Political Thrillers w/ Matt Bors and Ben Clarkson

[00:00:00] In your phone was a GPS sat tracker, pulses at 24 Gigahertz.

[00:00:03] I don't know what that means.

[00:00:04] It's like a load jack, only two generations better than what the police have.

[00:00:07] And what does that mean?

[00:00:08] It means the NSA can read the time off your fucking wristwatch.

[00:00:11] The National Security Agency conducts worldwide surveillance, fax, phones, satellite communication.

[00:00:17] The only ones in the country, including the military, could possibly have anything like

[00:00:20] this.

[00:00:20] Why are they after me?

[00:00:22] I don't know and I don't want to know.

[00:00:23] Here they come.

[00:00:24] Today on Struggle Session, Ben Clarkson and Matt Bors, the twisted minds behind Justice

[00:00:31] Warriors join us to discuss political thrillers.

[00:00:35] The Manchurian Candidate, Marathon Man, Enemy of the State, Days of both the Condor and the

[00:00:42] Jackal, All the coups, assassinations, clandestine operations, illegal surveillance from all the

[00:00:49] alphabet agencies, Jason Bourne, Jack Bauer, Woodward and Bernstein.

[00:00:54] All that and more on today's Struggle Session.

[00:00:58] It's here.

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[00:03:25] Anyway, let's talk some political thrillers.

[00:03:28] Ben, Matt, welcome to the show.

[00:03:31] Congratulations on volume two.

[00:03:33] Hey, thanks for having us.

[00:03:34] It's a pleasure to be here.

[00:03:37] Yes.

[00:03:37] Congratulations to us.

[00:03:39] Like it really is a cartoon.

[00:03:40] We try to focus.

[00:03:42] It is not a serious comic.

[00:03:44] We try to make, we try to take our stupid cartoon as seriously as possible, which I find

[00:03:50] like American art really has trouble with.

[00:03:54] Like if they have like a comedy series, they can't take their premise seriously.

[00:03:59] They have to constantly be disarming the premise of their series.

[00:04:03] Justice Warriors doesn't disarm itself.

[00:04:05] It just keeps pushing the stupid premises of Bubble City, this super unequal society, this domed

[00:04:15] city where the rich people live and the us, the uninhabited zone outside, which are full

[00:04:21] of super over-policed mutants.

[00:04:23] We try to push that to the limit and to the end of the idea.

[00:04:30] And from that pushing, we get to, you know, multiple assassinations, someone eating shit

[00:04:37] at the debates, literal childless cat ladies in the book, ghost guns being used to assassinate

[00:04:45] people, 3D printed guns, all this stuff that ends up in the news cycle a couple of months

[00:04:53] after we release the book.

[00:04:55] But it's, it's because Matt and I are like, we're paying attention to what's going on in

[00:05:02] the world around us.

[00:05:03] And we're just like, yeah, what if we use all this?

[00:05:05] And a lot of culture, like it's trying to, I'm sorry, it's trying to like pat down the reality

[00:05:13] of what is happening around us.

[00:05:16] Like movies are not engaging with the fact of like untraceable guns.

[00:05:20] Movies are not dealing with the fact that people are pissed and they want to shoot CEOs

[00:05:24] in the head.

[00:05:26] And we just say yes to all that stuff.

[00:05:29] Yeah, like the, we have, so we have three assassination attempts in the book.

[00:05:35] I won't spoil how many are successful or not.

[00:05:37] But, you know, similar to the attempts we saw on, um, on Trump and the Luigi Mangione stuff,

[00:05:47] I think all of the shooters are sort of politically incoherent in their own ways.

[00:05:52] Uh, but you know, which is something that's a running theme in justice warriors.

[00:05:57] Everyone's super online.

[00:05:58] Everyone's hysterical, but they don't really have a, uh, a lens through which to make sense

[00:06:05] of the world.

[00:06:05] So everyone's sort of, everyone's sort of crazy.

[00:06:07] It's like a, you know, it's a, it's a hyper, hyper political reality.

[00:06:12] Um, much like our own, but, but cranked up to 11 or whatever.

[00:06:18] Yes.

[00:06:19] And you crank it up past the cop level, past the street level.

[00:06:23] You get into politics, kind of like the wire.

[00:06:26] It keeps expanding, you know, in volume two, we have instead of a, this kind of a parody

[00:06:31] hyper, you know, this hyper parody of a buddy cop drama.

[00:06:35] We have a parody of a political thriller.

[00:06:38] Yeah.

[00:06:39] We wanted to, just like the wire, we want to show all the different levels of how society

[00:06:45] works.

[00:06:46] Like justice warriors is a satire of the system we live in and our system nominally has politics.

[00:06:52] And so we wanted to show what it would look like if maybe the people didn't really have

[00:06:58] a say and maybe elections were a little bit more focused on elite competition at the highest

[00:07:04] levels of society.

[00:07:05] No, no.

[00:07:09] And, uh, and so we, we, we rolled with it and it's basically two completely unappealing,

[00:07:16] uh, Royal technocrats running against each other almost entirely on vibes and coupons being

[00:07:23] thrown out to people.

[00:07:25] And mixtapes.

[00:07:26] I really liked that they were dropping diss tracks and mixtapes, uh, as part of the, you

[00:07:31] know, their campaign.

[00:07:32] I feel like that's, that will happen in the near future.

[00:07:35] Yes.

[00:07:36] Oh, I mean, that's definitely going to be a part of the Hawk to a girl's presidential

[00:07:41] campaign.

[00:07:42] Which by the way, not to spoil too much, but you also predicted, uh, the recent that you

[00:07:49] predicted the Hawk to arise and fall, uh, almost, uh, specifically cause she has disappeared

[00:07:55] in the mix of a crypto scandal.

[00:07:58] Now she'll be back.

[00:08:00] I believe in her.

[00:08:03] She's on the new, she's on the new, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh,

[00:08:05] fame meme cycle, which is we're transitioning into yet.

