PODCAST · tv
Bang-Bang Podcast
by Van and Lyle are Bang-Bang
A show about war movies, with an anti-imperialist twist. Hosted by Van Jackson and Lyle Jeremy Rubin--military veterans, war critics, and wannabe film critics. www.bangbangpod.com
Episodes
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From the Vault: Ender’s Game (2013) w/ Alexander McCoy
From the vault! Re-releasing one of our earliest and most popular episodes, with antiwar veteran and organizer Alexander McCoy. New episode coming next week. ✌️ “When I understand my enemy well enough to defeat him, then in that moment, I also love him.” So begins the 2013 film adaptation of…
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In Waves and War (2024) w/ Ryan Miller | Ep. 76
Ryan Miller, the next on the show’s fellow veteran lineup, was a Marine in Okinawa from 1998 to 2002, spent years in About Face: Veterans Against the War, helped Oakland decriminalize plant medicines in 2019, and now works as a therapist in psychedelic integration. He joins us to discuss Bonni...
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Canadian Bacon (1995) w/ Eric Stinton | Ep. 75
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com A president stuck in the polls needs an enemy. The Russians decline, being busy perfecting indoor plumbing and getting MTV, so the war machine settles on Canada. In 1995 that premise earned $178,104 against an $11...
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Inglourious Basterds (2009) w/ Carlos Hogan | Ep. 74
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com In Afghanistan in 2010, most frontline units Lyle spent time with had at least one Jewish Marine, and every one of them was nicknamed Bear Jew. That’s the reach this movie had with the war-on-terror generation, and...
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Ex Machina (2014) w/ Ryan Perez | Ep. 73
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com Ryan Perez makes his living in the industry this film is secretly about. An actor (The Gilded Age, et al.) and host of An Actor Despairs—a rueful wink at Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares—Ryan has turned hundreds of...
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Taps (1981), w/ Jasper Craven | Ep. 72
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com Taps was shot at Valley Forge Military Academy, and this episode’s guest is the journalist whose exposé of that school’s hazing and abuse presaged its closing. Jasper Craven’s new book, God Forgives, Brothers Don’t,...
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24 (2001–2010) w/ Adam Johnson | Ep. 71
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com Fox’s 24 was set to premiere weeks after 9/11. Its first hour blows up a plane, so the network held it back. That delay is the whole show in miniature. It was the post-9/11 show before the letter. Adam Johnson,...
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I, Robot (2004) w/ Max Read | Ep. 70
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com Underneath the sneaker product placements and CGI chases through a gleaming 2035 Chicago resides our ever-contested present. Except the film is a mess. The plot wanders, full of dropped threads and convenient or...
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Seven Days in May (1964) w/ Paul Adlerstein | Ep. 69
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com Seven Days in May imagines a four-star general nearly toppling an American president. It gets filed with the era’s paranoid thrillers, but its threat is not the Cold War’s usual one. There are no communist...
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Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) w/ Luke Savage | Ep. 68
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com Jacobin staff writer and Michael and Us co-host Luke Savage joins Van and Lyle for a conversation about Peter Weir’s Master and Commander that’s also, inevitably, about Patrick O’Brian. Luke grew up with the...
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From The Vault: In the Loop (2009) w/ Spencer Ackerman
From the vault! Re-releasing one of our earliest and most popular episodes, with prize-winning journalist and best-selling author Spencer Ackerman. Scottish filmmaker Armando Iannucci’s In the Loop, a satire about the lead-up to the Iraq War, never achieved the household success of Veep…
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Hamilton: An American Musical (2015) w/ Orli Matlow | Ep. 67
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com Comedian and podcaster Orli Matlow, who hosts War is Stupid: An Anti-War Podcast About War, joins Van and Lyle for a conversation about Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton that turns out to be less about the musical’s...
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Crimson Tide (1995), w/ Andy Facini | Ep. 66
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com Van and Lyle welcome back Andy Facini, Communications Director at the Council on Strategic Risks, to take on Tony Scott’s Crimson Tide. Gene Hackman’s Captain Ramsey and Denzel Washington’s Lt. Commander Hunter are...
