Unclear and Present Danger - The Peacemaker

Episode Date: April 28, 2025

On this week's episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched The Peacemaker, a 1997 political action thriller directed by Mimi Leder and staring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman.When a train carrying nuclear warheads crashes in rural Russia, nuclear specialist Dr. Julia Kelly is brought in by the U.S. government to investigate. She quickly discovers the incident was no accident, but part of a larger conspiracy to steal the warheads. Assigned to work with her is Lt. Col. Thomas Devoe, a brash U.S. Army intelligence officer who specializes in field operations.Together, Kelly and Devoe uncover a plot involving a rogue Russian general and a vengeful Yugoslav diplomat named Dusan Gavrić. Gavrić plans to detonate a nuclear bomb in New York City as a twisted act of personal vengeance and a misguided attempt at political "peace."As they chase the warheads across Europe, facing betrayals and dangerous obstacles, Kelly’s strategic thinking and Devoe’s action-driven instincts clash but ultimately complement each other. Their pursuit culminates in a high-stakes showdown in Manhattan, where they must stop Gavrić before he detonates the bomb in a crowded area. Risking everything, they race against the clock to prevent a catastrophic attack and avert a global crisis.The tagline for The Peacemaker was "Every nuclear device in the world has been accounted for...accept for one."You can find The Peacemaker to rent or purchase on Apple TV or Amazon Prime.Our next episode will be on Executive Power, a little-known political thriller directed by David L. Corley. Here is a brief plot synopsis.While protecting the U.S. President, Secret Service agent Nick Sager helps him to dispose of the body of a young girl, who accidentally died during an adulterous encounter. Some time later, a few weeks before the elections, the disillusioned ex-agent is approached by his former partner. The President’s former aide, and one of few people who knew about the cover-up, is found dead in mysterious circumstances.You can find Executive Power to rent on Amazon Prime.Our producer is Connor Lynch and our artwork is by Rachel Eck. You can reach out to us over email at [e-mail]

On September 26th, good guys, it's us, we chase the bad guys. America will know. The guy got away with a bomb. The threat is real. We have the weapon and mass destruction coming into the United States. You get this man out of here. George Clooney, Nicole Kidman. Shoot him.

Take the shot. Take the shot. The peacemaker, rated R. Starts Friday, September 26th. Hello and welcome to Unclear and Present Danger, a podcast about the political and military thrillers of the 1919 these 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. My name is John Gans. I'm the author of, wait, that's the wrong order. Hold on. My name is John Gans. I'm a columnist for the nation. I write the substack

newsletter Unpopular Front. And I'm the author of the book, When the Clock Broke, Conman, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the early 1990s, which will be out on paperback. I think May 27th and out in the U.K. Yeah. June 12th? Yeah, that sounds right. Yeah, I was going to say there's a new U.K. edition that has Trump in the title just in case you needed. Yes, it's called the same title except it's common conspiracies and the origins of Trumpism, just in case you missed what the book might hint about.

Yeah, to help our British friends. On this week of the podcast, we watched the 1990. Political Thriller, The Peacemaker, starring Nicole Kidman, who is recently having a bit of, like, a boomlet of films. She's doing a lot of stuff these days, starring Nicole Kidman and George Clooney, directed by Mimi Leader, Mimi Letter. I'm not actually quite sure how you say her last name. I think it's Leader, yeah, Mimi Leader, who you will recognize from 98's Deep Impact, which came out around the same time as Armageddon, the two Meteor movies. 2000 to pay it forward, which has Helen Hunt and Kevin Spacey and Haley, Joel Osmond. And then the 2018, not too terribly successful biopic about Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the basis of sex.

She, what else does she done? She's done a lot of stuff. She's like one of the few, I mean, there aren't that many women who have been given and big opportunities to make, you know, blackpusters and these kinds of Hollywood pictures. And she's one of the handful. The peacemaker appears to be her first Hollywood feature, although she directed TV movies before then, quite a few, and then was prolific in TV directing 13 episodes of a series I've never heard of, China Beach.

and then directing stuff for TV through the 2000s into the present. She was executive producer on The Leftovers and directed 10 episodes, and executive producer on the morning show and directed 11 episodes. So still directing, still working, and not doing films as much. The film was shot by Diedrich Lohman, a cinematographer I have not heard of. He working since the 1960s. Is he still living? No, he passed. He actually passed after this movie finished. It's quite young, relatively so, 1987. And he mostly was working in Germany doing work for German filmmakers, although he worked with a leader on the peacemaker and Deep Impact. And music by Hans Zimmer. I got a Han Zimmer score here. Very recognizable. I feel like Zimmer is. is, you hear a note of a score like that, that's a Hans Zimmer. He's like James Horner in that center, or, obviously, I mean, no one's as recognizable

as John Williams, but all these guys have their little tricks and such that you can pick up on. In The Peacemaker, Nicole Kidman plays Dr. Juliet Kelly, a nuclear engineer turned head of the National Security Council's nuclear smuggling group who gets involved in a international incident when a nuclear warhead is detonated on Russian soil. This is, the movie begins, in fact, with the theft of this nuclear warhead, the plot to steal it to detonate a warhead to make it appear like it's been destroyed. And then we get to, then we get the Kidman's character quite late, actually, like 25 minutes. This opening sequence is like 20 or 25 minutes. It's quite good,

I'm going to say. I like the opening sequence a lot. There's this really nice overhead shot of what is a very detailed model train that shot quite nicely. And then you have a pretty well-staged action sequence. But that all establishes that this some Russian dissident general of some sort has stolen a bunch of nuclear weapons. Dr. Kelly believes this was the work of Chechen terrorists.

But her military liaison, put by George Clooney, Thomas DeVoe, believes that, in fact, it was staged to hide the hijacking of the warheads. This scene bothered me, John, because if I were her, I would have been furious at my authority being served before a bunch of people who looked to me for guidance and respect. He was very annoying. He was very annoying. Not great. Yeah, I was shocked with how annoying he was in the movie. Unprofessional. Yeah.

Kelly and DeVoe begin trying to collect information, trying to get to who might know who stole these warheads and what they're trying to do with them. And this takes them kind of a globe-trotting mission. They go to Austria where they meet a liaison and friend of DeVos, who is then killed. well, they meet this guy who works for the Russian mob. They torture him, get information. Then their guy is killed by the Russian mobster dudes men. They escape. They discover that the nukes are on the way to Iran via Azerbaijan.

They stage a special operations mission to try to stop the missiles. They're able to secure some of the warheads, but one of them escapes, and after they interrogate one of the people who helped construct a nuclear device of U.S. educated Pakistani nuclear scientists who says he was educated at Harvard, I'll say as a quick comment here, I saw this, and I was like, oh, this is why J.D. Vant wants to kill universities. They want to take out Harvard because they're educating all the terrorists. Yeah. They, DeVoe and Kelly eventually discover that the actual mission behind all of this is an attempt to detonate nuclear device in Manhattan by a Bosnian who does not belong to any faction in the ongoing Yugoslav war. So it wants revenge for the murder of his family and once revenge on those who have sold arms to the various factions in the war. This leads us to a chase through Manhattan, a confrontation with the bomber, a shootout. and then Kelly and DeVoe, Kelly, using her knowledge as a nuclear engineer,

have to disable the detonator on the warhead to save the day. They do, and the movie ends. It ends actually without any, I mean, it just ends. I always appreciate that. They solve the problem. They save the day and then fade to black. So that's the peacemaker. You can find the peacemaker to rent or buy on Amazon.

