Unclear and Present Danger - Without Warning

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

In this week’s episode, Jamelle and John discuss “Without Warning,” a made-for-television science fiction film from 1994, produced as if it were an actual breaking news event, with “reports” from on-the-ground correspondents from around the world. They discuss the inspiration for this “docudrama” genre as well as the general wave of “asteroid attack” films in the 1990s. They also talk the psychology behind the idea that a global disaster would bring humanity together (under American leadership, of course).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.We’ll see you in two weeks with “The Rocketeer,” a science-fiction adventure film from 1991, directed by Joe Johnston and starring Billy Campbell and Jennifer Connelly. It’s available to rent on Amazon and iTunes and available on Disney Plus.

56 years ago tonight, America was shaken to its core by War of the Worlds. Orson Well's classic radio broadcast about an alien invasion of Earth from Mars. Many Americans believed visitors from outer space had actually landed and there was nationwide panic. It was the most startling radio broadcast of all time. On tonight's anniversary of War of the Worlds, CBS presents another story, perhaps as disturbing and equally alarming. What you are about to see is pure fiction. It is not actually happening,

but could events depicted in this special program someday take place? Judge for yourself. Without warning. Without warning, sponsored by Advil, Advanced Medicine for Pain. No non-prescription pain reliever has been proven more effective or longer lasting than Advil. Welcome to Unclear and Present Danger, a podcast about the political and military thrillers of the 1990s and what they say about the politics of that decade. Jamal Bowie. I'm a columnist for the New York Times opinion section. My name is John Gans. I write a substack newsletter called On Popular Front, and I'm working on

a book about American politics in the early 1990s. This week we are discussing without warning. I made for television science fiction film from 1994 produced as if it were an actual breaking news event with reports from on the ground correspondence from around the world. It was directed, this is interesting to me, by Robert Iscove, Iscove, I think it's how you say his name, otherwise known for the Freddie Prince Jr. and Rachel Lee Cook film, She's All That. Oh, really?

Which a movie I like. Yeah, it's not bad. It stars some actual news anchors, specifically Sander Van Oaker. And then also a bevy of character actors, including Jane Casmeric, who you'll recognize from the sitcom Malcolm in the middle, and Philip Baker Hall, who you'll recognize from a lot of things, and then some other real-life

people, including Arthur C. Clark, science fiction author. So a lot of familiar faces, a lot of character actors, and a lot of people for whom I hope, CBS, who produced the thing, gave them a good check. Here is a short plot synopsis in a simulated news broadcast, an enormous asteroid breaks apart and plunges to earth as the world watches the terrifying event live on television in this shocking, realistic science fiction drama. It's not that realistic. Without warning is available to rent on iTunes, but honestly, I wouldn't. Unless you're extremely bored.

Yeah, it's like 90 minutes, 87 minutes. It's like a curiosity if you're into sort of like, you know, 1990s docudrama kind of stuff. We've watched a few of them already. But I personally would not watch this and I would watch anything else. It aired on CBS Primetime, which is wild to think that this aired on primetime on on October 30th and 1994. So let's look at what the New York Times was saying that day.

Okay, Sunday, October 30th, 1994. or at gunman shoots at White House from sidewalk, windows are broken, but no one is hurt. Suspects seize. I remember this happening as a kid, just as a note. A 26-year-old Colorado man carrying a Chinese-made semi-automatic rifle sprayed the north face of the White House with a score or more of bullets today piercing both a window of the mansions remaining and the mansions. Oh, they're getting a little fancy here.

And their mansions remaining aura of invincibility, but injuring no one. It was a second uncontested attack on the executive mansion in less than six weeks, and it immediately raised a new question about the safety of a present living, not just in the midst of a major city, but barely 50 yards from its sixth lane main street. You know, when this happened when I was a kid, and I don't know if this says more about America or me being a screwed up kid, but I just wondered why it didn't happen more. You know, it was just like it was right there. I knew already at this young age of with the Kennedy assassination, I knew people

are mad at presidents. And I was wondering, well, why don't people just shoot at the White House? And I guess this answered my question. But yeah, do you remember this happening? I don't remember this happening at all. Yeah. But I've also always wondered why there wasn't more of this sort of thing, just like taking pot shots at the White House.

because all of the president is extraordinarily well protected I mean you know not that well protected I mean presidents in public all the time and it is

it does sort of surprise me that like more people don't take shots I've been I'm just so finished up with the big famous bio of Lincoln that came out 10 years ago or so

yeah it's very good but it does amuse me when it's just like talks about Abraham Lincoln kind of just like wandering around D.C., you know, Confederate Army is not that far away. No. Walking around D.C., there's no security

rides his horse over the, from the summer, during the summers from the soldiers home in Northwest. Yeah, Northwest. And down to the White House. And like that was, that like casual nature of

the president's relationship to the public was pretty much the norm, until until like relatively recently. Yeah. You could show up to the White House and get an audience with the president, which they show famously in the Lincoln movie. Right. That was, and it's weird because America was a pretty,