[00:08:09] We don't know what's coming, but like, you know, she'll come back with something because

[00:08:13] the logic chain is that you just have to, you know, you have to keep going with, she

[00:08:16] doesn't want to just sit at home and do nothing.

[00:08:18] No, you, who would be happy with $50 million of stolen money?

[00:08:25] Uh, history has shown no one.

[00:08:28] Yeah.

[00:08:29] So we, we end up, yeah, we end up predicting a lot with justice warriors.

[00:08:33] There's like entire, uh, news cycles about Elon Musk's Grok super AI, which we end up like

[00:08:40] Elon Musk buying Twitter ends up being predicted in volume one as well.

[00:08:45] Uh, and I'm just, it's always fun to see what else pops out of the news.

[00:08:54] When, when a new justice warriors plot line hits the news, it's very exciting.

[00:09:00] You messaged me because you want to talk about the genre itself of political thrillers and

[00:09:06] how they influenced this volume two of justice warriors, which you can find everywhere.

[00:09:12] The, the, the political thriller is a, it's sort of dead.

[00:09:17] What do you think?

[00:09:19] It's, is it gone?

[00:09:20] See, I, I was, I was, I, when you messaged me and I started researching this first thing

[00:09:26] I kind of realized is there's no really good definition of political thriller because it

[00:09:33] can apply to so many things that, you know, it can like, for example, it could apply to the

[00:09:40] film, it, all the president's men, obviously, but it also can apply to something like 24,

[00:09:45] you know, like it's kind of a wide, wide range of things.

[00:09:50] But, um, Eileen Jones in Jacobin put out an article recently, uh, titled it's a dismal time

[00:09:58] for political films.

[00:09:59] And people were pretty upset about it, but I think she kind of had a point with where you're

[00:10:03] saying like, it's kind of dead on a cinematic scale.

[00:10:07] Like you can talk about a film, maybe like civil war, uh, Alex Garner civil war.

[00:10:13] You might, and that was a fairly successful movie.

[00:10:15] You might call that a political thriller cause it vaguely points to politics, but it has nothing

[00:10:20] really to say about politics is much more about at least his, and this was his intention to

[00:10:26] focus more on the act of photojournalism itself, as opposed to any sort of wider political thing.

[00:10:34] But also when you're talking about political thriller, you might be talking about like

[00:10:38] a spy movie as well.

[00:10:40] Like Jason Bourne.

[00:10:43] Although I would, you know, to try to narrow the definition a little bit, like I think it's

[00:10:48] civil war.

[00:10:49] I thought of as a war movie.

[00:10:51] I mean, it's an, it's an anti-war movie in the way a lot of war movies are, but I didn't

[00:10:56] think, you know, there's something about political thrillers.

[00:10:59] You know, they, they are hard to, hard to define.

[00:11:02] You're right.

[00:11:02] I mean, I, I know that we looked to the heyday of, of the political thriller, what I consider

[00:11:10] the heyday, I think, you know, where the sub genre of the paranoid political thriller

[00:11:15] came about in the seventies, where you had this, like in the mid seventies, this run of what,

[00:11:20] what is all the president's men, which you mentioned parallax view, um, marathon man, and all of

[00:11:26] these things to varying degrees are about like deep state power.

[00:11:31] Essentially they're, they're about, you know, there are force forces at work driving society

[00:11:36] that you can get pulled into that, that move things that you don't have control over.

[00:11:41] We don't have control over democratically or that are above the law or whatever.

[00:11:46] So that's what we were pulling from, uh, for vote harder.

[00:11:49] Cause but just, uh, this won't spoil anything, but a main plot point is that one of the cops

[00:11:53] is sent into the opposition campaign in a sort of COINTELPRO style operation and, and blended with

[00:12:04] sort of a Manchurian candidate type brainwashing scheme.

[00:12:09] Yeah.

[00:12:09] I honestly, you know what guys, I got a great definition of a political thriller.

[00:12:14] I've got it.

[00:12:15] It is a thriller.

[00:12:17] That's really important.

[00:12:18] So what a thriller movie is, is a thriller is, uh, something that is inherently cinematic,

[00:12:25] which means it uses some of these parts of cinema that people have maybe talked about,

[00:12:30] like ticking clocks or procedures.

[00:12:34] Mechanical procedure is inherently cinematic.

[00:12:36] Like showing someone assembling a gun is interesting on camera because one thing leads to another.

[00:12:43] It's a time-based activity, time, uh, mechanical activities over time and procedure.

[00:12:50] So usually thrillers are procedurals.

[00:12:54] Original day of the Jackal from the seventies is two procedurals against each other.

[00:12:59] You've got the assassin who's doing his procedure of setting up the shot to kill De Gaulle.

[00:13:05] And then you have the police that are trying to find the titular Jackal.

[00:13:09] Uh, what makes a political thriller, I think is some sort of overview of real world political

[00:13:19] issues and sort of a, a survey through the narrative, through the thriller narrative,

[00:13:27] through the structure of the thriller, this survey of the issues and political insights

[00:13:36] and political points of view and ideologies, which lead, uh, which lead the viewer to understand

[00:13:45] the political conundrums that then the thriller takes place within.

[00:13:50] So like day of the Jackal, is it a political thriller?

[00:13:54] Yes.

[00:13:55] In the sense that like Charles De Gaulle is being, they're trying to shoot Charles De Gaulle

[00:14:00] in the head, but does it do a great job at the politics of De Gaulle?

[00:14:05] Not really.

[00:14:06] So in my definition, there's like two sides to it.

[00:14:09] I I'll give each film like a, uh, a thriller score and a political score.

[00:14:15] Like how well does it score for politics and how well is it a good thriller?

[00:14:20] Well, and I think often the thriller overtakes the politics because you have to make an interesting

[00:14:25] movie and you know, a lot of filmmakers are concerned with that above ideology.

[00:14:29] I think it's, you know, the ones we mentioned in from the seventies, those did have a particular

[00:14:34] political point of view that was coming out of like collapsing faith in government from

[00:14:40] Nixon and, you know, the Vietnam war and understanding that the deep state being very alive in everybody's

[00:14:47] consciousness because of all the political assassinations and, and other things.

