Unclear and Present Danger - Strange Days

Episode Date: July 24, 2023

For this week’s episode, Jamelle and John watched Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 cult favorite Strange Days, a collaboration with James Cameron inspired by the political and social turmoil of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Although not quite “cyberpunk” — it isn’t a William Gibson pastiche like its contemporary Johnny Mnemonic — Strange Days borrows heavily from the genre and its various conceits. Strange Days stars Ralph Fiennes as protagonist Lenny Nero, Angela Bassett as “Mace,” Juliette Lewis as Faith and Tom Sizemore as Max, with appearances from Vincent D’Onofrio, Michael Wincott, William Fichtner and Richard Edson.Here is a brief plot synopsis:Set in the year 1999 during the last days of the old millennium, the movie tells the story of Lenny Nero, an ex-cop who now deals with data-discs containing recorded memories and emotions. One day he receives a disc which contains the memories of a murderer killing a prostitute. Lenny investigates and is pulled deeper and deeper in a whirl of blackmail, murder and rape. Will he survive and solve the case?The tagline for Strange Days is “New Year’s Eve 1999. Anything is possible. Nothing is forbidden.”Strange Days is available to stream on HBO Max and is available for rent or purchase on iTunes and Amazon. Our next episode is on the Hughes brother’s crime thriller Dead Presidents.Connor Lynch produced this episode. Artwork by Rachel Eck.Contact us!Follow us on Twitter!John GanzJamelle BouieUnclearPodAnd join the Unclear and Present Patreon! For just $5 a month, patrons get access to a bonus show on the films of the Cold War, and much, much more. Our latest episode of the patreon is on The Battle of Algiers.

Have you ever jacked in? Have you ever wired tripped? You ready? This is not like TV only better. This is life. It's a piece of somebody's life. It's about the stuff that you can't have, right? The forbidden fruit, straight from the cerebral cortex. I mean, you're there, you're doing it, you're feeling it.

Are you beginning to see the possibilities here? I am your main connection to the switchboard of soul. board of souls. I'm the magic man. If this has something to do with the water, sooner or later, it washes up on your beach. Fan mail from some flounder. I'm still what the fuck now! It's the dark end of the street. How do you like it now? He records it all. Everything.

He gives it to you. Why me? There's more of this whole thing than you think. Give us the tape right now. You're all. up the food change as thing goes. You know what this tape could do if it got out. I see the world opening up and swallowing us all.

This is conspiracy, paranoia. The issue isn't whether you're paranoid, Lenny. The issue is whether you're paranoid enough. Long more games, whatever's going on. You have to get out of here and now. Get him out. This tape is a lightning bolt from God. It can change things, things that need changing,

before we all go off the end of the road. It'll be an all-out war and you know it. No! Well, maybe it's time for a war. Go on, man, cheer up. Roll's gonna end in ten minutes anyway. Welcome to Unclear and Present Danger, a podcast about the political and military thrillers at the 1990s and what they say about the politics of that decade. I'm Jamel Bowie. I'm a calmness for the New York Times opinion section.

My name is John Gans. I write a substack newsletter called Unpopular Front, and I'm very close to finishing my book about American politics. the early 1990s. Maybe the next time you hear me, I'll be done. You have a title for it now. I do. I do. It's called When the Clock Broke. And I have a subtitle, Conspiracists, Conman, and the Origins of Our American Crack Up. And I'm very excited to share it. It's still going to be a while once I'm done because getting a book together is a long process. But I'm very excited to share it with everybody. Seems to be really coming together. Finally, I'm Very looking forward to being done with it. But yeah, I think anybody who enjoys this show probably gets something out of it.

We'll have to do a book event once it's out. Oh, I would love that. Yeah, I would love that. We could talk about it. You got to tell your agent, just be like, schedule something with Jamel. I'm going to do that. Yeah. And maybe we could even make it an unclear pod meet up in New York.

So we can meet all you freaks. Yeah, we could do an unclear pod. meetup slash book event just a whole 90s fest okay for this week's episode we watched Catherine Bigelow's

1995 I think it's fair to say cult favorite strange days which was a kind of collaboration with her former partner James Cameron that was very much inspired by the turmoil of the late 80s and early 90s it's not quite a cyberpunk

movie and this isn't like a William Gibson pastiche like Johnny Nomonic, which came out the year before or around the same time. But it does borrow pretty heavily from the genre and many of its conceits. Strange Days stars Ralph Fines, or I'm sorry,

Ray Fines. Rafe. Rafe Fines. As Lenny Nero, our protagonist, Angela Bassett as Mace, kind of his partner. Juliet Lewis as Faith, his former girlfriend.

And Tom Seismore as Max, his friend, or so we think. And there are appearances from Vincent Dinoffrio, Michael Winkott, William Fickner, and Richard Edson. I always love to see. This was the first time I had seen Strange Days, and I didn't know William Fickner was in it,

and I'm always very happy to see William Fickner, because I just like his face. I think he has a good face. Here's a brief plot synopsis. Set in the year in 1999 during the last days of the old millennium, the movie tells the story of Lenny Nero, an ex-cop who now deals with data disc containing recorded memories and emotions.

One day, he receives a disc which contains the memories of a murderer, killing a prostitute. Lenny investigates and is pulled deeper and deeper into a whirl of blackmail, murder, and rape. Will he survive and solve the case? The tagline for Strange's Days is New Year's Eve, 1999. Anything is possible. Nothing is forbidden. Doesn't really have much to do with the movie, but I guess you could say it does.

I mean, I guess this. I mean, we're saying up front that this movie was a huge bomb, so I'm sure that the studio was like, how do we get people to watch this thing? Strange Days for you, for you, listener, if you have not seen it or you want to watch it, Strange Days is available to stream on HBO Max and is available for rent or purchase on iTunes and Amazon. It was released. It had a Dwight release, rather, on October 13th, 1995. So let's check up New York Times for that day. All right. So here we got. Ceasfire holds in most of Bosnia for the first day, fighting in northwest. Government troops drive to isolate Banya Luka, both sides protest.

Bostra Bosnia and Herzegovina. Much of Bosnia remained calm today on the first day of the latest declared ceasefire. The sounds of continued war boomed through this valley of the northwest where Bosnian and Serbian forces have been battling for strategic territory over the last. few weeks. So far, neither side in this nearly four-year-old war is talking about abhorting the ceasefire agreement or derailing the peace talks that are to begin at the end of the month in the United States, then shift to France. But the Bosnian government and the Bosnian Serbs traded charges today that each was violating the truce in this hotly contested region where, over the last few days, as the original target date for a ceasefire was delayed, government forces have pushed back the Serbs and progress towards Boniluca, the largest Serb-held city in Bosnia.

Okay, so we're heading towards the end of the Bosnian War. And, yeah, the United States played a role both in, you know, creating the ceasefire and also enforcing the terms of the UN, no-fly zone, NATO, and the UN basically, NATO kind of became the UN's enforcement tool during this war and the biggest contributor forces to NATO, as per usual, was the United States. You know, the war comes to close. Obviously, you know, there was acts of genocide during the war. Eventually, Molesvich and other people on the Serb side of the conflict to be brought to justice

for ethnic cleansing and acts of genocide. Let's see what else we have. Giuliani is defied by state Senate over policing. Defying Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, the state Senate yesterday passed and sent to the governor a bill that would effectively unravel one of the mayor's proudest accomplishments, the merger of the housing and transit police forces into the New York City Police Department. The bill approved in Albany by the Senate after intense lobbying from the patrolman's benevolent association would allow labor to by a state agency that the police union believes would give it more favorable decisions of the current city arbitration office.