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Predator (1987) w/ Eric Stinton | Ep. 65
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com Van and Lyle are joined by writer and educator Eric Stinton, whose combat sports columns for Sherdog and essays for Honolulu Civil Beat have long explored how violence reveals deeper truths about culture, class, and...
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Independence Day (1996), w/ Morgan Spector | Ep. 64
Van and Lyle are joined by critically acclaimed actor Morgan Spector to revisit Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day, a film that turns planetary annihilation into a distinctly American spectacle. We spend time lingering on the movie as a shared artifact of a particular 1990s childhood. The Ray...
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The Anti-Imperialist Opportunity w/ Morgan Spector | Ep. 63
You might know Morgan Spector as the critically acclaimed leading man in The Gilded Age and The Plot Against America. Or for his appearances in Boardwalk Empire, Suits, Homeland, How to Make It In America (one of Van’s favorites), or even as a producer on The Big Scary “S” Word. What you might…
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Don’t Worry, Darling (2022) w/ Julia Gledhill | Ep. 62
Van and Lyle are joined by Julia Gledhill (of The Un-Diplomatic Podcast and Stimson Center fame) to revisit Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry, Darling, a film dismissed by many critics as a glossy pastiche but better understood as a deliberate medley of American ideological fantasies. Set in the…
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The Patriot (2000) w/ Graeme Pente | Ep. 61
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com Van and Lyle are joined by historian Graeme Pente to revisit Roland Emmerich’s The Patriot, a Revolutionary War epic that filters eighteenth-century civil war through the moral grammar of Braveheart-era melodrama.…
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Army of Shadows (1969) w/ Matthew Ellis | Ep. 60
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com Van and Lyle are joined by film historian Matthew Ellis to revisit Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows, a spare, rain-soaked chronicle of the French Resistance that refuses both triumph and sentimentality. From…
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Demolition Man (1993) w/ Daniel Bessner | Ep. 59
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com Van and Lyle are joined by historian and American Prestige co-host Danny Bessner to revisit Marco Brambilla’s Demolition Man, a silly 1993 action movie that doubles as a surprisingly sharp meditation on liberal…
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Three Days of the Condor (1975) w/ Matt Duss | Ep. 58
Van and Lyle are joined by returning guest Matt Duss—former foreign policy advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders and current executive vice president at the Center for International Policy—to revisit Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor, a paranoid thriller that captures a vanishing moment when...
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The Military is Trapped Between Fascism and Civil War | Ep. 57
Do US troops have a threshold for the kind of unlawful order they’re unwilling to follow? If Venezuela wasn’t a breaking point, is Greenland? Can the US have mid-term elections under martial law? Will troops fire on fellow Americans if ordered? And why is the permanent war economy at the root of...
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PatLabor 2: The Movie (1993) w/ Kevin Fox | Ep. 56
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com We’re joined by filmmaker and returning guest Kevin Fox to discuss Mamoru Oshii’s Patlabor 2, a film that masquerades as a techno-thriller before revealing itself as a bleak meditation on peace not as the absence of...
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Starship Troopers (1997) w/ Andrew Facini and Sam Ratner | Ep. 55
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com We’re joined by returning guests Sam Ratner (Win Without War) and Andrew Facini (Council on Strategic Risks) to revisit Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. So committed to its own satire that many critics in 1997...
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A House of Dynamite (2025) w/ Scott Sagan | Ep. 54
Van and Lyle are joined by nuclear weapons and disarmament expert Scott Sagan to discuss A House of Dynamite, the 2025 political thriller that imagines nuclear catastrophe not as spectacle or obvious madness, but as an orderly sequence of decisions made under crushing time pressure. Structured as...
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Tigerland (2000) w/ Joe Allen | Ep. 53
Van and Lyle are joined by writer and journalist Joe Allen to discuss Tigerland, Joel Schumacher’s 2000 film about a group of young men cycling through an infantry training camp in Louisiana in the final years of the Vietnam War. Shot in a loose, almost documentary style and anchored by a…
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Netflix's Marines (2025) w/ Sam Carliner | Ep. 52
Van and Lyle are joined by returning guest Sam Carliner to take on Marines, Netflix’s new 250th-anniversary docuseries, an unmistakable propaganda piece (it’s literally featured on the official Marine Corps website) that nonetheless reveals more candor than the institution intended. Directed by...
