Unclear and Present Danger - The Hunt for Red October (Take Two)

Episode Date: October 30, 2022

Episode 26 — The Hunt for Red October (Take Two)In this one year anniversary episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John return to the film that started it all, “The Hunt for Red October.” They discuss the film as an elegy for the Cold War era, and further explore the dilemma of American power and identity in the post-Soviet world.Next week’s episode…”The Fugitive.”Contact us!Sign up for our Patreon show on the films of the Cold War!Connor Lynch produced this episode. Artwork by Rachel Eck.Follow us on Twitter!John GanzJamelle BouieUnclearPodLinks from the episode!New York Times front-page for March 2, 1990

The most brilliant commander in the Soviet Navy. Remy has trained most of their officer corps. He's nearly a legend in the submarine community. The most deadly submarine ever built. This thing could park a couple of hundred warheads off Washington. Nobody'd know a thing about it until it was all over. And once more, we play our dangerous game. With our old adversities in American Navy.

His plan is a mystery. A man with your responsibility. of your responsibilities reading about the end of the world. Apparently he has suffered a kind of nervous breakdown in which he announced his intention to fly his missiles on the United States. He wants us to help you hunt him down and kill him. Open the outer doors, firing point procedures. We sail into history.

I'm going to blow him right to Mars. Ramius might be trying to defect. You're just an analyst. What can you possibly know what goes on in this mind? I'll give you three days to prove your theory correct. I am not field personnel I am only an analyst You're perfect

of expendable He's defecting You're willing to bet your life on that From the best-selling novel by Tom Clancy From the director Of Die Hard Give this man a chance My orders are specific

Battle stations Sean Connery Alec Baldwin James Earl Jones Scott Glenn Sam Neal The Hunt For Red October

Welcome to episode of episode 26 of Unclear and Present Danger, a podcast about the political and military thrillers of the 1990s and what they say, 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'm a freelance writer. I write a substack newsletter called A Popular Front. And I'm working on a book about American politics in the early 1990s. John, this is our 26th episode as I said up top, which means it is our one year anniversary of doing this thing. Wow. I can't believe we've done 26. I know. It does not, it does not. It sounds a lot. It does not feel like we've been doing this for a year, but we have. No.

And to mark the year, I thought it would be fun just to revisit the first movie we did, The Hunt for Red October, which is kind of like the load star for this podcast. So the film, Hunter for Out of October, based off of the Tom Clancy book from 1984, directed by John McTiernan and starring Alex Baldwin, Sean Connery, James Earl Jones, Sam Neal, and a bunch of other great character actors. go into too many of them or too much of the background because we've already kind of done that. This is going to be more kind of revisiting the movie and I'm trying to see what else we can get out of it. If you have not seen the hunt for Red October, here is a short plot synopsis.

A new technologically superior Soviet sub of Red October is headed for the U.S. coast under the command of Captain Marco Rameas. The American government thinks Rameas is planning to attack. A lone CIA analyst has a different idea. He thinks Rame is planning to defect, but he only has a few hours to find him and prove it because the entire Russian naval and air commands are trying to find him to. Before we get started, you got to watch this movie. I mean, it's a great movie.

It's a perfect little military thriller. You got to check it out. It's available to buy or rent on iTunes and Amazon, and it's also, there are plenty of Blu-ray releases as well. So when we first showed this podcast, we weren't doing the whole newspaper thing. So let's go look at the New York Times front page for the day this movie was released, which was March 2nd, 1990. There's a lot of late Cold War stuff going on here. Top San Nisa's security official hints he'll see it to new leaders. Militans are ordered to tone down, drive against vote results.

In his first public comments, since his government's defeat on election on Sunday, the hardline sentanyi who heads, Nicarabas, large security apparatus and secret police has indicated that he will willing to step down when the opposition takes power on April 25th. Yeah, well, this refers to the St. Anistas who were one side of the Civil War in Nicaragua, left-wing group, the United States back their rivals, and a lot of right-wing paramilitary groups called the Contras. But now in this story, the San Anisas were defeated in election

and a Sandinista leader is promising to abide by it. They didn't have as much Soviet backing anymore. So you see this sort of happening all over the world where a lot of conflicts that relied on the Cold War to give them structure and to keep them going sort of fall apart. So you have also around this time a few years later the fall of apartheid because the Cold War was kind of the only thing

that apartheid South Africa kind of could counter. on to keep some sympathetic powers supporting it. Cole writing to rabbi says fears of fascist Germany is unjustified. Chancellor Helmut Cole of West Germany says understands the anxieties of Holocaust or rights about the unification of Germany.

But insistent fears are unjustified. Okay, so Germany reunification is happening. And I didn't really know this, that there was some concern that reunited Germany might revert to fascism. That's interesting. I just didn't know that. think that in retrospect that fear um looks all that justified i think it's other parts of the

world that have bigger problem with that kind of politics unfortunately i mean it's sort of it sort of makes sense right just in the sense that the um the unification of germany in the late 19th century more or less like completely unsettled the european political order and like right you know it's too much they got very aggressive right right as soon as they all got together yeah yeah it's it's too much to say that it directly led right to the first world war or what have you but it's certainly true that the introduction of a new great power just like changed the incentive structure for everyone else uh and in that and and and sort of for Germany itself, which wanted its own kind of overseas empire, now that it was a great power,

set into motion a chain of events that ended very poorly. So I can understand, right, that like on the eve of German reunification, if people are like, should we let them do this? Right. Yeah, no, it's true. I mean, there is also a belief that there's something intrinsically aggressive about the Germans based on the experience of two world wars. and the Franco-Prussian war, and therefore it was better to keep Germany divided for the sake of prudence. But so far, they're behaving okay. I mean, so far, they're arguably one of the more responsible countries in the modern European order. Now the problem is that they don't want to fight enough, maybe.