Under the state agency, the union could argue for pay comparable to suburban police departments around the state, which have higher salaries in the city. So Giuliani, it was always a big ally of the patrolman's benevolence association to, who I believe still at this point was led by Philip Caruso. So the Petrolman's Benevolence Association in New York then and still was a very aggressive police unit, highly resistant, very aggressively, you know, and jealously guarding the amount of money. It received a city budget, which was massive. You know, the city had just had kind of another second fiscal crisis, but the cops didn't, you know, really see much of the cuts. The cops also participated at the leading match, this is in my book, with Giuliani as a mayoral candidate,

adding them on in a riot at City Hall while Dinkins was mayor, it was a very racist riot. So the police unit, the police and the policemen, the patrolman's Bernard and Evelin associate were a huge constituency of Giuliani's and a huge base of his power. He basically just did everything he could to make the police have. I remember when, you know, Bloomberg, there were many, this is a police brutality in this era and many police shootings. And Giuliani just never said any word one to criticize the police. When Bloomberg became mayor, Bloomberg is not exactly what you would call a left winger. He's kind of, you know, he's a centrist liberal.

He ran as a Republican in New York. I suppose you could, you know, he has some progressive views. one might say. But the fact is there was a, there was a terrible police shooting not long after he came to office. And he actually criticized the police. And I was, had grown up with Giuliani just, and I was shocked and that a mayor could could do that. And so anyway, Julianni's alliance with the New York Police Department is something that we're still dealing with the political consequences of today, both in the city, but also in a kind of national stage with the sort of police politics that we see with this thin blue line bullshit and stuff like that.

Albany Education Summit evokes images of Cold War. This is kind of local news. The tactics of his old foes help Clinton to fight GOP. GOP, excuse me. One, the Clinton health care proposal died in Congress last year. The administration belatedly realized that it had allowed a opponents to define the terms of debate, using television, lobbying, and grassroots politicking to capitalize on the public's fear of change.

Now, taking a lesson from that defeat, the White House is using the same tactics against Republicans who control Congress, fighting their plans for Medicare and Medicaid with political commercials and speeches around the country by the president and the members of his cabinet. And administration officials believe that his campaign, which has been under the way since August, has bought it in a daily White House session, is having the desired effect. Several recent polls show Mr. Clinton at some of the higher approval ratings of the presidency and the Republican Congress sliding sharply in voter esteem, and Americans losing their enthusiasm for a balanced budget if it means tampering with Medicare.

Okay, the Republican Congress, as led by Newt Gingrich, was a politically pretty sophisticated bunch. They baged basically a permanent campaign against Clinton on various fronts, and they were pretty successful. I mean, well, first of all, they took back Congress, which Republicans had struggled to do, I think, for like, what, 50 years. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, and so they, and, you know, they basically created the sense, they were very good at creating the sense that there was a kind of populist grassroots rejection of Clinton as a leader. And there was truth to it. He struggled with popularity, but the Republican Congress, and this is really, um, you know, contributed a great deal to the way the tactics work of the GOP today,

even though I don't think they're quite as good in politics as maybe Newt Gingrich was. I don't think McCarthy and Newt Gingrich is basically they presented, you know, themselves as the voice of the people. I mean, Congress arguably is, but they had a lot of success with this approach. I do not know what happened in the end of this debate. I do know that they ended up with a balanced budget. Do you remember? I don't think that Clinton's plans were totally successful.

I think that they came to some kind of compromise over this issue, and it was not necessarily what the Democrats really wanted. Yes. The White House was the Clinton administration was able to successfully beat back efforts to cut Medicare and Medicaid. Those are just like wildly popular programs and very difficult. to cut. It did, I mean, obviously caved on its own health care plan. And it caved on its like social agenda much, you know, broadly, right? Like it's in the wake of 94 in the wake of this that we get

welfare reform, that we get the, you know, the push for retrenchment in other areas. And then of course, like the Fed under Clinton was pursuing, you know, was what was supportive of efforts to reduce federal expenditures and such. And so, I mean, there's a degree to which there's much more, there's much more policy. Like, on the big ticket social insurance items, yes, Clinton and the Gingrich-led Republican Party were like really at odds. But there's a degree to which on things below that when it came to over, you know, generally trimming back the sales of.

of the welfare state, of the social stationette, of reconfiguring it, of making it more um, uh, laden with personal responsibility for recipients, that Clinton and Gingrich were kind of, um, simpactico. Yeah, I mean, basically Clinton, uh, throughout the course of his political career and his presidency, kind of tacked from left to right, sort of following the winds of public opinion. You know, after the Republican victories in 1994, he tacked right words and was way more, you know, kind of pulled the welfare reform stuff out of his back pocket. He had been talking about it earlier, but it was, you know, an available, it was available set of policies to pursue that kind of was more right-leaning than what he had tried before. So, you know, this kind of duality, duplicity, one might say, of Clinton was present throughout his presidency.

And I don't know. Is there anything else? Russian general campaigns on old-time Soviet values. Alexander I. Lebed, an Afghan war hero, an anti-established general, thinks it's time to bring back a little Soviet-style order and discipline to Russia. This country has been almost without stern, sails, and wind, and it needs someone at the helm. We are doomed to live in an authoritarian state until genuine democracy, which should not be confused with anarchy, can be set up. Russians seem to love that kind of talk. Weir of corruption, organized crime, and fallen pride, voters say they want strong leadership and a new face. Well, it's kind of an old face with a touch of the Iron Fist Authority of Old. General Lebed

45, a nationalist who says the Russian Empire must be restored. His merch is one of the most popular contenders for the 1996 presidential election, like General Colin Powell, whom he professes to admire. General Lebed enjoys a popularity based more on his resume and strong character than any clear-defied program. His macho populism reaches beyond military men to disenchanted liberals and even communists.

And he is seeking a seat in Parliament in the December elections is also already running and talking like a presidential candidate with the former boxer's battered face and a voice so deep as been likened to artillery fire. All right. General limits stands out. I mean, very interesting, this kind of politics. You know, Putin is not, although he uses this rhetoric a lot, he is not, and is a figure of the right, he's not the farthest right politics. that are, you know, present in Russia. In fact, a lot of things he does are to kind of co-opt or placate more far-right nationalists who kind of have grandiose visions of restoring the Russian Empire and feel

very bad about the fall of the Soviet Union. It's very strange and contradictory ideology because a lot of these people are both anti-communists and right-wingers, but also nostalgic for the Soviet Union. Union as a kind of projection of Russian power. So these politics are already cropping up in the mid-90s. The 90s in Russia are a very traumatic time, a time that nobody remembers fondly. And a lot of Russian politics are sort of based on trying to undo the trauma of the 90s. And we can see that today.

