Unclear and Present Danger - Surviving the Game (feat. Gillet Rosenblith)

Episode Date: January 21, 2023

New EpisodeThis week, Jamelle and John are joined by historian Gillet Rosenblith to discuss the 1994 action thriller “Surviving the Game,” a loose adaptation of “The Most Dangerous Game” and a glimpse into anxieties and fears regarding poverty, homelessness and urban decay in the 1990s. They also discuss other, similar films of the era, like John Woo’s “Hard Target,” and they discuss further what distinguishes the action movies of the 1990s from their predecessors in the 70s and 80s.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.

Why would you want to kill yourself? Maybe I like the idea of choosing when I die instead of having somebody else choose for me. If someone offered you a good job, would you be interested? What kind of job are you talking about? We need someone to help us with our hunts out in the wilderness. Are you sure about this one? Oh, I'm sure. Has he got courage?

Gentlemen, I would like you to meet our new hunting guide. A new hunting guide, Mason. Here's a toast to the hunters and a prayer for the hunted. The hunt begins now. We're not really gonna hunt him, aren't we here? He's nothing. He's less than nothing. You're mine, Mason! Don't take any part in this.

I want you! Thank, thank. If you make it to civilization, you live. If you don't, maybe God will have mercy. Oh, yeah! I like my meat rear. Trump, well done, bitch.

Jack Mason knows he's going to die someday. Damn, I wish I never start, smoke. But today, he's not in the mood. This is where it gets interesting. Never underestimate... Come on, Mason! A man who has nothing to lose. Rutger Hauer, Charles Dutton, Gary Busey, F. Marie Abraham, William McNamara, and Ice-T.

Surviving the Game. Welcome to Unclear and Present Danger, a podcast about the political and military thrillers of the 1990s and what they say about the politics of that decade. I'm Jamel Bowie. I'm a columnist for the New York Times Opinion Section. I'm John Gans. I write a substack newsletter called Unpopular Front, and I'm working on a book about American politics in the early 1990s. And we have a guest, Gillette Rosenbliffe, a postdoc at the University of Virginia, and a historian of public. housing in the 20th century U.S. Hello, Gillette. Hello.

Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. Thank you for watching this. I think a very entertaining movie, but more on the bottom of the barrel movie with us. In the movie we're discussing this week is Surviving the Game, a 1994 action thriller directed by Ernst Dickerson and starring Ice Tea, Riker Howard, Charles S. Dutton, John McGinley, Gary Busey, and F. Mary Abraham, which is an incredibly stacked cast for what this movie is. And a reminder that a guy like F. Murray Abraham seems very dignified. But that man loves a check as much as the next guy and is happy to be in anything. Same with Rutger-Hauer. This movie is loosely based off of the short story, The Most Dangerous Game from 1924, loosely based. And here is a quick plot synopsis. A homeless man is high.

hired as a survival guide for a group of wealthy businessmen on a hunting trip in the mountains, unaware that they are killers who hunt humans for sport and that he is their new prey. The tagline for surviving the game is the rules are simple, kill, or be killed. Pretty straightforward. The film is available to rent on Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play. Let's look at the New York Times page for the day of release, which is April 15th, 1994. All right, so let's see what's going on. The Federal Reserve is signaling a new increase in interest rates.

Strategy is aimed at fighting inflation of future. Well, that sounds kind of familiar. Federal Reserve officials say they see no signs of accelerating inflation. But the Nation Central Bank is signaling anew that it will raise short-term interest rates. Again, anyway, the reason the officials believe that low short-term rates have already encouraged too much lending, giving stimulus to economy that no longer needs it. Well, a little different from today where we actually do have inflation, but the thinking of these things was much different in the 1990s because there were still a lot of panic and fear

about inflation since the 70s and then the Volcker shock, you know, these drastic moves in the 80s, late 70s and 80s to take on inflation. So even the possibility of inflation was very worrying to the Fed and Paul. policymakers, it's worth keeping in mind that the federal funds rate was much higher at this time than it even is now, I mean, that we're having these rate hikes, which are sort of a new federal reserve effort to fight inflation. But the federal funds rate was higher than that it is now, even after cuts that were made during the recession of 1991 and 92, the zero interest rate regime happened after the 2008 crash. It seemed to have no, you know, create no

inflation. So they kept it in place for a very long time. And now we've got inflation again. nothing like the 70s and 80s though but still something that worries people okay uh let's see u.s jets over iraq attack own helicopter and error all 26 on board are killed pentagon baffled copters were mistaken for iraqi's craft weather was clear in a deadly military blunder american fire planes shot down two united states army helicopters today as they were carrying a team of officials from four allied nations over the Kurdish enclave of northern Iraq. The shootdown, which killed all 26 people on board, the two aircraft, occurred after 250 F-15 jets enforcing the no-flight zone over northern Iraq, mistook the aircraft for Iraqi

helicopters after flying near them to identify them visually. Well, I didn't know about this tragedy, but the background is basically that even after the Gulf War, the U.S. enforced no-fly zone over the north and south of Iraq. The southern one was close to the border with Kuwait, and the northern one was over the Kurdish part of Iraq, which you know, was mentioned here. And the point was to prevent Saddam from launching another brutal military campaign against the Kurds. And this was evidently a terrible accident that happened. Um, here's another one. Tobacco chiefs say cigarettes aren't addictive.

Which I can tell you as a smoker of almost 20 years is not true. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. It's just, it's so, it's so funny. It's funny in the sense it's sort of like the photo here is of the tobacco chiefs hands in their air, you know, swearing, you know, that they're going to tell the whole truth, nothing about the truth, et cetera, et cetera. and it's like, yeah, it's just a brazen lie. And so it's like the juxtaposition of the headline and the photo is very funny to me because obviously, obviously they're full of shit. Yes.