I mean, first of all, the civil war was going on, but America was a pretty violent place in the 19th century. I mean, there were lots of mobs and riots and people were shot all the time, but there was also a certain, there was less security, culture, I suppose you could call it. Yeah, so it's funny. The assassination of the president was deeply traumatic and upsetting and shocking to the nation, but political violence in the U.S. was not that uncommon. I mean, like in New York, every single election was just like a riot, essentially. Yeah. It was a total, total mess. And there were lots of people were killed every time

there was an election because there would be these fights between, you know, the people who were trying to rig the boat one way and the people are trying to rig the boat the other way. So we still live in, as we know, in a very violent country. But I think in the 19th century, the odds of just being a city dweller encountering a violent event on a day-to-day level, I think was much higher. Yeah, just if I were to make a distinction, I'd say, I mean, we, this country is probably less of violent than it was in the 19th century, but also the violence is much more. individualized. Whereas the 19th century, as you, as you said, really was a century of mob violence.

Yes. Mob violence directed both from mob to mob, mob, mob and individual. It was sort of like also people were like, well, that's democracy for you. Like that was just like it wasn't even that. I mean, I mean, a lot of people were horrified from it. But it was like almost, I remember when I was doing research about, you know, this riot and or place at the theater, and theater audiences were very rowdy at the time. And it was understood to be kind of free speech, right, of the, of the theater audience to like basically throw things and scream. And it was only when it got totally out of hand with this riot that people, like, realized, okay, we can't just let theater audiences, like, lose it all the time.

But it was a very, it was an understanding that, like, well, the people. it understood as like a kind of a core, a body, had some sort of right to express themselves and it could get pretty out of control before people decided to call in the militia, the National Guard. And then at that point, they shot people. But like, there was a very large purview for expression before it turned to, and, you know, before the state decided, okay, we got to get rid of, we got to clamp down on this. Right, right. Here's another interesting one, an old CIA plot cast a long shadow. In a small clandestine operation three decades ago, President Kennedy ordered the Central Intelligence Agency to dispose a leader of the

South American colony of British Guiana. The leader fell and the CIA quietly left town. The Cold War ended and with its and the opposed leader, Chetty Jagan, was elected president of Independent and Democratic Guyana. Although United States law says it's time to unseal the secret documents that detail Kennedy's plot against him, the State Department and CIA officials refused to release them, saying it is not worth the embarrassment by keeping secrets can cause embarrassment too. This year, I'm sorry, I'm making the time sound this way. I don't know what I'm doing this.

This is fun for me. This year, the Clinton administration prepared to send a new. ambassador to the little country, apparently unaware that the prospective nominee had helped to undermine the restored leader. That's amazing. I had no idea about this particular. I mean, we all know there were many such plots in the Cold War era, but I hadn't, I didn't know about the, the Gianna plot at all.

This is a fascinating story as I'm reading more into this article. But, yeah, I mean. there's probably stuff we still don't know about, that it was either too obscure, which hasn't been released, but pretty shocking stuff. And also, we've talked about this before. I'm a big detractor of the Kennedy cult, let's say, and the idea that Kennedy was some kind of victim of the national security states evil plotting. He was the author of the national security state's evil plotting, as I often like to point out.

So this is a reminder of that. Let's see what else. Black officers in INS push racial boundaries. Kellogg Wittick was the pioneer. The first black officer break into the senior ranks of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which is no longer called that, by the way. It's part of the Department of Homeland Security. It's called ICE Now. A Federal Agency notorious as a bastion for good old boys.

I guess that just means white people. I mean, yes, that's what it means. But I wonder who wrote this, because that's a very sort of like southern kind of thing. Deborah Sontag and Stephen Engelberg. I'm going to guess they're not from the south. But a good old boy is just sort of like, it's like a type you know, I don't know, you know when you see him. It was 1979 and Mr. Wittick got a rude welcome as the new district director. in Washington, INS employees smeared his car with X-Men. Jesus Christ. Mr. Wittick suffered this

hostility silently, hoping that he could carve a path through what he terms of service, blatant, invidious racism. But when he retired in 1983, is that what it says? Yes. And for another decade still, not a single black, that's how they write it, single black following him. Yeah, they didn't John. That isn't John. That's the article. They don't write that way anymore. I mean, I find this in old newspapers that they put it this way, but they don't so much into the agency's leadership. Even only one Black holds a senior post equal opportunity director at INS headquarters. Interesting. I mean, this is a story through law enforcement and federal bureaucracies and state and local bureaucracies in general

is the slow uphill battle that, you know, black officers have had to make through the ranks of it having to deal with harassment and so on and so forth. And, you know, it's obviously just the racism of the United States is a part of this. But there's a kind of political economy going on here. Of course, there's a political economy of racism in general. But these agencies and groups are felt to be kind of the preserve of certain groups and they're very paranoid hostile when they become integrated because they feel like, you know, this is our thing and what's going to happen to us? Like, are we going to get pushed out? So there's a kind of group interest that gets asserted that's, you know, as economic as much as it is just to do with, you know,