Amazon and Apple TV. You can also watch it on Paramount Plus, and I'm sure it might be available in other services. The tagline for the peacemaker was, every nuclear device in the world has been accounted for, except one, not technically accurate given the movie where we learned that there are multiple or hesitant stolen, but I get why that is the tagline. And the peacemaker did quite well. It earned about $41 million in the U.S. $69 million internationally for a total box office gross of $110 million, making back twice what it cost to produce. It was shot mostly in Serbia, in fact, with some location stuff in New York. And the critical response was almost exactly what you would expect, just sort of like this is a totally solid. action thriller. I think it runs a little long and gets a little convoluted in the middle, but it's perfectly serviceable. The peacemaker was released on September 26, 1997. So let's check out the New York Times for that day. Okay, September 26, 1997. There's a photo of Bill Clinton

and he's shaking the hand of Minnie Jean Brown Tricky, one of the Little Rock Nine, overwhelmed at the threshold of Central High and was comforted by President Clinton and Governor Mike Huckabee. Can you imagine? Yeah, well, Huckabee, Huckabee used to be something of like a moderate Republican. That was his deal. Yeah, he was kind of a moderate Republican and racially not so crazy. in Little Rock, Clinton warns of racial split.

Speaking from the steps of Little Rock Central High School, the same steps climbed 40 years ago by nine path-breaking black students and their paratrooper protectors. President Clinton warned Americans today of the dangers of racial separation and pleaded with them not to give up on the idea of integration. Although he offered no programmatic solutions,

Mr. Clinton used the 40th anniversary of the desegregation of Central High. to deplore that black and white Americans, despite abolition of legalized segregation, remain disturbingly isolated from each other in their schools and their everyday lives. With this nine former students sitting at his side and with an integrated assemblage of students before him, Mr. Clinton lamented that the country's schools are resegregating, that the rollback affirmative action is denying minorities access to college, and the Americans rarely associate those with those of another race.

the White House regard the address is a major speech in what is to be yearlong focused by Mr. Clinton on racial issues. Interesting to read this today, I would say what's so fascinating to me about this is, well, first of all, we're in a kind of resegregationist moment where there's a massive backlash of policies that, that, you know, of DEI policies, I guess, you know, the, the, the, this. descendants of affirmative action policies. You know, I think that actually what's weird about, and correct me if you think this is wrong, but what's so strange about the United States today is that you have highly racist politics, but probably that seemed to me so radically different from the consensus that was around during the Clinton era, which I took for granted a little bit, or maybe it advanced a little bit with Obama. But I think that there's actually less of the personal segregation that he's

talking about. It's strange. You have very racist politics, but perhaps like the average white person today has more interpersonal contexts, either at work or in friendships, black people, and vice versa. But politics aren't any less racist and perhaps more so. is that sound does that ring true at all to you it's it's interesting it's interesting because I think there are there's a lot of things happening right like so on the big picture schools are segregated as they've ever been right like most most black and Hispanic students attend schools that are majority black or majority Hispanic which is just in in most ways an epiphenomenal of the fact that like housing is still quite segregated in the

United States that like most whites live in neighborhoods that are largely white, like 80, 90%, and most non-white people, or at least blacks and Hispanics, live in neighborhoods that are like mostly black or Hispanic or some combination of the two. And that it remained the case that like when a neighborhood or a school begins to creep up around the 10% you know, black level, like there begins to be an influx of whites. It's very consistent finding. So that remains true. It's still true that there's a lot of just open discrimination and jobs and housing. Some years ago I wrote about how I did not like the fondness and the enthusiasm for discussions of implicit racism and implicit bias and microaggressions because I thought it was sort of like, okay, well, honestly, there are bigger problems. And that's mainly that there's still a lot of open and explicit discrimination and bias. I would have to have. trade implicit bias and microaggressions for, you know, mortgage company is not like openly discriminating against people. So there's still that. So that's true. Like in many critical

ways, there's still a good amount of discrimination and like, you know, it's not popular to say anymore. They don't want to hear it, but structural racism, which is an actual thing built in to the economic and social, built into the political economy of the United States is like racial disadvantage. That is the thing. Don't let them tell you otherwise. At the same time, obviously our pop culture is like highly integrated. Obviously that even within, you know, places where there is residential segregation to

they say that there is integration in schools. There is a good amount of integration amongst people of different races. There are more interracial relationships than there have ever been in the country's history. And although there is this return of a more explicit racist politics, there's also very much like an explicitly sort of like anti-racist and anti-discriminatory politics. Like there are both like simultaneously norms against the expression of explicit racism have degraded, especially, I think, among younger people and younger white people specifically, but also norms in some, in other areas of the population, norms against that expression have gotten even stronger and more broad-based. One way to think of it is that like

the backlash, like if you, if the U.S. for becoming more racist, there would be no need for a backlash, right? Like, the backlash is in part a product of the fact that there has been like meaningful change in racial attitudes and orientations and more meaningful integration, the more meaningful integration of elite spaces, whether it's colleges, newsrooms, boardrooms, like that is fueling some of the backlash, right? For sure. So it's like both and, right? Like it's, it's, all these things are happening at once.

I would say Clinton's warning, I still may say, may still have some purchase in part because of the eroding taboos against, like, explicit racism, which for people who've never experienced just, like, explicit prejudice of that sort, it, like, it's a corroding and degrading thing on, like, to you personally, like, it sucks to experience, but also it, like, it just, like, corrode social life. Like, the Jim Crow South was not a very pleasant place to be. It just wasn't. It's not only by example of things, but, like, when you begin to read about, actual day-to-day life, just for regular white people, like a world in which it is permissible to cheat and steal and exploit like some designated other class is a world

where basically becomes okay to treat everyone like that. Yeah. And I think you're seeing that in our society right now, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. Well, that was a long-winded, but those of my thoughts. No, I mean, it's extremely interesting and informative, and I think it sounds right about everything. Gingrich asserts campaign bill alive in Senate is dead in House. Law and a surprise schedules debate for today. Speaker Newt Gingrich today ruled out any chance that the House would pass the major bipartisan proposal for overhauling campaign finance that has been advocated the Senate. Mr. Gingrich's remarks at a breakfast meeting with reporters came out a day when the Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott suddenly decided to bring up campaign finance legislation

Florida paid on Friday weeks earlier than previously expected. Mr. Lott's decision caught the leading advocates of change by surprise. Senators John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, had not quite finished drafting the latest version of their bill, the principle of such measure. At his meeting with reporters, Mr. Gingrich said that any bill that passed in the House would have to include a number of provisions that Democrats have already described as unacceptable to them. His comments illustrated the campaign finance gridlocking, gridlock season Congress. Almost everyone says changes needed, but many key players insist on changes that they know cannot be enacted. The central provision of the McCain-Feingold legislation, which enjoys broad Democratic support, would ban soft money, unlimited, unregulated gifts to political parties.