[00:14:50] Um, but like the global war on terror era, political thrillers, I think we're a lot more accommodating

[00:14:58] to the point of view of like, this is the state of the world and it, you know, more embracing

[00:15:04] more of like a, like hero stories.

[00:15:06] Um, somebody in the system is going to change it type stuff.

[00:15:10] Let's talk about the original Manchurian candidate a little bit because that one has this politics

[00:15:17] of, it's, it's pretty reactionary in the sense that it's the politics that it's presenting

[00:15:25] are the politics of brainwashing of like, oh, you, you read a book and now you believe that

[00:15:32] China is good.

[00:15:33] Uh, you're, you're, you're bad.

[00:15:37] You're, you're, uh, you've been programmed by the, by the Chinese, by the Manchurians.

[00:15:44] Uh, I think that that's a very interesting way of framing basically left-wing politics

[00:15:49] of like, you, you've been brainwashed, which is a sort of a reactionary reversal of actually

[00:15:56] how, uh, MKUltra worked in society.

[00:15:59] Although I would say, um, I don't remember the original movie very much, but I did read

[00:16:04] the book, the original book, um, in the lead up to Justice Warriors.

[00:16:09] And it is, uh, a political thriller first and foremost, but it is a, actually a satire

[00:16:17] of that era's, um, you know, obsession with, uh, you know, communist influence.

[00:16:24] So it's-

[00:16:25] Is this a reverse Verhoeven situation where someone writes a satire and then it turns into

[00:16:30] a straight reactionary screed?

[00:16:33] It might, it might be.

[00:16:34] One problem with the film is it does include a character in full like yellow face, which

[00:16:39] is just, you know, unfortunate.

[00:16:42] Yes.

[00:16:43] It doesn't age well.

[00:16:45] I'm against it.

[00:16:46] Yes.

[00:16:46] But in general, it's a pretty exciting movie, a pretty like, and well done movie with some

[00:16:53] great acting.

[00:16:54] And, you know, it's, it's a, it's a fun thriller, but as far as like presenting real world politics

[00:17:01] in a way that I like, uh, it's not quite there.

[00:17:05] I have to say, even though you can read it as, um, anti-anti-communist hysteria, right?

[00:17:13] Like one of the villains is said to be based on McCarthy.

[00:17:17] No, it doesn't portray the communists in any positive light, but there's this sort of idea

[00:17:22] that the communists are being used by, you know, this authoritarian force in U.S. government

[00:17:29] to, as like a way to like create a crisis by which they can take over and kind of form their

[00:17:37] own anti-democratic autocracy.

[00:17:39] Yeah.

[00:17:40] It ends up being a rah-rah liberal movie.

[00:17:42] Like, uh, uh, Sinatra is the centrist that comes in and is reasonable and manages to disarm

[00:17:51] this whole situation and make sure the rule of law works, right?

[00:17:56] Like he's the good, he's the good veteran.

[00:17:58] Uh, the bad veteran is the one that ends up, uh, uh, reading too much Cuban literature.

[00:18:05] As Trump famously said, I like people who didn't get caught.

[00:18:09] Yeah.

[00:18:12] I like people who worked in the Manchurian candidate solitaire, actually.

[00:18:17] That's, uh.

[00:18:18] Yeah.

[00:18:19] And this is like, this is a theme that I noticed with a lot of modern political thrillers too.

[00:18:25] There was one, uh, Jodie Foster, the Mauritian and another one with, uh, who's that Star Wars

[00:18:32] guy?

[00:18:33] Uh, driver, driver, Adam driver, the report.

[00:18:36] These two were just like watching paint dry.

[00:18:41] These movies, terrible movies do not recommend, but both of them end up being like rah, rah,

[00:18:46] the legal system will win someday.

[00:18:48] But isn't it crazy how these Republicans keep messing up the state?

[00:18:53] Uh, liberalism will work.

[00:18:54] Our institutions are fundamentally healthy.

[00:18:57] Uh, there are political thrillers.

[00:18:59] Also, those films fail as thrillers.

[00:19:02] Uh, well, that's what I was mentioning earlier.

[00:19:04] Those movies are what I was mentioning earlier as far as like, you know, the idea that you

[00:19:09] could work with inside the system or that, you know, the wrongs will be righted, that the,

[00:19:13] the legal system can prevail.

[00:19:15] I mean, that maybe is a good segue into like eye of the sky, which I actually was surprised

[00:19:20] with.

[00:19:21] It deals entirely with the law.

[00:19:23] It's like an rules of engagement thriller is really what it is.

[00:19:27] It's about the legal manner in which we kill people from the sky with drones.

[00:19:31] Um, that came out.

[00:19:34] Yeah.

[00:19:34] At the tail end of the Obama era.

[00:19:35] I, I have to like, for the listener, big flashing star watch eye in the sky.

[00:19:42] Like it is sort of a forgotten 2015 Mike, almost micro budget, uh, film.

[00:19:49] I think the budget was like 18 million, uh, not a very, uh, high profile director, but I

[00:19:59] honestly, I was, I went into it thinking it was going to be one of these liberal ha ha,

[00:20:04] uh, uh, dumb, dumb thrillers.

[00:20:07] I honestly mixed it up with, um, that Eagle Eye movie with, uh, the Transformers guy in

[00:20:12] it, uh, where there's like a AI that's watching everything.

[00:20:17] I thought Sheila Booth.

[00:20:18] Yes.

[00:20:19] Sheila Booth.

[00:20:19] I don't remember anyone's names.

[00:20:21] I can't remember a name.

[00:20:23] Oh, it's got comrade Rosario.

[00:20:25] And yeah, I'm sad.

[00:20:26] I'm sad.

[00:20:26] It's not a good movie though.

[00:20:28] So I am the sky.

[00:20:29] I watched it, had no expectation.

