Unclear and Present Danger - The Rocketeer

Episode Date: February 18, 2023

In this week’s episode, Jamelle and John watch Disney’s “The Rocketeer,” a throwback action-adventure film starring Billy Campbell, Alan Arkin, Jennifer Connelly, Paul Sorvino and Timothy Dalton. They discuss the 1930s revival of the late 80s and early 90s, the real-life conspiracies that might have inspired the plot of “The Rocketeer,” and the political power of nostalgia for Americans on the left and the right.Episodes come out every other Friday, so we’ll see you two weeks from now with the 1992 film “Toys”" directed by Barry Levinson and starring Robin Williams. “Toys”" is basically impossible to find, so don’t worry about watching this one!Connor Lynch produced this episode. Artwork by Rachel Eck.Contact us!Follow us on Twitter!John GanzJamelle BouieUnclearPodAnd join the Unclear and Present Patreon! For just $5 a month, patrons get access to a bonus show on the films of the Cold War, and much, much more.

To some, it was the fulfillment of a dream. To others, it was an instrument of destruction. A creation that could change the course of history. It was stolen from my factory. Where's the package? This is the FBI. What do we tell the president? Tell me exactly why this merchandise so important to the feds.

It's a rocket. I wouldn't touch. If I were used... How do I look? Like a hood ornament. Stand clear. What is that? A flying man!

Big Gopher. Are you trying to kill yourself? I like it. Let him have it! Hand over the rockets. The Rocketeer Go get him, kid. Go get him, kid.

Welcome to Unclear and Present Danger, a podcast about the political and military thrillers in the 1990s and what they say about the politics of that decade. I'm Jamel Bowie. I'm a columnist for the New York Times opinion section. My name is John Gans. I write a substack newsletter called Unpopular Front, and I'm working on a book about American politics in the early 90s. I'm almost done with the manuscript, but I will say saying that for some time. We are rooting for you. I cannot wait to check up the book. This week, we are taking a little bit of a detour back to 1991. We've previously been in 1994 to discuss The Rocketeer, a action-adventure film based on a comic book by the artist and writer Dave Stevens.

The Rocketeer was directed by Joe Johnston, who would tackle somewhat similar subject matter about 20 years later with Captain America, The First Avenger. And it stars Billy Campbell, Alan Arkin. Let me say real quick, Billy Campbell's Charlottesville native, Alan Arkin, Jennifer Connolly, Paul Sorvino, and Timothy Dalton with cinematography by Hero Narita, who I'm mentioning because he also shot Star Trek 6th, The Un Discovered Country, and a score by James Horner, which I'm mentioning because I just really enjoyed the score. It's very good. Here's a very brief plot summary. Young pilot Cliff Seacord stumbles on the top secret rocket pack, and with the help of his mechanic and mentor, he attempts to save his girl and stop the Nazis as the rocketeer. The Rocketeer is available to stream on Disney Plus, and it's also available for rent on iTunes and Amazon. It was released on June 21st, 1991, so let's check out the New York Times. John, please take it away.

Okay, let's see what we got here. All right. Bush meets and commends Yeltsin, but site support for Gorbachev. Bush gave Boris and Yeltsin a brief pat on the back today for pushing Democratic values and free market principles, but emphasized his own support for the Soviet president, Mikhail S. Gorbachev. We have been heartened and encouraged by President Yelts's commitment to democratic values and free market principles, and we look forward to working with him. Mr. Bush said in the Rose Garden appearance with the newly elected president of Russia

before they're meeting in the Oval Office. But at the same time, I want to be very clear about this. The United States will continue to maintain the closest possible official relationship with the Soviet government of President Gorbachev. So this is a really interesting thing going on here. The existence of Russia, the Russian Federation and the Soviet Union briefly overlapped. Where Yeltsin, they had democratized, you know, the former republics. And Yeltsin was elected as president of Russia, but Gorbachev was still president.

I think he was the only person to actually have the title of president of the Soviet Union. But, you know, he was the paramount leader of the Soviet Union, who generally was the head of the, of the communist party. And also another interesting thing about this is that the Bush administration, the first Bush administration, was quite realist in its foreign policy. And although, you know, after Reagan's very idealistic kind of Cold War attack, were actually quite cagey about the Soviet Union collapsing and kind of afraid of what might have. happen, and their preference was to sort of continue going with the Soviet system, but albeit a reformed version, this was not popular among many reasons why Bush the first was not popular among conservatives, members of the conservative movement, even though he himself was governed from a quite right-wing place. So that's interesting little piece of history there in

terms of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was still some time off. It was about six months off at this point, plan to emphasize minority cultures ignites a debate. New York studies issued changes would alter teaching in areas from Columbus's role of Thanksgiving. This sounds familiar with a sweeping blueprint for amending the teaching of history and social studies in New York public schools. State education officials today sent in motion a sharp debate over how much to emphasize the roles of non-white cultures. The revisions offered by a state panel of teachers and scholars presented a radically different program for public education in New York State. Columbus would not be, I remember this happening.

Columbus would not be proclaimed as the Discover of America, but as a voyager to an already settled land. School children would then debate among themselves the significance of this content. And it's history, enslaved persons, this is in quotes here. Thanksgiving would not be described simply as a joyous national holiday. It would be presented as a day that many Americans have come to celebrate as a cause, had come to see as a cost of celebration, but that others, including American Indians, believe it should be a day of mourning, schoolchildren would be encouraged to discuss why this

is so. There would be no slaves in the Antipal himself. Instead, there would be enslaved persons, a distinction the panel described as critical to helping school children understand that slavery was a condition into which people are forced, not a chosen role like garden or cook or carpenter. So, I mean, these debates are still going on. many educators said today that emphasis on multicultural education recommended by the panel would transform the teaching of social studies, stressing that there are many different

interpretations of many basic things in American history, including colonization of development of American West. Now, they didn't have a word for this back then, but well, conservatives complained about this as multiculturalism back then. Now they call it wokeness, I guess. Well, I mean, the wokeness, I feel like, is encompassing of multiculturalism and quote-unquote political correctness. Right.