Yeah. I don't know. I mean, we're recording this in late October, and at the moment, the U.K. is still, you know, trying to tear itself apart. And I think Germany has been subject to the same kind of rise of far-right politics, but it's done a much strong, better job of resisting and keeping a bit of a lid on the worst of it. Well, they're still hanging around, but they were fears about them really getting out of control have sort of subsided. And social Democrats seem to be doing better again.

And, yeah, Germany fears, I mean, I don't know, they probably have some economic issues coming up. Especially with this gas stuff, but so far, not the place in Europe I'm most worried about. Let's see what else we got. World drug crop up sharply in 1989, despite US effort. Evermore cocaine. World like production of cocaine in thousands of metric of tons. Gray band shows the, oh yeah. Okay.

So basically the war on drugs, as we know, is not working. But this is interesting to talk about in the context of this because the war on drugs became maybe one of those sort of post-Cold War project. that could organize like the American, American foreign policy and domestic policy around some kind of, you know, well, war. Not really war, but something, the moral equivalent of war. And it didn't work. And we're slowly kind of giving up on it. It would appear.

Oh, here's something from the Soviet Union. What's left of it. Weary of party sniping Soviet cooperatives rebel. The fertile region of southern Russia, best known for producing wheat, cost. Sacks and Mikhail Gorbachev is rapidly acquiring a reputation as the graveyard of Soviet Free Enterprise. Last year alone, the local authorities in sprawling Krasnodar territory killed off more than a thousand of the small independent businesses called cooperatives. Once the spring flowers of Gorbachev's economic program, they're now regarded by the territory's party boss as a

malignant tumor. So one of Gorbachev's reforms was an attempt to kind of do a market socialism. So he allowed these like entrepreneurial cooperatives to form, to form businesses, but they became in tension with the old structure of the party. And this is what reflects it. The experiment kind of, it has to say, failed. It was a very interesting idea, like a lot of the things Gorbachev came up with, like democratization in the USSR, trying to come up with a less centralized economy, but sticking with socialist principles, all on paper, sound very attractive, but a lot of the material circumstances

of the Soviet Union and what dire straits it was in economically, plus just the years of having, you know, this terrible political system that it had, did not lend itself to these reforms succeeding. So this is sort of the beginnings. Well, not the beginnings, but a clear sign that Gorbachev's efforts were really, really not panning out the way he wanted them to. Indian troops killed 29 protesters in secessionist rally in Kashmir, as the conflict in Jammu and Kashmir is still not resolved today. I mean, it's quieter than it once was, but still an open issue. And that's pretty much the foreign policy and Cold War inflected news. See if there's anything domestic that looks interesting here.

License is granted to nuclear plant in New Hampshire. A big game for Seabrook. There's a story in the end. I was like flipping through the whole page on an A14, or a whole paper. And on A14, there's a story on the U.S. Asian population increased by 70% of the courts in 1980s. Which probably, I mean, almost certainly, right, goes to fueling the anti-Japan, anti-Asian panic of this period. And then creating visible. and importance of

Asian Americans as a political group I mean and as a cultural group really really begins in the 80s and 90s. Right, right. But that seems to be the most interesting stuff I don't see anything else.

I flip to the opinion page just at a curiosity. Nothing good there. A weird William Sapphire column that was like too clever by half which is how I kind of feel about William Sapphire. but yeah whatever but otherwise yeah not but very typical a typical front page I think a typical

front page is typical paper yeah in the coming year there was a recession and the fall of the Soviet Union and that made for some more upheaval in the in the headlines but we sort of seem to be in the end of the 80s and the early 90s we knew the Soviet Union wasn't as powerful it was before but We weren't really expected to collapse in the way it did, you know, Iran Contra was in the news, but, you know, I think that things were relatively quiet until 91 when it really seemed like everything was about to turn and with the Soviet Union and the U.S. entered a pretty bitter recession. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so the movie, The Hunt for Out of October, there's not a ton of background.

Again, we were revisiting this movie, so I'm not necessarily sure there's a ton of background we're through. We've talked about John McTiernan before. I watched this movie this time with the director's commentary on, and McTiernan talks about kind of the making of the film. He doesn't really go into that much detail about sort of the actual process of making the movie or any of the ideas or whatnot behind it. He talks a little, I mean, there's some interesting things that I find interesting as a film nerd, like the scene. where the commissar basically is speaking on the red october and the he's speaking in russian and the camera pushes in and he's speaking in english is just like directly lifted from judgment at nuremberg um lots of stuff like that that's interesting but uh not much from the director's

commentary we've already talked quite a bit about sean connery it might be worth talking a little bit about alec baldwin um who is not interestingly it's funny this is one of those movies where because if you're watching it in like a post kind of Alec Baldwin being a big star and then like falling off and then kind of returning and then kind of being in this weird place now um you you watch it thinking that oh this guy must have been like at the top of his career at this point but this is kind of this is the moment actually the humphor out October um followed by glengarry glen ross in 1982, be each of the moments where he becomes a superstar. Prior to the Humphabright October, he was well regarded and certainly like a Hollywood, like a Hollywood guy who was very

much in the A list, but he wasn't, he wasn't like a superstar yet. So in 87, he is in a film called Forever Lulu, which I have never heard of and never seen. Directed by a man I have never heard of called Amos Kolek. It's a West German production. So I don't know what this is. It's a comedy. He is in a John Hughes movie. She's having a baby. Never see that one. Yeah, me neither. Stars Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth McGovern. I don't know anything about it. He plays a best friend. See, that's the thing. He's one of the best friend character, right? But then he's in Beetlejuice in 88, directed by Tim Burton. And he's one of the parents in Beetlejew. is not the star, the star of that movie, of course, is Michael Keaton, but he has a big role.

