Unclear and Present Danger - Rising Sun

Episode Date: August 6, 2022

On episode 21 of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John discuss the horrifically problematic 1993 thriller “Rising Sun” starring Wesley Snipes and Sean Connery. It’s lurid, salacious and incredibly racist, which makes it fertile ground for a discussion of the anti-Japanese panic of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Additional topics include Wesley Snipes' career, Michael Crighton’s whole deal, and the question of whether it is even possible to forge a unifying national narrative.Connor Lynch produced this episode. Artwork by Rachel Eck.Contact us!Follow us on Twitter!John GanzJamelle BouieLinks from the episode!The Washington Post on the protests against the release of “Rising Sun.”Hobart Rowen on Japan-bashing in the 1980s.Roger Ebert’s review of “Gung Ho.”New York Times front page for July 30, 1993

You ever negotiated with the Japanese before? Well, this is hardly a negotiation. What is it? It's a homicide. Every aspect of your appearance and behavior will reflect on me as your semai. My simpai? That wouldn't happen to be anything like Massa now, would it? Whatever happens, don't lose your temper.

I don't lose my temper. That's good to know. Sean Connery. We're playing that most American of games, which is what? Catch up. Wesley Snipes. Hey, look, Simpie, apple pie, whatever it is you want me to call you. We have a murder here, and I want to solve it.

We're in the war zone. Welcome to Episode 21 of Unclear and Present Danger, a podcast about the political and military thrillers of the 1990s and what they say about the politics of that decade. I'm Jamel Bowie. columnist for the New York Times opinion section. My name is John Gans. I write a substack newsletter called Unpopular Front, and I'm working on a book about American politics in the early 1990s. Today we are talking the 1993 action thriller Rising Sun, directed by Philip Kaufman

and starring Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes, as well as featuring Harvey Kaitel, Keri Hiroki, Tagawa, Tia Carrera, and Ray Wise. Here is a short plot synopsis. When a prostitute is found dead in a Los Angeles skyscraper occupied by a large Japanese corporation, detectives John Connor and Webb Smith are called in to investigate. Although Connor has previous experience working in Japan, cultural differences make their progress difficult until a security disc showing the murder turns up. Close scrutiny proves the disc has been doctored,

and the detectives realize they're dealing with a cover-up as well. As always, you should watch the movie before listening to The Conversation. It is available to buy or rent on iTunes and Amazon. It is, appropriately enough, available for streaming on Cinemex. Before we get to the meat of our conversation, let's look at the New York Times page for the day of release, July 30th, 1993. Okay, let's take a look. Oh, first of all, Israel courts sets Damanyuk Jamajek, Jamajuk, free, but he's now without a country. This was a, they kept on trying to get this guy, charged this guy John Jamangich, who they thought was Ivan the terrible, a notorious concentration camp guard, gas chamber operator.

And this guy who was in an auto worker and Ukrainian American auto worker kept on going on trial and acquitted. He lost his U.S. citizenship. I'm not sure how it ends up, but I think eventually he was actually convicted because they thought it was him. But he kept on being acquitted, but then he became stateless. So that's that. That was a long story that went through the 80s and 90s. Victory now seems in Clinton's grasp on a service plan. GOP solidarity broken.

Republican Center says he'll change sides and support cloture on filibuster. President Clinton's National Service Bill tonight appeared ahead for passage after three Senate Republicans abandoned their party's filibuster of the legislation and set it forth he would join the Senator Bill Cohen of Maine. Can you even imagine in the modern day context of politics, this is just unimaginable, like that there would be a total breakdown of a unified Republican block this way and ending a filibuster. the legislation itself wasn't that controversial. Clinton was trying to pass a bill to do some kind of national service to encourage people who had graduated college to go into local educational programs and stuff like that. An idea that everybody has kind of liked and has been popular,

but has never really taken off because it's never been funded properly. But it keeps on coming back up. I think someone ran on this recently coming up with this national service. Was it Buttigieg? I feel good, it sounds like him. Same kind of. Yeah, it does. It does.

So I think, but people, people have periodically come up with this idea. I think there are programs, but it's never become like something on the level of like a domestic peace corps or military service or something like that. Prosecution hurt and banking trial. Oh, wow. Okay. So a New York state judge dismissed half of a charges, including bribery court and the indictment of Robert A. Altman. And this has to do with effort to defraud banking regulators. There were lots of cases like this in the late 90s and early 80s that a lot of the issues that they revealed came to a head around 2008 with the financial crisis.

If you can't run for a walk, we'll do. Okay, so this says walking is okay, but you don't need to jog. It's healthy to walk. Clinton gives his tax plan a homie touch. The flowers were fake. The books borrowed from the stiff, and the stiff poses could have been from family feud,

but the faux homie set in the White House stage had a real political purpose to give a human dimension to President Clinton's fight for an economic plan that is being derided as taxing and spending. The president has proposed a $28 billion tax expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit Program, the greatest in more than two decades, a scaled-down version of his proposal now appeals, almost certain to win favor in Capitol Hill. All right, so.

Just real quick about this one. First of all, obviously listeners can't see it, but there's a picture of Clinton here. The suit he's wearing, it's like so 90s, it's like a 90s big suit. Yeah, it's like a box. So I just want to point that out. I would never wear a 90s box suit, but I do enjoy seeing them out in the wild, especially materials like this. I think you could pull it off. It would be too Steve Harvey on me.