meanness. And that happened, happens on every level of the government as it becomes more integrated. Yeah. And I mean, I happen to think that the consistency of this and especially the consistency of it in law enforcement and security services actually provides insight into the nature of those services, right? So to me, it's no surprise that the Immigration and Naturalization Service, one of the services responsible for patrolling borders, for deporting, you know, quote unquote illegal aliens would be a service with sort of a service with sort of extreme and deep-seated racism. Yeah, that's not shocking at all. Yeah, it's not shocking at all. Just like given how immigration policy in the United States developed in the first place, we were talking about the 19th century just a minute ago, immigration, like actual immigration

restriction doesn't begin until the Chinese Exclusion Act, doesn't begin in earnest until the Chinese Exclusion Act. Like immigration enforcement has always been intensely racialized and structured in a lot of ways around the idea that was sort of like the closing of the frontier, there's no more need for people to come in. We can begin to sort of, we can begin to remove, either remove people who quote unquote should not be here or keep out and assorted groups of undesirables unless we need them for some specific purpose. And so this stuff is just like ingrained in the DNA of immigration enforcement in the same way that very much,

ingrained in the DNA of American policing, as we are reminded of on a regular basis, is a kind of racial antagonism. Anything else here looks interesting to you? Yeah, just as campaigns tenor disappoints black voters, we are, I want to say we're just like a couple days away on October 30th from the midterm elections, from the very consequential midterm elections that are about to come down. So this is just a dispatch on how black voters don't feel very mobilized. Philadelphia October 29th, T.J. Smith is a lifelong resident of West Philadelphia who eagerly voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, thinking a new administration to bring him a better job in a safer neighborhood.

But he's still doing odd jobs, and Mr. Smith now fears that he and his wife will be unable to provide properly for their first child due in May. disappointed in President Clinton and put off by hospital television commercials, which the statewide candidate seemed to talk about nothing but locking up criminals. Mr. Smith and his wife, Bernadette, said they would not vote this year. I'm not sure what black turnout looked like in the 94 midterm elections. I've never actually, surprisingly to myself, I've never actually looked into that. But it would not surprise me to learn that it declined. There's a general decline in turnout across elections in the middle of the 90s.

The 96th election, infamously, had the lowest turnout in decades. And, yeah, just interesting. Yeah, I mean, the fact that Republicans did so well, it wouldn't surprise me that there was a decline in black turnout. And, yeah, I think that has to do with, as this article hints out, the nature of Clinton's politics. Okay, so without warning, just some quick background, not really background on the broadcast itself because there actually isn't a ton to say there.

But I think it's worth talking about this kind of film without warning represents what was a whole genre of television entertainment that is kind of mostly disappeared in the modern era. On a pretty regular interval, networks used to not just air television movies, but these sort of special bulletin-style docu dramas designed as speculative fiction or meant to highlight some kind of issue. I've mentioned before that we've already watched a few. We watched by Don's Early Light, and I'm about a kind of fictional nuclear exchange from

the U.S. and the Soviet Union and China. We also watched one whose name I cannot recall about the assault on Waco, about the Waco, the assault on the brantivity and compound. So those are two we've already seen from the 80s for special bulletin and from 83 about a fictional nuclear terrorist attack in South Carolina. There's also Countdown to Looking Glass, a Canadian film from 84, also about nuclear exchanges. And then later in the 90s, there's World War III, a German pseudo-documentary.

But this was like a thing that networks did, in part because they were cheap, in part because they filled airtime. and audiences, you know, mostly like them. All of these are, of course, inspired by the 1938 broadcast of the War of the Worlds by Orson Welles, which if you've heard about this, you've heard that it frightened some listeners than thinking that there was an actual alien invasion. And without warning, the CBS specifically aired during its commercial breaks, like warnings to, viewers that this was a fictional program, not actual news. The fact that they used real anchors in some cases, I think made this even more pressing. And there were CBS affiliates and some pretty large markets, including Detroit and San Diego, who refused to air the program, which I

mentioned ran during primetime hours. So kind of, you know, you would have most people watching television and television on. And I have to assume these affiliates that there's a real chance that people would just kind of glance over and not realize that they were watching a movie and not an actual broadcast about asteroid striking the Earth because, you know, in part, fear of asteroid striking the Earth. There's like a real thing in the 90s, something that was very much like in the air, and we can talk about that. This movie, what to make of it, if you can even call it a movie.

Maybe I don't know if it's the most post-Cold War of all the movies we watch, but in a way, it's a big repository of a lot of the themes that we discuss regularly on this show. I mean, there's a sudden threat to the world, but it's not the Cold War. It's not the Russians, not the Soviet Union. It's this kind of, first of all, seems like a natural disaster. and then it turns out to be, you guessed it, an alien invasion of some kind. It's not clear to me. I don't know if this is because I wasn't being particularly attentive, whether or not they intended to invade or we picked a fight with them.