Now, Jamel, correct me, didn't McCain final turn out to be something of a curse rather than a blessing? Yes, because if I understand this correctly, let me look this up. There's a nuance here that is in effect by weakening the amount of money that could go into parties create the super PAC system and dark money. I mean, this is just, I'm not. a campaign finance guy. I'm just kind of picking up this up from the ether, but I think that's what happened. I think that it did not really accomplish its goals. I know that Citizens United ruling is a much bigger deal, but from what I understand, from what I can remember, McCain-Feingold kind of created this structural situation where, I mean, it wouldn't be passed until much later, actually, until in the early 2000s. I think you're right about the ultimate effects that the main thing is that by

by restricting the use of soft money by political parties, it just sort of funneled the money through non-party organizations and through candidates. And so what you had, what, you know, instead of, yeah, instead of the Democratic Party, the Democratic National Committee or the Republican National Committee directly spending, raising money to spend, you have a political action committee associated with the party or with the candidate, the candidates directly doing it. And the main effect was just to weaken the amount of disciplinary power parties could wield over their members. And then Citizens United just supercharges that. We're now, you know, you can be a candidate. I mean, this is what happened with Trump. You can be a candidate and have

like your own pet billionaire or maybe you're the pet candidate for the billionaire and um they can just directly fund basically an entire campaign yeah yeah and and and and and post i think it's the connection of the mccane fingold bill and the citizens united ruling they kind of interact in this particularly toxic mix uh that permits just absolute wanton spending and now you have Elon Musk, just kind of throwing money at things. So, yeah, I think basically Citizens United says spending money is the same as free speech. And so the problem of getting money out of U.S. politics is much, much harder. And we can kind of see now the results of that, especially because, you know, people who have a ton of money.

don't tend to want to put the people in power who say maybe those people should have less money. So that's sort of a structural problem there. Okay. Director of IRS issues an apology for agent abuses. Congress ends hearing. Several policies revised after citizens and police tell panel of misconduct. The acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service issued an extraordinary public

apology date of four individual taxpayers, and by extension to all American taxpayers, for severe mistreatment, I'm sorry, I don't know why this is funny, for severe mistreatment of the hands of angry officials, of agency officials. The tax official Michael P. Dolan also promised immediate changes to eliminate incentives for misconduct and make the IRS more responsive to public complaints. What did they do? Oh, agency workers browsed through tax turns to snoop into the finances of celebrities, relatives, and prospective dates. Not nice. IRS agents are judged by their total tax collection no matter how poorly documented. Managers cover up abusive behavior by collection agents. Revenue officers consider all tax debtors

crooks or flakes who deserve no sympathies. Well, that's not good. I think that this is funny. It is funny. It's sort of like the IRS kind of got a reputation for being being a very evil branch of the government, partially because of Republican propaganda against the whole idea of taxes, but I think partially because the actual conduct of the IRS was abused and it got this reputation for being abusive. I don't, I think any, I mean, God has spared me from this thus far, but I think anybody who describes being on the wrong side of the IRS is not a pleasant situation. They don't treat you like you made a mistake. You are guilty. until proven innocent.

You know, and that's good because there are people who cheat on their taxes, and that's bad. But the IRS is not going to win any popularity contests in America. I just had to pay my taxes. I am a freelancer, so I pay self-employment tax. And I got to tell you, this year, it did not feel good to send over a giant wire transfer to the federal government. Although I did my duty, it wasn't fun. Yeah, I still have to, I may need to get an extension because I filed the return, but I haven't mailed the checks yet. I think you certainly do need to get an extension.

It's April 16th, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they're good about that. So as we've learning on this podcast is, Jamel has not paid his taxes. We're telling the world. Um, so, you know, I think that that, we were discussing our worries about being harassed at the border by rogue DHS, a CBP agents, but I think, um, you got to worry about the IRS now, Jamel. If you're going to, yeah, I know, a politicized IRS. I'll just, I have a tax guy. I work with a guy. I'll just ask him if he can file an extension. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sure that you'll be fine. Okay. I think that's it for that. I think we should get to the movie. do you think? Sure. I wanted to just mention real quick that it was funny to me that we were talking about race in America and that immediately the next thing was Trent Lott

involved in some congressional negotiations. For younger listeners, Trent Lott was, as you may have guessed, a Senate Republican leader who had to resign his post after he praised Strom Thurman for Thurman's 100th birthday. I think the exact quote was, if Strom had been elected president, And all those years ago, he wouldn't have had all these troubles. And everyone was like, what do you mean by that? Yeah, he had to resign for that. But it's so crazy to me that he had to, well, at the time, you're like, yeah, of course he has to resign.

That's a horrible thing to say. But today, you got guys doing Nazi salutes and they don't have to resign. So changed. He would not have to resign today. And no one would expect it. No, not at all. He could say and do a lot worse. So, yeah, a much different world

Where Trent Lott wouldn't be pushed out Who was the guy who got, well, I don't want to get too sidetracked But we'll talk disgraced politicians who had to resign another time Yes Okay, the peacemaker I think I did a pretty decent summary this time So we'll just jump into kind of discussing the movie John, have you seen this movie before?

Never. Most of the movies we've seen a we watch I've seen before or I know of and I know them, but this movie I didn't really know anything about before I watched it. And I kind of understand, it's not super memorable or classic, but it's, it's passable. It's a, it's a fine movie. I thought that the dynamic between Kidman's character and Clooney's was not that charming. Like, he was just kind of a jerk, and she was sort of portrayed as kind of an uptight lady. I mean, it's not

that they didn't have chemistry. I mean, they're both extremely attractive people. Good actors. But I think their script didn't get them going the way it should have. So I was a little bit like, eh, they're interacting in a way on screen that's not that charming.

I thought that it did dragon points. I thought it was a little formulaic. I had a ton of cliches. Some of the cliches were fun. Like, I love the depiction of, you know, post-Soviet Russia, of Eastern Europe, of like, you know, all that kind of thing is just the stuff that we really enjoy in these movies. Yeah, I was going to, I was thinking at the beginning of the movie, the opening shots in post-Soviet Russia, not only was, it very cliche, but just sort of even the color palette.

And like, like, everything got out of it was sort of like, yeah, it's supposed to be Russia. Everything's kind of gray and foggy for some reason. Yeah. Yeah. And I like that. I was like, it's comforting or whatever. I'm like, yeah, it's one of those movies with all these visual cliches that I'm very used to see.

So I was like, and with the Hans Zimmer score, it still, it kind of gave me a nostalgia kick for sure. I also appreciated like, it's kind of like tore through the White House and the Pentagon with all these different briefing rooms and situation rooms, which felt kind of realistic and interesting. And, you know, what I also thought was fascinating about the movie. After I looked into it, it was actually based on a nonfiction book by Andrew and Leslie Coburn. Andrew and Leslie Coburn wrote a book called One Point Safe. They were married, journalists. He's the brother of a journalist. Our listeners may remember, may know Alexander Coburn.