It's kind of depending on how it's huge. They found a container. They were bought. This is when these things first started to bug them, and they found a container word for it can be for both problems. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's worth, you know, it's worth saying that certainly this, this would be described

as wokeness today, but sort of like when you think about what they're kind of saying, it's essentially in this case that. A depiction or approach to U.S. history that is not extremely flattering to, you know, traditional conceptions of the country is like somehow illegitimate, which like kind of just rules out, you know, all sorts of different understandings of the country. Certainly the African American perspective on the United States. I'm reading David Blight's biography of Frederick Douglass at the moment, which is very good, it's quite good. And it's reading it, it's so funny to me that conservatives today are trying to claim

Frederick Douglass as sort of like one of their own, in part because Frederick Douglass's, you know, analysis of the United States is exactly the kind of thing that would be condemned, right? It's like out of control, wokeness, you know, leading people to hate the country kind of thing. And that even after, right, even after Douglas rejects the idea that the Constitution is like, you know, necessarily pro-slavery. Like, he still has this very radical analysis and critique of the country. But trying to, you know, trying to give that pride of place in a history class and say Florida these days is like liable to, you know, put you on the bad side of the state. Right. I know. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's crazy how old, how old a lot of these themes are and how

they're, aside from Douglas, a lot of abolitionists, even white abolitionists were, were out of control woke in their sense that they actually said that the Constitution was evil and the United States was a hopelessly evil country. I mean, this is part of our history. And these, you know, like, I think it's the better way to teach this, you know, is just to be like, look, There's a long context for this kind of discourse about America. And, you know, let's look at what Douglas wrote. Let's look at what William Garrison wrote. I mean, you might be surprised.

These people are looked on as heroes now. Let's read what they actually have to say, you know. If you're going to get to this headline on the right set of the page, court 6.3 applies voting rights act to judicial races, which I'll just talk about this one because this is, there are lots of voting rights cases. I mean, people know kind of the big ones. ones, and especially probably the biggest one of the past generation, which is Shelby County beholder in 2013. But there are lots of challenges to the voting rights act. Lots of challenges to

existing laws that may have not fallen under the voting rights act and then the court or previous situation in the court so that they had to. And this is one of the latter cases. And so the big impact in the South rulings could put more minority judges on the nation's benches or the two subheadlines and the head is in decisions that could eventually change the makeup of state courts, particularly in the South. The Supreme Court ruled in two cases today that elections for judges are covered by the Federal Voting Rights Act. The rulings could affect most parts of the country because 41 states elect at least some of their judges and relatively few blacks or members of other minorities are represented on state courts. The act makes, I'm reading a bit

further down, the Act makes it illegal for states and localities to maintain voting practices or district boundaries that have the effect of discriminating on the basis of race. The twin six to three rulings today reinstate lawsuits brought in the lower federal courts by black and Hispanic voters challenging the electoral districts for the Louisiana Supreme Court and for trial courts and 10 counties in Texas. So this is, I mean, if you don't know anything about how the Supreme Court is supposed to take its cases. I would say how it takes its cases, but this has changed under the current 6-3 conservative majority. But how it's supposed to work is if there's a split in the appeals

courts, then the Supreme Court takes up the case. Because a split in the appeals courts, meaning, let's say, I don't know that, I don't remember the particular circuit courts here, but let's say it's like the 6th and the 8th, right? Like two similar cases come up through two separate sets of appeals courts. One appeals court says, Yes, the other appeals court says no, which establishes a split in the law, and then the court takes it up or the court can take it up to kind of resolve the split. And here it's what it seems like is that there are lawsuits brought in Louisiana and Texas and then in either one or both of those cases, probably just one.

Yeah, here it goes. The lawsuits were dismissed last year on the basis of a ruling by the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court, which covers Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. be, okay, I guess here, I guess here, ignore what I just said. I guess here it just went up into one circuit, but then the plaintiffs appealed the decision of the appeals court to the Supreme Court. Okay, so I want to highlight this because it's actually a good example of how basically Jim Crow voting systems persisted for much longer than I think people realize. So if you look at the actual syllabus for this case, which I brought up. It describes exactly what's happening.

The Louisiana Supreme Court consists of seven members, two of whom are elected at large from one multi-member district, but the remainder elected from single-member districts. Petitioners represent a class of black registered voters in Orleans Parish, which is the largest of the four parishes in the multi-member district and contains about half of the district's registered voters. Although more than one half of Orleans parishes, registered voters are black, over three force for the voters and the other three parishes are white. So what's happening here is that five of the Louisiana Supreme Court seats are chosen like a congressional seat. And so that set of voters just like in that district chooses that judge for justice. But for two of the

seats, they're in a single multi-member district consisting of four parishes. And basically it's impossible for the black registered voters in this district to elect a judge of their choice because there will always be outvoted by the other four, the other three parishes, which have majority white electorates. So it's like it's the plaintiff's argument is like, come on, this is very obvious. It's very obvious what's happening here, the creation of using at-large districts to dilute the voting power of black registered voters, which is a thing that was common in the Jim Crow South, along with other things. Georgia, you probably know, has runoff elections. If no candidate reaches 50%, those are runoff. And that is also designed basically as an obstacle towards the state's black voters. originally designed as an obstacle for the state of the black voters to elect a lawmaker of

their choice. Up until a couple of years ago, Mississippi had this frankly insane thing where in order to win the governorship, or I think any statewide election, you had to both win a majority of votes and a majority of counties. but because like the United States, most of the votes are in just like a handful of counties. Right. And if you were, say, the political party that black people support, the vast majority of your votes are going to be coming from just a handful of counties. It is essentially impossible for you to win a statewide office, even if you get the majority of votes. Yeah, it's like, it's basically like, um, it's basically like, um, it's essentially impossible for you to win a statewide office, even if you get the majority of votes.