So, yeah, I think that's pretty much it. The only other thing I would like to note is this headline here, because it relates directly into the conversation we'll have on our podcast. Organizers defend role of Farrakhan in March by Blacks. With a march on Washington by Black men planned for Monday, this would be the Million Man March. Organizers today pointedly rebuffed efforts by elected blacks and other political figures to endorse the demonstration but not its leader, Louis Farrakhan of the nation of Islam. The attempt to separate the message from the messenger is not going to work, declared Reverend Benjamin F. Chavez Jr., national director of the event, called the Million

in Man March, which was Mr. Farrakhan's brainchild. The message and the messenger have transcended all divisions in the black community. Both the White House and mainline black political groups like the Black Congressional Caucus have been emphasizing just this distinction between the March and its leader. They are wary of Mr. Farrakhan whom critics view as a race-baiter and anti-Semite, but they say that they approve of the social cause, which is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of black men to the capital. all right so ferricon is actually not that complicated of a figure he is a pretty straightforward patriarchal

nationalist type and part of his influence in the 90s is very much a function of this feeling this belief that because of the drug epidemic because of the upswing in crime, this real sense that, like, the black family is essentially dissolving before people's eyes. And the thing you have to remember is that most black families, right, are intact, right? Like, most black people are not part of what you might call an urban underclass. But because of segregation, there are still tight ties between people who are, you know, deeply impoverished and live under conditions of hyper segregation, people who are less so, who are not necessarily part of that particular set of relations. And so there is, you know, there's

among individual black people, individual black families, there are these connections that are real and maintained, right? Like, and then there's also this sort of collective sense that the conditions under which black America is currently exists are kind of intolerable. And so you have a bunch of political responses to that. And Farrakhan hits a target that wasn't really occupied. And that is someone who both was of the black people and specifically the black man has to stand upright and take. take responsibility and secure the foundations of the black family and also had no tolerance for white racism because often you might get the latter, you might get the former, but not so

much the latter in the world of black conservatives. So Farrakhan is sort of like this, this, you know, hostile to white racism, hostile to white people in a lot of regards. and also supportive and a nationalistic and to many people positive sense of black people and specifically black men. And so it's like it's that combination of things which, under these particular conditions, in this sense that traditional civil rights leaders have failed.

Right. That kind of help give him a greater. following than outside the nation of Islam, which for many black Americans, like in the city is sure, big presence, but like if you're down south, you don't really, it's not really a thing, you know, not really anything you have much, you don't really encounter. But it's, it's, it's, it's this, um, you got to, I think you have to understand Farrakhan's, uh, prominence in this period is like basically like the result of a lot of conservative leaning, like, you're not ideal. conservative, like, dispositionally, traditional-minded black people, basically looking for

someone who's going to say, we need to take care of ourselves and our own, but also, racism is bad. That's kind of a simplification, but I think that's like, I think that's the heart of it. The other thing I'll add is that Farrakhan being this, being a black nationalist and being a quite conservative one, also I think renders them, but having these connections to, or these links to mainstream black leaders, mainstream black organizations, this sort of thing, makes them a bit of a figure that's hard for like white conservatives and moderates and liberals to figure out because in terms of white mainstream, mainstream political language, to be very attentive to racism is to be on the left, right? Like it's to be, is to have some sort of left-leaning

sympathies. To believe that the United States is like, you know, structurally racist or whatever, that's considered to be a view of the left. And so because that's what tends to take that that's Farrakhan holds those views into people mainstream figures like well Farrakhan must be a man of the left But you have to remember that like black politics is not you know It's not a color swapped white politics It has its own dimensions

And so within the context of black politics That's sort of just almost the given That's the thing that like most people believe whether they're cosmopolitan, nationalistic, you know, whether they're liberals, whether they're left-winger, most people operating within the context of black politics hold this view. But there are different ways to express it. And for Farrakhan, it's a very nationalistic patriarchal, very hostile to women who don't Antisemitic.

Right. anti-Semitic viewpoint, which to my mind puts him very firmly. He's like a right-winger. But this is not so legible, I think, in mainstream politics for a bunch of reasons. Yeah, I mean, like, I think they were, I mean, I agree with everything you're saying here. I just want to underline after the kind of disheartening reversals of the Reagan period and the failure of Jesse Jackson campaigns, even though they were exciting and and arguably, you know, had long-term political effects that are interesting to think about.

Nationalistic politics of Farrakhan's kind became more and more attractive because in a weird kind of mirror image of the popularity of right-wing populism among white people, there was a sense that they reflected the direness and the situation of despair in a more clear language. And, yeah, that's what I noticed. Yeah, I think that's right. I think it's a good segue into Strange Days, which very much is a movie that is taking in all of this and putting it through this sort of filter of cyberpunk-ish and stylized action. So real quick, just on some back. background on Strange Day, as I mentioned before, that it's kind of a collaboration between Bigelow and Cameron.

At the time, when Cameron came up with the initial idea for the film, they were married, this would have been in the mid-80s, they break up because James Cameron's a psycho, but they still keep working on this idea, working on the script. Bigelow brings quite a bit to the script. It's more or less, I mean, by the end, it's pretty much hers. even though Cameron gets the story credit and the screenplay credit,

Bigelow had a big impact on shaping the script. And she, by her own account, says, sorry, and I got a screenwriter Jay Cox was also did a lot of the structural stuff. But she says she was motivated to continue on with this project and do this project in large part by the 92 Los Angeles riots. And those riots are kind of all over this film. I'd say pretty much like this film is an attempt to kind of like, you know, plot out a linear progression from the 92 riots to the end of the decade.

Like what does, under these conditions, what does Los Angeles look like, you know, seven years down the road? And so the movie was interestingly enough part of a package deal or a production deal, with Fox along with true lies. And so they were kind of in production at the same time, which is funny to me, two very different movies. Angela Bassett was one of the people attached to the film at the earliest date. She had accepted the role of Mace basically in 93.

They had went through a few different actors for Lenny, including. including Andy Garcia, who was, I think that's at the top of the list, but they go to Ray Fines after his role in Schindler's list, and after he gets nominated for the Academy Award of Matt. They get Juliette Lewis, another Academy Award nominee as well, and the breadth of the cast builds out from there. I think it's important to say that part of the reason why so many A-list actors are interested in working on this movie, besides Cameron's involvement, is that Catherine Bigelow is at this point like a big-name Hollywood filmmaker. 91 had Point Break, which was a huge hit, a lesser hit, but still quite good movie.

The previous year was Blue Steel with Jamie Lee Curtis, and her solo director debut, Near Dark, was an 87, was also, you know, well-regarded. And so she's an interesting director. She's doing interesting things. There are very many women making action movies, basically. And so that's interesting. And I think actors just want to work with her. I also want to mention real quick that Angela Bassett is sort of kind of rocketing to Starhood.

And one thing I think is interesting about this movie is that Angela Bassett's character and Ray Fine's character and the movie kind of is a love interest. And I think that's just an interesting thing. You don't see very many. we've mentioned before you don't really see very much interracial romance period in 90s Hollywood but not specifically black women and white men is not a thing you see very often even now but she she you know just in the 90s which is kind of the mid to early night the early to mid 90s is when her career really takes off she's in boys in the hood she's in Malcolm X she has her big star making turn in what's

love got to do with it, which is the Tina Turner biopic. And then in 95, in addition to strange days, she's in Panther as Betty Shabazz. I don't really know what this movie is. It is an adaptation of Melvin Van People's novel

Panther. And it's a dramatization of the rise and fall of the Black Panther Party for self-defense. There you go. So that is Panther. But she's also a vampire in Brooklyn, which is

another kind of cult hit, director of West Craven, starring Eddie Murphy. It's a good movie, actually. And I really like it. Yeah. And she's in waiting to exhale, which is another like a man. I feel like if it was a huge hit, if you were like a black kid

in the 90s, your mom was probably obsessed to this movie. My mom was I know the soundtrack was like all over my life. at the time because it had a big Whitney Houston hit attached to it, directed by Forrest Whitaker, interestingly enough. I think that's really interesting that he directed that movie. And her next two movies, Contact, and then another massive hit, how Stella got her groove back.