And that kind of brings him the prominence. He's in Married to the Mob, which is a fantastic Jonathan Demi movie. One of our listeners, who is a friend and former professor of mine, always wants us to cover this movie for the podcast. Unfortunately, Chuck, Married to the Mob does not work for this podcast. No, I don't think that's really topical. But it's a very good movie, music by David Byrne, and has a phenomenal Michelle Fyfer performance, like one of my favorite Michelle Fyfer performances, in fact. So if you've never seen Mary to the Mob, worth checking out, he's in Working Girl, the Mike Nichols film, he's in Talk Radio, the Oliver Stone film.

he then shows up in a Jerry Lee Lewis biopic Great Balls of Fire. Jerry Lee Lewis played by Dennis Quaid in this. I kind of want to watch this just because I'm obsessed with Walk Hard, the Dewey Cox story, and how it's like the perfect bio, like the perfect parody of a biopic. And I just want to see how much this one fits that template. And then Humphor-Rat-October. Like, as you can see, just sort of some good films here, but nothing where he's, like,

really the star, you know? And the Humphabre October is the movie where Alec Baldwin is like, this guy is the main guy. And then after this, he's in a film called Miami Blues, which I like quite a bit. He plays a sleaze bag. Co-star is Jennifer Jason Lee, who is a great actress. And then we got, you know, a couple of the small things. but then Glenn Gary Glenn Ross, which is another kind of, you know, magnetic performance that shoots him to the top.

But he's not the top that long, interestingly enough. He kind of falls off pretty quickly. But I'll just say as long as I've been cognizant of these things, I've kind of known who Alec Baldwin is, which maybe speaks to his longevity. So that's Alec Baldwin. Sam Neal, who is the other actor, I don't think we've really spoken about much. We haven't spoken much about James Earl Jones, but I honestly have no idea what I could say about James Earl Jones. It hasn't already been said.

I will note that in the director's commentary, McTiernan says that he cast Jones because he wanted someone who everyone would perceive as being trustworthy and who everyone would perceive as being kind of like the best possible boss you could have. And I do think that's interesting. Just kind of getting to this thing we've talked about a couple times of sort of like the way black man have been represented in these movies is like people in people. positions of almost unimpeatible authority. So I think maternity kind of like essentially gesturing towards that is interesting. But beyond that, I got nothing to add about James Joel Jones, you know, one of the great American actors.

Sam Neal, he's also an interesting place. He's been, you know, he's been acting since the late 70s, largely in small movies, genre stuff, B movies. And as far as I can tell. the hunt for Red October marks kind of not the beginning of his kind of like American stardom but sort of when he starts to really pop in American movies and Hollywood movies his next kind of I'd say big role is a 91 movie called Death in Brunswick which is an Australian film kind of black comedy type and then he's in memoirs of an

Invisible Man in 92. This is a John Carpenter film. One of the, I mean, the worst John Carpenter film, I think, kind of straight up. A very strange movie with Chevy Chase, Chevy chasing all over the place. And that's apparently, I mean, that's the reason why the movie doesn't really work. But he, Sam Neal, is amazing in it. And then he's in the piano in 93. We talked about it in a previous episode.

The piano is just one of those, like, you know, huge movies in 93. that along with Jurassic Park, really put him on the map as far as Hollywood goes. I'll note that in 94, he's in one of my favorite movies, I have a John Carpenter in the mouth of madness, which is like one part Lovecraft, one part Stephen King kind of movie. It's a lot of fun. And at the end, Sam Neal goes insane. So if you want to see that, you should watch it.

And that's the background that I think we need to go through as far as the actors go. So, again, we've talked about this movie, but one thing, one reason I wanted to revisit it is just I've been thinking about how, and this is in part because I've recently rewatched the 1978 film, The Parallax View, which is an Alan Pakula, Pacula, about kind of conspiracies and like shadowy government institutions and such. And I think it's interesting that, you know, a little more than a decade after that, you have this film, the Humphraud-October, which really does put, like, the American security state and bureaucracy and intelligence services in, like, the best possible light. Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think that this movie, well, first of all, the book was extremely popular in the Reagan administration. And it was sort of like, I think Ronald Reagan even himself said it was, he enjoyed it. And it basically justified the whole program. of Reagan's foreign policy, which was that the Soviets were developed, you know, the premise

of the book and the movies that the Soviets had some kind of secret weapon that could approach the United States. So thereby justifying the expenditure, you know, the huge expenditure on arms that we did in the Reagan era, but also shows the ideological weakness in holes of the Soviet Union because it's based on the idea that this senior official wanted to defect. And by the time the movie comes out, we're out of the era of high Reaganism. But, yeah, it presents the American security state. This was, you know, during the Bush administration where we had all of these kind of still masterful figures of foreign policy and bureaucracy before their names were damaged by being associated. with huge disasters.

So, as we've mentioned before, we've Colin Powell, his star is very much on the rise. I think that the Clancy movies, and he objected to, it got a little bit more liberal in Hollywood. So it's almost a bit more of Cold War liberalism than the kind of hawkish Reaganite conservatism once it reaches the big screen. And that also kind of plays into the, well, these are all honorably. highly competent, intelligent people that we can rely on at the height of these bureaucracies.