Did you get the clarity about that? I think the implication is that they did not intend to invade because they initially landed in unpopulated areas and the survivors were repeating. the message from the UN Secretary General, which, I mean, kind of, I mean, how would they know that that's a peaceful message, like whatever? But, well, they also crashed into us pretty hard. So I don't really blame us for thinking that they were hostile. Right. So essentially what happens in the movie is there are three asteroid impacts, one in China, one in the U.S., one in Russia. And they're terribly destructive. And scientists noticed that,

They should come in like a very precise geometric pattern. And so they notice a second asteroid coming in, second set of fragments. And so they blow them up with some nukes. And it is after this that it becomes apparent to some people that this initially was a peaceful contact now. It is a hostile one. And this kind of frames the rest of the movie where. Another round of asteroids isn't coming. They're blown up.

And then it ends with basically sort of like a barrage of asteroids that destroyed the planet. Yeah, but I think that because they initially crash and it looks pretty violent that, as I was saying, somewhat of a militarized response is understandable. But I guess the movie implies that we overreacted or the militaristic nature of humanity is to blame. On the other hand, it kind of presents the scientists who saying, like, oh, they're reaching as a piece as kind of like an annoying liberal whiner. Yeah, yeah. So he's very much presented as like a lib. Yeah.

And so it's not, and it's, it's not really clear. I don't maybe intentionally not really clear what's, it's sort of, I guess, trying to show what realistically might happen in this circumstance. What's funny to me is, I mean, it's dated on many levels. But the idea of the TV news as being like the source of information and the constant source of information during this, which was a matter, of course, and it now seems so quaint, you know, this would all play out now on social media, obviously on cable news, but these sort of authoritative network television anchors as being, you know, the deliver of solemn news, this is something that's sort of in the past, not the way most people get information. news or think about the world anymore. So this being like the mediating, the media, the prime media of experience is sort of funny and feels more and more old fashion.

Yeah. So that's another reflection on watching this and how kind of data this now seems. We use nuclear weapons to fight back against these things, which I think is the hope sort of that we could find. well, constructive use or use that's not against each other. And there's something of the kind of utopianism that later comes out in Independence Day where the appearance of an alien threat makes it that the world becomes united against an enemy so that we can extend the logic of war in enmity, but not amongst each other.

That will bring humanity together, which is sort of a sad utopian. to believe that only a war against an alien species is what could end internal conflicts on planet Earth, but is a constant theme in science fiction, especially in the post-Cold World, post-Cold War era. Although I think there are some things from the Cold War era that kind of like suppose a Soviet U.S. alliance and some kind of threat, I can't think of it off the top of my head, but I remember things like that. The acting in this movie is really unbearably bad at its points. It's almost like a parody of itself and the sententious tone of the anchors and the human interest story. So it's almost like there's something almost like Mike Judge, you know, Beavis and Butthead parody of the news of the era about it, which I don't think it was intentional, but I would made me laugh from time to time, especially. because they keep on trotting out these sort of like quotations, these like cliches that have nothing to do with the subject matter. Like, well, he who forgets history is, is doomed to repeat it

and shit like that. It's just like, it has nothing to do with guts going on. Yeah, there's one moment when it's like one of the anchors is like, you know, we're all about to be wiped out. And now to our human interest story. Like now, to Little Susie. Yeah, exactly. Which, I mean, I guess it's sort of like, if you were writing a satire of the news. Oh, I guess we have to talk about that movie now with the asteroids. Armageddon?

I mean, there's Armageddon, which came out later, which will definitely do. But the new one. The new one. Don't look up, right? Oh, I guess we do have to talk about don't look up. Because that's, that's sort of, that was. it's not a fake documentary, but it's the theme is the opposite. It's like, well, if there was an asteroid heading towards Earth, and we wouldn't take it seriously, which is supposed to be

an allegory for climate change. Climate change. And it was made by that guy. Adam McKay. Yeah, not him. The other, it was written by that guy from the Bernie campaign. Oh, David Sarota. She's a real schmuck. Yeah. And that idea was at the U.S., you know, the astro, I guess asteroid heading towards Earth is sort of a stand-in for the idea of a disaster in general. In this case, I was like, at first when I started watching this movie, sort of my response was, this is boring because, like, well, if it's an asteroid and there's nothing we can do about it, there's nothing we can do about it. But once it becomes intentional and there's a, you know, a rational being behind it, I was like, okay, well, there's aliens here. You know, for some reason, like, I mean,

some disaster movies are exciting. But, you know, obviously like malice or some kind of intention is obviously like a lot more interesting to the human mind than I think like just the sheer force of nature. Like, oh, gravity accidentally brought an asteroid into our orbit. Now it's heading towards us. Well, I mean, what can you do? That's why I think it's also kind of like a bad allegory for climate change because we actually kind of did that and our own stupidity and short-sightedness has created it. So it's not like, oh, hey, like, this is just happening to us. And we're not taking it particularly seriously. It's like, no, like a long period of, there's a deeper irony about, you know, our own technological process of progress kind of like hoisting us

on our own partard. But yeah, once the idea, it sort of became clear that there was a kind of an alien invasion type thing going on here. I won't say I got terribly interested in it, but I was like, all right, this is a little more compelling than just asteroids are hitting the world and they're going to make fake, fake news. Not fake news. Fake news. They're going to make these like, you know, knock, send this send up of the news type of thing about it. But where else was I going with this?