Yeah, it's like, uh, it's basically like, um, if John C. Calhoun design the system. Right. Uh, so yeah, an example of how this stuff persists, and I should say to get on my, one of my hobby horses, when people talk about maintaining, like, the integrity of states to manage their political affairs, you got to keep this shit in mind, right? Like, the actual history of this country is that you give the states any legal, way in designing their electoral systems, they're going to do the craziest things you can imagine. Right. Yeah, it's just going to empower a local oligarchy. A bunch of fucking car dealers

and fast food franchises. We respect people in those professions if you happen to listen to the podcast. Not that there's anything wrong with those jobs. But, okay, so let's see, one more thing here, I think, looked good, or looked relevant. Berlin to regain full capital role, lawmakers vote to transfer government for Bonn. The German parliament voted by a narrow margin today. Oh, I didn't even know it was that margin, that narrow, margin today to move the seat of the federal government 359 miles eastward from Bond to Berlin, the country's historic capital. So, you know, Germany had just reunited. And Bonn was still the capital. of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The vote taken after nearly 12 hours of vigorous and often bitter debate was 337 for Berlin and 320 for Bonn, a small city on the Rhine that became West Germany's temporary capital in 1949, pretending eventual reunification with East Germany. Over the years, Bonn increasingly took on the look of a permanent capital as its bureaucracy grew and hopes for unification faded. But after the sudden collapse of East Germany's hardline communist government in 1989 and the unification of Germany last October, the question of whether to move the seat of power became a major issue, even though the treaty joining the two Germany's had officially restored Berlin status

as the capital. So that's interesting. Given the huge expenses of ownership, the seat of government, the resolution approved today gives the German leaders 12 years to make Berlin and fully functioning center of power. Care was also taken not to unduly upset those who campaigned to keep the government in bond. Interesting. Didn't know. Really would be strange if the capital of Germany was still bond, but it doesn't feel right.

But yeah, the Cold War is just really ending now. Yeah, I think that's pretty much it for the news that we like to talk about. I guess one just at the bottom, Dinkin said crack down on guns in public housing. Yeah. Just. Well, this was a very bad crime time in New York City. Dinkins was New York's first black mayor. He promised to be very tough on crime.

crime and he did, he hired more cops, which was politically controversial because there wasn't a lot of money left in the city at the time. He introduced some community policing initiatives. Actually, crime, I mean, which was very bad, did start to fall. He didn't really get any credit for that. And the police, he had very bad struggles with the police union who actually rioted and tried to storm City Hall while he was. was mayor. But you can read all about that in my book. But yes, this was a very seriously bad time for crime in New York City. There was a lot of police corruption as well, a big scandal of a police officer who was actually kind of running a protection racket for drug dealers and helping them out and so on and so forth. So that's going on in New York City. Yep. All right. Some background on The Rocketeer, as I mentioned at the top, the Rocketeer was originally a comic created by a writer and artist Dave Stevens and first released in 1982. So it's, by the point, by the time a movie comes up, the comics, almost a decade old, the film rights were purchased almost immediately.

They elapsed after the original purchaser was just sort of like not doing what, or they didn't lapse, but Stevens got them back after he was unhappy with what the original producer. was trying to do. And him and a team, a couple years after that, begin trying to sell or pitch the film to studios because they all think that this is very, very clearly something that can be filmed. The problem was that most studios in about 1886 weren't especially interested in a 1930s superhero period piece. You got to remember, this is all pre-Batman. And Batman is one, of those movies that really does change Hollywood in a big way. And one of the near-term impacts of Batman is that it just created the space for superhero films, for better for worse, looking back, but also for period pieces. And you have a lot of these things come out after

89. I think Dick Tracy comes at around the same time, too, and is not as, I mean, it's popular, but it's not as big as Batman, but still also does this, has this effect. And so you have like the shadow and the phantom. And you have a bunch of these things come out in the early 90s. But anyway, no one's really interested except for Disney. And Disney picks up, I think they're under Jeffrey Katzenberg at the time. And Disney begins developing the project in 1987. It was apparently a very arduous writing and development process with Disney, like, constantly

making rewrites and changing things. And Stevens at all not being very happy about it. but they finished writing it they hire johnston as director johnson who had done lots of work on sci-fi or rather on effects heavy sci-fi pictures and worked on star wars and worked on a bunch of stuff a guy who just been around um that world and they start filming or they start pre-production in early 1990 and start filming soon after the budget was originally said at 25 million dollars uh but it kind of balloons at 35 million in part because Disney was like, oh, we like what we're seeing.

We think this is great. We think this is going to be a big hit. And so they really start, like, throwing lots of money at the whole thing. They're using period, correct planes. We're using old World War II runways. They're, you know, some of the effects, the big Zeppelin explosion, they're spending a ton of money on it. I think that one effect costs, I mean, like, $400,000. So just like they're spending real money on this thing.

Unfortunately, although this was well received by critics, Audiences weren't that into it. They weren't really. You could speculate why I think part of it might have been like unfavorable comparisons to Indiana Jones, which is the last, or the then the third movie, at the time it was the last movie, the last crusade had come out either around the time or shortly before. And this is very, you know, 1930s period piece with Nazis.

It's very Indiana Jones in terms of its vibe. but it didn't it didn't it wasn't a flop it made it made back all of its money but for disney that's basically a flop that's that's not really even work doing so they canceled the sequel there was a video game i remember playing it super nintendo um and that was that was pretty much it for the rocketeer a couple years ago they released uh an uh an animated series based on it for little kids but the property which disney still owns his he still owns the right to the Rocketeer has been pretty dormant. I mentioned also at the top that Johnston, Joe Johnston, the director, did something similar with Captain America, the First Adventure. In that movie,

if you've never seen it, has like so much of the DNA of the Rocketeer in it. Also a 1930s, 40s period piece. They don't make direct references to Nazis, but the villains are basically Nazis. And all of the hallmarks of Johnston's kind of style in The Rocketeer, which is like very earnest and very, very fast paced, lots of, uh, kind of screwbally energy between the male and female leads, like all that stuff is in Captain America, the first Avenger. So I would say that if you like the Rocketeer, you should watch the first Avenger as well, which is probably like one of the few of the Marvel movies. It is like not just good for its genre, but like actually pretty good movie in its own right. Um, but as I was texting with John while I was watching

This movie also just has a ton to talk about that's relevant to this podcast. So how about you, you jump in, John? I love this movie as a kid. I don't think I saw us in theaters because I would have been like six when it came out, which might have been a little young. But we rented this movie all the time. I had a Rocketeer poster and I loved it. The art style is great.

The art style is great. I kind of want to get a poster for myself. Yeah. I mean, I was thinking like maybe I should just buy a Rocketeer poster again. But as you mentioned, there was a wave at this time period of kind of interest in both thematically, but also just stylistically, in Art Deco, in things from the 1930s, in, you know, like there was just a, in the look of film lore movies, there was an explosion of interest in that.