And it's amazing that they can still. It's amazing that people even said this and it was as recently. You know, you think of this kind of comment of being from like the 1950s when they're like, it's actually not that bad for you or some cigarettes are better like, but they were trying to keep up this bullshit for a very long time. Smoking can be part of a balance. a balanced lifestyle. Also, like, yeah, you can smoke cigarettes, but, like, heaven forbid, you smoke anything else, right?

Because we're in the height of the war on drugs. So, but smoking cigarettes is fine. Right. It's American. It's American. It's patriotic. It's marijuana, though. It's like the most American thing is smoking tobacco.

Off the front page, there is other more interesting news that pertains to the podcast in general. This is during, U.N. and Rwanda says it's powerless to halt the violence. This is during Rwanda's civil war, as it was called now, but was really revealed to be the Rwandan genocide as time went on. The UN mission was not able to prevent it, which had a lot of effects on U.S. foreign policy thinking and the thinking of liberal humanitarians who, you know, you know, kind of shied away from interventionism and then after, uh, the experience of Rwanda had a, you know, used it as a justice. Some would say was a instructive experience, others might say use it as a justification for more interventionist policies. Um, anything else look interesting to you here, guys.

Um, I didn't scroll into the opinion pages, but usually they're just kind of a restatement of what's on the front page. Endorsing growing practice, Vatican approves altar girls. I got nothing to say about that, but it's interesting. It's a front page story. World power. The Serbs raised stakes in Bosnia.

The Serbs intensify their campaign against peacekeepers. They sought to force the UN to surrender impounded heavy weapons. So, you know, the war in former Yugoslavia is still continuing at this time as well as the situation in Rwanda. I think that Rwanda, and we often talk about, just one more note about this, we often talk about like the end of history, the feeling that liberal democracy was triumphant in, you know, after the Cold War.

And the genocides in Rwanda and in Bosnia kind of, if not, kind of cast out or put a darker cast on that proposition. So that's one thing to keep in mind. Yeah. Jolette, do you see anything you want to comment on? I don't see anything. Okay. Okay.

All right. Let's move on to this movie, or at least some background. As I said at the top, this film is loose basely off of the most dangerous game. It's actually kind of a part of a mini boomlet of rich assholes hunt the whole. homeless films. The other one I have in mind is John Wu's Hard Target, which came out just a couple months earlier, maybe late in 93. Hard Target is not as explicitly political as surviving the game is to the extent that surviving the game is political, but Hard Target has like zero politics and there's like no attempt at deception. That's a movie where it begins

similarly to this, this one, with some rich people hunting a homeless person. person. But then it's like the premise is very straight up. Like, I'm going to hunt you. And if you survive, you'll get money. There's no deception about it. It's a very different kind of movie. I love Hard Target. But we're talking this one, not Hard Target, because I think this one, it fits a little more into the themes of the podcast. Surviving the game directed by Ernst Dickerson, who is not a household name, but in my opinion, very much should be. He was cinematographer. His first big job, he was cinematographer on John Sayles' brother from another planet, great movie, something we will likely watch for the Patreon feed at some point.

And he was, I mean, he's most kind of notable as one of Spike Lee's frequent and early collaborators. He shot and was very much significantly responsible for the look of, she's got to have it, school days, do the right thing, Mo Better Blues, Jungle Fever, and Malcolm X. The kind of warm tones of those films, the bright colors, the bright sort of like a colors in dimly lit areas. Like all that stuff is Dickerson. You can see it in his first film as director, Juice, which starred Omar Epps and Tupac. That movie was part of its own kind of boomlet of so-called hood films, Boys in the Hood, Men's to Society. And it was, Juice was a big hit,

very successful film. And surviving the game is Dickerson's follow-up to Juice and was unfortunately much less successful. It eventually earned its budget back, but not really much beyond that. Critics were not very favorable to this film at release, which I kind of understand. But I think the movie is much better than that initial evaluation would suggest. And I think it actually holds up quite well compared to other sort of like lower budget action thrillers of the era. Dickerson, you know, still works in film and television. He works in horror. That's kind of a genre where he found some success in.

and he has collaborated with Lee again and again. I think in an upcoming HBO series, he directed a few episodes of something. It's the DMZ series, which I think it's for HBO for Hulu, and he directed some episodes. So the guy still works. He's in the 70s,

but I think he's a really talented visual stylist at the very least. I think a pretty talented director, too. As for the rest of the cast, there are lots of people you probably recognize. There's, of course, iced tea. original gangster. He at this point is pretty, pretty well into his Hollywood career, which took off a couple years earlier with New Jack City in 91 and continued ever since. I mean,

he, if you look at his 90s filmography, Ice Tea isn't a lot of stuff, a lot of genre stuff, obviously. And then he has his long running role on Long Under SVU as a cop, which is still very funny to me. Gary Busey, you recognize that guy and his teeth anywhere. And, And if you are not super familiar with Gary Buse, you at least recognize him from previous Unclear Pod movie Under Siege. And the previously mentioned F. Murray Abraham, who at this point is pretty much famous for his turn as Salieri in Amadeus, which is a great movie. Great movie.

So, yeah, very stacc-cast. If you aren't familiar with Charles S. Dutton, which I feel like as a black person in my 30s, I'm very familiar where Charles has done because he's like part of like the television of my youth. But I'm not entirely sure how familiar people are with the guy. He's a highly acclaimed theater and screen actor. He got in the acting after serving. I think 11 years in prison for manslaughter. I think I think the sentence was five years for manslaughter. Then he like beat up a cop and got like more more tight. Beat up a cop in prison or a guard and got more time for that. So he was sent to solitary. He picked up like a book about acting in solitary.