Okay, this was made by CBS. And the last line of the movie is Sandy Van Oker, solemnly quoting from Shakespeare, The Faultier Brutus Lies Not in Our Stars, but Not in Ourself, but in Ourselves. This line is very famous for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being that this was what god damn it what's his name uh give me a clue uh good night good luck oh um uh edward r murrow yes edward r murrow which i knew i just forgot for a second which murrow famously used in his broadcast about mccarthy when he was saying um you know the problem with McCarthyism is some fault in the american character that we've allowed this to happen.

And this is considered to be one of the finest moments of American news, a very, you know, the gravitas and seriousness of a news anchor was sort of used to end, this is not really what happened, but this is sort of the public imagination narrative used to end the kind of tyranny of McCarthy. And that line was a, you know, a big part of that and a memorable part of that. So I thought it was interesting that they used it in this movie, I think just maybe as a little bit of, it was something that would resonate with the kind of like memories of the people who watched TV news and like it was a little reference to the history of television that people might catch up on. But it was also like almost a, in this whole movie was almost a throwback in a way to like the idea of TV news not only being important. This is when, you know, cable.

The internet is just getting started, really. I mean, but cable is a big thing. But it's almost a throwback to the time of the TV news being an important source of information. And not only an important source of information, a powerful, legitimate institution in our society, right? So Murrow is its finest moment in the post-war period. And the big networks are part of the whole group of big institutions that make up the Cold War and post-war era thing. And their rule in the early 90s is ending, you know. I mean, there's there's kind of like a fascination with people like Ted Cople and stuff like that,

with tabloids and stuff. But, but that's almost a throwback, you know. So the interest, the public awe of the network TV anchor and network TV in general is sort of coming to a close. And this is like a last hurrah of it as an important institution, like as if you would be in the final moments of humanity glued to Sandy Van Oker, you know. I'm fascinated by how the American public, the movie going public, the news watching public, like there really seem to be an appetite for these stories about some sort of global disaster, often extraterrestrial, but not. not always. And we're going to, I mean, the next, I mean, kind of beginning kind of with this, we're going to be hitting a lot of these as we go on. Contact isn't about a disaster, but it is about something from, you know, beyond in space,

kind of bringing the world together, mentioned Armageddon. There's Deep Impact, which is the other asteroid movie that came out around the same year. But this, to me, it seems that this idea of humanity being threatened from space seems like a lesser reflection of any kind of anxiety and more kind of reflection of a sense of complacency and triumphalism, right? that like, well, we, we defeated our enemies on the earth, right? And China will soon be the kind of economic powerhouse that it is. Russia at the time has more or less declined to, you know, a struggling state that just happens to have a very large military and a nuclear arsenal. And so from the American perspective, there's no one on earth who can really challenge us in any meaning. way. And so what, what is there to look out for, to be afraid of, to anticipate in the answer,

it seems to be a compelling answer was, oh, well, it has to be an asteroid, something that might come out of nowhere and destroy us. And notably about this, I mean, what makes this actually kind of distinct from other movies of this type, Is that like, we destroy the asteroid? I mean, I guess we do so in Armageddon, too. Yeah. But this one, we die, apparently. That's only because there's too many of them.

And in Armageddon, right, sort of like that part of the thing is we have to send a team to go, you know, drill into the asteroid and plant nuke. Yeah. But here, it's just, it's like the comp, which I'm looking forward to talk about that movie because it's gloriously stupid. But here, and without warning, it's just like the competence of the U.S. military, right? sort of like the security state military industrial complex is so competent, is so able that it's really no challenge to intercept a couple of asteroids and blow them out of the sky with nuclear weapons. Not even any radiation damage. They tell us the radiation will dissipate into the atmosphere within a few weeks. So there's something, I don't know, triumphalist about all of this.

The only thing that could possibly under or stop or defeat the U.S., military power, to economic might, is literally a hailstorm of asteroids from an unimaginably intelligent alien species. That's what it takes to defeat America and the news, the TV news. Right, and the TV news, they're professionalism last to the end, and then they start to like kind of lose it. But there, that's so, it's so annoying about this. And I guess a lot of what people find annoying with good reason about like so-called liberal elites is how like this and the media in general is like this movie like makes the media into the real heroes of this situation. Like they're staying on the air throughout the thing. Like don't do, you're not really doing anything.

You're sitting there and talking. I mean, I mean, it's not that important, you know, like. So I think there's a little bit of the self, again, I think that has to do with the fact that that was sort of fading. So like the self-importance of the media was sort of kind of puffing itself up and being like, we're going to be a part of this new century. It'll just be like the last century when the news, TV news was very important and the anchor was a very important guy. I mean, I guess cable news show anchors, opinion news show anchors are now important. But the Sandy Van Oker, I mean, does anybody even know who that is? Was he as famous as Dan Rather or I don't know, some of the other ones? Not quite. It's very much like the TV media sort of high on its own supply in terms of its importance. And it does sort of, I guess you could argue, make a kind of perotic mockery of itself, but I don't think that's intentional. I think they were trying to convey real drama. And it just kind of showed how silly the TV

news was sometimes. Yes. Yeah. The self-congratulatory vibe of the news anchors. So there's a scene when there's like a press, a NASA press conference or something and the representative doesn't, NASA press guy doesn't answer a question. And then the main news anchor is like, you know, that was something out of Watergate. Right.