I mean, just like she's on top of the world. But you'll note that outside of, you know, context of science fiction, picture of a strange day is a science fiction picture like the Hollywood the big Hollywood productions have her kind of as like a supporting character and it's not really it's really only like the black um movies aimed at a black audience that she is a lead and in a romantic role so this is like unusual in a lot of ways and I think um yeah that's just my quick Angela Bassett thought I thought that was very interesting uh what who else is worth noting Vincent Sinophros and men in black this year as well he's great. Tom Seismore is in heat, I think, around this year as well. I mean, everyone in the

cast is kind of like really doing some of their best, their career-making work, or if not career-making, some of the best work of their careers. Michael Wincott had, will be in Basquiat the following year, and the previous year was in the Crow. So, yeah, a lot of stuff here. I mentioned the the movie was a bomb. No one saw it. People were like, what is this thing? But it was

hugely influential. I think it's I think you can draw a pretty direct line from strange days to the matrix. Absolutely. I thought about that while I was watching it. I think that both in terms of style, I mean, there's just

wholesale borrowing from from a visual stylistic basis. You know, it's, it's, it's, the country's in the period kind of post grunge where culturally, you know, it's not clear what's going on basically. I mean, gangster rap is still around, but it's kind of transforming into into kind of something a little bit more polished and, and, and, and then there's, you know, electronic music is getting very big, which is featured in this movie a lot. I think we hear some, we hear some tricky and massive attacks. Tricky, trip hop, yeah, which I still love. I love this. This movie, this movie is very, I think one of the cooler movies we've seen in a sense.

And I mean this in a few senses. I think this movie is like, was very plugged into the hippest things going on in the 90s at the time in terms of music and art and culture. And, you know, movies that came after kind of copied it. And it almost seems like, even though this is a Hollywood movie and there's sensational and even kind of absurd things about it. It's almost an art movie, both in the sense of how much care it takes in its visual world,

and in the sense that, like, there's some kind of imaginative vision on the parts of the filmmakers being developed here. It's almost like an art, like this is like an artour film kind of like enchained by Hollywood conventions in a way. And, you know, I think Catherine Bigelow is kind of like interesting director in that way. Cameron's this way a little bit. He's more mainstream Hollywood. Kevin Biggles always seemed to be someone to me like, you know, like under different circumstances, could have been like an indie director, you know? And like, I think that this like movie has a bit of that.

And it's, you know, it's a cult classic and it may have just been like, might have just been meant to be an independent movie and not a big Hollywood production. It's, I think, one of the cooler movies we've seen in terms of just like giving a sense of like the avant guard stuff was things that were more avant garde in the culture in the mid 90s this is a movie kind of gives you a little bit of an insight into it is more edgy um I think it's like a movie that I really really want to like for a lot of reasons and I don't that much it's it's not that I dislike it but I just find it to be kind of like this movie has so many it's like one of those movies that has so many endings you're like it had endless kind of

climaxes and I don't mean that in a good way. And it, it, um, the, the amount of like atmosphere and drama that the movie creates, which is significant. It doesn't really match up with the plot, which is sort of silly and has certain kind of anti-climactic features to it. I think this happens with a lot of cyberpunk things, like the visual world of it, the atmosphere, the vibes of it, what it suggests some of the technological ideas are all very cool and interesting and then it doesn't really deliver in terms of being like a really solid movie all those things but but I just like find it a little tedious or something like that it's also one of the most in some ways one of the roughest movies we've watched there's rape and there's also

sexual fantasies are dealt with in a very kind of direct way and also which is interesting because it's a director as a woman, rape as a kind of, as a sexual fantasy, and, you know, like, that's a, a big part of the movie as a fantasy that people, as a subject of desire, which is, you know, an extremely disturbing topic. This movie is very violent, not in the sense that there's lots of squib work or anything. It's violent in the sense that, yeah, it's, it's depicting kind of a, the darker side of humanity, of, of the human psyche. in a very unflinching way and not really shying away from it and outright depicting some of the event. So kind of the

plot of the movie, more or less, is that Ray Finds play as a guy who deals in, with like a playbacks or something. And in this world, there is a device that you can wear called a squid that records your memories and then you can play people can you can either play them back for yourself or other people can play them back and so he is a collector of these memories and the first thing we see in the movie although we do not realize it is him experiencing

what's called like a blackout or or something just one of these one of these memories where someone dies at the end and to robbery and one of the one of the thieves ends up dying and so it's through that that we learn what he does what kind of the deal is with this technology and everything um and i'll say just in terms of the movie's quality and structure the first like half hour i think it's genuinely great because it kind of is just sort of us going through la with him and going to go kind of living his life seeing his whole deal i mean that stuff is all the plot hasn't really begun yet and it's it's quite interesting i think um but through all this work, as a dealer, he comes into the possession of a recording made by a woman he knows,

a prostitute named Iris. He watches it. He finds, he sees that she's been murdered. And then he basically, with the help of Mace, who is sort of a friend, she's a driver slash bodyguard. They have a somewhat antagonistic friendship. But they kind of begin investigating what actually happened here. And it ends up entangling his ex-girlfriend, Julia Lewis, who is now with Philo, this record dealer guy. And it's all related to the killing of this rapper, whose name, I forget the character's name, um uh jericho one played by glen plumber uh glen plumber who you will recognize you may not be able to immediately place him but you'll recognize him from menace to society from uh the substitutes speed

two spy games he's in a lot of stuff uh he's a guy who works um but he plays his rapper uh oh i know that actors yes yeah yeah who's kind of like a teupac figure is this very political west coast rapper um anti cop kind of the leader of what seems to be a nascent political movement. And what we learn is that she witnessed his execution by two police officers, and now they are trying to kill her, or trying to get her. And so she makes two recordings. There's a recording of, well, there is the recording of her murder, which is not made by her.

But there's a recording of what she witnessed that comes. to the hands of Lenny and Mace and it's from there that kind of all the entanglement with their friends and enemies and such kind of resolve. But I wanted to go through the pot real quick to say that so much of the movie does

it's plugged into the culture of the 90s in a lot of ways and one of those is just sort of the rise of hip hop as this sort of globally popular music form. pop obviously had been in existence since the early 80s, kind of an offshoot of disco.

But it's not really until the early to mid-90s that it goes from being a very regional phenomena, something that people who live in, you know, there's a hip-hop scene in New York, there's one in Miami, this one in New Orleans, there's one on the West Coast, California, L.A., that is sort of not really a national thing to really be. this sort of like national music market movement, whatever you want to call it.

And you had I think hip hop is in a lot. There's still plenty of political voices in today, but in it kind of as part of what we were talking about earlier with this sort of sense of crisis in the black community, there was this kind of like really explicitly

political hip hop coming out of Los Angeles in particular in this period. And so that very much is like part of this movie, right? That the L.A. It's unclear if there have been, the L.A. riots happen in this world. But it's like L.A. on the verge of the L.A. riots.

It's like a perpetual L.A. riot. It's like it's a world. The dystopia of the world is interesting because it's like a very disordered world. Obviously there's lots of crime. It's always night. time there's always there's always violence it's a very violent and disturbed world where there's not a lot of order yeah it's almost like the LA rights have become a perfect permanent condition of society and they're always on the verge of exploding again right there's a scene or yeah there's

a sequence early on in the movie Verleni is driving through like downtown LA and it's and you see craziness going on yeah total chaos you see cops beating up suspects you see you know people vandalizing There's a, I think, a very evocative shot of two Korean shop owners with guns. That's straight out of the LA riots. Yeah. That shot of the Korean storekeepers guarding their store with assault rifles. Yeah, it's like the society is like a kind of collapsed. And the police are not very functional.