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Under Fire (1983) w/ Paul Adlerstein | Ep. 51
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com Van and Lyle are joined once again by historian Paul Adlerstein to revisit Under Fire, Roger Spottiswoode’s gripping and often overlooked drama about the final days of the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua. The film...
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Downfall (2005) and Triumph of the Will (1935) w/ George Dardess | Ep. 50
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com Van and Lyle are joined by the literary critic George Dardess to talk about Downfall (2004) and its grim mirror, Triumph of the Will (1935). Where Leni Riefenstahl turned the Nazi project into divine spectacle, an...
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Emergency Politics, Revolutionary Gen Z, General Strikes, and Business School for Leftists | Ep. 49
This is where the liberal resistance people were always right. The US is an insane nuclear power. How do you revolt against that? If change is going to come, it’s going to come from the periphery of the world-system, not the American core. The majority of the people in the military…do not…
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Part II: WarGames (1983) w/ Sam Ratner & Andy Facini | Ep. 48
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com Van and Lyle are joined by Sam Ratner, Policy Director at Win Without War, and Andy Facini, Communications Director at the Council on Strategic Risks, to discuss WarGames, John Badham’s Cold-War techno-thriller that...
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Part I of II: WarGames (1983) w/ Sam Ratner & Andy Facini | Ep. 47
Van and Lyle are joined by Sam Ratner, Policy Director at Win Without War, and Andy Facini, Communications Director at the Council on Strategic Risks, to discuss WarGames, John Badham’s Cold-War techno-thriller that accidentally foresaw the age of algorithmic warfare. What begins as a teenage...
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Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) w/ Dan Borus | Ep. 46
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com Van and Lyle are joined by historian Dan Borus, Professor Emeritus at the University of Rochester, to discuss Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, a film that continues to define political satire as much as it mocks…
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Stephen Spielberg's Munich (2005) w/ Eli Valley | Ep. 45
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com Artist and writer Eli Valley joins us to wrestle with Steven Spielberg’s Munich, the director’s retelling of the 1972 Olympics massacre and Israel’s subsequent campaign of assassinations. The film is meticulously...
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The Report (2019) w/ Adrian Horton | Ep. 44
The Guardian arts writer Adrian Horton joins us to discuss The Report, Scott Z. Burns’s dramatization of Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones’s investigation into the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program. We follow the film’s flashbacks and committee-room battles, tracing how “enhanced interrogation” was...
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Lone Survivor (2013) w/ Wes Morgan | Ep. 43
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com The combat journalist Wes Morgan joins us to unpack Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor—a film that packages “victim-hero” mythology in SEAL-recruiting gloss—alongside John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968), a studio-era...
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Lawrence of Arabia (1962) w/ Osita Nwanevu | Ep. 42
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com Osita Nwanevu joins us to revisit David Lean’s epic with an eye toward empire’s soft power: the seductive aesthetics that make conquest look noble, even as the film telegraphs its own critique. We track Lawrence’s...
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The Hunt for Red October (1990) w/ Remember Shuffle Pod | Ep. 41
Van and Lyle are joined by Ben and Jordano from the Remember Shuffle podcast to take on The Hunt for Red October (1990), John McTiernan’s Cold War submarine thriller packed with an all-star cast. Sean Connery’s Ramius may be the most Scottish Russian ever put on screen, but the real star is the...