and I think there's other Coburns running around. It's a very journalistic family. They wrote this book about nuclear proliferation and loose nuclear weapons, which was a big preoccupation in the 90s. And I took a look at it because I was interested. And it has some pretty interesting stories. I did not know, for example, that the Bader Meinhauf gang attempted attack and presumably steal from the U.S. stockpile of tactical nuclear weapons in Germany

and were fought off by U.S. guards. So that's a fascinating story. It also goes into things I kind of knew but didn't know were real, kind of like where I knew more by vibe. For instance, like the U.S. government was very concerned about the loose, the possibility of loose nuclear weapons as the Soviet Union fell apart, and they observed the Soviet, as the Soviet Union fell, and there was ethnic strife in Azerbaijan, in Armenia, that, you know, the remaining Soviet government kind of drew its nuclear weapons back to it on trains, which is where we get the train scene from the movie, obviously. So I'm going to read a little bit from this book, because I thought it was a little bit interesting

and it kind of tells you where they got the imagery from the movie. It was not long before the CIA team this was created to look for rogue nuclear weapons or lost nuclear weapons, began to report something extraordinary going on in the USSR. Satellite

snapped long trains snaking through the Caucasus mountains and into the Slavic heartland. The uninitiated, they look like ordinary freight chains. But an analyst who devoted his life working to his working life to the arcane study of Soviet nuclear transport systems concluded that the ventilation ducts on the roof of nuclear weapons freight carm were shaped slightly differently from those on ordinary wagons. This meant only one thing. The cargo was warheads. And the trains were not just coming out

of Azerbaijan. Moscow had made a decision to pull all tactical nuclear weapons out of ethnic areas before they erupted. Trains rolled out of the Baltic states where events were soon to take the same bloody turn as in Baku. Car stacked with warheads pulled out of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan. So precipitous was the retreat of Soviet forces from East Germany that the amazed CIA analyst detected weapons being moved in ordinary wagons so decrepit that the rain leaked in. U.S. intelligence received report that one weapon waiting to be shipped from Armenia had actually been stolen, only to be retrieved three days later.

So this kind of joke that people made in the 90s that you could buy a Soviet nuclear warhead on the black market for a few million dollars was not, was an exaggeration, but not that much of an exaggeration. There was real concern about this. And it's funny, this is, I think, Secretary of Defense Gates is doing this. It's the same Gates. And Condoleezza Rice was in charge of this. initiative to follow up on. It was called the Rice Group to follow up on this stuff. So you kind of begin to understand, and this movie also brings us into the world because loose nuclear weapons was a big concern after 9-11 of the mentality of the security official who inherited the war

on terror. And this movie definitely influenced the kind of worst-case scenario thinking about what might happen, a terrorist might get a hold of a nuclear weapon. Obviously, in this movie, it's not Islamist terrorists. It's a very, I will say one criticism I have of this movie is a very vague and unconvincing motivation for this terrorist who is somehow has no actual politics in the Bosnian War. He seems to, if he wants to revenge his family, but he seems just mad that the Yugoslavia broke up in the first place and there was an ethnic war at all. which he's a he's a radical centrist he's a radical pro he's a rat or you you go nostalgic and a titoist or something yeah i would really have enjoyed if he were like a radical titoist

yeah me too he was like he wanted i thought i was like are they he's he going to like blackmail the uan into like re-convying yugoslavia back together like recreating yugoslavia i so i just thought that that was a little silly i mean it's put he's played by a very good actor who's actually a Romanian actor, but who's brought in every time they need to represent like a Balkan person, you'll recognize him. Like that guy, he's in a lot of movies in the 90s and 2000s. He think he's still acting. He's a great actor. And he's got a, he's got a terrific look, but he's definitely used by Hollywood to be like the stand-in Balkan guy. So, yeah, I mean, you know, it's not, it's a solid B, not in budget, but in quality B movie.

and it has a lot of cliches that we both like and kind of grown about. And I just thought from a political, ideological level, it's obviously, it's not exactly a neocon movie. It's definitely like a Department of Defense feeling itself movie. Yeah, I wouldn't call it a neocon movie in part because, I mean, the Kidman character is kind of neocon-ish in her insistence that, you know, the only reason anyone could want to do something like this is ideological. It's not like they're driven by ideology. And the Clooney character is a kind of more realist. Well, no, this is people want to make money. They're stealing things to

sell. And that's like an interesting dynamic, but I think you're right. The movie itself isn't, no, it's not a neocon film. It is a look. The American security establishment is hyper-competent. kind of film. Yeah, exactly. That's sort of the main thing. At no point, like, anything that goes wrong is the function of the inherent uncertainty of a military operation or of intelligence operation. But the actual operators, whether Kidman's character or Clooney's character or any of the soldiers we meet, are all consummate professionals and very competent and able to do their jobs. And this is often contrasted with the Russian soldiers who are like bumbling dumbfucks. Right? Like they're corrupt. Yeah. And corrupt and unable to to adequately do their jobs and

all this sort of thing. So I think you're right. This is a film that is basically, you know, if it has a politics, it's that it's pro pentagon. Right. It's pro pentagon. The American security state. Like, the U.S. won the Cold War for a reason. And it was the, the competence and ability of the American security state. And that American security state retains the ability and capability to continue to protect Americans in the present day against all kinds of asymmetrical and non-state threats. Right. A myth shattered on 9-11, by the way. And one that, Yeah. And the competence of the DOD, the hyper-competence of the DOD that this movie represents and of the national security state in general is a myth that was shattered by 9-11 and then by all the wars thereafter. But yeah, this, this, the civilian military partnership that the movie represents where you have like this scientist, ex-scientist who becomes a national security official and working with a kind of man-of-action soldier and they.

kind of come up with a modus operandi that works. Yeah, it's just very pro. It's just very what the Pentagon would like you to think the Pentagon does. It's just like we got a lot of smart good people and we're going out there and we've got all these these means at our disposal and we're just doing everything and doing everything well. And these characters were based kind of on real people in the book. I mean, there was such a scientist who moved from what I can understand. I didn't finish the book, who moved from the Livermore Laboratory, which I didn't really know much about, but it's very fascinating to me in California, into the Pentagon, or I'm sorry, into the National Security Council, and she had a counterpart in the military, and I think they

were actually boyfriend and girlfriend or something like that. So, or vice versa. And it's definitely the story that the book portrays is like there's a lot of smart people working on this, but it's a very shaky, unstable situation. And I guess that's sort of like true in a sense that the 90s was a unstable, uncertain, where the next threat was coming. And it wasn't necessarily going to be al-Qaeda, it just sort of happened to be. I mean, it could have been, well, I don't think any Bosnian Serb. we're going to use nuclear weapons on the United States. But, you know, all of these other ethnic

conflicts and the issue of nuclear proliferation and loose nuclear weapons was also, you know, there was, there's, in all the movies we watch, these themes come up over and over again, stolen nuclear weapons, lost nuclear weapons, you know, the, the lack of stability after the Cold War and clarity about the Cold War, where is that going to, where is the threat going to come from. Where is it going to eventually explode, so to speak? The other thing about this film or about the book it was based on, I read a review of the book by Eric Schmidt, the very famous national security reporter at the New York Times, who wrote a kind of critical review of this book for The Times. And he said, I think, very smartly and it turned out presciently,

the book and obviously the movie is very focused on the extremely sexy idea of nuclear weapons being on the loose because that's a premise for an action movie and not on the more boring but perhaps more important issue of nuclear expertise and materials being taken over and lo and behold one year later in 1998 Pakistan has a nuclear test right yeah And I think that that shows you what well-informed people were not maybe fixating so much on the idea of a literal nuke being sold, but the idea that nukes were going to be proliferated because scientists and materials and know-how was going to spread. And funnily enough, the movie does show a Pakistani nuclear scientist that the U.S. had trained. And as you pointed out, and I also noticed had that little kind of paleo-con moment in the movie where Clooney, Clooney says... Cluny complains that the U.S. has trained all these foreign terrorists. Well, no one's going to be coming to American universities anymore. So that problem is solved. But I think that, you know, honestly, I feel like having for having had the world pretty,

preeminent universities and higher education establishment, like the cost, the cost benefit there. If one out of every million people we end up training as a terrorist, I don't know if that's the worst outcome, you know? No, not at all. I mean, you know. And also, you never know. They might be terrorists for our side. Right. Until they switch, you know, that was a big function of U.S. universities and U.S. soft power. I was like, well, you know, it often would be that a general or a warlord in some foreign country happened to have gone to United States school and had friends in the United States and social contacts still were like, oh, why don't you call him up?