And Dick Tracy was part of that. The first Batman movie was a part of that. that the Batman cartoon, it was very strange in a way, but it seemed like I was already into that kind of stuff, I guess, but it, but it was very appealing to me as a kid who kind of was already interested in history and, you know, the World War II era and liked old-timey stuff. So all of this, these, these sort of kids shows that had like these 30s and 40s vibe, I just thought were the best and I couldn't get enough of them. And the Rocketeer was one of them. I think it was also particularly because I was sort of fascinated slash terrified of the Nazis

and World War II was a real preoccupation of mine as a kid. So anything that had anything to do with that, especially, you know, where they were the villains, I just loved. And I hadn't seen it in years. And it was a lot better even than I remembered it. I was like, this is just like a very well made fun movie. I was like, this is probably going to age pretty badly and be kind of corny in it. No, it's like I would, you know, like this, this, this is, this still seems like a pretty high quality flick. I mean, it's not like a, it's not an art house picture. It's a, it's a very much a Hollywood movie. But as they go, a well made one. Um, yeah, I'll say, I think it's a, a, of, a very much. A good. I'll say, I think it's a a very well-made

Hollywood movie. It kind of does everything you want for a kind of like 10-pole Blackbuster to do, right? It's like it's exciting. It's visually. I mean, it's the flying sequences are genuinely very impressive. Yeah.

It's, they're exciting. They're impressive. The whole thing looks terrific. You have a lot of great performances. Alan Arkin is like perfectly cast and is delightful. We were both talking about Jennifer Connell. who plays the female lead, who looks incredible.

Like it looks sort of just like like a classic movie star and is very good in the film. Billy Campbell, who doesn't have like a big career after this, is still quite good. And he like has the right energy for the role. I mean,

it's Paul Serbino is great. Well, he looks like a, Billy Campbell looks like a leading man from that area. He looks like a Alan Ladd or something like that. Right. You know, you could imagine him in a movie film.

from that time. Right. Tall, broad shoulders. Right. Yeah. Um, so yeah. And it's like, you know, you, you watch this today. You watch this and you compare it to most of the blockbuster is out today. And you're like, oh, this is both a movie that kids will obviously love and enjoy. Like, I'm half tempted to show it to my four year old, who I think would just get an absolute kick out of all the flying. Um, but, uh, you know, there's a, there's this a legitimate romance subplot. There's sort of like kind of adult conversations. Like it's not, there aren't, you know, silly quips in like 80-yard lines for kids.

Like, whatever humor is in the film, growth comes naturally out of the interactions between the characters. It's a, it's what they call a four quadrant picture. Like, it hits every note that you wanted to hit. And it's why critics, like I said earlier, were very favorable to the film. Even if they were like, you know, there was some plot. stuff that doesn't, doesn't quite hold up. The whole thing taken as a whole is great.

I'm just trying to situate the movie in its historical moment a little bit. Like, in terms of the style and the themes, I guess you can call it a postmodern movie in the sense that postmodernist works often are like pastiches and omages to previous eras of art. They're not fixated on being contemporary, like modernist works. So there's lots of, like, when you watch the movie and you're familiar with old Hollywood, there's lots of things you're like, have I seen? There's like a weird sense where you're, where often you get this also from watching

Cohen Brothers movies, which make an enormous amount of, you know, affectionate references and homages to classic films where I'm like, I think I've seen this in an old movie. And you get that feeling very much that there's lots of tropes, lots of cliches, lots of cliché, reference, but in a way that feels extremely fun and makes it satisfying to me, at least. There's no other references even to old Hollywood, like, well, the villain played by Timothy Dalton, who turns out to be a Nazi spy, is sort of like Nazi Errol Flynn, I guess, and a character plays Clark Gable in the movie. W.C. Fields, like, comes over to their table at one point in the movie. I mean, these are references that probably like even the parent, well, the parents

of kids at the time would have been able to appreciate. But, you know, nowadays, I think, would be totally law. Even Howard Hughes is in the movie. There's lots of historical figures in the movie. Howard Hughes is in the movie, which adds just kind of whole comic booky pastiche of reality and fantasy. I think a lot of these references would, and I'm very sad to see this, both on its general cliche and trope level, but also on its.

actual historical reference level, I think would be kind of lost on audiences, sadly enough, except for sickos like me and you who love this kind of shit. And we're like, oh, my God, did you see the part where it's got WC Fields in it? Like, but like the, so there's that. Oh, another reference of the time of this kind of style of retrofuturistic kind of stuff is duct tales, that show that came out. And also. tailspin. Oh, yeah, I'm sorry, tailspin. That's when I was thinking up.

Tailspin and Porco Rosso, the Hio Miyazaki movie. So what to make of the more political or ideological things going on in the movie, if we can identify them. Yeah. So the part, what happens in the movie real quick is that it begins, I mean, it begins, you see Campbell's character in flight. establishing as a pilot and everything, you meet kind of all the cast of characters at the aviation field. But the plot is sparked when some thieves who have some secretive, you know, device are chased by the FBI into the airfield, into that area. And one of them, the surviving one, tosses a package into a plane and then sort of gets arrested. He's injured, he's arrested. And later, Campbell, his character, an Arkansas character, find it.

And they discover it's a jet pack. It's a rocket pack that enables a person to fly. And so they are, they have it. We, the audience, find out that this is owned by the feds, developed by, developed in some way by the federal government. And some mobsters are trying to steal it for the villain of the film who's played by Timothy Dalton, who's playing kind of a vain superstar. actor model off of Arrow Flynn, which is apparent when we see him acting kind of a swast buckling pictures, a very Arrow Flynn kind of thing. And as the film goes on, as sort of like the chase for the rocket pack heats up. Campbell uses it to save a friend of his during an

aviation show. This tips off the mob and the feds. And Dalton's character as to where it is and who has it, and as the chase heats up, as people get killed in the attempt to get this thing, we discover that what's actually happening here is that the jetpack was produced by Howard Hughes and attempt to beat the Nazis who are trying to develop something similar in that the Nazi one that wasn't working. His does. And a Nazi agent in the United States is trying to get it to use to send back. to Germany, so they can have a bunch of, you know, flying troops to, to invade the United States. Timothy Dalton's character is that Nazi agent, high in Hollywood society. And the kind of the big conclusion in the film is like a confrontation between the mobsters, the FBI, and Howard Hughes, and the Germans who show up in a big Zeppelin. flying very silly a big zeppelin that has been it's cover being a diplomatic trip across the united states ending in los angeles and then they fight it out for the jet pack and so you know

when i was watching this my my immediate my immediate thought went to sort of the activities of nazis in the united states um in the lead up to american involvement in the second world war First of all, there were Nazi plots in the United States. There were lots of sympathizers. There were organizations that were openly pro-Nazi in the U.S. that kind of went underground or kind of tried to meld with more respectable or mainstream groups eventually as we got closer to war. And there was also, it has to be admitted, a good deal of paranoia and fear, I think, probably correctly felt about Nazism. To the point which some historians talk about there being a brown scare in the 30s, like there was a red scare in the 20s and again in the 50s, that there were a national fixation with uncovering Nazi age.