It was like, this sounds really great. And then enrolled in acting classes when he got out on parole and became a very acclaimed actor. He earned two Tony nominations for characters in August Wilson plays. Like the guy is legit. And he, if you recognize him from anything, you'll recognize from Rudy, which he was co-starred. He directed, if you've never seen this, I recommend it you. He directed the adaptation of David Simon and Ed Burns book The Corner,

which is sort of like the thing that immediately precedes the wire about a family on a Baltimore Colt corner in West Baltimore. And I like that in a series quite a bit. And I highly recommend it. So that's

the relevant stuff about the film. Gillette and John, what did you think of surviving the game? I was worried I was going to be more gruesome than it was, but I found it very enjoyable and fun to watch 96 minutes is perfect. That was perfect. And yeah, it was fun. The hair was incredible throughout, I think, iced teas in particular.

But, yeah, I thought it was like a fun action romp with a, as you said, stacked cast, like so many. so many fun people doing the scenes in different in different scenes throughout the movie. I thought it was, you know, my tolerance of this movie, these kinds of movies is sometimes a little limited. This wasn't definitely not the worst movie we've ever watched on this on this one. Did I enjoy it? No, not exactly enjoyed it, but I got something out of it. I thought there were some interesting cultural details and memes from the era in it and things to talk about.

I thought it was pretty, pretty, I thought it was pretty gruesome and violent. I guess I'm more sensitive than you are, but, but like, I just thought the, uh, yeah, I thought it was very violent. Um, we often talk about, you know, movies getting, you know, less violent over time from this year, but I thought it was pretty gruesome. Yeah, for, for a studio, for what, what is a studio picture, right? It's relatively low budget. I think it only costs about $7 million, but this is a studio, a studio movie. having a scene where you have a character's legs get blown off and you get like a wide shot of of him legless I was actually I was actually I had forgotten about that scene and I was like shocked

that it was in there oh you've seen this before yeah of course I had yeah I thought it was it was gruesome I think in terms of you know I think Gillette probably will have more to say about this than I do But I think, you know, that as you hinted at Jamel, the choice of making a most dangerous game adaptation or inspired piece with a homeless person in it is very indicative of its era because there was a, I would say there was a severe crisis of homelessness in the 90s, of this era in the 90s. And there was also, I think, a lot of fear of the homeless and a lot of fantasies about their danger to society and rather disgusting and nasty fantasies about what should be done to deal with homelessness. And this movie definitely is a much more sympathetic take than some of the things that would have appeared. I know it a little bit from my own research, but don't know it in great detail. So I'd be really curious, both just the scope of the crisis at the time and also just how it manifests itself culturally. Yeah, I mean, homelessness is like a big issue kind of in the 80s and then into the 90s as well, right?

Like in the 80s, Reagan is slashing budgets for public housing, left, right, and center. Meanwhile, right, like Paul Mann, afford and Lee Atwater making hundreds of thousands of dollars from HUD contracts. But, and then, you know, that kind of continues in the Bush and Clinton administrations, right? But, like, nobody wants to support low-income housing, especially not public housing. So that really exacerbates the homelessness crisis, especially because, like, there are all these economic downturns that are happening, right? In the 80s and 90s, and, like, the recoveries from them are very uneven. And then you also have the war on drugs and, like, the proliferation of, you know, kind of crack

and, like, other drugs throughout the, like, major cities especially. So, yeah, I mean, it's a huge crisis. And the lack of sympathy for poor people, for homeless people, right, like means that there's just a whole lot of kind of criminalizing going on. And that contributes, right, to the, like, uptick and mass incarceration and the war on drugs and, like, which, you know, functionally kind of is hunting poor homeless people, right? Especially black and brown men. So I was kind of surprised by the level of sympathy that this movie had for homeless people, even if it's still kind of, I think ultimately had like a pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality about what to do with it. But yeah, I mean, it's like millions of, you know, millions of people are really struggling.

Even if they're not homeless full time or at least homeless some of the time or have very precarious situations in which they're unhoused, you know, for part of the year. So, so real quick, just as far as a little plot for the movie goes, just to situate listeners a bit, ICE, he plays a homeless man. he is on the street. He has a friend, an older and older gentleman who I think it's supposed to be a veteran, maybe of Vietnam, maybe of Korea, but he fought, maybe even the second World War, but an older man who is his friend. And ICT is homeless. Kind of the movies suggest by choice that he formerly was basically a super in a public housing development that was decrepit, that was falling apart, that was a slum. He neglects to fix something or deal with the fire hazard, the sun sets on fire in his wife and son, or wife and child.

I don't think he'd say whether the child was a son or daughter. His wife and child die in the fire. And this sort of like spurs him that kind of just believe society entirely. And you get the impression that among kind of the homeless people in this city, which I think it's supposed to be Los Angeles or maybe Seattle. I'm not really sure. Yeah, I wasn't sure. Seattle? Yeah. You get the impression that Icy's character is something of a leader among

this community of homeless people. But the main, the big thing is he does, has no interest in reintegrating into society. After his friend passes away in his sleep, he tries to commit suicide. He's saved by Charles S. Dutton's character who says to him, hey, you know, I have some work for you. If you want the job, you got to help me and my business partner be a guide in the wilderness. You'll learn on the job. It pays well. I see his character takes them up on this. And at this point, the plot, you know, the stunt begins. This is sort of where the action begins. But the one thing that stood out to me in this regard is how this seems to be another one of these films that is at least keyed into what we've discussed in the podcast before, which is

this economic downturn in the early 90s, which is to an extent been kind of like, erased from public memory, but was very significant. And the movies of this period, at least the ones that attempt to deal with some sort of social issue, you see it pop up again and again. Falling down, it plays a big part. Sort of falling down has, in addition to our kind of protagonist being a laid off defense contractor, there's a lot of homelessness in that film that's portrayed. And we see it again and again.

and a bunch of the movies from this period. And so I think, you know, I think, I also think that this film has a much more sympathetic take than you might expect. And it's also, I don't know, I was struck by how at the same time as the film was sympathetic, it does not pull punches about the characters like. disgust for the homeless, which is a recurring, a recurring thing. Like, and to compare this to Hard Target, and Hard Target, like, they're hunting the homeless because, like, that's who's available. It's like, that's easy. But in this, there actually seems to be, like, a hatred of them.