You know, I went to school, which is very much how the British Empire worked too, where, you know, it made all these personal ties to elite institutions. So I don't think it's necessarily such a great idea either for the U.S. Yeah, you know, sometimes these people are not going to like us, but at least we know something about them. So, yeah, I also just think, like, this movie is just coming from such a different attitude about what the fundamental, what makes up U.S. power. It's like, I was looking at the Livermore Laboratory because I was so fascinated with the existence of it. And it's just like it is a institution of the Cold War in this very particular way. It is a public-private partnership that includes universities, the government, this is where they develop nuclear weapons, thermonuclear weapons.

Universities, the government, these weird nonprofits that are kind of do only government work for development of nuclear stuff. and private corporations like the Bechtel Corporation. And basically they were founded. They were started, this one was started by Edward Teller. So Edward Teller, of course, is the founder of, you know, I mean, the father of the thermonuclear bomb. Right. He's played by Benny Safdi in Oppenheimer. Yeah, I was about to say, very memorably by Benny Safdi and Oppenheimer.

So you have a combination of these public sector, private sector. And then refugee foreign scientists brought to the United States to work in our institutions. And you're like, oh, literally American power comes through this kind of combination of different factors. We get the scientists from all these different places. We have got all these different extremely powerful institutions working together and we make the bomb or nuclear energy. I mean, literally the most powerful thing in the world. And that's kind of what we're dismantling in a way. It's like, so the competence of the bureaucracy that's being, which we all know

was sort of bullshit, right? But we have nostalgic feelings about even the myth of it for some reason. And then, you know, this idea that, oh, well, the United States is not blinded by ideology, we will always have an edge because we know how to get the people together and leave them alone. You can be a weirdo. You can be any race in the world. But if you're smart and you come here and you work hard, you're, you're fine by us. And if you're building nuclear bombs by us, by God, you're definitely fine by us. That's no longer the case. It's just like they're shooting themselves in the foot. You know, there was a joke. I mean, not a joke. Well, it's sort of a

joke, I suppose, in Oppenheimer where, and I thought about this recently, where Oppenheimer says to general graves, we have one advantage on our side, and he's like, what? He said anti-Semitism because all these talented Jewish scientists were being chased out of Germany into the United States. And I was like, oh, you know what? There's some truth to that. And the United States has always been very good at grabbing up people who did not or could not live in other places in the world and integrating them into our society because we

just recognize our talent. And this is just no longer the case. we are chasing away for the maybe I mean the United States has a long and shameful racial history but it's at least been in its own self-interest seen from time to time that it has to welcome people and has to integrate people in order to keep an edge and for the first time in my lifetime and I don't know even historically perhaps an ideological program is so is harming the national security interests and the and the commercial interests of the United States, these are things that we were told were we were not possible, right? Yeah. We would never be so stupid as to. We contrasted

that during the Cold War. This is to be contrasted with the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union, they allow ideology to govern. Right. I mean, we had the Red Scare. Sure. I was about to say, but yeah. Yeah, yeah. But in general, the propaganda was that only over there do they allow ideology and political concerns to dictate science, technology, national security. Yeah. Yeah. And that's part of why we have an edge. I mean, I mean, part of why we had edge is just vast store of capital. But the idea, the story about that was, well, why? Because we are welcoming to all talent. And we will not, that was a big argument against, for a long time and now with this reversal of it, a big argument against racism.

and against xenophobia was it gives the United States an enormous pool of talent and capital and human capital because we're not discriminating against anybody will take any talented person as long as they're willing to make a contribution. And that spirit has really died in the U.S. And I say that I don't know. Like I'm more...

I'm just going to go on this rant. I know that we're supposed to be talking about movies. And this is, they like the rants. They like, they like to hear them. Yesterday was Jackie Robinson Day. Jackie Robinson, I thought, was the most secure symbol of U.S. racial integration to the point where it was a little conservative and perhaps deployed in ways that were dishonest or meant to obfuscate more substantive gains. Well, Jackie Robinson, this, Jackie Robinson integrated baseball. Then we're done.

Of course not. That's silly. But I thought it was such a conservative position to say the integration of Jackie Robinson was good that they would never touch it. And then this, Jackie Robinson's war record was purged from a DOD website during this bullshit they're doing with AI. And when the DOD or the Doge spokesperson, no, the DOD person was asked about it. They said, oh, this is part of our, we're doing very well with our DAI purged. Now, they immediately went and changed that because they realized that they were playing around with something that was really taboo. But I never thought I would live in a country where Jackie Robinson, they were going to deintegrate baseball, like, that was such a sacred. And it made me very upset in a way where, look, a lot of what's happening is upsetting. But sometimes these things that trouble your childish, you know, you grow up watching baseball. you grow up with this myth of Jackie Robinson. I don't see myth in a bad way. I'm not saying it's not true. I'm saying it has a certain structuring part of our imagination of what we think the country is about. You learn about fairness. You learn about racial quality through Jackie

Robinson. And everybody can kind of participate in this. You can be a conservative and say this is about merit and the market and us ignoring stupid old prejudices and recognizing a truly talented person. And if you're a liberal or a leftist, you say it's about principle. It's about rejecting racism. You know, there's ways, you know, it's just a part of the American myth. And to see that being rolled back, it really made me want to cry. It really made me upset. And I realized what it was was I had, as a child, had a book, or it was a book in the school library, and it was a book about Jackie Robinson. And they gave, you know, it's pathetic in a way, but its lesson of tolerance was they had

the famous photograph where, you know, Jackie Robinson was being heckled in the crowd by, you know, racist fans and Pee We Reese, the shortstop for the Brooklyn Dodgers. put his arm around Jackie Robinson and that image was used in the book to like teach kids about racial integration. And then I just realized like, oh, that stuck in my head. And then now we're in a country where like there are people in power who are against something that innocent, you know, like, and that good. And I just found that very deeply upsetting. And yeah, they can do things that are more evil than that. But for some reason, attacking these, I thought were the building blocks of a decent society, obviously not sufficient, but like just necessary beginning

points where it be like, you know what, we are not that society. We are, we are not defined by segregation, but by the integration of baseball. And obviously there are critiques of that saying, well, that sweeps things under the rug and we need to recognize. I grant all that. But I will take even what I was shocked by and I always thought was a little bit was I'm not totally shocked by because I thought it was at risk but I was and always thought that those very almost conservative rituals and myths of American civic religion were really important and didn't like it sometimes when leftists were mocking of them and I was like no no no that stuff if you start to get rid of that stuff, who knows where at the end of that. Anyway, rant over.