They're just brutal. Yeah, it's basically an extrapolation of the LA riots as a kind of basis of, which is basically a lot. lot of people's fears about what was going to happen to society in the 1990s. This is movies really plugged into that. Like, well, we're going to live in like this crime dystopia and, you know, we're or we're already living it. The other thing that's about it is that, but okay, here's a, it's not a contradiction, but what I find interesting is, so this guy sells these virtual reality clips of people's,

you know, real life experiences, but for other people who want to experience them. So it's a society that's already really violent and disordered, but it's also a society that's bored and craving experiences, craving a way out of the self, a way into other experiences. And there's even an explicit kind of end of history talk where like some characters in the movie are talking about, oh, there's no, we've reached the end. We're reaching the, you know, the end times because there's no new movies no new music we you know we're in this post-historical postmodern state of cultural exhaustion even though it's also um a world of of disorder so you would think okay well if it was a boring place then these extraordinarily violent fantasies and scenarios

would be appealing to people but no it's actually a chaotic place the likelihood you might experience one of these things is not that low, but for some reason, people still have this craving for these things, and this guy makes a living off of it. Now, it's an interesting conceit for a filmmaker to talk about, oh, well, there's this machine that kind of embodies people's fantasy, lets you embody fantasies and other people's actions. I mean, that's arguably what's going on in the movies. Obviously, there's a conversation. the movie where I think Julia Lewis says that I still prefer to go to the movies because they have the structure, right? They end. And these kind of clips don't really have the same sort of structure.

But it's interesting this movie itself is quite violent. Itself has, you know, disturbing sexual fantasies. And it's about the desire for people to inhabit those things, which I'm sure if you're a Hollywood director, I don't know if Bigelow is doing, having a moment of conscience or self-criticism, but it's interesting. Like, is the drug dealing, is the clip dealer, you know, Hollywood? Like, is that, is that the implication? Is that the director in a way? So that's, that's an interesting thing. It's like a world that that is violent, but still needs escape, but it's escape us into They're more violence, more sexual degeneracy. And, you know, it's also a movie about people's fantasies.

And in a way, it's not like the Matrix, which creates a whole metaphysics and other world and a kind of, you know, war that's going on in the background. it's much more it's it's what does it say about this i don't know what it says about people is quite so easy to sum up but it has some kind of comment about you know the nature of desire and the self which is um these fantasies that haunt people are destructive in a way i mean the main character's obsessed with it the main character is obsessed with his act right juliet lewis who can blame him um like and he keeps on playing the clips that he made of their love life together and they're at the high points of their affair and it sort of suggests that he's stuck you know these he's plagued by these these powerful fantasies um and it's preventing

him from from from getting going and you know that's sort of a um you know, a psychoanalyst might tell you a similar thing if you're stuck in a part of your life while you're plagued by these fantasies and you need to stop replaying them in your head or so and so forth. Right. I mean, there's even a line in the film exactly about this towards the end when Angela Bassett grabs him and is like, she's stomping on the tape. She's like, you do not, you cannot watch these anymore. She says, this is your life right here, right now. Right. Which I'll note is sampled in the Fat Boy Slim song right here right now. Oh. Interesting.

Yeah, yeah. That's like the, that's the opening, the opening right here, right now. It's just that pitched up. I didn't realize that. Cool. Well, I'll listen to that with new ears. Yeah. She's very, she's not interested at all in these tapes and these clips, these like kind of mini-discs of people's experiences and fantasy. She thinks they're gross. And they're fun. She brings up a good point. Like they encounter this kind of snuff film one, but she sort of says like, well, how different is that really from what you sell all the time? You know, that crosses the line for you. Like, this is the one

that's too disturbing. But yeah, I think that that's, you know, basically the movie is in certain sense about the power of fantasies. On the other hand, these things are also real recordings. They create evidence in the movie and they're kind of the truth at the same time. So it's, it's It's wrapped up in a complicated story of what's going on in this media, this media environment that they're doing. But I think that, you know, also, we've talked about this many times. There's a big fear in the 90s about what the fantasies, films, and TV we're going to do to people's minds. Right.

And video games. I mean, yeah. I think there's something here. I mean, even though these are memories of a sort, and they are real. It's sort of like they also do, and this is Angela Bassett's point in the film, they can engend, they can kind of, you can be captured by sort of nostalgia, even if it's a memory, even if it's a real thing that you experienced or someone else's experience, it can still create these feelings of nostalgia for wanting to go back to the past.

And I think there's something, I don't know how self-conscious it is, but I feel like there is something happening in Hollywood in this moment when you have several movies essentially dealing with this, right? So the Truman show was actually just rewatched a couple weeks ago is like, you know, in part about Jim Carrey's character having, you know, been raised as part of this reality show, which I got to say, I've seen that movie a couple times. This time, the last time I watched it, I, you know, when they're talking, when they're describing what actually they've done to Truman, I'm like, this is one of the most evil things I've ever heard yeah i mean that's incredibly fucked up yeah it's like profoundly evil uh in that movie kind of gestures

towards the existence of like a political movement around trying to free truman but like i feel like maybe i'm not cynical enough but i i do kind of feel like i don't think they would fly i don't think they would fly no i don't think that would think people would get mad about nothing they would definitely get mad about that yeah uh anyway um but that you know that movie part of that movie as well is how the rest of the world is vicariously living through this 19, yeah, his life, his 1950s kind of past each life. You have, you have, you know, there's a Brady Bunch movie that comes down around this time. There's a bunch of like revitalization or resurrection of properties from the 50s and the 60s. Yeah, big nostalgia wave. Yeah, big nostalgia wave. And I wonder if, if, if this movie,

isn't consciously or not, not just commenting on maybe the role of the filmmaker, but also just sort of this, the role of nostalgia in society, nostalgia as something that can obscure one to present conditions and trap one in a deletrious fantasy. Yeah. Well, it's sort of suggesting it that when it talks about that whole like society, being stuck thing it's kind of suggests that the kind of rehashing of things is is a problem and that's like limiting people's imaginations actually um and limiting the possibility of the future i think it's interesting that like virtual reality becomes a big issue there's this film

there's the matrix there's existence which is a really cool movie which i think is another you mentioned a few films that were like the ingredients for The Matrix, with this being one of them, and that's another one of them, which is like about some kind of virtual reality game that, like, it's a Kronenberg movie where it like plugs into your, of course, it's got to do something weird with your body because it's Kronenberg. It plugs directly into your like spinal cord. There's lots of paranoid fantasies and solipsistic fantasy. I think the Truman show, what's interesting about the Truman show is we all, I don't know, maybe

I'm going to out myself as a lunatic right now. But I think from time to time, especially when you're a small child, we all have these solipsistic fantasies from where you say, oh, what if the world has been sort of created around me, right? And or like we all indulge in these feelings. I think, you know, once you sort of have these like Cartesian thoughts, like what if the world was all created by us? It was a simulation. You say this kind of thing. I don't know why this starts to become around the late 90s. I think it's because of the obviously there's huge technological.

change. There's computers, there's video games. There's things that just suggest where the technology is coming. But there's a big fear and interest in the, in the possibility of a virtual world and the possibility of other selves and other realities. And then these movies all deal with the necessity of coming and the difficulty of living in these alternate realities, but also the necessity of dealing with the actual reality and not running into these, you know, escapist world of fantasy. So I think that that's, I don't know if that's just the society

is heading towards, you know, I think virtual reality is something that we're always, we're always not quite there. We have some augmented reality things, and they keep trying to sell these goggles to people. And, you know, I don't know. if they're going to really replace movies or whatever. But I think, you know, at some point, what none of these films quite get at,

maybe the Matrix in a weird way is closest to it. Okay, AI, right, is going to be, you know, let's say AI has all the potential that, you know, you can, that people say it has, right? You can describe things to it and it creates them. So if there is, it's like the, like the hologram deck in Star Trek or something like that. Well, what kind of world is it? What's the meaning of reality and not reality if, you know, we can, there is no technological or material gap between what we're able to imagine and what the, and what we're able to conjure up?