[00:20:30] I give it a 10 out of 10, honestly, on the politics and the thriller side.

[00:20:37] Uh, this is now my, this is, it's my platonic ideal of a political thriller now, because when

[00:20:43] you go through the film, not only does it have incredible ticking clocks mechanisms, it's

[00:20:49] setting up who is who by showing, not telling it's, it's just great filmmaking from beginning

[00:20:57] to end, but the politics, by the time you get through it, you're going to have like a complex

[00:21:05] moral perspective on drone warfare.

[00:21:08] It's, it's unlike any other film I've ever seen.

[00:21:11] Uh, go, go, go watch now.

[00:21:15] Yeah.

[00:21:16] So, you know, for, for, if you haven't seen this, what it's about, Helen Mirren is like

[00:21:22] a commander of a drone mission.

[00:21:24] And, uh, Aaron Paul from, uh, Breaking Bad is like the drone pilot.

[00:21:30] And then there's a bunch of other characters, Alan Rickman.

[00:21:33] It's like his last role.

[00:21:34] Last role.

[00:21:35] He's like a British general that's in a room with politicians and the attorney general and

[00:21:40] stuff.

[00:21:41] So it's almost like a chamber play in that it just takes place in these separate rooms.

[00:21:46] Everyone's connected through video screens and, you know, uh, communicate, uh, communication,

[00:21:52] but, and then there's the drone mission on the ground in Somalia, which they go to and

[00:21:57] there's some action and there's some good characters, but like, it shouldn't be as visually interesting

[00:22:02] as it is, but, but it is.

[00:22:07] And like, like Ben said, it uses like ticking clocks and it ratchets up the tension with,

[00:22:12] like I said, it's like a rules of engagement thriller.

[00:22:14] So everyone throughout the film is sort of scrambling for legal and moral cover to unleash

[00:22:20] hellfire missiles, knowing that there's going to be collateral damage and they're rationalizing

[00:22:25] and arguing about what's acceptable.

[00:22:27] Um, and much better than a movie like this, you know, should be.

[00:22:34] I think.

[00:22:34] I want to talk a little bit about Jonathan Demme's update to the Manchurian Candid.

[00:22:41] This one came out in 2004 and it stars Denzel Washington, Lee Shriver, uh, Meryl Streep,

[00:22:48] John Voight, early, you know, Jeffrey Wright, uh, role, like a big time cast, big time movie

[00:22:55] follow up to, uh, the original Manchurian Candid, which I should mention was like a big hit.

[00:23:01] People love that movie.

[00:23:02] And so I really always liked this one because of how it captured the paranoia visually.

[00:23:09] I think when you've earlier said that paranoia is kind of like a key element to like the political

[00:23:15] thriller, I think, because there are, are, are always all these powers moving around you

[00:23:21] that you don't really know.

[00:23:23] And you may be, and you're being manipulated constantly by these, by these entities that

[00:23:29] you can't see, can't influence, except for these political thrillers, where it's like

[00:23:34] one person has a shot to change something, to change the world.

[00:23:39] And that's kind of like the fantasy of the political thriller.

[00:23:42] And that's kind of what we see.

[00:23:44] I feel like in the new, the newer Manchurian Candidate, it, as you said earlier, it kind

[00:23:49] of plays more into a hero story, even though it's kind of dark and grim, it's still like

[00:23:54] Denzel does kind of save the day at the end.

[00:23:56] All I, all I remember is that it's very like Al Qaeda coded, uh, of this one.

[00:24:02] And like how the sophistication I'm reminded by Donald Rensfeld's, uh, uh, quote of the

[00:24:09] sophisticate sophistication of the third world is why we have to maintain NATO or was that

[00:24:15] HW?

[00:24:16] Uh, yeah, it's, it really is just like an update, but we're paranoid about terrorism

[00:24:21] now.

[00:24:22] And we're paranoid about middle Eastern people rather than technologically sophisticated,

[00:24:28] uh, Manchurian.

[00:24:31] Well, we, we, uh, there is a point in his favor because it makes the Manchurian is the company

[00:24:37] now is a corporation that's behind all these maneuvering.

[00:24:42] So the, the Gulf war stuff is just kind of a cover for it.

[00:24:45] That, that does feel very 2004 in like, you know, Apple and all the, and Amazon are going

[00:24:52] to be the, the corporations of the future.

[00:24:55] They're going to rule over us.

[00:24:57] And, uh, they were right, but they were right.

[00:24:59] Yeah.

[00:25:00] Speaking to what you said without having, you know, without remembering the movie, um,

[00:25:04] you were talking about like the hero, the hero's role and, and stuff.

[00:25:09] And I do think that like an essential part of a good political thriller is not falling

[00:25:13] into that trap.

[00:25:14] And cause that's like a blockbuster movie, uh, fantasy in an adventure story, the hero's

[00:25:21] tale, you know, once the rebels, um, you know, overcome the empire they've won or not

[00:25:28] as you know, they had to make another trilogy, but the end of the movie is they won.

[00:25:35] The end of the matrix is, is, is they win the end of all, a lot of things is like that.

[00:25:40] But in a political thriller, I think it's more about exposing more intractable problems.

[00:25:46] Um, so like in the end of a lot of the seventies thrillers, it's just like, Oh, everything's

[00:25:52] fucked.

[00:25:52] It's just, this isn't, this isn't resolved.

[00:25:54] And in like, in I have the sky, it, it shows not only the problems with drone warfare, but

[00:26:00] I think something that I pulled from it myself is just that this style of thinking is enabled

[00:26:07] by technology and empire.

[00:26:09] And it's just, these people are just making decisions at the end point.

[00:26:14] Uh, they've been put into this position, whether you agree with it or not.

[00:26:17] And that, that system is coming for all of us.

[00:26:20] It's coming for normal everyday policing and is going to be how a future of how we live.

[00:26:26] Yeah.

[00:26:26] One of the, one of the key lines that Matt, uh, repeated to me in a text message from eye

[00:26:31] in the sky is we're all locked into this kill chain, which I think is words from the future,

[00:26:38] uh, that are going to keep coming back over and over again.