And yeah, that's sort of where the politics of the movie lie. You know, we talked about in the past about how there was, having a black CIA director, because James Gerald Jones plays a CIA director. in the movie has some interesting political valence at this time, and it kind of shows the American security state is meritocratic and potentially anti-racist, reflecting the pluralism of American society and so on and so forth, and definitely makes it more appealing to liberals than if it was all just, you know, aging wasps.

So, yeah, I think that that's kind of the ideological tenor of the movie. I think that they had to change certain things about the movie because it wasn't such a height of the Cold War re-escalation as the 80s when it came out. So even the way the Soviet Union is presented in the movie is, I think, slightly or more ironically, and less of a threat and more something that already seems potentially Bridal, subject to collapse and not really possible to take fully seriously anymore, although

there's a, I think that the nuclear menace in the movie is real, and the threat of war is, you know, is meant to be real. But I think that the presentation of the Soviet Union as kind of a fading power definitely enters into this movie a little bit more. Yes, I mean, the original novel and sort of Clancy's work in the 80s is incredibly hawkish and incredibly right wing. And so, I mean, it's interesting just like in translation, it becomes less so, even as, right, like one of the screenwriters on this is John Millius, who is uncredited, I believe. To McTiernan refers to him as being a writer on this. So I'm kind of an uncredited writer on this is John Millius, who is a right winger.

So it's interesting to me that some of that is lost in translation, in part, maybe just to make the drama of it that much more compelling, make all the characters that much more sympathetic. You know, one thing, it's interesting to be talking about this now and talking about a nuclear submarine and nuclear threat in part because the extent to which nuclear weapons still exist is, I think, has entered the public consciousness much more in the last few months. because of the conflict in Ukraine and because of the real worries that in the absence of some sort of like ability to safe face, the, you know, the Russian government might decide to use a tactical nuclear weapon or use a dirty bomb, like not initiate some sort of full-scale exchange, but begin to like breach this taboo, right, that has not been breached since not. in 1945, and I don't know if I have a grand point with this, but just to say, I think it's hard to, like this, this, this, this re-awareness of the existence of nuclear weapons

into kind of the, into the atmosphere, into the culture, I'm not sure has shown any particular effects, but it's interesting to think about a movie like this coming out in 1990 when when fear of nuclear annihilation hasn't yet faded from the public view or the public culture yet. It's still kind of like a thing that's in the background, not in the same way it was in the 60s, not in the same way it was in the early 80s when there were real fears of escalation because of Republican Hawk winning office. But it's just, it's part of the cultural background of 1990 in an interesting way. I don't know. What are your thoughts? What are your thoughts on that? You know my theory about the Hunt for October that it has a secret communist or secret

left wing message? Yes, yeah. I think I actually found evidence from my theory. So I was reading about the background of Hunt for October, the novel, right? And there was an actual event about a mutiny in the 1970s on a Soviet frigate by a captain named Valerie Sablin and he wanted to start a mutiny to start off a Leninist revolution in the Soviet Union because he felt the Soviet Union had kind of like lapsed into a reactionary stasis and he thought that he could relaunch the revolution by starting a mutiny on this Navy ship And as if you know anything about the history of the Russian Revolution, mutinies on Navy ships are a huge part of the revolutionary history of Russia because there was Battalion in the Revolution of 905. And there was the ship Aurora, which was part of the October Revolution.

And this was apparently a inspiration for Clancy, which I think was really interesting. And there's a point in the movie where Captain Rameas has a little revolution every now and again. is not such a bad thing. And Alec Baldwin agrees with him. So my whole deep reading of the movie with its sort of ironic appropriation of Soviet imagery, there's like all this that makes it look very cool, makes the Soviet submarines look very cool. The Soviet officers seem hyper-competent and intelligent for the most part. Some of them are bad. And I think I always was like, when I was young and I watched this movie, I was like, oh, this movie actually

turned me into something of a communist as a young person and I got very interested in the Soviet Union I got very interested it might have been the Huntford October may have been the reason I read

the Communist Manifesto to be perfectly honest with you I think that and it's strange to think about it that this book in this movie which are in some ways such Cold War propaganda I just always felt

had this strangely hidden left-wing subtext. And apparently, and this sort of slightly perverse reading, but apparently it has some basis in facts. Like the event that inspired it was an attempt to, I mean, a kind of sad and pathetic attempt to start, restart the Russian Revolution, which I just think is really funny. And I think now I feel, I feel vindicated by my interpretation of the movie. You know, as we talked about in our first episode, I think the extent to which the movie is extremely sympathetic to the defectors. Yeah.

But it's not just sympathetic to the defectors. It doesn't try to treat their Russianness as some kind of obstacle. Like the problem isn't that they're Russian, right? The problem isn't even really that they're Soviet. The problem is that they are in possession of this ship, which Ramos believes could cause a war. And that's why they're defective. Yeah, he's doing it for kind of pacifist reasons. Yeah. Right.