Right. Right. Right. Right. it's like their go-to for everything right now but i mean i think i think there's something actually watergate being this almost kind of not like origin myth but this sort of the finest hour right finest hour for a generation of journalists and specifically the generation of journalists i would go on to kind of like help build the modern media landscape or who would train the

people who would build it so sort of like it's a direct kind of line there and you see it with that scene and in this film you sort of see a representation of this but i think we saw it all throughout the last throughout the trump years or the yeah 2017 to 2020 this sort of chasing of watergate yeah and this desire to have another watergate and i'm not even going to just say the trump years i think i think um whenever you have a big presidential scandal or whenever you have something that looks iffy with the president. There's a desire to make it another water gate. I mean, the gate suffix is used for lots of stuff.

And kind of the problem is it, I think it misses what made Watergate so, what made that scandal so crisis level, less to do with the break in, more to do with the president, basically like claiming unilateral power. But also, I think. What it does is that it lends towards missing other kinds of scandals or sort of like paying more attention to the cover-up than the things happening in plain sight. Yeah, and the idea that like, well, you release it into the public and it will and the public will be outraged. but the problem is just like there's an enormous amount of um first of all there's a lot of institutions that have been set up to kind of blunt that effect but but second of all there's a lot of like

apathy and public misunderstanding like you couldn't really like people really i mean i think there was a lot of anger about iranconcha for something kind of fizzled and and iran contra was supposed to be worse than watergate by some people's estimation but the but the impact wasn't as big. I mean, I don't know. Like, well, Congress started to turn against Nixon. And then Trump lived through all kinds of horrible scandals and just he had the right idea in a sense was just like, just don't fold. Like Nixon believed in all of these things on some level. Like he believed like he was a serious guy you know he believed that the congress of the united states on the senate of the united states and the press like he believed these were like real important things and you know

they represented something as most americans did at the time especially very conventional americans like nixon was and basically trump although i do believe he thinks that television is the real world and he does think that what's having is the media is important, he just also is like, well, what if I just pretend it's not real? And that's kind of like the cheat code. I mean, we're now seeing that there's some kind of political gravity and that doesn't laugh for forever. He did lose an election. He did never win the popular vote. Like there's not, there's some headwinds. But he got pretty far just like pretending none of it. was real or maybe not even pretending, maybe realizing that none of it was real. And I think that

that's, you know, the thing is, is like, yeah, there's a lot of like, he's, his total cynicism was insightful, which is just like, you can just not take these things seriously and maybe that'll work. What does that have to do with this? I don't know, but I definitely think, like, We live in a time when the self-seriousness of the media, of the traditional media and self-importance looks a lot less formidable because we all thought, or I thought, and I don't want to say everybody, I certainly thought like, well, you know, when these things come out in the New York Times and then they're on the Sunday shows, Trump is never going to be able to recover from some of these things.

It's going to create scansles upon scandals and he'll collapse. And that didn't really happen, you know. It never really amounted to much. I mean, it got, I mean, there were big scandals. They were politically significant, one could argue, but not the kind of debacle of Watergate where he had to resign and it looked like the system was coming to an edge. It went much farther than that. So, and not to say, I don't think the media had an important role.

preventing Trump from being worse. I think they did. We have to give it up a little bit to the press. But it was much different than I supposed or hoped. Yeah. Where the, you know, the idea that the media is so powerful and so important and so righteous that it can take down the president. Give me a break. Right. Right. Yeah, just to return a little to an earlier point. So with a movie like Armageddon, Ganesh Armagedon is like my standard kind of, you know, big object about the strike of the earth, changes global politics. Contact also works for our purposes here. In both movies, there's a good amount of international cooperation.

It's striking to me that and without warning, there isn't really international cooperation as much as there is Russia and China decide not to interfere with the U.S. That, and I don't think this is just, you know, a product of this being an American production. So obviously the U.S. is like they be the leader of Earth, the de facto leader of Earth. I think it does, again, speak to the, I guess, like the arrogance of the U.S. in the 1990s, the sense that it is really a competitor without peer. One thing this made me just saying that made me think about was how you ever read the three body problem or any of the. remembrance of Earth's past science fiction novels. It's this trilogy of novels by a Chinese author whose name I cannot recall. I think it's Lu Xishin.

Lou Shishin, yeah, there you go. So not to give anything away because they're quite good, and I recommend them, but the kind of the conceit of the books is that the Earth makes interstellar contact in the 20th century in this sort of like sparks. not an age of development or an age of exploration, but an age of competition with an extra-terrestrial foe. And sort of the books were kind of like kind of looking at both about in the near term and the medium term and like the very, very long term. Sort of like the entire rest of the history of humanity. They're very ambitious books.