I'm sort of like I'm actually too much, I'm too much like the, the shape and look of a guy to wear that suit. Right. It fits how I look too much, so I can't do it. You got to go against type a little bit. Right. I got to go against type. The other thing is it's just it's funny to me I guess we're both old enough to remember

when you know people claim to care about deficits and such Yeah And it's just so funny to me that Well they're pretending to now again right Yeah I guess you're pretending now again But like the epithet tax and spend liberal has always been so funny to me It's sort of like you know what you are You want to you want to raise

revenue and then spend it on people. And it's like, yeah, what else would you do? I don't understand what else is the point. It sounds bad. They would run away from it. Like, no, I don't want to tax and spend. It's like, it seems reasonable to me to say I want to raise taxes on, you know, very wealthy people and then spend it on less wealthy people. But yeah, this was a, and Clinton was very explicitly trying to position the Democratic Party away from this sort of tax and spend. image and it's all it's also quaint um looking back that this was the charge that really got people up in arms jemal come on you know enough about politics to know that spending money on poor people is the last thing that americans want to do that's true that's true but yeah no there there is

actually something pretty related to the movie we watch there was a not an election but uh a new government formed in Japan, bringing about the first non-liberal Democratic prime minister who was described in the New York Times article as a conservative populist who has promised to reduce the intrusive role of the government, the Japanese economy. Today's decision kept two months of the most drastic change in recent political history started the industrial world's most conservative country in a slow dory towards a more open economy, greatest work for consumers, and a more active international role all goes that the United States has pushed for in recent years, the decision would install a sort of rainbow coalition of

conservatives and socialists' polity differences and paper over. They can achieve their principal aims to unseat the discredited liberal Democrats who are, doesn't sound like it to American ears, but the kind of the establishment conservative party in Japan and reform the corrupt electoral system. So basically, Japan was beginning to enter into its period of economic troubles around this time. And we'll discuss. us all that. But then the Liberal Democratic Party got back in charge and they've been in charge pretty much ever since and are back in charge now. Right. The recently assassinated former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was a liberal, a member of the Liberal Democratic Party

was the longest serving prime minister in Japanese history. It's a totally dominant party and this was a surprising period in which they weren't in control. So yeah. Uh, rising sun. Okay, rising sun. Uh, let's do a quick, I guess, like I'm calling this a Hollywood spotlight talking a bit about the context of the movie in terms of it's, it's, you know, as a blockbuster. Um, this, I wouldn't call this like a major movie. It did have a pretty decent budget of $40 million, which is not nothing.

And it did break the 100 million market at the box office despite getting very mixed reviews. Yeah. Um, uh, and also despite being the. subject of real controversy, which I'm sure we're going to talk about. A rising sun has, to put it lightly, an extremely problematic view of the Japanese, of Japanese culture of Japanese people, and so on and so forth. And there were protests. Asian American groups protested the movie in the run-up to its release. I read a piece in the Washington Post about it, the Peace of Vanity Fair. There was real discontent with this movie and its portrayal of Asian-American

And especially in kind of fraught context, I think we're post-L.A. riots at this point, you know, there's still real concerns about anti-Asian American prejudice. So Rising Sun kind of is part of that cultural fervent. I don't think there's much to say about the director, Philip Kaufman. His previous work includes the 1970 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatcher, which is great, a great actually kind of you know cold war film and then he also directed the right stuff another terrific movie but there's a plenty to say about a couple of the stars and then the person who wrote the novel rising son on which the movie is based so a quick Sean Connery sidebar there's not a time I don't even to say that much about Sean Connery's

whole career the guy is the guy was just sort of a titan of Hollywood of the screen he we can't say that at this point in the 1990s he's sort of in the middle of a very fruitful run of roles obviously the hunt for at october which is our first episode um continuing with the russia house which is episode nine of the podcast if you haven't listened to it and then a couple years later with michael baize the rock which will be a future episode and sean connery has a big role in that he has a couple bombs uh in the 90s as well but his 1990s are actually pretty solid and a pretty sell foundation for his retirement in the early 2000s. And I'm sure that part of the big box office draw for this was just Sean Connery on the poster in a title role. The other box office draw is

Wesley Snipes, who at this point, he begins his career in the 1980s and his mid-20s. He's about 30, 31 when this movie is released. And he's more or less approaching the peak of his powers. If you just look at the sheer number of films he carried in the 90s as sort of like the lead, I think it's totally fair to say that next to Will Smith, he was probably the biggest black actor of the decade. And I don't know the racial demographics of this podcast. But speaking as an African-American person who would have been kind of vaguely aware of all this stuff, I think that Wesley Snipes being much darker skinned than Will Smith and much willing, much more willing to take kind of harder, grittier roles than Will Smith, I would say that for black audiences,

Snipes was more relatable and I guess the more populous figure, sort of the more figure that like you go to cheer for versus Will Smith, who really did kind of occupy this almost Tom Cruise like role in Hollywood in the 90s. Not that he was like running away from being a black actor, but he's very obviously trying to shape himself as not being exclusively a black actor. I think Wesley Snipes really was considered to be he's a black actor in a way that Will Smith, if this makes any sense, the way Will Smith wasn't. it wasn't the same.

So as for Snipes's movies, in 93 alone, he is in Demolition Man, a movie we should probably add to the list to watch that. I mean, I fucking love that movie. So first of all, I just want to watch it. But second of all, I think, you know, the 90s future vision is interesting in that movie. So add to the list. And he's also in Boiling Point, a crime thriller starring Dennis Hopper and Vigel Mortensen, which I have never heard of.

And I kind of want to see that the ratings are poor, but like a poorly rated 90s crime thriller is probably going to be better than 90% of what I watch these days. So before 93, he had major roles in the King of New York, Abel Ferraro's great movie starring Christopher Walken. And then also New Jack City, which I feel like was his, you know, New Jack City is the role that really established Snipes as kind of like an iconic actor. He plays Nino Brown, an iconic character. character. And that's a terrific movie, a movie I really love. And he's also in two Spike Lee joints, Mo Better Blues, and Jungle Fever. The rest of his 90s are stacked with films that we will cover on this podcast, Passenger 57, kind of a terrorist film, drop zone, I think another terrorist film. Murder at 1600, one of two I saw the president do a crime movies. And U.S.

Marshals, the much maligned sequel to The Fugitive. The unfortunate thing about Snipes, of course, it said he went for prison for three years for tax evasion. So pay your taxes. That's a thing you should do. Didn't his lawyers convince him that he could do sovereign citizen stuff or something like that? Yeah, pretty much. He was like, yeah, I'm a sovereign citizen. I'm going to pay my taxes.

And it's, you know, the government was like, you know, you really do. And I mean, frankly, you can't be a big Hollywood black actor trying to pull that shit. Maybe like, you know. Maybe, maybe, you know, East would. If East would have tried to pull sovereign citizen shit, I bet he could have gotten away with it. Oh, yeah. Ronald Reagan would have gone on TV for him and stuff.

