, Sankerian, In the world, that's all the way,

I'm all right Oh, away.