They work in some ways. They don't work in others, but I found them all very enjoyable. But what's striking about them, being works of science fiction coming out of China, is that in the same way that American science fiction in the 90s places the United States as really the apex of the global order, the de facto representatives of Earth, in these books, that's the position China has. And part of the argument of characters in the book and an argument that I think the author I would agree with is that it's in fact sort of like Chinese values are the ones that will best assist humanity in confronting the extraterrestrial threat. And it's Western values that are, and specifically American ones, that falter and leave humanity kind of vulnerable as it meets these challenges.

It's interesting to think about how, like, the relationship between, right, real-life geopolitics and the real-life position of a country and how it kind of, like, reflects itself in that country's pop culture, media output, fiction, all these sorts of things. Because I'm sure, you know, if you look back to the golden age of British imperialism, you'll find something very similar. I know you will, if not directly positing sort of like the British as kind of the apex of humanity. Or not to, if not posse of that in like a celebratory way, at least like positing it as like the background information of the story. It's just the way the world works. Right.

I mentioned War of the Worlds. And I think that's how World Worlds begins, essentially, that, like, the reason they show up in London is in part because this is the capital of this global empire. Like many of the things we watch, the worse, the movie, the more obvious, not, well, the more obvious it is about what kind of preoccupations of the times. And it's like, it's War of the Worlds, but it's interesting. It's side of, I mean, you know, I hear what you're saying about the triumphalism and arrogance of it, but it's downbeat, you know? Yeah. You know, it ends with them with us losing, which is not usual, especially for something that was made for TV and being overwhelmed. So the idea, I guess the idea is that it's supposed to be some kind of, you know, with this quote, with the Shakespeare quote, there's some kind of moral lesson here, which was, you're better like the.

You know, better act. Humanity better get attacked together or else we're not going to be able to deal with our next big problem, which is sort of the same lesson as that movie, the Soroda movie. And, you know, so there is a bit of a moral lecture implied in that, a moral of the story, which is humans have a tragic flaw that prevents us from cooperating. on this level to defeat this sort of thing, and we will be destroyed. Now, isn't that kind of interesting as an idea after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, that it is more likely, I mean, Slavois-Zegh has this classic thing, he says, where it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capital. capitalism, which is true. I mean, like, we have tons of movies about just world and disasters. Very few movies imagine some kind of post-capitalist society. But it's interesting

to say a movie that says, well, some kind of global international cooperation will not be enough to stave off the destruction of humanity. So we're just too, we're just too, there's something too wrong with us. There's something intrinsically wrong with us. We will never get it together, which is sort of like, you know, what you say, what people say when, you know, you try to imagine, oh, maybe we will have, you know, a future without war or a future without poverty, whether we have some kind of economic system that provides for all. But people would say, well, no, there's something wrong with us and probably not possible, which, I mean, it's not a stupid thing to believe or think because it's got a lot of evidence for it.

But I think it's interesting after the fall of the Soviet Union, this movie sort of thinks of American, American power alone is not enough, right? It fails. And there's something kind of sad about that. It's almost like this movie is answering in a very sad way the question that our podcast and all the movies we talk about in our podcast pose, which is what now. And the answer is, well, something bad will happen and we won't really be up to it. Like, our glory days are behind us and we just won't be up to it.

And it'll be scary. And then, you know, we'll fall apart. which is not unlike our actual experience of the world past 9-11, which is just sort of like, well, we seem to have gotten pretty good by that. And I don't know if we're coming back. You know, like there's a sense, there's a sense often like we got hit in the gut and haven't been quite the same ever since, right? Right.

And now we're kind of internally falling apart. And it's not clear where we can handle any problems. That kind of changed a little bit with COVID because we're like, whoa, the government, when it gets to act together, can actually do all this amazing stuff. Like, we can make this vaccine and just shoot money to everybody. And like, we actually are more powerful than we thought he was. But then the dispiriting thing was, well,

we can't even convince people to get on board for the most basic simple shit with this. Like, how are all we going to do anything? You know, like, there was like a downbeat of that, which was just like, what is so depressing man like they don't even want to take a fucking vaccine they're going to save their lives like that's just so sad like so where am I going with all this I all I'm saying is interesting at this early date that the answer that that mainstream you know media literally the mainstream media I mean CBS comes up with to the post world post war cold war dilemma is well probably won't go that well right I think it's a good place to end yeah

No need for last thoughts on this movie because it's barely a movie. Yeah. Like I said at the top, don't watch this. I mean, we're watching it for science. It's not worth your time. I mean, you're not going to get anything out of it. I guarantee you as smart as you think you are. You might think you're smarter than me and Jamel.