The extent to which the Soviet Union is not presented as the evil empire. It's presented as like another rival power and that the people who comprise it aren't necessarily bad people. They're just on the other side. I think might contribute to the sort of sense of sympathy you picked up as a younger person. Right. Yeah. I mean, he and he does he's not particularly political. Well, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's not a

Russian. And that kind of is given to some kind of explanation that he may have not been such an ideal Soviet citizen. And he has a sort of a grudge because his wife died under circumstances that he felt were unfair. He was at sea. So there's that. But he's not particularly ideological. He kind of feels like this weapon is just too fearsome. And he feels that. And he feels that the Soviet Union would use it to potentially attack the United States because they could launch a nuclear strike without being detected. So he does it for a kind of pacifist reason, or he doesn't believe in nuclear war, essentially. And that's at least the reason given in the movie. He's not shown as an anti-communist. In fact, that ideological part of it doesn't really

enter into it. I also think what's funny is that there's an evil KGB agent. Well, he's evil or he's just an apparatchik. There's a bad KGB agent on the, or the political officer. I don't think he's actually a KGB officer. He's a political officer on the commissar on the ship is named Putin, which is kind of, it's kind of funny to think about that. So, I mean, this is as good a time as any to mention it. I can have mentioned. at the end of the podcast, but now that it's not that I'm thinking about it, it'd be weird not to just set it aside. But we're launching a Patreon, launching a separate Patreon show that will be covering the movies of the Cold War, not the post-Cold War, you're in the 90s,

but everything before that. Movies of the Cold War and then other associated things that we talk about on this podcast. If there are letters we want to read, if there are other materials we want to tackle, they'll be for the Patreon. But the main thing about the Patreon, is Cold War movies. And so the first movie we've done, we already have the episode in the can, is on the 1965 spy film. The spy who came in from the cold

based off of the La Carre novel. And the reason I'm thinking about it is, I think Humphrod October does something similar as the spy came in from the cold, which is present men, people who I think maybe Americans are acculturated to thinking of as, you know, basically being on the bad side and presenting them as decent and principled. And sort of like it's not, it's not, it's to the, when there are, you know, the, the, the, the,

the, uh, GRU agent on the red October or the Americans who are, you know, self-interested that we meet, It's sort of, the movie presents the question of decency as being kind of separate from the question of ideology and the question of, of virtue as being separate from any question of whether you're on the right or wrong side or of a conflict. And I think, I think that is, even if it's not intended to be, I mean, I think that's the thing you do for dramatic effect. It just makes a story and makes characters more interesting. But even if it's only for dramatic effect, I think it does, you know, it does have an impact

in how the politics of a film are and how an audience might take them in. This isn't, you know, Hunter-October isn't Red Dawn, right? Or like the vulgar intercomyism of it, yeah. Right, right. It is, it is, it's almost sort of, I mean, being a movie made in 1989 about a book written in like 83 roughly, so a book written and published at the height of sort of late Cold War tensions, but then being filmed and released as the Soviet Union interiors sort of it's like, you know, period of final crisis. There's something somewhat like elegiac about it as

sort of just being like, you know, we, the United States, we've won this war essentially, but we're going to miss the kind of adversaries that we have. We're going to miss the kind of opponents that we had on the other side who may have believed the wrong things, but we're ultimately decent men. Yeah, I think that's right. That sort of also where it gets its kind of like what I call it's ironic appropriation of Soviet imagery and propaganda as sort of,

being like slightly celebrating in a certain way as being like this was cool it was cool to have these as our opposite numbers you know that we could kind of admire it in a certain way yeah I think you're absolutely right there is a sense that like you know we're going to we're going to miss you guys yeah yeah and I'm not sure if the filmmakers are aware of this either I think I think it's all sort of like it all it's one of those things that comes out having made the thing, right? Like you film it, you edit it, you do all these things, and just sort of like in the way the performances are and in the way everything kind of just shakes out in the final product, this is one of the things that emerge out of it. But it's certainly there, I think,

and it, in a funny way, it kind of frames the movies, both in this franchise and the movies we've talked about, but come after it, which also, many of them are also looking, who is, who is our next enemy, who is the thing that will unify, us and are in their own way sort of wistful for this past when the lines were clear and not just that the lines were clear, but there was, you know, there was a sense that you're out of these areas followed the rules, or that there were rules that existed and everyone kind of played by them. I mean, you know, betraying, betraying formative experiences here, but this, I think, was very

much in the air during the early war on terror, right? Like, this was very much a thing that I just recall reading, um, pundits and policymakers like talk about in 2001, 2002, 2003. That's sort of like, you know, the reason why we have to turn to these techniques like quote unquote enhanced interrogation and we have to rendition people is because these people don't follow the rules, unlike our previous adversaries, and the lack of rule following is what makes us truly difficult. I mean, the failure of the Soviet, the failure of the project of the Soviet Union, I mean, no matter what you say about the state, which by the end was an absolute mess, I mean, it had a horrible history, did not serve its people well, but the failure of the project is kind of a historical tragedy because we've sort of gone back in time. It's like we're, what are we doing? What are we doing now?

We're doing the 19th century again. You know, we have, we have like big nationalist, imperialist states. You know, the end of history has not just, and which is supposedly the tribe of liberal democracy is actually sort of made liberal democracy a little bit shaky, you know, in a lot of the places. So it seems like, you know, without the. Soviet Union and with the failure of the socialist project, of the Soviet project, it's just like, well, where do we go next? I mean, the belief that we might actually accomplish, I mean, Gorbachev did this last ditch effort to try to accomplish, you know, the original promise of the Soviet Union as it kind of, not just a terrible dictatorship, but as a democratic but socialist society, you know, and that failed. for a lot of different reasons. I don't think because it's intrinsically impossible,

but it was impossible at that point. And now we have the United States unsure of what to do with itself. We don't have a center for, I mean, I think it just really took even people who knew the Soviet Union was a bad society on the left. You know, when the Soviet Union collapsed

and the viability of socialism looks like, okay, well, that system doesn't work. It just is a gut punch for the left that has never really recovered from. You know, we're always, the horizon is always so limited now. It's always like there's only, well, we can be some kind of internal opposition in capitalist society, but there's no real global alternative except for, you know, even the other communist states are really capitalist now. So, yeah, the loss of the Soviet Union, although it's difficult for me to say, and I know from the perspective of people say who were, you know, subject people of the Soviet Union, either Russian, but especially ethnic minorities that lived under Soviet control, Ukrainians and Baltic peoples and, you know, people from the Central Asian countries. I don't think, you know, they have the same nostalgic feelings for the Soviet Union that