[00:26:41] Yeah.

[00:26:41] This like this hero story idea in the political thriller, I want to point it all the president

[00:26:47] men, because that is sort of, uh, a synthesis of these two ideas of like, uh, covering the

[00:26:54] real world politics.

[00:26:56] All the president's men for the listener, uh, is the real life story of the Watergate scandal

[00:27:01] from, uh, the journalists who broke it at the post.

[00:27:05] Uh, if you don't know the film, uh, and it's got, uh, Hoffman and Robert Redford playing

[00:27:13] Bernstein.

[00:27:14] And, uh, what's the other guy's name?

[00:27:16] I don't know any names.

[00:27:17] Woodward.

[00:27:18] Woodward.

[00:27:18] I'm sure these are famous journalists.

[00:27:21] Woodward and Bernstein.

[00:27:22] The most famous, maybe.

[00:27:32] Yeah.

[00:27:33] Carl Bernstein on line one.

[00:27:35] One.

[00:27:37] Yep.

[00:27:38] Mercy.

[00:27:38] I think I got a lead on Donald Bernstein.

[00:27:40] I just, I got it.

[00:27:41] What?

[00:27:41] I just talked to him.

[00:27:42] I just hung up for him.

[00:27:43] And Bernstein, listen, it goes all the way to Stans.

[00:27:45] What are you talking about?

[00:27:46] It goes all the way to Stans.

[00:27:47] He gave the check to Stans for the committee to re-elect.

[00:27:49] Did he say that?

[00:27:50] He said it.

[00:27:51] I've got it on my notes.

[00:27:53] Jesus.

[00:27:53] It's down on record, Bernstein.

[00:27:54] That money winds up in the back of the Watergate burger?

[00:27:57] Yes.

[00:27:58] Fantastic.

[00:27:58] I'm coming home.

[00:27:59] Okay.

[00:28:00] They do not make movies like this movie.

[00:28:03] Just as like a formal aside, they don't make movies like this anymore.

[00:28:07] It is so precise and well acted and well written.

[00:28:11] There's this tiny little moment at this right wing Florida County Commissioner's office where

[00:28:19] the secretary is keeping Dustin Hoffman from talking to this bank attendant or something.

[00:28:25] And she's repeating Bernstein's name over the phone.

[00:28:28] And she says Bernstein as though like she's never said a Jewish name before.

[00:28:36] And it's such a tiny detail, but it does so much.

[00:28:40] There's all these little details of like Robert Redford for mixing up people's names.

[00:28:45] And he keeps doing it through the whole film over and over again.

[00:28:49] And you don't really get performances like these anymore.

[00:28:52] You don't really get tiny little written details in it.

[00:28:54] And I thought even that that might have been off the cuff and they kept it.

[00:28:59] But either way, I thought it showed that he's learning information really rapidly.

[00:29:04] So like the last thing is still on his mind when he's talking.

[00:29:09] Just like details, these details that don't get addressed at the level of performance or writing in modern films.

[00:29:18] But to come back to this idea of the hero story, they go on like a heroic quest for information.

[00:29:25] And they're not saying things like, oh, we're going to take down the Republicans or we're going to take down the president.

[00:29:34] They're just following leads to publish a story.

[00:29:38] They really just want to do their job well and write a good story.

[00:29:43] And then at the end of the film, it zooms in on the TV and Nixon is resigning.

[00:29:49] No, I think he's accepting his nomination because he doesn't resign for a few more years.

[00:29:55] He accepts the nomination.

[00:29:56] It zooms in the TV and he accepts the nomination.

[00:29:59] While we're on all the president's men, I have to give my take on this, which is not about the politics at all.

[00:30:05] It's just how stunning it is.

[00:30:07] It really is a period piece to watch today.

[00:30:09] Yes.

[00:30:09] Because it's really a procedural about journalism.

[00:30:13] You're sitting in the office watching them do journalism, which involves calling people on the phone, writing notes, going to a pay phone, driving somewhere, interviewing someone in person.

[00:30:23] All these things that don't – it's watching a film from another era.

[00:30:27] It almost seems like I described it to Ben as ASMR because it's actually like a slow – it's kind of a slow movie, frankly, because to get information, they have to show him calling someone.

[00:30:41] Then someone else goes somewhere.

[00:30:43] He writes something down.

[00:30:44] All of these things that people don't do anymore.

[00:30:47] The movie couldn't even exist today because it's – they get a piece of paper.

[00:30:52] They go into their boss's office.

[00:30:54] They talk about it.

[00:30:55] They drive somewhere.

[00:30:55] All these things now would just be done through text message or Slack.

[00:31:00] Everybody in the President's Men would just be sitting on Slack the entire time.

[00:31:06] I just thought it was just a great period piece because of that, of like, oh, a world that used to exist not only pre-smartphone but just when newsrooms used to operate as newsrooms and not people sitting at home on their laptops and only communicating through a workplace Slack.

[00:31:25] I was saying to Matt, because all the technology is so old and everything is analog that it's like someone let Mid Journey make a movie.

[00:31:34] It looks like an alien world created from old photograph.

[00:31:39] It seems alien.

[00:31:41] It seems alien.

[00:31:42] It's really alienating.

[00:31:46] After Ben said that, I couldn't get it out of my head because it does have this Mid Journey sheen to it.

[00:31:52] Not because it looks fake or because it's AI slop, but you can kind of see – like he said, it's an alien world that doesn't exist anymore.

[00:32:02] Every piece of clothing, every item in the set is nowhere to be found in modern society anymore.

[00:32:08] It's very weird.

[00:32:11] A movie that reminds me of All the President's Men, I just wonder if you haven't seen it, Spotlight.

[00:32:18] I have seen Spotlight, but there's things in Spotlight that just still don't line up, right?

[00:32:25] Like it's a procedural, but it's not as naturalistic, right?

[00:32:35] Like it's still very modern.