Which I think is sort of, although exaggerated for the movie, is definitely a feeling that a lot of people had at the time. Yeah. To me, it felt like, right, like, but, like, these guys who are hunting iced tea, right? Like, there's nothing subtle about this movie. And like the way that they're talking about it, right, was like almost like they were kind of caricature villains, but like not far removed from the kind of, yeah, the rhetoric around homelessness and unhoused people in like happening on like the New York Times. But like I think we were supposed to think that they were really, really bad guys. Right. And so like that's like that to me was like where the kind of sympathy came in where it's like these people are deranged and horrific. And this is their take on on homeless people, which is like maybe. a slightly more extreme, but also like the logical conclusion maybe of like what people are saying in kind of day-to-day conversations about it. I also think there's like a kind of, wow,

you know, all these movies of this period like don't really have like class politics as such what they kind of have a certain kind of populism. So like the the group of men who's haunting ice tea, um, the hero is. like a who's who of the ruling class like one is an oil tycoon one's a wall street guy one is a CIA uh psychologist who started the hunting team um one is you know rucker how are sort of a generic business type um and uh so they're sort of like there to represent the rich and the powerful It's the very heights of the rich and powerful in society, and it presents them as, you know, sadistic and deranged. And he, and the F. Murray Abraham, the Wall Street executive is sort of bringing his son along to kind of initiate him into this bloodthirsty culture.

As you say, not subtle, but a kind of allegory of society going on here where, you know, we're meant to identify with the, with, with, with, um, IST's character, the, the character who is, um, you know, at the, at the mercy of these, of these ruling class figures. It's a futuristic movie because in a lot of the populist rhetoric or ideas of the era, the middle is caught between the underclass, you know, homeless people like IST's character, or, you know, just black people in general. And, you know, these, these tycoons at the top. And, but this movie is actually unusual in that it's not sort of like a middle class every man who is, is the hero kind of caught between these two extremes, but is actually, you know,

homeless and he wasn't rich before. He wasn't like a middle class guy who kind of fell onto, um, on to, um, on to hard times. I mean, I see his character talks about living in precarious circumstances before that. You know, when he had a life crisis, uh, it didn't take very much for him to edit. end up in the circumstances. And again, you know, kind of a more sympathetic or story about the homeless, you know, the way homeless people were presented then and sometimes now often is being almost a different species, some sort of zombie creatures from another world who are deranged, drug addicts,

et cetera, et cetera. And this movie actually says, well, no, this is maybe not the most likely, but a situation in which, you know, a relatively normal person could end up in the, you know, a relatively normal person could end up in these circumstances and the ask the audience to identify with them, you know, this could be you. Aren't they really kind of hunting us all? Or isn't this sort of just the nature of society? It is more political than some of the films we watch, but is a little different from some of the ways that politics are articulated in that it actually dares to ask you to identify

with a homeless character. So I was just looking up real quick on the New York Times archive about like stories about homelessness from this year. And there are actually like a ton of stories about crackdowns on homelessness in American cities. So there's one from December here, headline mini-cities in crackdown on homeless. A growing number of American cities are approving ordinances that restrict movement of homeless people and reduce services to help them. A new study by an advocacy group for the homeless is found. And one thing this makes me think about is this, and I believe 94 welfare reform comes the following year or is it 96 but it's in conversation from 94 on right

like yeah before even right right right because it's based on the wisconsin you know welfare reform stuff that that precedes all of that um you know how i phrase this the 1990s are remembered as a decade of general prosperity sort of like rapid economic growth you know the rising tied lifting all boats, kind of like a vindication of kind of the market-friendly policies of the era. That's how it's perceived of. This is how it's perceived of at the time. And I think that's how it's still perceived of by many people. But what of the interesting dynamics of that decade, I think, is that as you have this economic growth in this sense of an expanding middle class, you do have, as you mentioned, Gillette, an uneven recovery. You do have many people

who are left behind. The growth in mass incarceration more or less like takes an entire chunk of the public out of the labor market, which A, makes things look a little better than they actually are. But B also introduces a lot of dysfunction, right? Like when parents and breadwinners are suddenly like in prison for 10 years, that throws communities into disarray. But you have you have simultaneously in the decade growth and a sense of kind of like boundless possibility and what appears to be the growth, the continuation and growth of an underclass. I think one of the things that happens in both in media and in politics and in sort of like the discourse, you might say, is basically an attempt to reconcile this, but not by looking at

kind of like any structural features of the American economy because right we won the Cold War capitalism works we are like you know there's there are no problems here but reconcile it by fight by basically like saying well the people who are failing are not really people in the same way that the rest of us who are succeeding are and so dehumanization of the homeless you know you have that the bell curve right the reemergence of scientific racism um of biological explanations for poverty, I think it's very much a part of this. Like if you, if the country is succeeding, if the country's growing and you still have

these people who cannot seem to climb ahead, then obviously the problem is with them. I don't think it's moving necessarily evokes all of that because it doesn't provide like an image of prosperity at any point. the image of the city is of some place that's like economically distressed. I do think that in at least some way, it's probably keyed in to some of what's happening in the discourse. Yeah. What do you think, Gillette?