Right, right. But you can't be, you can't be as dark as I am and try to pull that shit. Get away with it. So let that be a lesson. The other person to talk about is Michael Crichton. who wrote the novel in which Rising Sun was a Cold Rising Sun and kind of wrote a bunch of books that went on to become big 90s blockbusters, obviously Jurassic Park, which comes out this year as well. There's Jurassic Park sequel, The Lost World, also Congo, a movie I saw a bunch as a kid for whatever reason,

and then Sphere. Crichton was also an incredible crank. That's very apparent in the Rising Sun, which, as I said, is very problematic. patronizing races toward the Japanese and towards the end of his life he became an outspoken critic of the science behind global warming. You can very easily imagine that if Crichton had like lived past the 2000s, he'd be like on the cancel culture, Jordan Peterson circuit. He was that kind of guy. Scott Adams. Yeah, Scott Adams. Yeah. Let's let's talk about this movie which has which has a lot. I know I know the the anti-Japanese panic stuff is it something you

done a lot of research on. So do you want to jump into that? Sure. I just want to ask you, on a scale of 1 to 10, how racist would you say? On a scale of 1 to 10. So, you know, 10 being birth of a nation. Okay, so 10 being so racist that it inspires the Ku Klux Klan to reform. So it's not a 10.

Yeah, no. I put it at like a solid eight. It is, it is, it is, it is, it is from the jump. I mean, from the jump when there is a gong in the soundtrack. Which is actually by, I like the sound, I know. The soundtrack is very orientalist, but it's by a Japanese composer, and it's kind of good, even though it's like, yeah. It is a good score, but just sort of like if, if, if, if, if that score were next to something more nuanced, right?

Yeah. or something less terrible, then it would be great. But in the context of the script, that score is just sort of like, you know, it's like a hat on a hat, right? Just sort of it makes it really amps up the sense of this movie being very racist. So there's all that stuff. There's lots of extremely kind of patronizing stuff. There's a quick cut when they're walking into the party in the corporate office of like, you know, these small elderly Japanese men taking pictures with like statuesque-ass blondes and sort of just

like I don't I don't like that vibe there's uh I you know before we started recording I mentioned what I think is an infamous scene where uh the character of Eddie played by Kerry Hi Hiirouki Tagawa dips a woman's breast into tea and then sucks on it parenthetical this movie is very salacious the kind of movie that like if you watch with your parents as a teenager, you'd just be blushing red the entire time. But in that scene, Harvey Kytel, who plays a cop, mutters, taking our natural resources. Which is like, there's a version of that line and that character in that script where he is obviously portrayed as sort of like a Neanderthal.

But like in this, like, he's actually a pretty decent guy in the movie. He's a little overzealous, but he isn't portrayed as sort of like a villain. And so it comes across as like a script endorsing the view of like, yeah, yeah, that got like Japanese man taken, taking our women. Yeah, well, it's less racist than the book, which was they actually, they, they toned it down a little bit, even though Crichton worked on the script. So I want to talk about the Japan panic, phobia, Japan bashing as a phenomenon. One real quick point about how racist the movie is. There's like a five-minute sequence where they go to South Central L.A., which is also. Oh, yeah. Also very racist.

So. Yeah, no. But that was like, that's a, that scene where they're like, there's like gangbangers in South Central LA and then they're like, it's done this in this stupid way. It's just like pitting racism against racism where it's like, they're like, oh yeah, like they're black gangs, but they're American and that's cool. And they're like helping us. And that sort of hints at the whole ideological purpose of Japan bashing, which is to kind of reconsolate the whole national project against an, a new enemy. But yeah, we'll get there. So in the early 80s and 90s, and this is sort of almost forgotten, there was like a huge fear and concern about rising Japanese economic power. Japanese economy was doing well. Japanese were investing a lot in the United States, buying businesses, buildings that comes up a lot in the movie. And it was, and Japanese products were also on the market, electronics, cars, and this, you know, led to an enormous amount of

kind of populist nationalist feelings that were wrapped up with memories of Pearl Harbor and the Second World War. And it was a huge problem politically. A lot of politicians, you know, tried to use this. There was a cottage industry of books of sort of nonfiction books that would predicting a war between the United States and Japan, if you can imagine that, some kind of great power conflict. You know, these books were taken seriously, you know, serious professors wrote them. And then there were kind of more middlebrow books that had, you know, and a lot of them emphasized that there was these cultural and really racial differences with the way the Japanese did things. They were sort of a hive and they did things in these inscrutable and

culturally specific ways that were also extremely impressive. And Americans had to get on their shit to otherwise they would overtake us and that that kind of thing is throughout the movie. But the thing that's interesting about that Japan's rise as an economic power or its importance in the U.S. economy was that Japan sort of buoyed the U.S. economy in the Reagan years in a number of different ways. So because of the rate hikes, the Volka shock to deal with inflation, the dollar was extremely strong during the early part of the 1980s. And this was hurting U.S. exports.

And Japan had been an importer of manufactured goods, but became an exporter. And its products, automobiles and electronics, were really cheaper and more reliable, often cases than American-made products, which were kind of starting to decline in this period. So American companies are having a lot of time, hard time competing with Japan. So in the early 80s, the chairman of Caterpillar Lee Morgan made a report that said that Japan was artificially depressing the value of the yen to get an unfair competitive advantage. And the U.S., the Reagan administration should pressure Japan to open up its capital markets and that would create more investments in Japanese capital and their currency would strengthen

and so on and so forth. This was a dubious idea because Japan had a lot more savings, so they were more likely, if capital markets opened up, they were more likely to invest in other places than people invest in them. The Reagan administration took it up because they wanted to help a US company and it fit in with their kind of ideology of market liberalization. Guess what happened? Japan's savers, basically their pensioners, started to buy American treasury bonds in huge numbers. And that was great because the Reagan administration was cutting taxes but still doing a huge amount of military spending. So basically, our huge military buildup in the 80s was paid for by Japanese pensioners.