[00:32:38] Modern film has like a weird sheen to it.

[00:32:41] Like you don't have the Robert Redford getting people's names wrong.

[00:32:45] You don't have the trucking through the newsroom in the same way.

[00:32:49] The camera is very static.

[00:32:52] It's all shot very flat, and they take the case apart slowly, but not by sort of carpetbagging – not carpetbagging, not by mudracking.

[00:33:12] Mudbreaking.

[00:33:14] Mudracking.

[00:33:14] Mudracking.

[00:33:15] Mudracking.

[00:33:16] Not through the procedure of journalism necessarily, but just through characterization, I feel.

[00:33:23] You do have to bag the muck after you rake it though.

[00:33:26] Yeah.

[00:33:26] How are you supposed to get rid of it?

[00:33:28] Yeah.

[00:33:29] Now I use a muck blower.

[00:33:31] Mmm.

[00:33:32] That's what I've been doing wrong.

[00:33:34] They're quite loud, but –

[00:33:35] This is a political thriller that I used to watch all the time back in the day.

[00:33:39] In fact, this is my mother's favorite movie.

[00:33:41] We wore out this VHS tape.

[00:33:44] Enemy of the State.

[00:33:46] Yes.

[00:33:46] From 1998.

[00:33:47] Tony Scott.

[00:33:49] Possibly the most prescient of all political thrillers, because basically everything this

[00:33:54] film was worried about ended up happening.

[00:33:57] It's a political thriller about a rogue NSA bumping off people who are standing in their

[00:34:07] way of conducting mass surveillance on Americans.

[00:34:12] And this Will Smith, who's just this regular smegular labor lawyer, kind of gets brought

[00:34:19] into this by happenstance randomly, and they're able to destroy his life by basically – they

[00:34:27] basically canceled him.

[00:34:28] He was the first person to ever be canceled.

[00:34:31] Can't go for the internet.

[00:34:33] Yeah.

[00:34:34] Yeah.

[00:34:35] Like, this is fairly early internet stuff.

[00:34:37] But yeah, they were basically able to destroy his life by surveilling him, find out that

[00:34:42] he's cheating on his wife, and publishing this information.

[00:34:45] I think they get him fired from his job, framed him from all these crimes.

[00:34:49] And it's just this intensely paranoid film with a joy to watch, a blast of a thriller, and

[00:34:56] all the issues that I worry about are like bit for bit, spot for spot, like what happened.

[00:35:02] And this is pre-9-11.

[00:35:04] So it's very early to this party.

[00:35:08] Yeah.

[00:35:09] You know, I mean, God, did it come out the same year as – oh, God, I'm forgetting the

[00:35:15] name – the Paul Verhoeven movie with the bugs.

[00:35:18] Why did I just –

[00:35:19] Starship Troopers.

[00:35:20] Starship Troopers.

[00:35:21] Because that was another – sorry.

[00:35:23] I've seen it a lot.

[00:35:24] I love it.

[00:35:25] I just blanked on the name.

[00:35:26] That was another very prescient pre-9-11 movie.

[00:35:29] I was just – they came out –

[00:35:31] 97.

[00:35:32] Okay.

[00:35:33] So within a year of each other.

[00:35:34] The thing I remember about Enemy of the State was like at the time – and I think it's

[00:35:40] Gene Hackman who says it in the movie.

[00:35:42] He's talking about like, they can see your license plate from space.

[00:35:46] Yes.

[00:35:46] Like the world has changed and you don't know the world that you live in anymore.

[00:35:51] Like the power that they have now is crazy.

[00:35:54] And, you know, there's a lot of like the aesthetics of that film and the posters is all like those

[00:35:58] top-down shots of satellite shots.

[00:36:02] Which was at the time a much newer thing.

[00:36:05] Now it's totally pervaded everything.

[00:36:07] Eye in the Sky is told – a third of the movie is literally told through that effectively.

[00:36:13] Effectively.

[00:36:14] But, I mean, very effectively.

[00:36:16] But yeah, at the time it was like they can see you moving from your house, driving, following

[00:36:22] your car.

[00:36:22] You can't escape.

[00:36:24] We live in a total surveillance state run by the NSA and they can destroy your life.

[00:36:29] Perfect.

[00:36:29] And it's that point of view used to be like unnerving.

[00:36:35] But now it's like the – now we associate it with Google Maps.

[00:36:39] It's like, oh, that's how I know how I'm going to get around.

[00:36:43] We've accepted so much of it.

[00:36:45] We opt into it like just on a daily basis.

[00:36:49] It's fascinating to look at.

[00:36:51] Like you could put out this movie today almost because I feel like people don't really think

[00:36:56] about like what does this mean that we're constantly tracked.

[00:37:01] We're constantly on video.

[00:37:02] Just the doorbell cameras, for God's sakes.

[00:37:05] How did we – how did – Tony Scott didn't put out in the media state for us all to be

[00:37:10] – to voluntarily put doorbell cameras on to be part of the surveillance web.

[00:37:16] You know, like how did they all have – how did that happen?

[00:37:19] To do what?

[00:37:20] To make content for our own – you know, I – this will really date the issue – this

[00:37:27] episode when people listen to it in the future.

[00:37:30] I saw today that Nick Fuentes, the far right lunatic guy, posted footage online from his

[00:37:38] ring camera of a guy who came to his house to murder him in Chicago yesterday and ended

[00:37:45] up being shot and killed by the police.

[00:37:47] But he had a gun and a crossbow and he was knocking on his door, ringing his doorbell.

[00:37:52] But just the fact that, you know, he's got this installed immediately when it happens.

[00:37:56] It's like, what does it do?

[00:37:59] It goes up online for others to see.

[00:38:00] You got to get ad revenue.

[00:38:01] Yeah, exactly.

[00:38:02] Like he's an influencer.

[00:38:03] Come on.

[00:38:04] Like pump out – this is great content.

[00:38:06] It's going to rile everybody up.