Yeah, I mean, I think like, right, like the dehumanization and stuff is happening for anybody who's poor, right? Like it's like obviously kind of extreme in terms of people who aren't housed, but like, right? Like welfare reform is punitive, right? Mass incarceration is punitive. All of these things are based on these ideas of people being not only like bad people, but also that like capitalism is so successful that we need to have less like social welfare state, right? Like that is actually what's harming these people, right? So I think that that's like kind of part of the discourse of what's happening too is like that the excesses of the welfare state are harming poor people and preventing them from kind of pulling themselves up and and like, and like, like taking advantage of the jobs that are theoretically available for them to improve their own lives. And I think you can kind of see that in the like beginning of this movie where they're like Hank and and the older war veteran and Ice Tea, his character kind of talking about like, why is Istee homeless? He's, you know, like a smart guy and he could like get himself

together and like having this conversation where Hank is giving him like a pep talk about like standing on his own two feet and kind of being a man in a way that's doing. different from the like masculinity evoked by these um like barons uh who are who are hunting him that's very much an undercurrent it's it's clear to me that like dickerson is is very tuned into the kind of conversations that are happening around poverty and like you know he's not necessarily having a full movie conversation about it but it's it's very present in particular moments within the movie it's my experience of both these hood films and some themes in spike lee that there is a certain conservatism in some of the black filmmakers of this era

or a belief in certain kind of ideologies of self-reliance and so on and so forth. So it's not surprising to me. I mean, even though there's sympathy for the state of iced tea, there's a certain like, oh, he's let himself go. I mean, you know, his situation is tragic. But, you know, that that kind of bootstraps mentality would appear in this and I think that's just also a way to connect it to the way most Americans

look at things. I also think, you know, another thing that's missing in this movie and a lot of the movies from this era that deal with social issues is like there's no historical perspective, right? Like, it's just like this is the way things have always been. There's a little bit of historical perspective, I guess,

in falling down because like there's a sense that, you know, there was once a stability and now that's gone. But, you know, what you're talking about Gillette and what we're talking about is like, basically from, you know, the 70s into the 80s, the late 70s into the 80s into the 90s, there was destruction of the American working class in various different ways. You know, first of all, we have the interest rate hikes, destruction of organized labor.

Then we have, you know, deindustrialization, the creation of all these rust belts, which urban, you know, centers are part of two, even though we don't think of them that way, you know, like, you know, there was great industry in all these cities that disappeared. And then you have, you know, basically this creation of this surplus population that is pathologized and is, well, what's wrong with them? What's wrong with? Well, there's no jobs left. And then, you know, those people either, you know, end up in on the street. They end up sometimes in criminal enterprises and so forth. And then everyone's wondering, well, what do we do with them? So either people had to get out of this situation because there was no working class life to sustain them.

And they either tried to move frantically into the middle class or they fell through the cracks and ended up homeless or in prison, as the case may be, at both. you know so basically like there was a great destructive change in the in the economic basis of life in the United States and that's just not something people were really conscious of I mean I guess people kind of knew something had gone wrong but you kind of get this weird sense in these movies that like that no one remembered a time when things might have been different you know like it's just like oh yeah there's the homeless and there's the super rich and this is the way you society is. Well, no, I mean, in living memory, there was a, there was a world that was slightly different. And that's such strange to me is that there's always this, there's this great, and I think

we've recovered it a little bit in the way we think about things, but there was like this great forgetting of what happened over the course of the 80s. And as you were mentioned, the destruction of, of, you know, subsidies for housing and stuff like. There was a, I mean, you know, not a conspiracy theorist, but there was a deliberate attack on the basis of, you know, working class life in America. And the product, one product of it was, is mass homelessness, which was then blamed on the people, you know, who became victims of it. So this movie is the whole problem of 90s politics is like it is not politics. It's always like, well, there's these bad guys and there's a kind of popular.

hero who takes them on and resist them, but there's no consciousness of, like, what happened, what was really responsible for it. It's just kind of shallow. Right. I mean, in the end, the movie concludes with IST, more or less, like, methodically picking off each of the people hunting him, and he gets away. And then, then Riker Howard's character trying to kind of, I guess, complete the hunt, like, searches it searches for him. him in the city, and ICT using his superior smarts and whatnot, ends up killing or engineering a situation of Rucker Howard is killed. And that's the end of the movie, right? And there's no, like, there's no sense that another group of rich psychopaths aren't going to do

something like this again, right? Sort of what happens to ICT? Does he get off the street now? Or is just going back to being homeless. Right, exactly. It gets to something that we talked about in our Die Hard 2 episode a while back, which is the extent to which the heroes of these films in this decade are always these singular individuals sort of like disconnected from anything else, right? So in the Die Hard series, in Die Hard and Die Hard and Die Hard 2, John McLean, although a cop, right, like although an agent of a, the state, presumably working in, like, a somewhat cooperative and collaborative environment is, in fact, this, like, singular hero who is impeded by the state, who is impeded by

the bureaucracy. And although IST obviously does not have that kind of, those sorts of impediments, he nonetheless is portrayed as, like, an exceptional individual, right? Yeah. His salvation comes from the fact that he himself is an engagement. exceptional person who probably isn't supposed to be homeless. It's sort of the underlying message here. Right. This guy has actually, you know, had hard times, but should be a productive member of society. And it's like uniquely smart. Right. Exactly. Uniquely intelligent,

uniquely capable. Yeah. And of course, I mean, this is like genre contrivances, right? Like, I don't think Dickerson, who is a very smart filmmaker is like necessarily thinking about that's the message he's trying to send. But when you kind of like put this stuff, in dialogue with other films similar films other other films of its genre at the time. This thing

kind of comes out a bit. And I think it both reflects the way the action genre change in the 90s, both sort of like shedding the extreme muscle-bound hero of the

80s, like the hyper-masculine muscle-bound hero. of the 80s, but not shedding the hyper-individualism of that hero. And like you said, John, I think it reflects some of the conservatism of this generation of black filmmakers.