with and a lot of people who were isolationists or didn't want the U.S. to join, you know, the European conflict, thought that this was a, you know, often they had their own conspiracy theory, which was a communist run, Jewish communist run endeavor to smear them, which, which sounds a little bit Nazi in its own way. But a lot of people believe these things. I mean, what's interesting is Charles Lindberg, the flyer who actually has a weird cameo in the movie because they take a, they strap, I don't know what to even make of this symbol. When they're testing out the rocket, they cut down a statue of Charles Lindberg and they strap the rocket to him in order to test it. Lindberg was, you know, part of the America First Committee, which was committed to keeping

America out of the war and, you know, had made anti-Semitic remarks and his speeches. And I think, I forget who it was, it may have been to Felix Frankfurter, FDR remarks. If something should happen to me tomorrow, I want you to know one thing. I'm absolutely convinced Lindberg is a Nazi. There's a reality of these things, but there was also a great. cultural atmosphere of fear and paranoia about the Nazis. I mean, and this was whipped up by people like Walter Winchell, who, you know, was a, was a, you know, a wonderful anti-fash, popular anti-fascist, unfortunately later used those same

talents during the Red Scare. And this movie sort of implicitly refers to this time and is sort of like, kind of of almost forgotten time in American, pre-war American history of the Brownscare. And, you know, there's a wonderful scene where they show a German propaganda movie they found about America being taken over by these rocket troopers, which is interesting because I don't think that they would show swastikas so liberally in a Disney movie these days. So, yeah, it recalls in that way it also recalls a kind of lost world or for, forgotten world of, you know, America cultural anxieties or preoccupations. And it also, you know, talking about tropes and half-forgotten images or whatever. I mean, the ending is reminiscent of the Hindenburg disaster because this big Nazi blimp, big Nazi zepplin explodes, except in this

case, it's a good thing. It's not some kind of horrible humanitarian disaster. The bad guys blimp explodes. And it ends up destroying part of the Hollywood sign that used to say Hollywood land, which is interesting. It's almost like this is like commencing the modern era. Yeah. So, yeah, I think that it's interesting that at the end of the Cold War, we see a lot of nostalgia in films for the previous dispensation and nostalgia for an anti-fascist America. And we see this a lot. You know, we see it in Indiana Jones, which date back to the 80s, but, you know, we're at the beginning of this.

We see it to a degree also dating back to Star Wars. And, you know, this was something that people that had liberal sympathies or maybe were Jewish. Hollywood could, you know, get behind. And conservatives, of course, you know, didn't, you know, don't like Nazis either. So, you know, it was a, it was a convenient villain. But it's interesting that it kind of like is a is a, is a callback to a America that felt very confident about its role in the world for good. And the movie sort of, you know, shows the good guys all coming together to defeat the Nazis as we all know that we can and it's interesting that this happens right at the end of the cult this movie comes right at the end of the

cold war i think you know recognizing that we have the emergence of this 1930s revivalism right in the 80s yeah into the early 90s we can't get into the minds of people behind this part of this is undoubtedly the fact that you have a class of executives and creators and such who are just remembering the stuff from their childhoods. You mentioned Star Wars. You know, Star Wars is a pastise of Flask Gordon, of World War II pictures of all these things, clearly just like the ephemera of George Lucas's childhood. Same with Indiana Jones. And yet, it is interesting that as we are leaving a decade of just unbridled individualism, And we are seeing the end of or the slow and then rapid collapse of the Soviet Union.

There is this burst of nostalgia for the 1930s for its aesthetic. And as this movie, I think, makes clear maybe some of its politics, a sense of unity among the country, of collective effort, of clear lines of right and wrong and good and evil and heroes and villains. Yes, absolutely. And, you know, villains, we could all agree. There's a wonderful scene in the movie that we were joking and laughing about, which was, you know, like the, when the mobster finds out that he's working for a Nazi agent. What is the line? It's so good. He says, you know, yeah, Paul Servino. He says, I may not earn an honest living, but I'm 100% American. Right. You know, and then he, and then he turns and the gangsters join the FBI guys and it's all American. It was like, this. such a funny vision of being like the gangsters like just all the Americans are on one side and we're fighting the the Nazis right and notably right like the the mobsters are very they're I mean it's Paul Sorvino from from from Goodfellas right momsters are coded as like Italian Italian Americans yeah and the FBI characters are all kind of like G men right like wasp G men um sort of in micro in microcosm the kind of

assimilation into the mainstream right that happens in real life during the second world war happens but this little these true groups joining forces to to stop nazis notably it's i mean i don't necessarily have anything an analysis here but like there are no black people in this country no i was thinking about that too it's pretty white i think that that's pretty much like first of all an artifact of its time, but definitely, you know, the downside of this nostalgia of this nostalgia is often, you know, for a world of cinema and culture that was really, really white. And, you know, that's definitely, they couldn't even stick one character in, you know. Right.

Yeah. I mean, you know, Los Angeles was already becoming, you know, a diversity. at this point so there's not really much excuse yes you have i mean the war american involvement and this is the movie takes place in 1939 so i think len lease is still is is happening or beginning to happen right um but the domestic uh manufacturing you know war materials manufacturing industry isn't isn't ramping up the way it would once the united states formally enters the war but you do still have you the the previous wave from the first great migration you have you have African Americans to Los Angeles.