[00:38:08] The future of Enemy of the State – if they did a remake now, Enemy of the State would

[00:38:13] it be about influencers making ad revenue off of tracking Will Smith online.

[00:38:18] One thing I love about Tony Scott's movies, though, is that he is one of the premier visual

[00:38:25] stylists of the 90s.

[00:38:28] That he ends up defining this like visual look of engaging with digital technology and this

[00:38:37] frenetic camera work.

[00:38:38] The camera, it's never – he's like the – he walked so Michael Bay could run.

[00:38:44] The camera is never static.

[00:38:46] The camera is never exposed properly.

[00:38:49] Everything is always moving and in motion and there's blinking lights.

[00:38:55] There's flashing.

[00:38:56] It's very kinetic.

[00:38:57] And which is very interesting to compare to All the President's Men, which is very mannered

[00:39:07] and slow and analog and intentional versus this commercial viewpoint of Tony Scott.

[00:39:22] The thriller can hold so many different aesthetics.

[00:39:28] Three Days of the Condor.

[00:39:30] It's fine.

[00:39:31] It's basically Robert Redford discovers that the CIA is doing bad things and that there's

[00:39:38] nothing he can do about it and that some of the plots of the CIA end up in spy novels

[00:39:43] because they were using a computer.

[00:39:46] It's basically sort of like a proto version of Enemy of the State where they're using a

[00:39:49] computer to scan all printed material in the world and they end up finding a CIA plot

[00:39:56] in a spy novel and then he has to run away and they kill everyone at the station.

[00:40:01] Some of it's incoherent.

[00:40:03] I barely remember it, to be honest.

[00:40:06] It's okay.

[00:40:07] It's fine.

[00:40:08] I give it a C.

[00:40:09] What about you, Leslie?

[00:40:10] I just couldn't get over how badly he treats the woman in this movie that he ends up kidnapping.

[00:40:17] He is a CIA agent, so you know, no good cops, no good agents, but like his office gets shot

[00:40:23] up, right?

[00:40:24] And he gets framed for it.

[00:40:25] And it's a pretty cool action scene.

[00:40:26] He's so nasty to this woman that he kidnaps.

[00:40:30] He's like just trying to, who ends up like trying to help him with that he needs.

[00:40:33] I watched a little bit of the streaming series, Condor, and he's much nicer to her in that

[00:40:41] one.

[00:40:41] She's more empowered.

[00:40:43] But I wanted to say, actually, I think the thriller has moved to TV largely and streaming

[00:40:49] shows because there's kind of a ton of these.

[00:40:51] Now, are they all thrilling?

[00:40:53] Not quite.

[00:40:54] In fact, a lot of them are quite boring.

[00:40:56] I think House of Cards kind of got the ball rolling.

[00:40:59] These quote unquote political thrillers are soap operas, usually featuring movie stars doing

[00:41:07] TV.

[00:41:08] And they have these long plots to take 10 episodes to fill out, but they're not necessarily

[00:41:13] all that thrilling.

[00:41:16] So when it is and I think it's not a good move for the political and it's all people talking

[00:41:21] in rooms like in very static born rake ways.

[00:41:25] Usually House of Cards.

[00:41:27] Now that you bring it up was was great because it just added enough like, you know, it was

[00:41:33] like they were killing people.

[00:41:34] They were having bisexual threesomes.

[00:41:36] It was it was a little like Kevin Spacey was unhinged.

[00:41:40] It was great for a while.

[00:41:42] I'm going to call TV political thrillers political fillers.

[00:41:46] Oh, wow.

[00:41:48] Wow.

[00:41:49] Because I watched a little bit of the new Day of the Jackal.

[00:41:54] I'm I'm like a Day of the Jackal head.

[00:41:56] The 1973 Day of the Jackal is a great movie.

[00:41:58] Go watch it there.

[00:41:59] It's unlike any other movie.

[00:42:01] And I've also watched the 90s remake with Bruce Willis just called The Jackal, which is

[00:42:09] not a good movie.

[00:42:10] And I've now watched the TV series The Day of the Jackal, which this is my criticism is

[00:42:18] that we have become a society that hates storytelling.

[00:42:23] We hate story.

[00:42:24] We hate moving things forward.

[00:42:29] In in writing, it's called building a bridge to nowhere.

[00:42:32] Like you're unwilling to take that next step in where you're supposed to go with the story

[00:42:37] because you're saying no to your own ideas.

[00:42:40] Like Day of the Jackal, it's been so long just showing all these shots of him aiming.

[00:42:47] You don't need to see it.

[00:42:49] And then they're like narrating over top of him aiming like, oh, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[00:42:54] That's a big thing now.

[00:42:55] Everything with an assassin, he has to have his in-head narration now.

[00:43:00] Like just shoot.

[00:43:01] I don't want to hear you talk or opine.

[00:43:03] Just shoot.

[00:43:03] The killer.

[00:43:04] I'm sorry he didn't kill that many guys.

[00:43:06] He didn't kill that many guys in that movie.

[00:43:08] He killed like three guys because he's too busy listening to the Smiths and talking to himself.

[00:43:12] Come on.

[00:43:13] What you're supposed to do in a thriller is you set things up.

[00:43:18] It's like a chess game or dominoes.

[00:43:21] You set things up.

[00:43:22] And then as they're knocking over, that's when you have the feelings.

[00:43:26] But we're so impatient to get to that moment that we don't do the setup.

[00:43:31] People don't have the patience for the setup anymore.

[00:43:35] And so without the setup, you have the moment itself, which flops.

[00:43:40] And then you need to do something else with the rest of your runtime.

[00:43:44] So you put a bunch of filler in to your thriller.

[00:43:48] And you have Eddie Redmayne has a wife now.

[00:43:50] And they're on the rocks.

[00:43:53] Oh, come on.

[00:43:54] He's talking to this person and he has to get this thing because, yeah, it's we have a real problem in a society with just getting to the good stuff.

[00:44:05] Let's just only have good stuff in our video games, in our TV and our movies.

[00:44:10] Thank you.