They bought U.S. Treasuries. And treasuries didn't start to do well. Then Japanese investors look for other things. Real estate. And this is when the racial shit started happening. When they started buying tangible capital or opening factories in the United States, which they started to do, this is when people started to feel very weird about it and started getting very phobic about it. But this was all because of U.S. policy. We created this. And they were also helping out an economy that was sort of cobbled together in a way. Like we have been kind of going from scam to scam in a certain way. And like one of the bubbles was kind of fueled by this brief period of Japanese investment, which created this backlash of, even though they were

kind of helping to inflate the value of U.S. assets, they were viewed as some kind of of competitor and threat. So yeah, it's a strange paradox where the United States created this situation and then it created internal backlash in the country. Crichton's book came out in 1992 and he had an appendix in the book, which he cites, he read all of these kind of middlebrow books that had come out about Japan, Japan's cultural differences, the rising Japanese economy and so and so forth. And he cites them as his research. So his book was extremely didactic and convinced of this Japanese panic and criticized for it. And the other thing that has to be mentioned is that there was a growth at this time throughout the 80s into the 90s of

violence against Asian Americans. It was definitely driven by the fear of Japan and political and media exploitation of it. So it's a strange mini episode in America. And this was also just perfectly in line with all the themes of our podcast, which is that there was a sense of Well, who was our foe after the Soviet Union? And Japan was kind of being slotted into that role. And then Japan's economy crashed, just kind of as this was peaking. Like, this movie came out shortly after the bubble popped. And the Japan phobia stuff kind of dissipated with the popping of the Japanese bubble economy.

So this movie is almost after the height of the hysteria. And it was almost starting to go out of style, in a sense. but it was very indicative of a lot of the things that people got about. And this book and movie was not the only book that movie came out around this time that had a blonde woman killed by Japanese people. So there was definitely this weird psychos, as Jamal mentioned, this weird psychosexual component about Japanese access to white women and how this was defiling or angering in some way.

The movie kind of suggested a white guy did it to sort of save it from its full racist implications, but sort of leave some ambiguity about who committed the murder in the end. But the book is a Japanese guy, definitely did the murder. So, yeah, this was a part of a racial hysteria, which they think they also, by putting Wesley Snipes in the movie, which actually Michael Crichton was not happy about, because he thought it complicated the American versus Japanese thing to have a black guy as if, like, a black guy is not really an American. I don't know.

but but I think that they sort of tried to make it um they tried to make it a little bit more complicated or whatever but because of like oh look you see the Japanese are racist against our black hero so therefore they're not so great right so it's sort of kind of put in Wesley Snipes as a as a human shield against racism in a way um to be to show that the Japanese were just as racist or so on and so forth. But yeah, it was a product of a very, very time of kind of racial, cultural paranoia in America. And it has a lot of it in it. And it's pretty shocking to watch it today.

Yeah, I mean, you're right to say that this is, this is, this movie's on the wane of that panic and paranoia. I mean, just the year prior, President George Zathebius, Pappy Bush, had gone to Japan to meet with Japanese leaders could kind of begin this sort of like, you know, re-adjustment of the United States relationship with the world after the Cold War and with Japan in particular. And sort of like we're in this moment of at that point of sort of like reproachment with the Japanese sort of like redefining the role. Not that relations were hostile necessarily, but to kind of like extend the hand of friendship,

obviously, right, sort of like in popular culture, things like Nintendo and Sega are like wildly popular with children, although I'll say I was watching this YouTube video about, I think it was about the NES, but sort of just like the creation and the marketing of the Nintendo Entertainment System. And there was definitely, you know, in the clip from news shows, there was definitely a sort of a sense from some parents sort of like, I don't know if I like my kids playing with all these Japanese toys. So there is that in movies, right, sort of the Japanese panic stuck is much more apparent in the late 80s. So, you know, the movie that immediately comes in mind for me is gung ho with Michael Keaton. Yeah. Which is about Japanese executives sort of taking over an American auto factory and kind of the cultural tension that emerges. That is not the greatest movie, but it's, you know, it's, I think it's very emblematic at the time. Diehard, right, has, it takes place at the. Nakatomi Plaza, which in the movie is like, it's a new purchase by a Japanese company.

And there's, there is some, there's, it alludes to some tension, um, between Americans, uh, and, and the Japanese. So, yeah, this, this movie is a little bit past that. But again, it is, it is emblematic of the, of the racial panic, um, that swept over the United States in response to Japanese economic growth and sort of the open. up of markets to Japanese products and Japanese manufacturing and so on and so forth. Sort of, you know, it's interesting that once the bubble pops, that this stuff starts to dissipate, like once Japan ceases to be sort of like a meaningful economic threat, then, you know, Americans chill out, chill out about it.

Yeah, it doesn't. It's just all sorts of, it becomes a very quaint thing to believe that Japan would be become like our geopolitical rival, when it was, you know, earnestly believed by serious people a year or two earlier. Hey, we did. I mean, we didn't mention it in the In the Line of Fire episode, but there's a whole little scene where they're, yeah,

Malcovich's character is discussing, you know, with some, you know, political donors, sort of like the Japanese, like their success at business, how they're much more disciplined than Americans. And all of the, I mean, that's sort of the funny thing about, that funny, but they're thinking about it because the racial panic has also mixed up with this kind of like admiration, right? Sort of like the Japanese are in this narrative there.

I get, they're more disciplined and more forward thinking. They see further ahead. They're not, you know, they're not as indebted to, I guess what we would call these days like political correctness and all that sort of thing. And if you spend any time on the kind of hardcore racist. right there is like this kind of like admiration among you know your jared taylor types your american renaissance types for the japanese as this sort of like ideal kind of homogenous culture yeah the racial homogeneity of japan is definitely like something which is which is overstated

it should be said which is overstated yeah which is overstated and ideological here as much it is there um is definitely like something that's fascination to American conservative or American radical people on the American radical right and believe that that's like the sign of the superiority or the source of superiority for Japanese civilization but yeah

and also it allows these narratives of like they're being like a singular Japanese culture with all these different norms that's sort of like built in and they're almost like they're treated as a kind of Borg like entity in these books of this era whether it's like there's no real

internal differences in Japan there's just like the way things are done and they're coming at us and their their method is going to because they're they've got their shit together and they're like they have no internal dissent like they're going to be able to overwhelm America which is a mess it's interesting how you see sort of similar narratives now with regards to China yeah yeah you know not not saying that the chinese regime isn't very problematic and I mean it's terrible. But just saying that when you, especially sort of like be big China critics in American

politics, you see sort of a similar kind of language about sort of how China is like this monolithic state, this monolithic culture that will overtake the United States if we aren't vigilant. And if we don't do something about our own internal divisions and our own internal conflicts. Right, right. It was like if America doesn't learn how to be how to adapt to this foe where I don't think that was ever with the so the Soviet Union you know after the maybe the 30s this people believe that that there was something about the Soviet system that was superior to the United States. I mean, I think we thought they were ruthless like hardcore anti-companies thought that they were endlessly devious and ruthless and they could out evil us or something like that. But I don't think no one thought like the Soviet Union and communism was after the 1930s had like more productive capacity than the United States.