Russian sometimes feel. I think that this feeling of nostalgia for the Cold War arises over and over again. And we kind of are trying to do it again with China, treat China as a Cold War rival. Obviously, we are in a sort of tense situation with Russia, which has some redolence of the Cold War, but without its, I mean, there is a kind of ideological side of it. but not exactly the same. And in a way, as a lot of people are predicted, with the fall of the Soviet Union,

the situation is much more uncomfortable and unstable. I mean, you know, this current, we have a large-scale land war in Europe for the first time in a long time, you know, where there's discussion of the use of nuclear arms. And, you know, even though there was a kind of nuclear threat and the tensions between the powers, things were somewhat stable.

you know. So I think it's just blown a huge gap in people's minds and the way the world, you know, a basic pillar of the world just collapsed, right? And then, you know, everything has been sort of shaky since that. And I don't think that it's necessary. A lot of people said, oh, well, the specter of nuclear apocalypse has ended with the end of the Cold War. Well, I don't know. Is that really true? Yeah. You know, we're sort of getting some uncomfortable feelings about that now. So I always go back to that Nixon wrote that memo in 1992 where he said, if we don't do a good job at creating democracy and the former Soviet Union, Russia could end up with a nationalist dictatorship that's even in some ways worse than the Soviet Union.

not the stupidest I don't know if you can really I don't know who's to say worse better but but not definitely not a stupid analysis you know 30 years later right yeah I think I've been thinking about is this point about just the the collapse the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union on the Western left because I it's sort of it's both that right it's it's collapse it's failure The failure of the Soviet project kind of like represents the failure of socialism as like this grand historical project in some sense. But I think I think it's because I think I think as you know, right, like there were plenty of American leftists who by short of the 1930s are very much like this thing is like not good. Like the Soviet Union, you know, whatever its ideals are is not what we want to be behind. I mean, the anti-Salinist left was a thing.

What still remained, though, was like the romance of the Russian Revolution, right? Like, the romance of, like, be romance of this apparent ability to, like, make the world new. And I think it's not so much that's sort of like the Soviet Union, not to speak for, you know, leftists in the late 80s, nearly 90s. It's not so much that the Soviet Union was, like, represented sort of, like, the place that they wanted to go in terms of, like, the development of their societies. But sort of, like, as long as the Soviet Union was around, there was, like, this hope that maybe the spirit of the revolution could be recaptured within it, right? And that there was a process, there were prospects for reform, that you had this terrible,

this terrible period, but that maybe, maybe Gorbachev could. could do it, right? Or maybe his successor could do it. Maybe they could do it and build something that was worthy of that romance. And its collapse kind of like forecloses that possibility. What then becomes the story you tell yourself, what then is the romance, right, for the Western left? And as you say, as you suggest, there really isn't, there really isn't one, right? It's sort of just like, you know, now it's just sort of a matter of trying to be in opposition or trying to shape this sort of like, you know, liberal market capitalism as best as you can. Well, it's a little different. The French Revolution

kind of kept on happening, you know, like they couldn't, as much as the reactionary powers tried, couldn't really contain it, you know. It broke back out again in various different ways. was the dictatorship of Napoleon, but still kept alive some revolutionary things, some revolutionary deals. And then the restoration led to more repeats of the French Revolution until republicanism was pretty much established France and eventually most places in Europe, around the world. It seems like the permanence of the bourgeois, what people on, what Marxists call the Boers-Rah revolutions is more there, you know? I don't know. I don't know. It could get rolled back

in a lifetime, but that seems to be, you know, kind of a done deal. It's sort of like, yeah, the French Revolution was permanent. It still has its opponents, but most things happen in the kind of in the world that it built, you know. Well, the Russian Revolution has, very few children, and now seems to sort of been, there hasn't, I mean, the world has changed a great deal, but there hasn't been a proletarian revolution like it since, you know, there's been similar events, but nothing quite, you know, of its scale and type. And a lot of the, you know, the problem, well, The French Revolution did this as well, but, you know, they tried to export it through wars and conquests, which kind of just, you know, recreated imperialism rather than spreading a revolution, which I think were living through the consequences of that now and definitely did not convince the people who lived under the Soviet Union that, you know, it was.

was a desirable system that deserved to keep going. From my perspective, a lot of these things were hypocritical and not real, but there was at least lips in the same way that, not to compare them overly, but in the same way like we have ideals in the United States, we really don't live up to very well. But, you know, there was a cosmopolitanism in the Soviet Union that looks attractive now in the in it or sounds attractive on paper in the in in this year in this you know era of national conflict where it's like yeah they thought they can make it work so all of the ethnic peoples of the former um so of the former russian empire would like participate as equal members of this

project did that happen in practice absolutely not you know there was still uh in practice ethnic Russian domination and, you know, it was, and racism and so on a kind of colonial attitude towards, you know, the nationalities. But on paper, there was a hope and a belief that you had a world federation of, you know, different ethnicities, which both kind of maintain their difference, but also kind of cooperated in a, in a larger project. And that doesn't sound so bad in retrospect. I mean, I guess in the United States has a different image of that type of federation, but also has its own problems.