Over the course of the 40s, you would see, right, sort of like a serious migration of African Americans from Mississippi, from Alabama, kind of from the western part of the south to Los Angeles, a movie we may cover later. Who are often in the aviation industry. Right. Who are often in aviation industry. A movie that we may cover in the future, maybe cover specifically just to talk about this, devil in a blue dress.

I love that movie. Yes. A phenomenal movie. It takes place in the early 1950s. its hero, Easy Rollins, is a laid-off aviation factory war. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who comes there because of the war. So, you know, the, it's not as if there are, there are no African-American to Los Angeles in this period.

But I think it speaks to how this film is like nostalgia pastiche that like it's, there, there's no, there's no room for African-Americans in this, this, this vision. of the of the of the of the kind of the the popular front that it proposes is kind of a grim one because it's like normal white people uh the FBI the mafia and big business you know like it's like a big a big capitalist and Howard Hughes and these are the people who will save the save the and I kind of you know this they suck small business owners of this airplane um so yeah it's the the policy i wouldn't you know the politics are not progressive exactly yeah they're not they're not progressive but they they speak to they speak to something that was that was for beginning to you know fracture in the in the 90s with the end of the

cold war which is just um a kind of like mainstream consensus about basic values right the The reason, I mean, the great example of this is basically how civil rights law happened, right? Like, the reason you can have a bunch of conservative Democrats, not in, and some of them, actually, southerners, very few, but a handful, conservative Democrats, some conservative Republicans join with a bunch of liberals and civil rights activists to pass civil rights legislation was in part because of a sense that, you know, in international competition with the straight, of a union, we have to actually demonstrate our values in the law. And there's some interest, there's foreign policy and the domestic policy interest conversion to use a term from legal academia. This isn't the same as that, but it's sort of, it's that kind of willingness to

act on or agree on a certain set of values about patriotism and demise. and whatever, so and so forth, you know, we've talked about this before, the end of the Cold War, the early 90s is when it really begins to, like, visibly deteriorate. You wrote recently about Pap Buchanan on his retirement from being, I guess, like, a writer. But Pat Buchanan, you know, is kind of the herald of a shift in domestic politics. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly. I mean, like, this is, we're talking about what my book.

about essentially right now. So like what you're talking about, what I'm talking about, I've called like previously anti-fascist hegemony, which is like a period in which in order to fight the war and to prevent their being a fascist America, we organized the society a certain way. We put certain values as our highest ones and, you know, made certain priorities. room, obviously, for changes and for dissent and within that structure, but that structure kind of created a certain world, and then that world has kind of broke down. And I think, you know, basically we're just kind of living in the aftermath of it. Obviously, it was not perfect.

But it did allow for certain things, which I believe are, you know, basically some of the greatest things in American history, like the New Deal, the civil rights movement, you know, a relatively prosperous life for many Americans, you know, the beginning of the government actually caring whether or not children, well, these things started earlier, but really the consummation of caring what kind of foods people ate and, you know, whether children should work in mines and all this sort of stuff. You know, the children yearn for the minds. Yes, yes. And caring about, you know, organized labor. And there's always been a section of the right, the America First right, which I think is what's reasserted itself in recent years,

that was sympathetic to fascism in Europe and did not share and always hated the Rooseveltian vision of the New Deal. And this movie, for all of its faults, is still, you know, a product of that consensus, which I think was a good one. I think there are many people who would disagree with me or say, oh, well, there were many, many problems with it. I don't doubt it. But I'm saying, well, what we've produced since also has been pretty unsatisfactory, in my opinion, I think is also, look, there's a degree I have to be honest with myself here. There is a degree of nostalgia here and that this, that was communicated to me by movies like this. It was sort of propaganda. What's so interesting about this movie and movies like it is how like the propaganda of another time.

kind of applied to a period where it just didn't, it became pure fantasy and it didn't have as much political relevance. You know what I mean? Like this, it's like, oh, well, at one time, all the themes and tropes in this movie would have had like a direct political meaning that was legible. And as a kid, I was just like, well, this vaguely seems like what's right to me, not like, oh, I know exactly. Yeah. And I think that, yeah, so I'm very much a product. And I think you are, as I know you are, of films like this. And that definitely constructs the way I view the world. So I wouldn't say, I mean, if I was going to do a very harsh critique of myself,

you know, I might say, well, you know, the problem with my whole way I'm constructing the history of American politics and my whole critique of the right today is because I watched The Rocketeer too many times again. But like, you know, but I do. believe, I mean, I can't really get around it. I mean, you can say that, but I just, I just honestly believe that this is the better side of America that's possible. We saw a better side of America that's possible. These are the sort of artifacts and offshoots of that. And it's a world that, you know, we're departing or maybe recovering. I don't know, but, but, uh, it's very uncomfortable

in many ways. No, it's, I mean, I don't think, so two things. The first thing, to the latter part. I don't think necessarily that we're departing, but that this vision of America is an active competition with another vision in a way that it just wasn't, right? That it just wasn't before. Right, right. It was dominant and hegemonic. Yeah. Right. The other thing is I would agree. I did not see the rocketeer as a kid, but certainly my pop cultural life and just like my cultural life was, uh, was suffused with sort of the legacy of this era of the United States. In my case, in particular, it's just sort of like in, you know, the constant, um, uh, exposure to sort of like the civil rights movement that like was part of my education. And I think, I mean,

I think you can make a case, right, that sort of, um, the, the adults, adults today, kids of the 90s and of the early really kids of the 90s pre 9-11 childhoods are kind of like the last group of kids that got this you know explicitly multicultural explicitly multicultural but sort of like also very kind of patriotic sort of education about the United States in a way that does like shape our political horizon so I No, no, no accident that the candidate that emerges basically concurrent with millennials entering the electorate is Barack Obama, who kind of embodies that. And for as much as in the post-O Obama years, like there's been lots of political change, lots of political turmoil even. And people's political visions have diverged or move away from that.

way or another, I do think it shapes in a very, like, important and an escapable way, like, how many, many people of our rough age kind of like understand what is good and laudatory about the United States. Yeah, I think you're right about Obama's candidacy coming at the right time because it was kind of idealistic last gasp, or not last gasp of this idealistic liberalism. Ah, here's my other thought. In a way, though, like we, there is lots of 30s, there's, we're in a 30s throwback period of our own in the sense that, you know, there's interest in a lot of things that feel, um, among young people, especially that feel a little out of time. Um, you know, when I was young, I was always interested in in socialism, you know, or I got interested in socialism. And I was always treated, told, oh, this is from another time. This is a total throwback. No, everybody's a socialist, you know, or a lot of, yeah. And so I was like, oh, this is just become so big.