And basically the belief was like this country is going to be more productive than us. It's going to be economically more powerful than us. It was just like no one had any sense of where, I mean a few people did of where like the actual material fuel for this stuff was coming from. It was like, you know, this was being fueled by Japanese. investment in the United States, which had come from a deliberate policy of encouraging it in the United States because of our own fiscal and monetary problems. And Japan had kind of stepped in as this solution to it. And then it created this whole brief cultural backlash here. The introduction of cheap goods on the US of imported goods did harm U.S. manufacturing.

But the way companies like Caterpillar respond to it wasn't, wasn't to innovate, but was to try this scheme of currency, you know, manipulation essentially, which didn't work, which was dubious to begin with, or squeeze American workers, which is the other thing they did. And in this time period, Japan was seen and with good reason as being technologically really innovative and coming up with all kinds of gadgets and stuff like that. And the U.S. was sort of seen as stagnant or, you know, even though, you know, Silicon Valley was, was getting going at this time period. But the U.S. industrial firms didn't really innovate so much as attempt these kind of scams or schemes and or try to squeeze their labor as much as possible or export labor as much as possible. So, yeah, it was kind of created by the U.S. economy. not to say that, you know, like, I don't, that people didn't lose their jobs or because there was cheaper imports, but, you know, the way U.S. corporations responded to it wasn't in the interest of the country. It was in their own interest.

One reason that is, I think, important information and useful information to have is that you can sort of understand the panic itself as kind of being an attempt to displace responsibility and blame for a set of moves made by the Reagan administration and its corporate allies to like, you know, loosening capital flows to, you know, weaken the position of labor to kind of begin, you know, I guess what we described now as a neoliberalization of the economy. And, you know, if those are, if those steps, if Japanese investment in the United States was deliberate economic strategy pursued by the administration, by its allies, then one,

you know, from their perspective, having this big racist panic about the Japanese is actually quite useful, right, because it sort of displaces anger away from the political and corporate leaders who are actually responsible for this and who are actively trying to break the power of organized labor, right? Like, there's no skin off their backs, right? If Japanese firms that buy auto plants to use the movie Gangho as an example, break the unions or don't allow laborers unionized, no skin off their back. If to compete, U.S. manufacturers begin squeezing workers.

It's actually kind of the outcome that they want. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I was definitely the more, I mean, definitely the more populist, right, and the, and some Democrats who are kind of going with the Japan managing stuff, you know, Reagan to the end of his administration was pretty loyal to the free trade stuff and pretty friendly to Japan. And Bush basically tried to keep that going. But it was in the worst political moment for it. As you mentioned, his trip to Japan was really unpopular because people. felt like he was, you know, going to prioritize this relationship with the Japanese instead of worrying about what was going on in the United States was just pretty dumb interpretation of it,

but, you know, like it was, it was a bad political timing for it. But yeah, I mean, definitely the people who really went with the Japan bashing as a politics were not necessarily friends and organized labor, although, you know, unions were also kind of, some unions were kind of also getting on board with this kind of stuff because they, you know, it felt like the only way to say something about globalization, which was sort of a new word at the time. They were trying to find some context to create a national coalition that would worry about labor issues again, and nationalism was, you know, was one way of doing it. And it didn't really, it didn't last. It was very evanescent. This is the thing about all U.S. efforts to consolidate a national project since the

Cold War is that they're really short-lived. And it seems like everyone gets a hype of it, and then it kind of bursts like a bubble. And this movie was like the tail end of this bubble. And it has all of the themes and the stereotypes. And it was all this ideological armature being built. for this new struggle and this new foe and we're like, well, you know, and then it's just like a year later, I mean, not a year later,

but now this movie is like a fucking artifact, you know? Right, right. And in a way that's like, of just a few years, maybe, you know, less than a decade's worth of something. So it's just something that just never really happened.

And, you know, we've seen that kind of happen again, again. I mean, well, the war on terror. happens in a sort of different way is a civilizational opponent but all these opponents sort of just like

end up letting us down in a way and like they don't really fill the role for us so there's all this loose energy about trying to find some some consolidating American projects since the Cold War

and none of it's really worked Japan didn't fit the bill China we're trying even now like this new bill has a national security justification. These new bills that are actually being passed that have gotten this China fears behind them, which, you know, of course, there's some, like China's economy has grown

and it's easy to argue at our expense in certain ways. So, you know, there is a rational justification to it. But definitely there are people in the policy world, journalists, you know, the intelligents, if you want to call them that, who who want to create a new Cold War because they feel like that's the only possibility of some kind of end of the year of polization and some kind of new consolidation of American spirit. And this movie tries to show that it's like, oh, I mean, look, the movie literally envisions

racial settlement over opposition to Japan. Right. We'll just like create a new race. system. It's the the constant search for desire for some sort of unifying foe for kind of political and ideological purposes. So interesting to me because it rests on what I think is just a very 20th century idea of what the United States is, right? You have this, I have this point two generations of elites, multiple generations of elites, whose kind of knowledge of what constitutes the American normal is the 50s, the 60s, and the 70s, to some extent the 80s as well,

where you have this unique, you have this big ideological foe that unifies much of American society, keeps kind of political and ideological conflict in check to a certain extent, facilitate some set of reforms, right? We've talked about this before, how the Cold War in a lot of ways makes kind of like the rights revolutions of the 60s and 70s possible in terms of how it should have like structures ideological conflict in the United States. And, uh, this is considered to be normal, right? But like, if you just like, you know, if you, if you widen your view of American history to before the second world war, you find a very different landscape where, where American politics

is intensely polarized and intensely partisan. And there's like fierce ideological conflict, not just from the center left and the center right, but from the far left and the far right. like the much larger span of the of the spectrum, it's part of these ideological battles. It's interesting. So one thing it's interesting to think of in this context is that for, say, Americans in the 20s and 30s, if they're looking back 50 or 60 years, what they're looking to is the final settlement, settling of the West, right? That is the big ideological project and political project that unifies Americans in their narrative, that Americans were expanding. standing westward. And, you know, they, by the end of the 19th century, they had settled the West.