What does art mean in that context? I mean, it was already worries about that, you know, our fantasy reality. all these things start to kind of collapse. I find that prospect to be really hard. I was listening to this guy on the Odd Lots podcast with Joe Wiesenthal, a VC for AI. And he said, oh, in a few years, there's going to be movies that are like, look convincingly like movies that can capture actors, mannerisms, and voices. And, you know, you won't really be able to tell there was made by. It's horrible to me.

I don't know why that's so horrible to me. I mean, there's many reasons. But I feel like this is also a problem that's starting to be hinted at in these later 90s movies dealing with the fungibility of reality and the strange days that were soon entered, perhaps. Well, I mean, I think if not to speak for you, but I think what makes that prospect horrible. And I think that what these movies are plugged into is, is a sense of like, in this almost like paradoxical way, it stifles creativity.

It does. Because all that AI can do is learn from things that have been previously created. Anything it creates is necessarily kind of a recapitulation or regurgitation of something that came prior. Maybe it's remixed in some way, right? Maybe it's put, it's displayed in something else. But it cannot generate new concepts on its own. It is constantly referring back and using past materials to recapitulate the things that people want.

And you'll notice it like even, you know, when you look at what people are doing, casually doing with AI today, it's all sort of like reproducing things that they want to experience. It's not so much like using the powers of human creativity to create something new, right? Because that's different, right? Like using AI to enhance human creativity is one thing. But as a replacement for it, it just can't, doesn't fit the bill. And in this, and this movie again, sort of like the reliance on these, on these tapes, right, is like part of, you know, part of a critique from characters like Mace is that like, listen, you are, you are, um, there's, there's, there's, there's, they aren't back to back scenes, but there's sort of like, the one scene we get of Mace kind of like daydreaming or like looking outward is she is looking at her son play with. fireworks. That's reality, right? Like, so a real person in front of you enjoying something new within life versus sitting in like a toilet stool, um, uh, uh, replaying memories of someone who

doesn't love you anymore. And that's like the contrast in the matrix even part of part of like the whole deal with the matrix, right? Is that like it is an eternal 1999. Um, uh, it is, I think Smith does say that movie this was this was the peak of your civilization. There's something to that, I guess. I don't know. But it's an eternal 1999. Right. And part of what, part of what, you know, part of why Neo by Thomas Anderson does not fit in is precisely because he's like this very creative person, right?

Sort of like there's something about the world in which he lives. It doesn't facilitate that. Right. It was not authentic to his sense of self. And that's what he was feeling. It's interesting how the Matrix has been so important for two very diametrically opposed groups of people. Both to people, both to trans people, because, I mean, the Wachowski's both came out as trans.

And, you know, the movie is seen as kind of an allegory of, of, you know, realizing you have a trans identity. entity. And also for extreme right wingers, reactionary right wingers of the most psychotic sort, where it's sort of like, oh, we live in a world of liberal lies or whatever, you know, the blue pill, red pill thing. I think it's, you know, obviously it's a, it's a story of conversion. It's a story of discovering true reality and the trauma and the joy or the liberation involved in that. So, I mean, it could appeal to it's kind of a timeless. It's literally, I mean, it has a lot of

religious traditions that it's calling on. So you can see that it, you know, has deeper. It's and it would resonate with lots of different types of people. But for some reason, the Matrix story, and it's interesting now that we're getting closer and closer to AI, felt like that was sort of the myth. That's, I don't like it that much. But, and I kind of like Strange Days better, even though I don't like strange jays that much either i think strange jace is like in the same maybe because there's less computer graphics in it just like it seems kind of like more of a labor of artistic creation to me and maybe a failed one and a flawed one but i'm like and the matrix aesthetic is not as cool to me um but that's neither here nor there it's interesting to me that the myth that the matrix is like

the myth of our time right that's like such a huge reference for people of all different types of it's such a you know it became such a phenomenon in popular culture and i think it just shows i think we're in a different world now than we but the 90s is a time of stagnation and frustration with prosperity and peace itself and that was creating its own kind of despair you know and there was all of these fears about social collapse, but then as a decade war on, I mean, look, I don't want to, a lot of people in the country were suffering a big deal. But, you know, it was superficially at least considered to be a time of peace and prosperity. But that didn't kind of, I call this in my book, which has more economic causes and more actually has to do with people's, you know,

lives becoming worse than they had been materially. But, I mean, that, that, that, that, has an upshot where people's lives where electronics are cheaper. You can watch video games all day. You know, you could be semi-employed but still afford video games. There's an impoverishment of life and imaginary life and spiritual life, whatever you want to call it, and a real desire to escape from that. And I think that that sort of explains, you know, I think this movie's a warning about certain parts of that. It explains a lot about the present. But, politics in the present, so much fantasy projection, wanting to identify with something that's going to break up the, you know, I think a lot of people voted for Trump out of sheer boredom.

I mean, I think that's, I think that's absolutely right. I think that's like, I have, I have, you know, in the immediate aftermath of Trump, I had a very sort of like, monocausal sort of like, oh, it was just racism kind of thing. Right. In the, in the, man, seven years, almost seven years since, I've really kind of like, my view about it have like have undergone not a transformation but grown much more nuance and i think i i think it's how i put this i think that if conditions in 2016 for like a standard deviation worse right if it was like 2009 in terms of like the conditions of american life that trump would have lost

decisively yeah i think the sense of normality that was emerging in 2016 um of boredom, was as much a cause of Trump's success as anything else. Yeah, that's super interesting. I think, you know, they say sometimes revolutions happen when conditions improve. Like, I think you're right. You know what I think what had happened? Well, I think it was still too early for Bernie to win in 2009. But I think there is something to what you're saying.

It's almost, but the normal was bad. Like, there was a sense that, you know, like, well, the economic situation, the cultural situation, the country had really had sort of like marginally improved since 2009, but it was still frustrating in some way. And people kind of lashed out. So it's like the underlying causes weren't dealt with. Yeah, I mean, I think even the racism of Trump, I think those these causes are, are complicated. I mean, there was no denying that just flat out racism is a huge part of the story of Trump. But the racism for a lot of people functioned as a kick, you know, like it was something. It felt transgressive.

It felt transgressive in an unusual way, it seemed like evidence of truth telling, right? Like someone who would be so willing to be openly racist. Right. What a refreshing thing in this day and age, you know? So, and now it's very dangerous, that's very dangerous, but yeah, the kicks of it were like, oh, wow, this guy's really going to just say it. And that was kind of the media circus of it, too. The frustration with what seemed to be stagnation of the 90s, I think made its way into politics then. I mean, I think, I think the desire for a war that was very palpable at the end of that decade.

Yeah. Is it direct product of it? The wars were disappointing because like the Gulf War, I talk about this in a book, just kind of came and went. And it didn't have like we think of the, like the archetypal war is the Second World War, which reorganizes society, right? Like everybody's working or at the war and like it organizes society in a very profound way. And then you think, oh, well, that's what war does. And it's such a small amount of people who fight the wars. And also such a small and specialized amount of technology.

It's not like a fucking River Rouge plant is like Sherman tanks are rolling off in the hundreds. You know, like they build these drones and jets and specialized factories, you know, where very specialized workforces, you know, skilled workforces create them. Wars don't do the ideological or productive work. that they once did. And every time we try to do one, they don't work, like on some level. They don't create the conditions that we think are like, oh, a war, that'll boost the economy. Not really.

It doesn't produce enough. Or a war that will unite the country, maybe for about six months. You know, like the horizon of what these things are doing is very limited now. And I think that that's just like a case where it's just like so little, so little seems to be those, these great moments of national unification that we talked about. And in this movie, we talked about it's kind of absence of politics in a weird way. Like the, the political movement is a rapper who's sort of, you know, angry at the cops. What they're worried about causing is a big riot. Like, you know, it's like all of these sort of almost pre-political things.