All I'm saying is, but this can go for all the movies we're watching, too. I mean, like, there are certain principles, there are certain rituals and codes being broken that I did not, I'm shocked to see happen. I would, I'm more shocked to see it happening in a way and not more concerned about it, but it's more emotional to me than seeing some of the actual substantive evil things being done. Because I think it's corrosive to the kind of society that we were trying to build and successfully in a lot of ways built. It's not wasn't all a, it wasn't all a failure. No, I think that's. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think I think that's exactly right. It wasn't all a failure.

For all of the very real problems the United States faces, I mean, now we have a whole new set of problems. For all the ones we were facing, we were making strides towards building a more, at least integrated and decent society. And that was what was fueling the discontent in some regard, right? I don't think you get, you don't get Black Lives Matter, you don't get the 2020 stuff without Barack Obama. Not that Barack Obama is directing it from afar, but Barack Obama, the integration of the presidency both reveals the successes and the limits of that kind of representational

politics. And so people necessarily want more. They want to, they want to see how much further they can go. And I think you're right to worry that this assault on. on myths complimentary, not derogatory, but myths, the kinds of things that structure our society and give it meaning that help us understand the kind of place that we live in. The attack on that stuff is really worrisome. It's really threatening. I'll put it this way. We have taken for granted, right, that our society wants to be the one, wants to be a one where if we were in the stadium watching Jackie Robertson playing, we'd be clapping for his success. We'd be hoping to see him hit a home run, steal a base. We wouldn't be the people

yelling racial slurs. No. But the actions of the administration, the actions of this whole movement, they want to be the people yelling racial slurs, right? Like, that's ultimately, they see themselves as the ones protecting baseball from some sort of like incursion. from someone who's not deserving. And that is just a fundamental inversion of, inversion of what I think the established, the aspirational moral order of the past 50 years has been. You've, you've written about, I've not written about,

but like mentioned, you know, the, the, where Chris Caldwell book highlighting the Civil Rights Act in 1964, is sort of like this, you know, where everything went awry with the American Constitutional Order. And of course, Richard Hanania, a, how do I describe him? Frankly, an obscure conservative writer who used to be probably still is, an Internet neo-Nazi. Now is something else, whatever he is.

He sounds totally woke now. I don't know. He changed his position because I think it's getting a more. more money and attention, but... Yeah, I mean, opportunists at the very least. Has written, wrote a book, The End of Woke, which is about beginning of 1964 civil rights side. And it's quite, I mean, it's quite,

you can quite literally say that this movement, this tendency in American politics views an attempt at the substantive integration of American society across racial lines to have been a mistake. Jackie Robertson shouldn't have integrated baseball, right? Like that's what it comes down to. I just since we're on this note and to relate it back to the film, and we've talked about this before, I'm, of course, always struck by in this, in this genre of movies

in this period, the way that African Americans are placed in command roles and it's not remarked on. It's not considered any kind of thing worth even commenting on. There are two army characters in this film who are the community. commanding officers of an operation who are senior over the Clooney character who are black. And honest to some extent, the fact that Nicole Kidman has a senior role on the National Security Council, there is sort of some comments at the beginning about making sure someone will take orders from a woman, but this doesn't come up again at all in the film.

The world of this picture of this version of the American state is one in which anyone who who gets to that level is presumed to be able and competent in their ability. And that presumption is also part of what this right-wing backlash is trying to end, right, to create the presumption instead that anyone who isn't white and who isn't male and who isn't straight and who isn't able, who is in a position of authority, position of honor even, is necessary. undeserving. Yeah. They want to do something similar.

It's a revolutionary government. It's just a counter-revolutionary government. They want to change the way the economy works, and they want to change the structure of recognition in our society. And they want to make sure that any kind of recognition that's given to a black person or a woman, an immigrant, a disabled person, is intrinsically of less. worth. They want to always attack that. They want to always make that look, they want to shit on it and make it work look less worthy. And say, they want to say, oh, it's a DEI hire. It's a affirmative action, et cetera, et cetera. It's always to to subtly degrade the contributions of people and the, and ultimately to degrade their citizenship, which is what I think is behind the entire thing, which is that the citizenship. of such people is not on the same level.

It's always a little less. It's a second-class citizenship. So they don't recognize the worth of people who are. And it's very insidious because they make people doubt. They're trying to cast doubt always on, like in that piece of shit, Heggsav's book, he writes about the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And he writes this disgusting thing where it's saying, well, because of DEI and affirmative action,

we'll never know if he's actually really good at his job or not. He, you know, like, and that's, isn't that a little unfair? This is an old affirmative action, I think against affirmative action. Like, and it's not fair to him. It's not fair to him, which is an extremely, like, patronizing awful thing to say number one and it's just like it's so infuriating to read something like that like this guy is a fuck face from TV who has made his career by licking Trump's ass and that's

the reason why he's in power himself washed out of the military I mean yeah who was never has no career in the military right he were I mean he he he he left the National Guard in part because he was not going to get promoted right like the way promotion worked in addition to you showing your effort is people who do have to recognize that you have leadership ability or leadership capability because part of part of advancing up the ranks in the U.S. military is schooling. It's a lot of schooling. Both my parents, people, long time wish I was known this, both my parents are in the military. My brother is in the military. And my brother, especially as he was moving up the ranks when he was still in the service, it involves him

going to school with every new promotion for weeks at a time. And if they don't think your capable of doing that, you don't get promoted. And it's very clear they didn't think Pete Hexeth was capable of doing that. And so we didn't get promoted. No, I mean, it's a classic anti-affirmative action argument. It doesn't make any sense on its face because the premise of any kind of affirmative action program, and especially DEI, which is really just sort of like, you know, broadening the interview pool, basically. That's DEI. But certainly affirmative action, it's the premise is giving people an opportunity, but then you still have to perform according to the standards. You still have to be good at your job or you have to be good at

school, right? Like affirmative action does not give you a 4.0 GPA. It just gives you the opportunity to show that you're capable of doing that kind of thing. So Lloyd Austin, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was Secretary of Defense. Yeah. I forgot his name, which is not right. Yeah. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, like, they, they earned those positions. Like, to the extent that they benefited from any kind of, you know, Affirmative Action or DEI, it was simply to make sure that they were in the pool of people who would be considered. But, like, the idea that someone, you know, in their 50s or 60s, Black, who has made their way up the rank,

So this is someone who probably joined, right, in their 20s, in their 60s now, they joined in the 80s, in the early 90s. The idea that this is a kind of person who has not demonstrated their competence or skill is, like, silly on its face. Same good for any woman who reaches the highest levels of the American military. Like, these people are all very good at their jobs. You don't get to be that otherwise. But the point, as you said, the point of these kind of rhetoric is to denigrate. and create the impression. And to play into people's resentments, you know, a lot of people have aspirations for their lives that they can't quite meet for whatever reason. Some of those

reasons are out of their control. But some of those reasons just maybe there are people who are better than them at the thing. Maybe they just weren't quite there, which is okay. That's the way things, that's the way it goes sometimes. But there are people like Hegsef, you know, you know, people who play this line are basically preying on the, on the disappointment of a lot of people to create this impression that, you know, you could have gotten ahead. But they, I mean, in the words of the famous political ad, you needed that job, but they gave it to a minority instead, right? Like that's, that's the message. I've always thought, this is a bit of an side. But I've always thought, in fact, that, you know, hiring managers, bosses, I think they

use that line to avoid having to confront mediocre employees, honestly, right? Like, someone doesn't get a promotion. You say, well, you know, we had to give it to the woman rather than say, you weren't good enough for this. She was. The other thing, and this is just me being petty, But of course, I'm called in the affirmative action hire all the time. And my main response to that is like, okay, maybe that's the case. Maybe the New York Times said, well, they just want to hire a black guy. But like, let's compare work and see, and see who's doing good work. I especially don't tolerate this from, you know, right-wing guys who, like, can barely hack it at, like, their actual sort of like winged out welfare publications.