They had tamed the West. And so what was there? And the response, the answer was we can do imperialism. We can colonize Cuba. We can colonize the Philippines. Our friend John Katz, his book about Smellie Butler, is all about this period of American history. Yeah, and guess who's just on the other side of the Pacific, the Japanese? Right.

The Japanese. Yeah. And it's interesting to me in this sort of like eternal recurrence kind of way that generations of elites are always looking back to the past and kind of like pining for a period of political and ideological unity and like missing or ignoring or being not even aware of the intense division and polarization that in my view is actually more of the norm of American political life, that, like, that is what's typical about the United States and American life is that all of our pluralism, racial, religious, I think, or whatnot, kind of predictably

produces a ton of conflict and kind of the, to the extent that there is a success story about the United States, it's really that sort of like, we have a political system that's been able to accommodate that conflict for the most part, at least after the Civil War. Big asterisk's there. Yeah, that's true. And there was also periods of political violence in the U.S. post and pre-Civil War that were more intense than we're used to. The whole 19th century is much wilder than, I mean, it wasn't just the Wild West. It was like the wild whole country with the amount of mob violence, shooting, so on and so forth, racial riots, you know, a new immigrant population struggling against each other and with the native population, very violent.

I recently watched for the first time Gangs of New York, which like its best part of the best parts of that movie illustrate sort of just like the wanton violence and ethnic conflict that characterized the 19th century America. And I guess my big point, my broad point here is that the search for a unifying, you know, ideological enemy or whatnot really seems to me to be like an attempt to avoid the, the truth of what the country is, which is sort of like rife with conflict all the time, as well as a way to sort of like, you know, add some substance to this vision of the country as being somehow, you know, more unified, more uniform than it actually is. And I think there may be the reason why these things keep failing. And I mean, you could make it a case with even the attempt to do this vis-to-vis the Soviet Union failed because it didn't really suppress. solve a division. It structured it, but it didn't completely suppress it. Maybe the reason these things just consistently fail is the fact that at the foundation and the fundamental

level, the United States just isn't a place of, you know, grand cultural unity. And it can't be. And that when you try to make it that way, yeah, it's too big. It's too big. It's too diverse. And those things are problems. It's not bad. But it is what it is. And attempts to build a kind of uniform, unifying, you know, political settlement are inevitably just like repressive and terrible and, like, in my view, like, inimical to ideas of freedom and liberty that we, that we hold as Americans. And so, you know, it's like, obviously there's going to be geopolitical conflicts. The U.S. is, you know, for better or worse, worse, an imperial power. And so we have geopolitical conflicts.

We have, you know, we have foreign policy interests. We have all these things. But it might be worth just sort of giving up, right, the drive for some kind of singular opponent or singular enemy that we can use to kind of structure a domestic political complex. It's just like not going to work. And I think it's, I think the, the consequences of trying to do it are very bad. Yeah.

don't know. I'm a little ambivalent about that because, I mean, maybe it doesn't have to be a foreign enemy, but I think a lot of the progress that we like as leftists and liberals or whatever are precisely kind of happened under the aegis of those unifying myths about American meaning of the country, whether it's in terms of domestic or foreign opponents. I mean, you and I both are admirers of Lincoln. I think he had actually a high level of tolerance and understanding of pluralism, but he also, there was a limit, you know? He said, look, there's a basic principle the country's dedicated to, and there's only so far we can go away from that before it no longer is the country. And I, I, I,

also think, and this is sort of conservatives pick up on this and don't like it, that that vision of the country is having some kind of goal in that regard is taken up by Roosevelt, both ones in different ways, but mostly FDR. And, you know, I agree with what you're saying. And I do think it is the consequence of it is continued imperialism. And this sort of gets into the kind of almost paleo-conservative critique of American exceptionalism or whatever, which is that, oh, well, as soon as you give America like a global mission or even a domestic mission, they're going to go around and oppress people because they're going to either have to make Americans conform to that stuff or they're going to have to make foreigners conform to that stuff. Okay, well, what are they

making them conform to? And then you say, and this comes back to like the whole state's rights things. Well, rights to do what? And you're like, well, rights to do what? And you're like, well stop stop pushing us around with our local values we we we should have some pluralism and you're all pluralism to do what and then like well to pick on black people and then you're like you know so so it's it's it's um it's hard one because i think some of our best tendencies which create the notion that we have a grand project to complete do it does have an imperialist and repressive side. But I think that the other side of it, which is let's tolerate the country's pluralism,

well, it just goes back to like we were talking about the other day with the Ruby Ridge shit and the Waco stuff. It's like, well, how much can you tolerate? Like, you know, a strange religious cult is behaving in such and such a way. And by American standards, we believe in religious freedom and basically, you know, let's just leave them alone, let them do their weird thing. But we also are committed to certain values of individual rights and autonomy. As Calhoun would say, the liberty of the plantation owner is a kind of pluralism, right? Because they're allowed to be. So I don't know where I'm going with

this, except that there's a tough one here, which is that the good things do lead to repressive measures and kind of foreign problems. But I don't know that. that giving up on them in favor of kind of loose pluralism is the way either. I don't know. What do you think? Yeah, no, you're right. You're right. I'm probably going just a little, a little hard for the sake of argument.

Yeah. But it's sort of, it's the contradiction inherent, right, and like Thomas Jefferson's declaration that the U.S. should be an empire for liberty, right? Yeah. Like an empire for liberty, which is, which is, you know, he envisions that sort of like the peaceful spread of American values across the continent, but that necessarily entails like the dispossession of countless people and their land and their lives. And sort of in the same way, the sense of the U.S. is having a grand destiny for the last great hope of mankind, et cetera, et cetera,

that kind of thing. I think is a very powerful idea that has been, that has been used for good. But as you say, it has this sort of dark side to it that can justify a whole lot of awful stuff. And it's it's difficult to think about what how you could square that circle, how you can retain, right, the best of Lincoln or the best of Jefferson or the best of Roosevelt. It's precisely because the United States was, has been built on a foundation of expropriation and race hierarchy. that grand narratives of this sort are very quickly and easily racialized, right? Very quickly and easily become about sort of like opposing groups of people who and their very person and their very identities are kind of like in opposition to the grand American project. And so sort of like, how do you, how do you advance the idea of a great American project of