Right. And despite the kind of like, I think you called it in our conversation before the show, kind of an edgy Hollywood liberalism of a bigelow and of the movie, how does this all resolve itself? It doesn't resolve itself of like some systemic shock to the system. And in fact, the movie almost disavows that when it's suggested that you just, that they show the tape of Jericho one's murder, just show it and let it. let let let chat fall where they may it's like no we can't do that we yeah we find an honest cop and we give it to him and then the bad cops get arrested and that's the resolution of the injustice the the the idea is absurd within the terms of the movie itself for two reasons for some for one reason it's a it's a violent and cynical society so why would people care the other reason is the boundaries between people and this is more real this is more realistic and perhaps more despairing the movie couldn't go here. The movie, the boundaries between people's fantasies and reality is so fungible that it's not clear that the spectacle of this murder would not just be metabolized

in the society as another spectacle, right? And as something that's kind of enjoyable in its own right. Maybe it causes a riot. Maybe it has political effects. But, but it, you know, I think, you know, but ultimately it kind of just goes to, to reaffirm the existing system. it works and the media makes a big deal out of everyone gocks at it like a spectacle and you know enjoys it on some perverse level so i just think like the by the terms of the movie it's it suggests a society of extreme corruption and and also reality breakdown almost but then suggests that the solution to it is quite simple you know it doesn't require revolution. It requires an honest cop.

But the main character then, he becomes more, it's one thing if you're like, look, this man is in the context of a totally, I mean, he's sort of a piece of shit. But like, if you're like, well, in the context, it's in Blade Runner, you're like, this guy doesn't really have a self. There's something totally broken about him. But in the context of the society he lives in, you can see why that would be in. This is a society where nothing makes sense anymore. But there's people, there are people of integrity.

Well, Mace, the character of has integrity. So if it's like, if you want to suggest it's still possible to have people of integrity, then you have to, I don't know, why is it, why is it interesting? Why is it important that your protagonist has lost his or maybe never had it? You know what I mean? Like, like what is the moral universe of the film? It's an interesting moral. I think film noir, and this definitely has film noir components,

usually is a world where moral action doesn't make a lot of sense, a very gray world, and human actions are compromised and complicated and often almost nonsensical. And in this world, I think they maybe made Angela Bassett's character a little too righteous and didn't have enough weaknesses, because I think had she been more of, okay, so the femme fatale stuff got all put on Julietteau's character,

who's, you know, a person who's corrupt. And Mace's character was without blemish. And, you know, Nero, Ray finds his characters somewhere in the middle, right? And I just think that the burden of the character of making her character so righteous and not, you know, you know, okay, this is a context in which

people need to rediscover what it means to do the right thing or to have personal integrity or to create or make moral sense of their world. for her it's never a problem she's just yelling at him the whole time that he can't do it you know i think i i just think it would be more interesting if she had her own struggle you know of personal integrity i agree i agree i think the movie i think bigelow wanted to use angela bassett to kind of highlight the role of of black women in like community formation yeah um but falls a bit into the trap of

of not actually rendering her as a full human in the writing although Angela Bassett is an incredible actress so she's able to really communicate a ton within the constraints of the role as right yeah I think and this is the holly this is the edgy Hollywood liberalism of the movie and the

and the superficiality of it this is like the progressive this is as far as the progressiveness of the of the movie can go it's like and then the hero is a black woman and you're like yeah in the 90s that's kind of that is sort of like all right I hear you pretty cool but like it's a little bit lame in retrospect to be like is that it like there's not more to this character like you know that's what I'm saying it's like the edgy Hollywood liberalism you know you know that that probably seemed to them like a like a big you know,

statement and it was and it, it's, you know, it definitely makes the movie look kind of ahead of its time, as you mentioned, for having an, you know, interracial couple,

a couple and then, you know, just having a black heroin who was very important to plot, but is a limited perspective. And I think it's a perspective that's like, because of the, this was like almost, this is the cultural politics of edgy Hollywood.

And it's the same thing like, oh, if we show them the truth, if we show them the right clip, then we'll fix everything. It's if we put everybody in the right role, if we cast everybody in the right part, if we rearrange the cultural inputs to scramble the system, then we are accomplishing an actual political change, right? And I just think, obviously, we can see the limitations of that. Yes, I think that's right. Yeah. let's wrap up i think we've i think we've gone through yeah um that is our show if you're not a subscriber please subscribe we're available on itunes spotify such a radio and google podcast and wherever

else podcast are found if you subscribe please leave a rating and a review it does help people find the show you can reach out to us on social media if you'd like the pod is at unclear pod um i'm barely on twitter anymore i'm on there but you can follow the pod at unclear pod also reach out to us over email at unclear and present feedback at fastmail dot com for this week in feedback we have an email from leum we actually had a ton of feedback from last last our last episode so thank you for that and it was kind of hard to choose what i was going to read this week but we have an email from leum titled fatherland in the ethics of alternate history let me pull it up real quick

Hello, Jamel and John. I'm a big fan of the podcast. I'm getting in touch because of the discussion at the end of the Fatherland podcast about the moral dangers of alternate history and how easily these scenarios can move into a sort of political pornography. If you are new to the podcast, this is our previous episode on the 1994 film Fatherland. Our guest was a scholar named Sam Goldman. You should go listen to it.

It's a great episode. Firstly, this is Liam. You're probably aware that this was a point made by George Orwell in his essay notes on nationalism. Quote, every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered. He spends part of his time in a fantasy world in which things happen as they should, in which, for example, the Spanish armada was a success or the Russian revolution was crushed in 1918, and he will transfer fragments of this world to the history books whenever possible. You can see this phenomenon recently with Putin's Russia, which

the terminally online right treats as a sort of resurrection of bizarrest order, autocracy, and nationality. And a bizarre stipend of the online left sees as heirs of the Soviet Union about to resurrect that world historical mission. Anyway, on to fatherland and thrillers. I'm a recently minted history PhD and one of the things that struck me was how the modern thriller and the modern alternate history rose together. And there's a lot of overlap. So in your period, Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising, it's a fantasy of NATO fighting the Soviets in the near future of the late 80s, and 20 years later, the video game world in conflict tells exactly the same story, but has it set in an in-and-imagined late 80s.

My point is that it's interesting how both genres often act as a way of working out our fantasies about fighting our enemies or having those enemies reveal our own decadence. See Nazi Confederate Soviet occupation narratives. Fatherland, a fairly smart book and a fairly dumb film, is no exception. Keep up the good work. Yeah, I know, I think I think I would agree with that. Orwell's point reminds me of, what is it, is it, Faulkner's point about boys imagining Gettysburg, Southern Boys Imagining Gettysburg. Always, always just before Pickett's charge, right?