But yeah, I think that the model, I mean, you can call them empires, and they certainly were, but the model of, you know, international cooperation between different ethnicists, races, whatever nationalities for a common project is sort of an ideal that's faded from the earth in a certain way. I mean, it's not as taken as seriously anymore since the fall of the Soviet Union. Right, right. This podcast is very much about the way that American culture and American society has been searching for something to replace the role the Soviet Union played in kind of

It's like a own national story over the course of the 20th century. But that, I think one thing we kind of, we both agree is that that does represent something real. That like the Soviet, the end of the Cold War was this epochal moment for the entire West, left and right and everything in the middle. and it's both that this country has been trying to find a replacement for it and also that in the absence of that kind of ideological conflict, in the absence of something to contain and provide boundaries to domestic political conflict, we are just seeing this sort of like regression as you said to the 19th century to the early 20th century to ideas and ideologies and crusades of various sorts that are volatile and some of that

within some of that lies promise right like I think that the revitalization of, you know, social democratic ideology in the United States or democratic socialism, or whatever you want to call it, the kind of revitalization, not necessarily of the labor movement, but of labor militantism is also a consequence of the end of the Cold War, even though it's taken some time to shake out. But so is the, nationalist turn and so is the they're really ugly and frankly quite like frightening anti-democracy stuff coming from prominent corners in the United States. Well, I think that, you know, certainly it's true in terms of like the growth of the left and the U.S. It's only like, you know, not having the Soviet

Union to beat them over the head with and the fading memory of that was is, is helpful, you know, not to always just be like, oh, you're, go back to Russia, you know, like, that, that's certainly helpful. I think, you know, the, even, there's only so much you can say, I don't believe in, I don't believe in this. Like, it's just not a, it's just, it's too much to explain at some point. Like, you know, as a political position, like, I'm, I'm against them both, you know? So, and someone could just say, like, you're a commie, and that was the end of the story. So, um, in some ways, it's helped the left. I, I, I have to. especially in the United States because the Cold War and the apparent awful things about the Soviet Union beyond just the propaganda against in the Cold War was a handicap for for the left.

So like I do think there has been some liberation from them who knows it might shake out in interesting ways. but I don't know. On the other hand, well, a lot of these far-right movements, we're sort of festering behind the Iron Curtain in a way, you know, like it's another criticism of what these societies did. Like, you know, a part of the part of Germany that votes most consistently for AFD is the east. I mean, and, you know, we're looking at this rebirth of very ugly nationalism.

in Russia, which was the center of the Soviet Union. So it's clearly that the project didn't secede at getting rid of these, these, you know, rather unsavory forms of politics. So I don't know. There's a temptation always to be like, oh, well, wouldn't it have been better if the lid really hadn't come off all this stuff and we still lived in this? As you said, it's a nostalgic for this framework. that's not a mature perspective, but it's one that's reflected, I think, in the movies

that we talk about and sort of grasping around for what is our direction as a society and a world even in the absence of this structure. Right. Nostalgia, as it often is, it's understandable, but also cannot be something that we that we rely on or fall into or utilize as our primary frame. Their lies only reaction. Right. And that is the wrong approach for thinking about how to move forward.

Okay. I think we should start to wrap things up. We like this movie, obviously. So you should just go watch. If you're listening to this podcast, if you haven't watched The Hunt for Red October, what are you doing? Why are you listening? even like why you were even interested in this is impossible what are you doing i didn't even find

this um go ahead and and watch the humphor out of october listen to our first episode listening to this episode uh and thank you i mean for everyone who has been listening either from the beginning or whenever you started thank you for being a listener to this podcast we really appreciate it i know there are quite a few of you out there i haven't sat down to really kind of exactly calculate our listenership, but it's more than a few people. And so I thank you for tuning in to us every other week. And soon, I mean, I mean next week, really, you'll be able to tune into us. Actually, no, not next week. Like now, you'll be able to tune into us every, like every week. We'll have an episode every week. There'll be the main feed episodes, which are staggered according to the

schedule Unclear and Present Danger podcast, and then there'll be the Patreon feed episodes which will come out the week after. And so the way it will work is every week there'll be a new episode. Two of those episodes will be about post-Cold War movies, and two of those episodes will be about Cold War movies. And the Patreon will be called, is called the Unclear and Present Patreon. My wife suggested Patreon games. You can call it that too. I think that's funny. and you should subscribe. I'll put the link to the Patreon in the show notes. I'll post the link to the Patreon on Twitter.

So you should go ahead and sign up for our Patreon feed. It's the unclear and present Patreon. It'll be $5.5 for a whole other podcast for you to listen to where we will go in into kind of the classics of Cold War Cinema. As I mentioned, our first episode, which you can listen to today, if you subscribe to the Patreon, is on The Spy who came in from the Cold, the 1965, John LaCarray, adaptation. We will follow that up with a James Bond film that came out the same year, Thunderball. And after that, we will just tackle movies as we find them interesting.

We'll also do mailbag episodes responding to feed them. feedback and so on and so forth. And also anything else that comes up that we think is interesting. I think it'd be fun. For example, if I can find a copy of a Tom Clancy-based video game to maybe put in some hours and then talk about that. There's lots of stuff. Are you trying to ruin my life?

I won't. You don't have to participate in that. Okay. I can just be a me thing. I know. I want to participate in it, but I'm afraid that it will. To completely take over. So that's the Patreon.