freedom, of liberty, of democratic self-government, of all these things, which are good, right? Like, I am very much a believer in the kind of world historical importance of representative self-government. Like, that's something that I genuinely and deeply believe in. How do you hail that as kind of an ideal for all Americans to work towards without also falling into these traps, but also maybe not even, maybe traps is like the wrong word, falling into what is sort of like the, the contradiction inherent in it all because of just what our history is, because of just how our society is developed. And no answer to that, because this is just a movie podcast, but it's, it's something, it's something to think about and think seriously about

given, I think, on both sides of American politics right now, efforts to sort of reconstitute some sort of like unifying narrative, something to inspire people beyond their immediate material needs. That's obviously, I think, what is motivating, you know, some of the radical right-winger you've been writing about. And, you know, their solution is like, we've got to get rid of democracy and people like kneel for a king who will lead them. Well, that's the thing with the nationalism stuff is that basically the problem with nationalism is that the opponent is never abroad. There's always an internal enemy, either people who are of dissent of that or even look like people of dissent of that. So it's very easy for us to say, oh, the World War II, the New Deal, you know, consolidated America in all these wonderful ways.

But, you know, first of all, it was a horrible war. But second of all, we can't forget, you know, Japanese internment. which was, you know, a huge consequence of the conflict. And it was a highly racist episode, another extremely racist episode in American history. So I think that that's the concern. So most of these nationalist projects usually define some kind of internal opponent, someone who doesn't quite fit in or is even racially identified as an obstacle to it. And that was the problem with this Japan backlash was that,

made life for Asian Americans very difficult because they suddenly became by the sheer fact that they looked somewhat like the people abroad, they suddenly became a target. So I think, yeah, these efforts to create, you know, that was less of a problem with the Soviet Union because Russians were more or less white as Americans were concerned. You know, that didn't create a lot of internal repression there weren't you know there weren't that many people from from from russia in the united states at that time um so the search for eternal foes for it leads to wars and internal repression as well so this as a as a method of consolidating the nation it's not without its costs and this movie is a perfect example it's just like basically proposes like uh maybe

we can just do a little bit of right just like do the right amount of racism it's like we still kind of like think the Japanese are cool and neat and like we kind of want to copy them a little bit. This is a very orientalizing form of racism. It's like, yeah, we like like the guy character John Connor is like does, lived in Japan and does calligraphy and does all kinds of Japanese stuff. But he's also kind of like, oh, there are another being across the way. Right, right.

So it's just like, there's always just like if we can do racism the right way. That's like the hope of a lot of this form of nationalism. It's like, what if we just did racism, like just the right amount of racism? We just do the right amount of racism. Nobody gets hurt. Black people, white people, we can come together with this new racism against somebody else. We're all going to be happier because of that. Yeah, the movie like proposes like this, in that scene where you talk about the gangs.

Or it's just like, like black people and white people can find. common ground against against the Japanese. It's horrible. That's a horrible basis for like the future of the country. It's like we just need to find a racial enemy that's not each other. And then we'll be fine. I mean, but the problem is that diversity in United States makes that impossible because like everybody's already here. So there's going to be people who look like those people sound like those people for whatever bigoted ignorant reason are associated with them or maybe are actually descended from those people, and they're going to be persecuted or picked on. So all of these ways of trying, this, this way of trying to create a new national unity by

picking a new foe abroad, especially if they look different from us, it's always going to lead to serious problem, or look different from the vast majority of Americans, because no one actually looks different from us now, because everybody lives here of all, you know, ethnicities and races. Yeah, so I guess you're right. I mean, it's better, I think the better, I think the better solution is to sort of give up on a grand national project in the way that we had it from the Second World War to the end of the Cold War

rather than continually have these ugly episodes where you know, we're hunting around. I don't think they would make movies. First of all, I don't think the Chinese stuff would ever lead to movies like this. I think that, first of all, so many movies

or export U.S. movies would export China? Like, would we ever make a rising sun of China now? No, that's a good question. And I'm not sure that we would precisely because the international distribution of films. I mean, sort of like, basically like Chinese capitals tied up in Hollywood and sort of this like very intimate and important way. I don't know how much you pay attention to kind of like the production logos before movies. But there are lots of movies these days.

If you just like watch the production logos, you're like, oh, bunch of Chinese companies. Yeah, it's, it's, uh, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's like Middle Eastern oil money, like Chinese manufacturing money. Right. I think there are a lot of young nationalists who really, they don't even want the racism of Jim Crow or the racism of, of the, you know, Japanese internment camps. What they exactly want is the racism of Rising Sun.

They're just like, I just want a little bit of racism, um, against the Chinese. So we can go back to make movies like this and it's like it was in the, 90s or the early 90s. Right, right. Yeah. They want a very, like, they want, they think they can control this like mild, wasn't mild. I mean, there were horrible hate crimes and there are again in the U.S. or still.

But like, they're like, oh, but you know, like can't we just say that the Chinese are like a weird different race than us? Like, can't we stop being politically correct about that a little bit because that would help us to fight them or whatever? They don't necessarily think that they want the degree of racism. they would say like a movie like Rising Sun is it really so awful and I mean in the observation you've made repeatedly about how there was actual violence against Asian Americans is important here that you can't mean the thing about

the stuff that you can't actually contain it like once you start indulging it we we joked about birth of a nation earlier but sort of like DW Griffith made birth of a nation and he was in his mind he was just making a big historical epic right sort of just like an entertaining movie dw griff did not anticipate his movie becoming the basis for, like, a mass, you know, proto-fascist movement engaged in, like, routine violence against an assorted group of, like, ethnic and racial and religious minorities. Like, you don't know where this stuff goes.

You cannot actually control it. And so, you know, people who are like, well, can't we have just a little bit of anti-Chinese racism? It's like, well, what, A, what does a little bit even mean? And B, there's no guarantee you can't, aside from like the ethical problems with this, it's like it's just like wrong out right. You cannot actually control what happens with that, that your little bit of anti-Chinese racism can very easily and very quickly become a straight up panic.

Yeah, it's not something that you have any control over and like it. And then you can't just say like, oh, we're not responsible after things get out of control. It's like, well, it wasn't really because of this. It was a whole climate of opinion that was created by things like it. I think I think we should wrap things up or we're kind of kind of, we're kind of a little over time. So I feel like those count as final thoughts for the movie. I mean, we haven't really said much about the quality of the movie. It's, it's not good.