And the same thing, unfortunately, with fascism. But these things, these older ways of conceiving of the world, as you mentioned earlier, as collective projects or just differing ideas of collective projects, this kind of nationalism, kind of right-wing nationalism, which reveres into fascism at times. And socialism, you know, suddenly. becoming a real topic of interest among young people again. And the fact that, you know, concerns over fascism are so central to our political imagination in the present, you know,

I'm not sure what if it shows that the conditions are the same, I mean, or that it shows that we're yearning for coordinates and the past seems to offer something that, um, that that that's more solid or, you know, gives a direction at least than what we've been able to come up with since. No, I think, I think it's very much the letter. Let me also say that I do, I do remember very distinctly being like a high schooler and, you know, reading, like, you know, reading a copy of the Communist Manifesto in class, you know, before class and people being like, what, what?

Right, exactly. It was just something so out of time. It wasn't even like, oh, my God, your economy. It was like, it's very weird. Silly and weird. Yeah. But, no, I think it's people. I think there's a, there's a, it's two things.

The first is that there is, people are looking for a response to real problems, but they perceive as being real problems, right? Sort of like the experience of the great recession, of the slow recovery from that, of like all kinds of economic catastrophe. and insane inequality of the past decade has like did has reinvigorated right like a socialist critique of the american economy um and slowly but surely reinvigorating a slow socialist critique of american democracy of sort of like what the actual scope of u.s democracy is and that on the flip side a sense that there's a lack of cultural cohesion in the united states a sense that there is

you know, the U.S. no longer has a kind of unified identity, I think it's like motivating the upsurge in nationalism, even among some young people, right? Like, it doesn't, you don't have to spend that long on TikTok to get the sort of like reactionary 18-year-old TikTok of people basically, you know, being like, you know, in so many words, America was better when they were like fewer brown people or at least when there was like when they were when they were when they were in a subordinate place right or perceived to be some sort of unified um culture and so i think i think people are looking to the past um and even kind of the aesthetics of the past uh for um for for guidance i also think to a certain extent that just like there are only so many you know

There are only so many new ideas under the sun. Yeah. And even if there weren't any kind of nostalgia, I think it would just be the case that what's that Mark's line about all of us sort of like living under the ideas of all the past generations pressed down on the brains of the living that all that one. And there's also we live under, I mean, I should be able to say this for me. them we live under we're fuck something like we make history but we don't not the conditions right it's yeah it's the first the first one yeah yeah uh which i can never remember because my copy of the 18th premiere which is what i think it's from is like an old translation and so it just that the language is weird and i know that anyway um but yes that we're all kind of like

laboring under the traditions of dead generations all generation weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living right yeah and so uh that's all to say that i think there's a great deal of that as well that some of this is just like an unescapable part of how like human societies work we're always sort of like reaching back um to traditions right yeah i agree okay i think it's time to wrap up Okay. I mean, there's not much, we always, like, say what we've thought about the film in total. But, I mean, the Rocketeer, it fucking rules, people. Just watch the Rocketeer.

It's great. You're going to love it. It's a lot of fun. And it ends with a bunch of Nazis getting shot up. Like, what better way to, it ends, whatever, it's a 30-year-old movie. You can't spoil it. It ends with Nazi Timothy Dalton. falling out of a Zeppelin and exploding.

What better way to end a movie? Really can't beat it. Can't beat it. 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 podcast are found.

If you subscribe, please leave a rating and a review. It does help people find the show. And you can reach out to us on Twitter. The podcast, Twitter account is at Unclear Pod. I am at Jay Bowie, although my tweeting has really declined as of late and John you are I'm at Lionel underscore trolling maybe the quality of my tweeting has declined as of late but not the volume for this week in feedback we have an email from Peter title without warning versus

World War hi Jamel and John it always such a treat with a new pot or Patreon episode drops thanks so much for the it's funny insight of conversation which have also introduced me to some movies. I never have otherwise sought out to hello deep cover. And thank you for the kind words, Peter. In your discussion of without warning, you noted a common presumption of 90s alien and asteroid flakes that a global faith, a global, a global, a global threat in space would quickly rally the world around American leadership. Before I get into the rest of this email, I feel like we have to say that the recent balloon thing. Oh, yeah. I was, I was thinking about our podcast. Our podcast was like weirdly prescient. Yeah.

there's a there's been this um i can't tell the extent to which it's a serious or like joking hysteria about aliens yeah aliens initially there's the chinese spy balloon which i'll say i was like the weekend that had this happened i was like deep in the weeds with my kids so i had i was just like not aware of the world outside of you know two screaming young children and so when someone asked me i was in an arbor and someone asked me what do you think about the balloon? I was like, what are you talking about? Like, I don't, I don't understand this question.

And then learned about the high altitude balloon. But then there's been, the U.S. military has shot down other objects in the U.S. airspace. And so now there's lots of like, are we shooting down alien aircraft? Right. You know, what have you? No. The answer is no. The answer is no. But there you go.

So if you want to know how serious people are, I got to tell you, and I don't think they listen to this podcast, but I have friends who seriously believe that they're aliens, and we're very concerned. And I don't know, this is my nutty friends, but these are like, these are bright people, presumably. Anyway, yeah. I'm of the opinion that the odds that there's extraterrestrial life is probably pretty decent, it's big universe, but also that there is.

no way anything can reach anyone no it's too far exactly you're right that's that's it that's the that's the whole that's the long and the short of it yeah there's just it's it's the distances are impossible um and so uh you know that's that's that's the way it is or maybe there's i'm also willing to entertain that there's just no extraterrestrial life that just like we are a weird fucking you know i think that that's less likely than there are either universe is so huge first of all it's probable that civilizations could have come and gone, you know, in the millions and billions of years. It's also probable to me that there are many, many, many worlds with different forms of life on them, just based on the size of the universe. But yeah, exactly. My whole

point is just not possible to travel the distances between these things. And any society that was able to actually travel those sorts of distances, I don't think it's just going to be recognizable to us at all like just straight up no they would probably just be not material yeah yeah um okay so peter says this made me think of harry turtle dove's world war series of sci-fi old history novels published in the 90s in which an alien invasion force arrives in earth orbit in early 1942 with war war two in full swing another parenthetical here this is a good email and sparking lots of thoughts have you read any hairy turtle dove no But I know that I've read, you know, it's really funny.