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Carlos (2010) w/ Noah Hurowitz | Ep. 40
In this episode, Van and Lyle are joined by journalist and author Noah Hurowitz (El Chapo) to discuss Olivier Assayas’ Carlos, the sweeping 2010 miniseries about the infamous Venezuelan militant Ilich Ramírez Sánchez. The conversation explores how Carlos’ life story illuminates both the allure…
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Soundtrack to a Coup d’État (2025) w/ Sandipto Dasgupta | Ep. 39
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com Van and Lyle are joined by Sandipto Dasgupta—legal scholar, political theorist, and possessor of an encyclopedic knowledge of Congolese politics, the Non-Aligned Movement, and postcolonial political economy—to…
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Costa-Gavras' State of Siege (1972) w/ Alex Aviña and Stuart Schrader | Ep. 38
In this episode, we discuss Costa-Gavras’s State of Siege, a tightly constructed political thriller based on the real-life kidnapping and execution of U.S. police advisor Dan Mitrione by Uruguay’s Tupamaros guerrillas. Set in early 1970s Uruguay but filmed in Allende-era Chile just before the…
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28 Days Later Trilogy (2002, 2007, 2025) w/ Rebecca Onion | Ep. 37
Van and Lyle are joined by historian and Slate Senior Editor Rebecca Onion to talk through the entire 28 Days Later trilogy, from its early aughts origins to its apocalyptic present. Together they explore the first film’s anti-militarist edge, arriving just as the War on Terror began to unfold…
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Guy Ritchie's The Covenant (2023) w/ Sam Carliner | Ep. 36
Van and Lyle are joined by journalist Sam Carliner to unpack Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant, a 2023 entry into the Afghanistan war movie canon. Together they examine how the film reinforces the myth, heavily circulated in the wake of the 2021 U.S. pullout, that American troops and Afghan interpreters...
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The Art of Memoir and Stories of Conversion w/ George Dardess | Ep. 35
Politics behind the scenes: A rare glimpse behind the curtain as Van, Lyle, and guest George Dardess talk about about memoir and stories of conversion. They discuss their own experiences relating to Monterey, California and the Defense Language Institute before getting into personal…
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Andor (2025), Season 2 Ep. 10–12 + Rogue One (2016) w/ Matt Duss and Paul Adlerstein | Ep. 34
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com In this finale to our Andor series, Van and Lyle are joined by returning guest Paul Adlerstein and—making his first appearance on the pod—Matt Duss, former foreign policy advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders and…
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The Battle of Chile (Part III) (1975) and Obstinate Memory (1997) w/ Jonathan M. Katz | Ep. 33
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com This is Part III of our three-part series covering the Battle of Chile (itself a trilogy). Check out Part I and Part II! Van and Lyle are joined by journalist and historian Jonathan M. Katz to discuss Patricio...
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The Battle of Chile (Part II) (1975) w/ Jonathan M. Katz | Ep. 32
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com This is Part II of our three-part series covering the Battle of Chile (itself a trilogy). Check out Part I! Van and Lyle are joined by journalist and historian Jonathan M. Katz to discuss Patricio Guzmán’s seminal...
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The Battle of Chile (Part I) (1975) w/ Jonathan M. Katz | Ep. 31
Van and Lyle are joined by journalist and historian Jonathan M. Katz to discuss Patricio Guzmán’s seminal Battle of Chile trilogy—widely regarded as one of the greatest political documentaries ever made—alongside its 1997 epilogue, Obstinate Memory. Our conversation was recorded mostly in the…
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Andor (2025), Season 2, Ep. 7-9 w/ David Klion and David Austin Walsh | Ep. 30
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com The Death Star was born in blood well before it ever came into existence. In episodes 7-9 of Andor, we see just how much blood, and why. A false-flag operation to secure critical minerals. A French-resistance style...
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Liberal-to-Left Transformations and America's Settler Colonial Exceptionalism: David Klion and David Austin Walsh | Ep. 29
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com An occasional glimpse behind the curtain as Van (missing Lyle!) sits down with writer David Klion and historian David Austin Walsh. Their candid convo ranges from the politics of liberal Zionism to personal...
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Bang-Bang Podcast have?
Bang-Bang Podcast currently has 79 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Bang-Bang Podcast about?
A show about war movies, with an anti-imperialist twist. Hosted by Van Jackson and Lyle Jeremy Rubin--military veterans, war critics, and wannabe film critics. www.bangbangpod.com
How often does Bang-Bang Podcast release new episodes?
Bang-Bang Podcast has 79 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Bang-Bang Podcast?
You can listen to Bang-Bang Podcast on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Bang-Bang Podcast?
Bang-Bang Podcast is created and hosted by Van and Lyle are Bang-Bang.
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