It's not a great movie. I mean, it has like some cool norish things. Like it looks kind of good, but it's not good movie. Like I'm not I'm not so, you know, politically correct, whatever we're going to say that I can't enjoy movies. that are sort of like problematic in a lot of ways. I don't know my favorite movies is as Orson Wells as Touch of Evil, which features Carl, Charlton Heston and like Brownface the entire movie

as like a Mexican police detective. Yeah. Like that's, I can tolerate that stuff. But this, this is not, it's not a great Snipes performance. It's not a great Connery performance. There's some like, yeah, there's some fun noir stuff. There's, it's salacious, which is, you know, more than you can say for most movies these days.

And I kind of appreciate that. But it's, not necessarily a great film. It's like very, very mediocre. And the, the racism, like, makes it kind of just, like, not fun to watch. Like, if it were, if it were mediocre in the way that, you know, like a diehard sequel was mediocre, then that'd be fine. But sort of the mediocrity plus the racism makes it just, this is an artifact that is really, that is really, really worth watching for the purpose of discussing it, not for, like, actually enjoying it. Yeah.

I mean, again, like, I'm with you. I can deal with a lot of problematic shit in movies. I don't need them to be super politically correct, but they kind of have to have some aesthetic merit to make up for it to make me rather just be like, well, it's interesting that, you know, despite all its problems, it's still like got some artistic things going on that make me look past that or, you know, and this doesn't really. have enough of it. It's like barely entertaining enough for me not to want to shut it off because it's too racist. It's like so yeah, it's not it's not the most racist movie I've ever seen but

it's it's pretty it's in retrospect it's pretty gross. It's interesting to see like what was tolerated back then kind of black rain which is I think is kind of from the same year of Japan Panic is a better movie, even though it's also pretty racist, but maybe a little less, actually. So yeah, not a great film. That is our show. If you're not a subscriber, please subscribe. We're available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, and Google Podcasts, and wherever else podcasts are found, whatever podcatcher you like to use, you can find this there.

If you subscribe, please leave a rating and a review. it helps people find the show. And you can reach out to both of us on Twitter. I am at Jay Bowie and John, you are. I'm at Lionel underscore trolling. You can also reach out to us over email at unclear and present feedback at fastmail.com. We've gotten some great feedback since we've been doing this podcast. For this week in feedback, we have an email from Jeremy.

It's titled, Is it Too Late to Write to You About Under Siege? It's given a long email, so I'm just going to go to the, I'm going to skip the praise, which thank you for the praise. and go straight to the substance. I just wanted to circle back to remark on Undersege as I have a degree in Russian studies with concentration in the literature of Lenin and Stalin eras that I otherwise never get to use.

When I watched Underseed, I was struck by the fact that even though Segal's character is recruiting all these lower deck types, most of them don't actually do anything. I was hoping that the laundry guy, for example, would have some kind of knowledge related to his work. That would be relevant. Like, oh, they don't know XVI guy.

thing about the ship because it's beneath their notice. I read a fair amount of socialist, realist fiction for my degree, and I have to say, well, I think it's basically unarguable that Genovanism, I don't know how to pronounce that, right, ruin the Soviet literature of the period. Socialist realism was initially kind of an avant-garde modernist genre, and a version of this movie that worked from the premises of these earlier works and had Segal's character as more of a catalyst, but legitimately have resulted in a more compelling action movie. Imagine a version of the film that let the ensemble use their knowledge of the ship's anatomy

and have them progressively mobilizing, quote, lesser crew members against the hijacker so that by the end, there's a kind of collective action going on against the individualist wreckers. And even though Seagall's character was a special ops guy, wouldn't it have been great if he'd made some remark about how maybe he had to kill some guys back in the day, but his real expertise with his blade came from deboning hundreds of chickens or something. Honestly, I would even prefer if he was just a particularly lethal cook and didn't have the background. But I know Seagal would have stood.

I know Seagal would have never stood for that. Speaking of socialist realism, any chance of a red heat episode. Anyway, great podcast, new episodes were a highlight of my week. Thanks. Thank you. I would have loved to see this movie. And honestly, I feel like if I had a bunch of money and was a screenwriter, I would just like try to write that movie. Because it does sound very compelling.

It's way better. It's way better a smarter movie. Like, and it would be, yeah, just like to show them kind of doing all these resourceful things with their specific skills that they were never expected to use for this. It would have sounds great. And I'll say as someone who spends, who has actually deboned a lot of chickens over the course of his life, you do get pretty good with a knife with that kind of skill. I'm not so sure I'm good enough to stab a person, but I'm pretty handy with the blade. Well, I hope you don't have to put that to the test. Right. Hopefully no home invasions or anything. I live in Charlottesville. It doesn't really happen here. Okay. Episodes come out every other Friday, so we will see you in two weeks that we should have covered but missed.

Speaking of Die Hard, it is the sequel to Die Hard, Directed by Rennie Harlan, Die Hard 2. Die Harder. Here is a quick plot synopsis. Off-duty cop John McLean is gripped with a feeling of deja vu when on a snowy Christmas Eve in the nation's capital, terrorist sees a major international airport, it's just Dulles, holding thousands of holiday travelers hostage, renegated military commanders led by a murderous rogue officer, plot to rescue a drug lord from justice, and are prepared for every contingency except one, McLean's Smart Mouth Heroics. Die Hard Toe Die Harder is available for rent on Amazon and iTunes.

I think we should watch this movie. I think we're going to watch this movie because there's some real Oliver North kind of vibes with this one. And I think it's an interesting way to talk more about the drug war and the role that played in kind of post-Cold War politics. So it's not a good movie, but I'm kind of looking forward to watching you with all that in mind. Have you seen it, John?

Have you seen the diehard sequel? I think, wait, is this the one in New York? No, that's Die Hard with the vengeance. I like that one. Yeah, that's the other good diehard. And we'll watch that too because. Okay, I've never seen two. Yeah, two is terrible.

Okay. All right. Well, I'm looking forward to this. Our producer for the podcast is Connor Lynch, and our artwork is from Rachel Eck. For John Gans, I am Jamel Bowie, and this is unclear and present danger. We'll see you next time. Thank you.