We hope you sign up and join us as we continue to bring a historical and cultural eye to movies both good and bad, interesting and not. But all that say something about the moment in which they were made. 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 both of us on Twitter.

I'm at Jay Bowie. John, you are... I'm at Lionel underscore trolling. You can also follow the podcast itself as at Unclear Pod, where I have taken to posting stupid memes and also other things about, you know, the movies that we watch. You can reach out to us over email at unclear and present feedback at fastmail.com. For this week in feedback, we don't actually have an email. We have a comment that someone left on John's substack because I guess they weren't aware that they could just email us. I'm going to actually speak directly to this person.

Michael, we're going to read your comment. But just email us, unclear and present feedback at fastmail.com. That is how to reach out to us with a comment about the podcast. But you left a great comment on John Substacks. I'm going to read it. Again, this is from Michael. Not sure where to leave remarks about unclear and present dangerous. I thought I'd leave this here.

Really enjoy the episode on The Firm, which I fucking love. Good man. Great movie. One thing I thought worth mentioning that you guys didn't discuss so much was the theme of the New South in the 90s. The idea was the out-of-time pockets of rights. racism that you guys mentioned in the Passenger 57 episode were becoming a minority. And instead, southern metropolises like Nashville, Memphis, Atlanta, and North Carolina Research Triangle were attracting top northern talent by offering a warm, soulful alternative to

the harshness of coastal metropolitan life. See the scene in the firm where Mitch is charmed by the kid doing backflips on Beale Street and joins him in a display of exuberant racial comedy. At the national level, obviously that was embodied by Clinton and Gore. both new Southerners plus John Edwards. In culture, you had the overwhelming crossover dominance of country music like Garth Brooks and Leanne Rhymes, paving the way for Shania Twain, not a southerner. I didn't know that.

And Taylor Swift, also not a southerner. Didn't know that either. Yeah, she's from Pennsylvania. From Pennsylvania, that's like the opposite. And though, on the whole, Grisham himself, his stuff mostly takes place in the South, no, takes a pretty jaundiced view of this whole phenomenon and does seem to be an obvious precursor to contemporary trend pieces about Blue Georgia and the reconfigured role that the South plays in American politics and the age of urban rule and educational polarization.

So the firm is great because you get the snapshot of this big shift from the narrow perspective of the Legal Guild. Please keep the bangers coming. Thank you, Michael. This is a phenomenal comment. You know, in part because it's an observation about a real thing that was happening in the 90s is sort of like this, the southern urban center as becoming this kind of like, you know, this dynamic cultural place, but also something that has like a real connection to American

history. The idea of the New South kind of goes back as early as the late 19th century with the, actually with the beginning of Jim Crow, Jim Crow being as much this, this is like a weird word to use for it, but like it's modernizing thing. We're going to get rid of the violent depression of black Americans and do things by the book. oppressing, you know, without as much, you know, mob action to help make the South safe for the kind of investment that will make it this, like, great prosperous region. Atlanta has had the moniker, the city, too busy to hate for a long time. This kind of speaks to this, like, sense of the metropolitan South being this place of dynamism and prosperity. And that very much is part of the, part of the vibe in the 90s about the South, such that when there were incidents of, you know, racial violence or whatnot, it was always, like, the perspective was almost like gawking.

Like, can you believe this still exists kind of thing? So, yeah, great comment, Michael. In the New South. Yeah. Yeah, in the New South, right. Which was always defined just if you're thinking geographically. as places like Atlanta, Raleigh, Charlotte,

maybe Charleston, Richmond, Virginia, Nashville, Tennessee, but like not Birmingham, Alabama, or Montgomery, Alabama, or Jackson, Mississippi, or places like that. The Deep South still remain out of remove

from the narrative. It was sort of the, it was sort of the South, much more adjacent to sort of centers of capital, centers of political power and so on and so forth for which this was the narrative

great comment thank you for sending it episodes come out every other Friday episodes of the main feed come out every other Friday and so next week we'll have yeah no not another Grisham but a movie

that I love that everyone loves And that's The Fugitive, starring Harrison Ford. And we'll have a guest for the Fugitive, which I do have right in front of. You're a guest for the Fugitive will be Michael Learoff of the 5-4 podcast. Oh, cool. Yeah. So please watch The Fugitive.

And I'll leave that in the show notes. Someone requested a while back if I could leave what the next film was going to be in the show notes. So I'll be sure to note that, put that in the show notes, that we will be watching the Fugitive for our next episode. a quick plot synopsis, wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife and sentenced to death, Richard Kimball escaped from the law in an attempt to find her killer and clear his name. The fugitive is available to watch on Amazon and iTunes to rent or buy on Hulu to stream, or you can do what I did, and buy the Blu-ray for like $10 off of Best Buy. So that's the fugitive.

For the Patreon, again, the current Patreon episode is The Spy who came in from the cold. We talked about lots of stuff in that episode, discuss quite a bit about sort of the Le Carre's sort of like cynicism about spying and about intelligence services and kind of like what this says about the kind of political environment in which the movie came out. We will, the next Patreon episode, which will be next week, consider that this La Carre one is It's the first, but also a bit of a bonus, because we're going to get on the schedule next week, is Thunderball, which is the fourth Sean Connery, James Bond movie, and was a massive hit, and we're doing it from their ball because it came out the same year.

The spy came in from the cold and represents sort of a very interesting contrast. So stay tuned for that, which you can get access to, signing up for the unclear and present Patreon. For John Gans, I am Jimal Bowie, and this is Unclear. in present danger. We will see you next time.