We talked, not to reference too many previous episodes, but this movie kind of like intersects with like a lot of other stuff. We discussed deep cover late last year. And deep cover is a movie that for all

of its sort of critique, of the war on drugs, of the entanglement of the state and the war on drugs, of kind of wealth, of all these things. It does, there's this like kind of whole subplot that does reflect this conservatism where Lawrence Fishburn's character is, you know, confronted with a derelict mother, kind of like a mother straight from the pages of the New Republic, right? It's sort of like unable to take care of her child, probably on welfare, it doesn't work, uses drugs, that kind of thing. Yeah, I think what you're saying is right. And the thing is, like, I thought, like, when I read the description of this movie, I thought I see it's going to be like a leader of a team of homeless people that were being

hunted these guys and then, like, organize them to fight back. And I think that would have been a better movie. But that's like a different thing. Like, if you look at action, you know, like war movies coming out of the World War II era, they were all these like platoon movies, right? So you had like a group of guys, often from different ethnic groups, and they got to learn how to cooperate, right? So there's always a group endeavor and everybody's personality, it rushes up against each other, they rub each other, but then they get along and they're able to do great things as a team.

But there's no, and we talked about this also with, um, what's it called, under siege, where it was like, wouldn't that be such a better movie if it was like a teamwork movie? But it's like just, you know, Stephen Seagall being amazing at whatever it is that he does. So yeah, there's like no, he's totally isolated as a totally isolated individual. There's a very lonely, I mean, he's a lonely man who's caught himself off from society and then his friends die. But he's also like succeeds as an isolated individual. And it kind of implies even that the resourcefulness that he acquired in his lonely life allows him to do to triumph over these people, even though they're organized around him as a group.

You know, like he learns things from being isolated that he wouldn't otherwise know, you know, that he knows things about life and being a human being. And he goes back to being an isolated individual. He doesn't form any bonds with anybody. and in the end of the movie, he's just smarter than everybody else. So, yeah, the lack of sociality, you know, is a thing as part of this movie. I really thought, you know, I was like, oh, he's going to lead a little team of other homeless guys. And then they're going to rediscover their ability to, you know, have self-respect through their group that they bring together and so on and so forth.

Nope, just the total individual thing. That's the 90s, right? That's the 80s and 90s. It's like very much like individualism, hoorah, right? Like that's, I mean, like these filmmakers, we're talking to these conservative, like the conservatism within black films. But like this is just conservatism also within the culture generally, right? Like there is this emphasis on individualism and like empowerment becomes this kind of

very individualized idea where it's not something that you, you know, like you're not seeking power as like a black power group. you're seeking, like, individual empowerment for you and your family, right? Like, this is, like, the general thrust of kind of mainstream American politics. So, like, of course they're not in a group. You know what I mean? Like, that's a very utopian vision that you had, John. And, like, that would be a lovely movie.

But, like, maybe not of the 90s. No, but it's depressing an earlier, like, I think also a movie that was, like, a group of mostly black people defeating a group of mostly white people might start to make people, might start to make people a little. bit uncomfortable, whereas we've talked about this, like, how, how, like, there was one change. A black hero could and could embody populist anger at the establishment, like, as an individual, but probably in this era, like, starts to do that. But probably as, like, the leader of an organization or a potential organization would maybe start to make people a little uncomfortable.

I also think it's interesting, you know, iced tea as a rapper's career kind of comes into this because, you know, he, I wonder what attracted, I mean, attracted into the role because, you know, he rap music in general, especially gangster rap also was a kind of rejection of authority and rejection of the system, but not political usually. I mean, there were, there was political rap at this time, but, but not, and, and, and I he had his own with cop killer, his own kind of moment, you know, of political controversy. But the subject of power, again, was not the member of a group or a collective. It was an individual who, through ruthless enterprise, sort of asserts themselves and is able to kind of make

their way and otherwise, you know, vicious society that would, whatever. have destroyed them otherwise. So again, like we were saying, the underlying ideology there is, yeah, like this is an individual who asserts themselves, especially enterprising, even under, you know, terrible conditions and is able to rise above, not, you know, oh, well, you know, we formed a collective or a union or whatever, and we fought back. So yeah, this is just endemic, I guess, as we're all discovering through this conversation, it's just endemic in the way people, thought at the time and probably still do not that I need every movie to to reflect perfect politics but even but it's remarkable to me that there's just like not even like is there a

single movie we've watched Jamel where it's like a team of people collaborates to get something done I've been sitting here thinking about that and I cannot think of a single one I don't think it's a single one I mean okay even the Jack Ryan movies he's got the CIA behind it but he's especially good his job, right? Right. You know, it's not, there's not a lot of collaboration going on at all. I guess, I mean, Hunt for Red October is the one that is, that is, where Jack Ryan, Alec Baldwin, Jack O'Brien is, is supposed to be an exceptional analyst, but like he does not

accomplish this through, yeah, he's, it's, it's a, it's a, it's not just a cooperative endeavor between him and the crew of the submarine he is on, but him and the crew of the about October as well, that none of this gets pulled off without them collectively. And interestingly enough, like, if we're thinking of this in bookends, I mean, the 90s, this podcast is not bookended by this movie, but the 90s are bookended in terms of action cinema by The Matrix, which is this, you know, kind of really transformer to film in the genre and for the industry. And although kind of the conceit of the Matrix is that Keanu Reeves' character, Neo is the

one, like what the film very much makes clear is that, like, Neo is essential, but cannot accomplish his goal without the help of everyone else. That without Trinity, without Morpheus, without the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar, Neo doesn't actually unlock his full abilities. And the sequels kind of, like, really hit on this point as well. I mean, the thing about the sequels is that they're all trying to sort of like strip away some of the stuff you may have taken away from that first movie that Wachowski's thought was erroneous. But I don't think The Matrix is exactly this kind of like collaborative action film, but I think it's closer to that than most of the action films of the 90s.