I've read a bunch of his, about a bunch of his novels on Wikipedia for whatever reason. Like his book were like brought AK-47s to the south or something like that. Right. Yeah. I'm familiar with the books where the Confederacy wins. Yeah. Which eventually end with basically World War I happening in the United States.

And then like they're being basically sort of like a Nazi-style genocide of black American. in the South a few decades afterwards. Very strange novels. Turtle Dove doesn't think any of this is good, but this is sort of like his alt history of what happens if the Confederacy wins. Okay, so the aliens, a hierarchical race of risk-averse lizards, are shocked that the agrarian societies, their probes that adverbs in the 12th century have industrialized in the span of just a few hundred years,

their attempt to subjugate a world fully mobilized for mechanized warfare quickly hardens into an asymmetric conflict. Our weapons technology is less sophisticated, but we are quicker to adapt and innovate and have deeper reserves of men and material. And as the Soviets, the Nazis, and the U.S., each acquire atomic weapons, we prove more willing to use them even against our own occupied cities than do the aliens built on colonization. Did I actually read these novels, pulled from my dad's shelf? No. Turtle's battlefield procedural writing isn't bad, but a little tank warfare goes a long way for me.

But I'd often flip through the books fascinated by the contours of the alt history, and I'd never thought until now about how the multipolar moment in which Turtle Dove sets the novels can be read as a corrective to the movies coming out around the same time. The Axis and the Allies ceased direct hostilities in the face of the invasion, but they hoard their technology and intelligence and continue to maneuver for military and diplomatic advantage. through to an armistice with the aliens and into an ulcerate Cold War. In short, an existential crisis for humanity doesn't suspend great power competition. Instead, nations look for opportunities to disadvantage each other in a common struggle and to emerge from the crisis in the dominant position. There are some twisty, real politic ideas in the books, e.g. the Polish-J. the Polish-Jewish resistance enters an alliance of convenience with the aliens against both the Nazis and the Soviets.

But there are also books for Molotov and Rippantrop, propound Nazi racial theories, Marxist Lenin, this historical determinism at the muse space lizards by trying not to throw up in zero gravity. That is to say, they're as fun as can be for books where Chicago gets nuked. The other threat from space property, the other threat from space property your episode brought to mind is Dennis Villeneuve's arrival. Villeneuve emphasized the humanity's response to aliens materializing above our cities. It's extremely multilateral at first, the ticking fuse of the plot is that the fracturing of the, it's a fracturing of the coalition. It's odd to say in such a visually beautiful movie, but the moment that hit to be hardest is when the scientist video conference line begins to go dark, square by square, as nations cut off their lines of communication and retreat into isolation. Considered in comparison to its 90s alien movie predecessors, arrivals framing feels very of a piece with its Obama era leading from behind moment. And thanks again for the hours of having listening and hope the podcast continues on to the actual end of history. Peter, thank you, Peter, for a terrific email.

And I'll say real quick, John, didn't you kind of make this point on Twitter? Yeah, I made this point on Twitter and people point. I had never read the Harry. Well, maybe I had read this, the Wikipedia article for this one a long time ago and forgot about it. I haven't read these books. And I made this point because everyone was talking about alien invasion. And I said, well, It's more likely that we would try to, you know, different nations would try to settle scores or use the chaos to, you know, to their advantage and form maybe form alliances with the aliens than unite in some kind of utopian project to defeat them. And people pointed out that Harry Turtle would have had written about this. But I think the reason why I said this was just based on observation of human history,

Because you can see this in histories of colonization, which is basically an invasion from another world where, you know, the local powers, you know, did not maybe had some sense that nothing would ever be the same, but they also kind of tried to adapt to it as a, you know, as a new part of their political equation being like, well, you know, we've always had a problem with these people. So we might as well ally with these new people to try to get rid of them. You know, you see this all a lot in early American history. Um, so yeah, that's what I was thinking of more of the history of, you know, colonization and, uh, imperialism than, you know, these turtled up books, which I'm sure he was pulling from too, you know, that, yeah, if most science fiction is really just like a recontextualization and things that actually have happened to humanity, then yeah, in real life, you know, the, the, the, a alien force arriving doesn't bring unity. It just brings, more of the same. Okay.

Episodes come out every other Friday. So we'll see you in two weeks with another film from earlier in our timeline. 1992 film Toys directed by Barry Levinson and starring Robin Williams.

I forgot to grab a plot summary, but it is about Robin Williams plays the brother of a guy owned a toy factory, he takes it over, and he's trying to maintain it against the will of another guy, another leader in the factory who wants to build drones, basically for the U.S. military war toys. Toys is impossible to find.

I just put on a, put a bid on a DVD on eBay. I'll get it from the New York Public Library. And then I will, if that doesn't work, I will just find it through. means. I'm not going to discuss on the air. Okay. Sounds good. Oh, I could do that too. So that's the next one. Don't worry about watching it if you can't find it. I think it'll be a fun conversation. And I may even spend more time on just a plot summary or just to help people since no one's going to have watched this one. Do not forget our Patreon. The most recent episode of our Patreon podcast and the movies of the Cold War is of the 1979.

That's being anastrama, The Human Factor, directed by Otto Preminger. It's a lot of fun. I enjoyed it. And I enjoyed our conversation. You can listen to that and much more at patreon.com slash unclear pod. It's just $5 a month and totally worth it. $5 a month for two episodes. So if you subscribe to the Patreon, you get an episode a week of this podcast.

And you're basically paying $1.25 overall an episode, but really $2.50 per episode for the for the Patreon one. So I think it's absolutely worth it. And every month, we pick someone to give a Blu-ray to. So there's a good chance that you end up getting, you end up getting paid for being part of the Patreon, which may not make the most financial sense, but it's something we wanted to do. So please sign up. Give it a shot. Our producer is Connor Lynch, and our artwork is from Rachel Eck. For John Gans, I'm Jamel Bowie, and this is unclear and present danger.

We'll see you next time. I don't know.