That's right. Yeah. I want to note another email we got this is from Cooper and Cooper it just kind of related to this, alternate history. And Cooper just wants to is also kind of affirming a point we made during that podcast, which is emphasizing how difficult it actually is to envision a Nazi victory in World War II just because of by virtue of the Nazis, being Nazis. You can't really assume that a way. And that's the only way you can really imagine it. He notes the author David Brin, who I like a lot, author of The Uplift Trilogy, if you've never read it. And Brin was asked to do a short story for an alternate history anthology exploring an alternate outcome to World War II. And he, he, Brin can only picture a prolonged

of World War II fought through like some fantasy means like magic for aliens or whatever. But I think that the general point that just kind of part of Nazi defeat, military defeat may have been baked into the fact that just like the nature of the Nazi state. Yeah. I think is a I think is a is the right one. It's not possible. It's such a stupid fucking idea. And like and they were also just like it was based on the belief that they could beat everybody a war, and they couldn't. It's just simple as. Yeah, I mean, I made a similar point to someone about the Confederacy, which is that there's basically like one victory condition for the Confederacy, and it's a couple of quick,

devastating defeats of the Union Army in 1861 and early 1862, followed immediately by diplomatic recognition by France and the UK. And that gets, that, that, that's the Confederate victory scenario. But if it goes any longer, right, basically at the point at which the union, the, the northern public decides it's in for a long war is like you can't really win just for like, they just have more people. But then also, the other thing, the other very important thing is that as the war prolongs, the longer it goes, the more the home front becomes destabilized, and you're basically left

with two options if you're the Confederate political leadership. You either have to take troops away from the fronts to secure plantations against potential slave uprisings, or you've got to deal or you face yourself with like internal slave rebellions, which is kind of what happened, right? That's kind of more or less what happened. Yeah. The other thing about the Second World War is Like, you know, the axis victories were contingent, too. There's a world in which, you know, we always think about the fall of France as being foreordained, but it wasn't. I mean, there's a world in which the French Army performs better. They cut off and defeat, you know, the German panzer breakthroughs.

And the Maginot line holds. And that's it. That's it. Germany loses. If they can't, if they can't beat France in 1940 and they're stopped, the whole, the French war plan was based on we're going to stop the Germans and then production from Britain and eventually in the United States will build up our military forces to a point that we can launch a counteroffensive. If Germany stopped on the border of France, it's over.

You know, there's no way. And basically that happened once they reach the channel and once they don't beat Britain, basically once Britain is in the war at all, it's kind of over for them because they were never going to be able to have naval supremacy to conquer England. You know, so it's sort of like, as soon as the Second World War breaks out, the odds are very much against them. And then once the Soviet Union and the U.S. enter the war, absolutely forget about it. So there you go. Alternate history.

We are both skeptics. It can be useful, I guess, in exploring certain things. The only alternate history I'm interested in is France, the Third Republic, successfully fending off the Nazi attack. I guess I myself am interested. it. I find myself, I recently read an essay about this. I think it was David Brian Davis, the late David Brian Davis wrote about this, about sort of alternate paths for British North America in the absence of either in the absence of the American Revolution or in the case of its defeat. I do find that very interesting.

Would have been better. Let's face it. It's genuinely hard to, the very short answer is. genuinely hard to say. Yeah. Because in terms of like the Atlantic world, the, the, what are the main consequences of the American Revolution was to sever from the, the, the, the Atlantic polity of the United Kingdom, the single largest grouping of slaveholders, right? Sort of like you, you, the, the slave colonies in North America, which are among the

largest ones, maybe not quite the most profitable, but the largest ones. are no longer part of the British, the British Empire. Right. And so, yeah, I see where you're going. On the one, on the one hand, for Americans, it's like, it's like, you know, all of a sudden, the slaveholders have a lot more power and autonomy and can kind of shape of political order much more to their liking. Although no one is aware that slavery, everyone's convinced the slavery is on its way out anyway,

but like when the conditions emerge for its explosive growth, that the political power of slaveholders becomes really determined. Right. But on the UK side, there is already this burgeoning movement to end the slave trade, in British involvement in slavery. And cutting out the Americans gives a real political boost to that effort. All of a sudden, you don't have to deal with these people. With the planter class. Right. And the planter class is much weaker all of a sudden. You see that play out differently. You see that play out in the Haitian revolution and the French Revolution because the planters is. in Haiti were a huge political interest that had to be dealt with, a huge powerful political interests that had to be dealt with, which sort of, you know, was a big part of Napoleon's reversal of the Jacobin liberation of slaves, an abolition of slavery. So, yeah, I mean, if the colony's slaveholding interest is still attached to the metropolitan, the metropole,

then I think slavery lasts a lot longer. That makes a lot. a sense. Right. It lasts longer. And like it's the conditions for its end like take different shape too. Like because then you have to think as well like what is like the distribution of economic interest within the empire now. It's right. It's this big planter agrarian class. But it's also burgeoning manufacturing class in the north. And what who are they going to link up with politically in terms of like the empire? So all of a sudden sort of like all the, all the, um, you know, you may still get an American Revolution later down like another one, but it may look very different, right? Instead of it being the 13 North American colonies, it may end up being the southern

colonies and like Barbados and Jamaica, right? Like all, it becomes all very different and confused. And it's hard to say if it's better or worse, but it's just like very different. So that alternate history I find fascinating because it like it really is a world that's like completely different than the one in which we live. Well, you could have a post-colonial, you know, talked about the Texas, Texas like, you know, Texas and the, the comparing Texas in Algeria we did. You could imagine some other scenario where like the indigenous, not the indigenous population, but the black population in the South is emancipated, but living under kind of Jim Crow conditions as part of a colonial empire still. And then they have like basically they're the American

revolution and they have like an anti-colonial struggle, you know, it's like, right, yeah, a Vietnam or an Algeria, the American South. You could imagine, I mean, one of the things that is happening in the late 18th century is the British, in an attempt to try to prevent and suppress slave rebellions in their Caribbean possessions are beginning to toy with the idea of a buffer class of free blacks, right? sort of like blacks that are, so loosening the race, race hierarchy. So how does that play out in North America if that happens in the Caribbean, right? Like, does all of a sudden, is that, does that carry its way over into the slaveholding colonies in North America?

Then what does it look like without, like one of the, one of the, I think it would be underrated consequences, underrated amongst the general public of the American Revolution in addition to strengthening the hands. of slaveholders, it really more strengthens the hand of expansionist. And so there's, there's, you can, you immediately see land grabs to the West, um, an attempt to box out the natives. And so if, if North America is still a British possession under the crown, that, that does that continue? Like what, what actually happens with the Native American nations bordering that?

It's all very, it helps you think better about like the multiplicarity of that world, um, which, which Americans have a hard time with. Americans like to imagine that like the 13 colonies are the only thing that existed, but like it's a big world with a lot of different players. And so that that counterfactual helps you imagine it.

But we are running over. I'm not sure if listeners want to hear a podcast about what if the American Revolution doesn't happen. Well, we could, you know, franchise this and create a split off and charge. harsh people for that one. Patreon goal,

if you get us to 1,500, we'll spend two hours talking about that. Yeah, that sounds good. Okay. Thank you, Liam, and thank you, Connor, for the emails. We do episodes every two weeks, until our next episode, our next main feed episode,

is the 1995 Hughes Brothers movie, Dead Presidents, a movie I love. I think it's a great film. Here's a short plot synopsis. On the streets, they call cast Dead Presidents, and that's just what a Vietnam veteran is after, when he returned home from the war only to find himself drawn into a life of crime. With the aid of his fellow vets, he plans the ultimate heist, a daring robbery of an armored car filled with unmarked U.S. currency that President is available to buy on iTunes or streamer rent,

or rather rent or buy on Amazon. I think this is a terrific film. It's the Hughes Brothers. Their previous film, I believe, was Menace to Society. And this one, I think, is quite good. So that will be our next film. And don't forget our Patreon. The latest episode of our Patreon is on the Battle of Algiers.

We skipped a week because I was out on a vacation with my kids in Montreal, as a matter of fact, in this French-speaking part of North America. Battle of Algiers is incredible film on the French War in Algeria. I highly recommend that you watch it and listen to our episode, which people seem to really like. So check out that episode. The Patreon is just $5 a month, and it's two episodes every month. It's totally worth it.

Next episode will be the Day of the Jackal of the Patreon. All right. So for John Gans, I'm Jamal Bowie, and this is unclear and present danger. We will see you next time.