You might be, but you're not going to get much more out of it than we did, I promise you. yeah no i highly doubt it i highly doubt it um some quick things that were funny though in the movie there's one sequence where they're doing man on the street interviews and they have two man on the street interviews that made me laugh one was just like the guy this like brooklyn white ethnic guy who's like yeah when they come to brooklyn we'll know what to do right and then they had a black guy do basically the same thing but the black version Yeah, but yeah, the black version, and me and my boys will show up. I thought that was very funny, and I appreciated that.

Also, lots of great haircuts. I mean, I'll say this for this movie. If you want a sense of what people look like in the United States in 1994, there's no better source, yeah. No better source. Like, one of the dudes had a haircut. I was like, my uncle had that haircut. I recognize that haircut.

Sort of like, yeah, it's a real artifact. Yeah, it is definitely an artifact. these. Yeah. Big suits everywhere. That's my favorite 90s. Artifact. Men were like we got to add 20% more fabric to our clothing. Yeah. So that's the only reason really to watch it. That is our show. If you're not a subscriber, please subscribe. We're available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher Radio and Google Podcasts and wherever else podcasts are found. If you subscribe, please leave a rating, please leave a rating. Please leave a rating and a review. helps people find a show. You can reach out to all of us on Twitter. Podcasts is at UnclearPod. I am at Jay Bowie. John, you are.

I'm at Lionel underscore trolling. And I've sort of begun to tiptoe into Mastodon, the kind of decentralized Twitter alternative. So I'm there as at J. Bowie as well. At J.Booey at Mastodon. down social or something. So if you want to go over there, there's hardly, I mean,

there's more people than you think over there. It's kind of fun because I feel like I can talk more shit without, like causing a fight. Yeah, people getting so upset. So, yeah.

You can reach out to us over email at unclear and present feedback at fastmail.com. For this week and feedback, we have an email from Chris titled 1994's rate hikes. Hi, Jamel and John. I love both this podcast and the Patreon. John and look forward to the new episode each week. Keep up the excellent work. Thank you, Chris.

I'm sure I won't be the only person to mention this. You, in fact, were. But when John was going through the headlines, the 1994 interest rate hikes caught my attention as being more directly related to the movie's context than was discussed in the moment. This was surviving the game. Greenspan's rate hikes executed largely due to fears of an inflation which never arrived are slash were notorious among we finance dorks as a massacre of bond investors, driving a sharp rise in borrowing cost for the U.S. government. This was seen by many of the time as the market becoming less willing to lend money to the U.S. government, which fed into a renewed hysteria about the size of the national debt. This hysteria gave ammunition to Gingrich's Republican

Revolution. It became one reason we spent to mid the late 90s further rolling back the welfare state and social spending, even as the U.S. economy enjoyed them of its best years ever. As the years have gone on, the U.S. has continued to borrow incredibly cheaply, despite a massive increase in debt. And all of these concerns about debt proofs completely unfounded, though the impact on policy remains to this day. Anyway, I'm sure this is familiar to both of you, but I did want to note the connection between the headline and the excellent discussion of the movie's context. Thanks again and keep up with the great work. That's really interesting. I didn't know about that. I mean, it all makes sense. And now my knowledge of the 90s kind of stops,

not stops, but it's mostly detailed up to about 1993 and then kind of starts to fall off. So I didn't really know much about the rate hikes in 94. I was vaguely aware of the rate hikes, but not any detailed knowledge. I mean, it is just real quick, interesting how, although you will still hear politicians just complain about the debt and the deficit. There's not really the kind of deficit hysteria that had been a hallmark for U.S. politics for 20 years prior, right? Like, certainly under Obama, I distinctly

remember, but like under Bush 2. It was huge in the early 90s. Huge. And huge in the 90s, right? Burrow ran on that basically. So thank you. That great email. Thank you. Thank you for the note, Chris. Episodes come out every other week. So we'll see you in two weeks with the

1991 film, going back in time. The Rocketeer. directed by Joe Johnson and starring Billy Campbell and Jennifer Connolly. Here is a brief plot synopsis. Young pilot Cliff Seckerd, Sechord, stumbles on the top secret rocket pack. And with the help of his mechanic mentor, he attempts to save his girl and stop the Nazis as the Rocketeer. The Rocketeer is available to rent on Amazon and iTunes. And I assume it's available to stream on Disney Plus as well, since it is a Disney movie.

I looked up toys real quick because I know we had talked about doing that. Yeah. not available for streaming no no we have to do it and the DVD is really hard to find because it's not a good movie and no one wants to remember it but I insist that we do it

if we find some way to do it I'm going to ask my friend if you can find it okay okay all right we'll we'll see if we can do that you can find them on eBay it's for maybe I pick up a copy their secret every movie that you're not allowed to stream

their secret knowledge They don't want you to know about. And those movies, I swear to you. Okay, so, okay, we'll look for toys. There's hidden messages in toys. As always, do not forget our Patreon. The latest episode of our Patreon podcast is on the 1950s adaptation of The Quiet American. You can listen to that and much more at patreon.com slash unclear pod for just $5 a month.

And it's totally worth it. Our producer is Connor Lynch. And our artwork is from Rachel Eck. For John Gans, I am Jamal Bowie, and this is unclear and present danger. See you next time.