It's like, listen, dude, if you could barely, if you could barely make a career like the Washington Free Beacon, you have no place to call anyone anything. Well, also, these, you know, these fuckers, like, I don't want to be a free marketeer, although my beliefs about the market are being sorely tested now and changing. It's like a lot of their publications work with billionaire or billionaire vanity projects. They're not like successful businesses that have like a show shown public desire for their writing. They're an ideological superstructure that's a vanity project of billionaires. Like those aren't businesses that are making money, you know?

Like so if you're if you're like it's sconesed away at somebody's pet project sinecure for storing wing nuts, you know, I don't think you have any. right to get uppity about your own quality in the world. I mean, like, you could be a very talented person and just it's not fair, but it could be that you might have an affirmative action job, you know, the same goes for them and much more so, you know, like they are not doing anything. They don't have, they're not being, they're not facing competitive pressures in the same way you know so that's my that's my attitude towards about it i was like yeah dude so you couldn't compete and you're resentful about it so you blame somebody else i mean this makes me sound very

republican but i mean if that's the game they want to play that's the game they want to play if the world is red in tooth and claw it's red in tooth and claw you don't get to cry that it's not fair now either it's fair it's not fair oh it's only fair if you win fuck you I mean, this is, this is, I mean, this is, this is, this gets to my, like, you know, I wouldn't, I would say I'm, I'm no conservative, but like my kind of disposition, like, traditionalist, or traditionalist disposition here is a kind of like, you know, you got to take responsibility for your life and you got to put in effort. Like, there's, there's no arrangement of social institutions that's going to change that just fact of life. Like, you have to, you have to take responsibility for your own life. You have to put an effort. And. And. if there are people like are there times when people give things on the basis of unfair advantages absolutely whether there's advantages of class what are those advantages of just you know they know people like that happens right but i i would still say to like a significant degree we still have a bit of a bit of control over the amount of effort we're going to put in we can do that and i i really

don't have patience a lot of things don't have patience for these days i certainly don't have patience for anyone who complains about not getting what they think they deserve, but who aren't putting any effort into it, whether that is journalism jobs, whether that is, you know, romantic prospects. This is why my, like, I can't talk about the male loneliness epidemic because part of me is like, this just seems like a skill issue to me. Just, just, you know, go outside and talk to people. But, yeah, that's, that's.

There are a lot of people in this country, I hate to say this. Back half of the podcast has become an Andy Rooney segment. Yeah, I'm getting very grumpy in my old age about cranking. But there is a sense, especially I hate to say this, and this also makes me sound like a cranky old person. There are a lot of young people who feel entitled and don't feel like they need to work. And that doesn't mean, there are limited opportunities, and I'm sympathetic that some of the opportunities aren't very good. But there's an attitude, especially towards education now, which is that it's not important and that you're just as good and you're just as smart. I'm sorry, no.

You have to learn, gain experience, gain wisdom, and work hard. And then, you know, you still might not accomplish what you set out to do, but you can feel proud of your effort. But it's, yeah, there's a, there's a weird attitude and it comes, I think the AI is making it worse and crypto is making it worse. Because both those things remove effort, right? They remove intellectual effort. They remove the idea that you kind of have to work for money. and the belief that you can just kind of be a you can kind of just sit there and accumulate wealth and um you can tell a machine to do everything for you like what makes you a person at

that point i just don't get yeah so yeah and you see this in a lot of like no one i mean i'm sorry this is getting really cranky but people don't read anymore people don't read anymore because it just requires too much effort Like, and no one wants to make efforts. I find making an effort, I mean, look, I'm subject to the same temptations as everybody else as a computer and all the phone and everything. It gives you definitely hits of dopamine that are too quick and then you become addicted to that. And then you can't, you literally can't do work that makes it that that's more time consuming but is more. soul-fulfilling, say, or more, you know, just makes you feel better and feels like real

accomplishments. So I appreciate that there are very objective factors that are that are deteriorating human character this way. But it's hard not to be cranky when you encounter people and you're like, you just didn't try and you're not going to try it, you know? And And that to me is just really sort of frustrating. And it makes me angry sometimes. I'm just like, what do you think you're entitled to? Like, you don't think you have to work hard. And you don't think that you need to, you know, even have an interest in things

and do something like to learn a skill and to develop yourself. Like what do you think life is about? I just don't get it. People just want to go on the internet and make videos complaining about the things don't fall into their laps and that's not fair. Yeah, there's simultaneously, we're far away from the movie now who cares. There's simultaneously a whole ecosystem of media that is trying to sell a vision of easy wealth, easy luxury, right? Like if you, if you, if you flip a couple houses, you'll get the passive income to be able to live like me, a baller, right? Like that's a, that's a popular form of content. Or you can, you can become an influencer and then you don't really have to work.

And there are all these sort of things. Or like easy, which is just, which I'll say, in fairness to Americans today, this is a classic American temptation, right? Like it's sort of the flip side of the country's, you know, Puritanism and. and Protestant work ethic is this belief that there might be a shortcut to it all, whether it's selling tonics in the 19th century, selling vacuums in the 1950s, or, you know, getting rich quick schemes of all kinds. Right, all kinds. But also, I mean, I think, I think, I think, when I think about like the rise of AI,

of AI art and air writing of these things, what that really does seem, to me is like rooted in a resentment of the fact that the people who are skilled at something, whether that's skilled at writing, skilled at communicating, skill at making music, skilled art, have to invest time and effort in some of their life into these things. And that part of the reward of doing it is the cultivation of skill. Right. Like there's, I think there is a real resentment at that. Yeah. That why should I have to do that? And, and, and, And so you have AI. I mean, the AI boosters are almost like crow.

Oh, we'll be able to get rid of writers with AI. Yeah, exactly. Which is not true, right? Right. The human creative spark cannot be, like, reduced to an algorithm. Can it be replaced by an algorithm? But I think the thing that is missing in a society that is seems to be completely optimized around what is the most efficient,

or productive or lucrative thing you can be doing is that, you know, you and I, we read and write for a living. Like, part of the value of that is just the reading and the writing. It's the learning. It's the developing skills and learning new things and engaging in the practice. Like the same goes to musicians, the same goes for filmmakers. Same goes for anyone who's engaged in any kind of a creative work. And I don't know what one does.