And what's striking right is that modern action films don't really get their start until the late 70s, but kind of the antecedent to those movies are like the disaster movies of the 70s. the Poseidon Adventure or I can't think of another one, but these movies where you have some big natural or man-made disaster that like a, your cast has to overcome.

And those movies, in part because they are ensemble pictures, like part of the draw of them is like you're seeing all these big actors together do a thing. And so naturally if you have all these big actors together on an ensemble, they all have to have a role in the film. But what effect of that is,

to make them less individualistic as a genre than the films that basically supersede them. And supersede them beginning with, I mean, essentially beginning with the election of Ronald Reagan. Yeah. Well, Rambo comes around at the room at the same time. Right, right, right, right, exactly. And even the Vietnam movies are all, like, about groups of friends. Like, wow, not not the heart of darkness one, apocalypse now, but Patoon and, and, That's, I guess, a little later.

Or Deer Hunter, you know, it's about the, it's about group dynamics. Right. Yeah. I feel like the group dynamics movies of the 90s that I can think of are Armageddon and Heat. So, but that's like, you know, like, I feel like you get, you get, I mean, Armageddon, I think, but like even then, Bruce Willis is like kind of the one who ends up saving the day, right? And it's because of his, like, individual, like, he won't let us lose.

We're going to watch Armageddon on this podcast because I've, I think it's one of the great stupid concepts of cinema. I mean, at like 11 or whatever, how old I was, I was obsessed with it. But yeah. I 100% saw Armageddon in the theaters when it came out. I guess that would have been 96. 97, around that time. So, yeah, 10 or 11.

Yeah. I saw it with a friend. And I very much remember my friend crying when Bruce Willis died at me. Oh, God, I wept. I wept. but yeah I think Armageddon is one right I mean it's again yeah you're right

you're right Jill at that Bruce Willis's character is sort of like he's the best oil driller but no they don't get there without kind of a team effort I mean some of the films we're going to cover soon like contact the movies that kind of deal with either extraterrestrial threat

or some sort of like you know we're going to reach for the stars in some way that's the only horizon that still has collective actionism. Right, exactly. Those movies do, and this is a thing we will discuss when we cover these movies, those feel, to me, like a reaction to the individualism of the decade in the previous decades, sort of like, can we imagine, envision a scenario in which people would come

together to work cooperatively to either save themselves or achieve some higher goal, Independence Day. Although Will Smith is the star, kind of the whole plot of that movie depends on different groups of people in different places, executing their part of the puzzle correctly to save the Earth. And independent state in a lot of ways, feels the closest thing to a spiritual successor to the disaster movie of the 70s than anything else, both from its like broad and ensemble cast

to like the actual mechanisms of the plot. I feel like, you know, there's like maybe what we're kind of also getting at is like a difference between like an external threat versus an internal. threat, right? And like what allows you to be collective is having a kind of an other that is outside of the context of the U.S. versus like the kind of internal wars that are happening in the U.S. are very much like, this is your fault as an individual and your fault as a group for being poor. But like, you know, like that's, I don't know. Yeah. Whereas like if it's, you know,

like if you're fighting, you're not finding communism anymore, but like you're fighting like extraterrestrials or asteroids or whatever, then you can kind of come together in a little bit threatening of a way to the social order and to capitalism. Right, right. There's like a Hobbesian state of nature going on at all times within the U.S. unless there's some kind of external threat that would, that's even like explicit in that stupid movie

we watched, A Rising Sun. Oh, yeah. He's like, don't let, like, we want to continue to have our own racial conflicts in the U.S. So don't like, so they, so, and kill each other and have gangs. So don't let the Japanese come here. We'll unite to throw back to Japanese so we can go back to the normal business of killing each other. Don't let them stop us from doing that, which is kind of true.

It's like, well, you know, in order for the horrible competitive society that we have to keep going, we got to make sure that nobody else, you know, beats us. So we can stay, you know, killing each other. Yeah. You know, I will begin to wrap this up by saying that I just started reading Gary Gerstel's new book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order. Yeah. There you go. And, yeah, I mean, kind of one of, kind of the, you know, his, one of his big arguments is that the pressure is of international communism sort of like shaped conservatives as much as it did liberals and pushed conservatives towards sort of like a.

if not compromise, if in reconciling with the New Deal order. And I think John, I think John that very much speaks to the idea, right, that there's this external threat. So we can be collective as we meet that external threat. But once that external threat is gone, no obligation to the rest of you motherfuckers. That is the movie.

Well, I do wanted to say there are no women in this movie. There are no women in the street. I think that's like, like, at the end of it, I was like, I think you heard 10 words from women at the beginning. There was like five. And at the end, there was five. And they were both had nothing really to do with the plot. So I don't know.

That was a fascinating thing for me to, to like kind of realize upon, upon finishing the movie, that there are literally no women. And I think this speaks sort of this, the kind of the genre of the movies were tackling on this podcast. Like, there are very few women in these movies. But, like, other movies have had more than, like, at least one woman, maybe with a speaking role, you know? Like, one woman who's credited in the list of past, right? Yeah, I don't know. It was like, it seemed extreme in that way, but also, like, a lot of things of this movie not subtle, right?

So. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so that was surviving the game, and that is our show. If you're not a subscriber, please subscribe. We're available on iTunes, Spotify, Sitcher Radio, and Google Podcasts, and wherever else podcasts 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 Twitter.

The podcast is at Unclear Pod. I am at Jay Bowie. John, you are. At Lionel underscore trolling. But I may not be. I'm trying not to be on Twitter until I finish my book, but we'll see. I've also sort of like receded from Twitter so much, mainly the, posts, shit post about movies and then, uh, and, and then go do my work elsewhere.

Jalad, you're, I know you're on, on Twitter as like a, as a civilian, no, not, not even. I mean, I am, but like, yeah, I, my internet presence is very low. So, right. I'm not, we're not going to, we're not going to, we're not going to put you on blast for your internet presence. Thank you. Um, but are you working on a book or anything? Yeah, I am. I'm working on a book got in public housing at the, uh, end of the 20th century.

and mass incarceration and kind of the decline of the welfare state. So eventually that'll be a thing. And when that happens, people will know about it. All right. You can reach out to the podcast for email at Unclear and Present Feedback at FastMill.com. For this week and feedback, we have an email from listener at Lowell titled The Real Puppet Master. It's a reference to our previous episode on The Puppet Masters. Here's Lowell.

I've been a fan of both podcasts for a while, but you're a deep. dive on puppet masters, which I'm not proud to admit I saw opening weekend in theaters has locked it in. Find an insightful, maybe more fun than usual, given the material. Quick parenthetical for me, this has been a big comment on the puppet master's episode that everyone's like, wow, we're surprised you got so much out of it. That's a testament to the skill of John and myself, and also of something I've learned that the worst, the movie, somehow the more interesting stuff there was to talk about it.

So back to Lowell, the film adaptation leaves out a key element of the novel. They quickly realized the best way to see who's infected is for people to at first go topless, and then once they realize the parasite still need to be on the upper spine, completely nude. All the time and no matter whom or where, everybody just starts going nude. It is, as Ripley says, the only way to be sure. From this point onward, Heinlein never misses a chance to reiterate more times than you'd maybe expect that it doesn't take long for everyone to acclimate to nudity and how it makes everyone realize just how useless clothes really were.

He cloaks it and after a while you stopped thinking about it, but he brings it up so many times you can be assured he will absolutely not stop thinking about it. To the point in the book becomes a version of the host who has found yet another way to slip swinging into the conversation once you and your spouse have sat down to dinner. I've never had that experience. Sounds like you may have.

Hyland had many ideas about how we should live his fervent wish for nudism is maybe not as underlined as he'd have liked keep up the great work and thank you for your service I can't tell you how excited I'd be for a body snatcher series the 781 is one of my beloved's thanks Lowell and that is a funny thing about Robert A Hyman he was a weirdo he was a weirdo freak. This is like this kind of, this kind of sci-fi thing that drives me crazy. Like, well, what if we just didn't wear clothes? Why should we wear clothes?

Look, I'm sorry. Clothes are very practical. There's a reason why most of humanity, especially in areas that are not very hot, have created clothing of some form. It's not like, oh, this is just some silly convention that we have. I'm a big believer in clothing. So this kind of thought experiment drives me crazy. And that's the other thing.

Like about Heinlein stuff is like, you think he's putting this stuff in his novels to be like, isn't this kind of horrible and dystopian? But it's actually something that like he thinks is good, which I think is funny. But like yet another example. Yeah. Anyway, that's my comment on that. Yeah, we'll talk more about him when we eventually do Starship Chippers, which I have a suspicion. Because every time we talk starship troopers or tease it, we do get emails from some listeners who are like, I think you're wrong about that book. I think I don't think it's fascist.

So I think that might be a contentious episode with some portion of the listenership. Because I do think the book is really creepy and fascist. But the movie is kind of satirical, I get, or supposed to be satirical. Right, right. The movie is, in my view, making be subtle. subtext of the book text. And to do that, it takes the form of basically like an in-universe propaganda film. That's how I think you should watch Starship Troopers. It is what the government of the earth in the universe of Starship Troopers would have produced to get people to enlist

in the war that they're depicting in Starship Troopers. Yeah, that sounds right to me. But we'll talk about this. That movie came out in 97. We'll talk about this, uh, 2024. Okay. Okay. Episodes come out every other Friday, and so we'll see you in two weeks with a television film, having to one of those in a while, called Without Warning. Here is a quick plot synopsis, and a simulated news broadcast, an enormous asteroid breaks apart and plunges to Earth as the world watches the terrifying event live on television in this shocking, realistic science fiction drama. I'm actually kind of interested to watch this, because this was also like a, like a, genre of movie in the 90s, just like these TV movies about real-life events, like fictionalized hypothetical real-life events. So we watched by Don's early light early on in the podcast, which is about sort of like a fictionalized nuclear exchange. There's another one about a World War III that comes out later.

The TV movie no longer exists in the same way that it used to, but this was like a thing. in this particular kind of movie was a thing, too. Everyone trying to chase the high of the day after from 83. Without warning is available for rent on Amazon and iTunes, and I think it also might be available to stream for free at the Internet Archive. You might want to just check that out. Do not forget our Patreon, which I think I mentioned earlier on the show, the latest episode of our Patreon podcast, which covers the films of the Cold War,

the spy thrillers, the military thrillers, the political thrillers of those that 50-year or so conflict. The latest episode is on, why did I just forget the name of the movie? The Ministry of Fear by director by Fritz Long. You can listen to that and much more at patreon.com slash unclear pod. It's just $5 a month. And as always, I think it is totally worth it. Our producer is Connor Lynch.

And our artwork is from Rachel Eck. For John Gans and Gillette Rosenblith, I am Jamel Bowie, and this is unclear and present danger. We'll see you next time.