Like I can think about what one does to teach that to someone in your life. Like my kids can appreciate, right? Like, you know, I write for a living. They know that. And that, you know, we're always talking about taking pride in your work and and not worrying about being the fastest, but worrying about like focusing on doing. it the right way and being thorough. That's part of how my kids are just going to become acculturated into life. I cook a lot, right? And like they see, like, I take pride in making things that don't

just taste good but are like aesthetically pleasing and all those sorts of things. But like how does one make that like a cultural message, right, that can actually push back against this idea that things should be easy and that effort isn't really worth it, which which begins to extend to political life, right? Like so much of Trump's value proposition, just, oh, I can just, I can, like, I can rub this, this, this, this, this, uh, this, this, uh, this, this, uh, this rabbit's paw, um, rabbit foot and not have to do any of the hard work of just like democratic life. He'll just make us rich. He'll just fix it for us. Yeah. Um, yeah. And that's the opposite of populism in a way, because populism traditionally was an ideology that was favored by artisans who were very proud of

their labor and we're worried about it being replaced by technological. It had some reactionary potential sometimes, but we're very focused on being like, look, I do good work. I have a community. It's being threatened by all these forces out of the control, but there's no reason why I should lose the good things in my life that I've worked hard and built up because of these big powers out of my control and therefore I'm going to organize politically on that basis. It's not bad people are taking away. I mean, it's a little bit of that, but it's, there's more to it than bad people are taking away, you know, the things that they were good in my life. It's more like, I built something and I deserve to keep it, you know, and that's different from, I did nothing, but I still

deserve something. Right. Okay. We should wrap up. Yeah. The peace, Yeah, the peacemaker. It's fine. Yeah, it's fine. For a recommendation, this is a perfect Sunday afternoon. You're doing other things movie. That's all it is. You throw it on.

You, uh, maybe you're making dinner. Maybe you're cleaning up. Maybe you're just hanging out in living room and you want something running. And the peacemaker would do it. Maybe not around young kid because it does have a very high body count. A lot of people get killed this movie. But, yeah. It works.

for those purposes. All right. That is our show. If you are new to the podcast, if this is your first time listening, and that's not a subscriber, please subscribe. Are available on iTunes, Spotify,

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You can also reach out to us on social media if you want to. John's on Twitter. I'm on Blue Sky. also on TikTok, I'm Instagram. I'm also on Blue Sky. You know, John's also on Blue Sky. You don't use it as much.

Yeah. I'm on Blue Sky, even though it drives me insane. And then they both drive me insane. Yeah, I mean, no human beings weren't meant to be exposed to this many people on a regular basis. No. I have lots of sympathy for

people who basically get a brain poisoning and go insane on social media. Because it's possible because it's possible it's an active hazard it's why I cultivate hobbies for myself so I have other things to do with my time

you can also reach out to us over email at unclear and present feedback at fastmail.com for this week in feedback we have an email from Michael, who I know. I'm not going to give out his last name, but Michael, good guy, titled Physical Media, Enemy of the State,

9-11, and the valorizing of operator culture. Hey, John and Jamel, love the pod. I just listened to your episode on Enemy of the State and you discussed the manner in which the malevolence of the surveillance state's conspiracism has curdled into a sort of admiration for it, the dream embodying the conspiracy, comparing enemy of the state with the state film the beekeeper. I note that the beekeeper also embraces the idea of one-man army operator culture,

which has become highly pronounced in 21st century filmmaking, not only in fiction like shooter or the John Wick movies, but also in ostensible nonfiction like American sniper. This is my parenthetical. I'm looking forward to when we eventually get to American sniper, a movie I Will Defend. Back to the email. I wanted to call your attention to one of the most startling examples of that beekeeper phenomena of valorizing Big Brother and the one-man army in the born identity. And specifically for lovers of physical media, you need the Born Identity DVD.

What people may not realize is that the firstborn movie was filmed in 2000, early 2001, but only released in 2002. On the DVD, among the deleted scenes, there was actually an alternate ending. Bourne, having escaped government pursuit with his love interest, is contacted by a shadowy government agent who offers to make him a freelancer for at-will assignments. As the audio commentary on this track explains, or as the audio commentary track on this scene explains, after 9-11, a lot of people express the idea that they, or at least the audience, would actually want the government to have some Jason Bourne's out there. As a result, director Doug Lyman filmed, but did not end up using an alternate ending that embraces wishful fulfillment desire. I don't think I am breaking any new ground when I say that 9-11 marks a real watershed, after which maybe we do want the government to be able to see every aspect of our lives

and send a highly trained pet assassin to extrajudicially set things right, became a thing people literally thought and sometimes said with their own mouths, but it's worth popping in the Born Identity DVD to see direct evidence of that shift happening with the causation expressly cited. Yeah. I don't have that DVD, but I will see if I can't find it. You can usually find the commentary tracks on like YouTube or something. But yeah, I mean, the operator, this fantasy, I mean, you know, we're coming to the end of the 1990s. We're 97 now, 98, 99, soon will be out of the 90s. But this operator fantasy does come to basically dominate American action cinema after 9-11.

And for my part, the paradigmatic example is just taken. Taken is a movie that is sort of like this, more so than even the born movies. This is this idea kind of taken to its extreme. So, yeah. Thank you, Michael, for the email. Episodes come out on the main feed every two weeks or so, and so we'll see you then with an episode on Executive Power, a movie with a boring name, which I have a feeling this is going to be a boring movie.

I've never heard I mean I think I've heard of it just because the name is so generic but I don't know what this is so it's directed by David Corley who I don't know it stars Craig Schiefer and John Hurd that's that's a name I'm familiar with

John Hurd passed away he passed away later than I thought passed by in 2017 but John Hurd plays a dad in home alone that's who you recognize him from well protecting the U.S. President Yeah. While protecting the U.S. President, Secret Service agent Nick Sager helps him to dispose of the body of a young girl who accidentally died during an adulterous encounter. Sometime later, a few weeks before the elections, the disillusioned ex-agent is approached by his former partner. The president's former aide, and one of the few people who knew about the cover-up is found dead and mysterious circumstances. This feels like it's going to be a Clinton, the Clinton kill count. Yeah, this is like the Chandra Levy's skin. Remember that? I think that was later. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was, Chandra Levy was, I think, 2001. It was like, right, like, right before 9-11, there were, like, a couple stories in the news, Chandra Levy, um, killer sharks, like, that kind of thing. And then, uh, and then we got 9-11. And then the world changed.

Yeah, this is a, that was a weird pre-9-11 moment. So, yeah, this movie is going to be the president. Was Elion Gonzalez pre or post 9-11? Pre-9-11. That was the big story before 9-11. I'm looking at other films directed by this guy. His only other movie is something called Angels Dance, starring Jim Belushi and Kyle Chandler. What?

All right. So that's the next episode, Executive Power. Over on the Patreon, we'll have an episode up. We should have an episode. By the time we're listening to this, it should be an episode up on the conversation, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. And then we're doing, after that, Army of Shadows, directed by the great Jean-Pierre Melville, one of the great movies in 1960, is a personal favorite of mine. And we'll do more, we'll do more Melville, probably La Samurai, probably La Circular Rouge. A great one.

Unfleek, another great one. Man, I love those movies. So we'll be doing some Jonathan here, Melville, over at the Patreon, which you can find at patreon.com slash unclear pod for $5 a month. You get two episodes every month. Also, video episodes of this podcast, maybe not this episode, since I'm in a hotel room right now with very bad lighting, but a previous episode can be found over at my YouTube page. It's just J. Bowie underscore NYT. And video episodes of the Patreon episodes will be, posted on patreon as well so another another patreon bonus for you all right our producer as always is connor lynch our art our artwork is by rachel ec for john gans i'm jemel bowie and we will see you next time Thank you.