[00:44:11] All right.

[00:44:12] So I want to mention briefly because I know you haven't watched it, but a political thriller that's actually fairly popular, written by America's television wordsmith, Taylor Sheridan of Yellowstone fame.

[00:44:26] Yellowstone, the number one show in the country, recently ended its run.

[00:44:31] He, a couple of years ago, started a show called Lioness, which is his take on the political thriller.

[00:44:39] And by that, I mean this is him adapting the Call of Duty campaigns.

[00:44:47] Because it is the most deranged show and the politics are incomprehensible at times.

[00:44:55] Like it's about all these spec ops operators.

[00:44:58] You know, they're back, you know, from the Bush era.

[00:45:00] You know, they used to be, you know, all the tier one operators, all the bearded guys who were hunting the Taliban.

[00:45:07] They're back in this show, but now they're like led by Zoe Sildanya.

[00:45:11] Okay.

[00:45:12] And she's their leader and she's like tough and she's ass kicking and she curses a lot and she tells everybody to go fuck themselves and pull their dicks out of their ears.

[00:45:22] But every time she goes on a mission, it goes tits up because it's an action show.

[00:45:27] And she ends up with a shootout that results in like dozens of casualties.

[00:45:32] Every single episode.

[00:45:34] One episode, they are fighting ISIS and getting the shootout with them and like 50 people die.

[00:45:40] The next episode, they're fighting.

[00:45:42] They end up cross swords with the cartel and they end up like blowing like a bunch of suicide bomber from the Taliban blows up smuggled Mexican immigrants that the cartel is trafficking.

[00:45:58] You know, just completely bonkers stuff.

[00:46:01] And yeah.

[00:46:01] And it all started because they, a U.S. congressperson, a Republican was kidnapped by a cartel because China paid on China's bidding.

[00:46:14] It's just this completely wackadoo world where nothing makes sense.

[00:46:18] And it's like, it's hard to call it a political, like a good political.

[00:46:23] It's certainly not a good political thriller and things happen in it.

[00:46:26] There's not a lot of filler, but it's just like bizarre, just shoot them up stuff for no reason that has the patina of real world politics and has Morgan Freeman and Nicole Kim and all these serious actors.

[00:46:39] But it's like more, a more bonkers style 24.

[00:46:44] I love this.

[00:46:45] I love this because it's sort of the paranoia of the early 70s thrillers coming back.

[00:46:51] But instead of being a revelatory paranoia of like the deep state is out to get you, it's like a reactionary paranoia of like everything you've heard on the news is actually working together to kill you.

[00:47:03] And the American imperial state is the only thing standing in their way.

[00:47:09] I'm not surprised to hear that, Leslie, because like I, you know, Taylor Sheridan, I think, has.

[00:47:14] Made some extraordinarily good stuff.

[00:47:16] I mean, his best era was these three, the three films that he wrote, you know, Sicario, Wind River and Hell or High Water are just like great, you know, neo Westerns, whatever you want to call them.

[00:47:28] And Sicario is like, sounds like a better version of what you're saying because there's not, you know, a crazy death toll where, you know, they're killing 10, 20 operatives in a thing.

[00:47:39] But, you know, I did like Yellowstone in spite of itself sometimes.

[00:47:45] I found it incredibly entertaining.

[00:47:47] But clearly the guy had to write too much television in the last couple of years and just unable to say no to the amount of money and time.

[00:47:57] And so he just wrote whatever, seven different shows like in the last two years.

[00:48:03] It's totally insane.

[00:48:04] He is white Tyler Perry.

[00:48:12] And as we can see, he's, you know, it's to diminishing returns.

[00:48:17] But, you know, when that Paramount Plus check comes in for, he did some insane deal, like 200 million or whatever.

[00:48:26] Hey, if they come to me and they say, you know, write 200 episodes of Justice Warriors and we'll give you and Ben $100 million, I'd say, sure.

[00:48:37] You'll have it.

[00:48:38] You'll have it next week.

[00:48:39] I'm loading up chat GPT.

[00:48:40] I'm going hard.

[00:48:42] Hard to blame him, I guess.

[00:48:44] But I wish maybe some other people had shots of making shows instead of just him making seven shows.

[00:48:50] One show, you can do it, right?

[00:48:52] With a vision and a really talented person.

[00:48:55] When you're doing 20 spinoffs in different shows because Paramount Plus demands endless content and for some reason you're the only person that they're allowing to write television shows, then it's to diminishing returns.

[00:49:07] All right.

[00:49:08] One thing we got to talk about because we've been talked around it, Marathon Man, an amazing movie.

[00:49:15] I avoided this movie because I had a thing.

[00:49:19] I never liked Dustin Hoffman as an actor.

[00:49:21] I think I saw him in a scary movie when I was a kid or something like that and I never really got into him.

[00:49:28] Yeah.

[00:49:28] Man, when I got around to watch this movie, it's an amazing movie.

[00:49:31] It's an amazing film.

[00:49:33] I hadn't seen it until, I don't know, two years ago or something.

[00:49:38] It's great.

[00:49:39] It is sort of a fantasy about getting to kill Nazis.

[00:49:44] Yes.

[00:49:46] I mean, in a time period when you could have, right?

[00:49:52] Like the plot of the movie involves him sort of being pulled into sort of a Nazi that exists because of like basically Operation Paperclip.

[00:50:05] And he gets kind of pulled into, I don't know, like this weird government criminal world where this Nazi is trying to do this scheme with diamonds.

[00:50:16] But it almost plays out like a, it's like a paranoid thriller where none of this, either this random guy gets pulled into this stuff.

[00:50:24] Well, and his brother is like a CIA agent too, right?

[00:50:30] In that one.

[00:50:31] I love the, I love the brother.

[00:50:33] I love social relations.

[00:50:35] I love familial relations to like show social relations.

[00:50:40] Well, and his dad committed suicide because of McCarthy, the McCarthy hearings.

[00:50:45] Oh, that's great.

[00:50:46] I love that.

[00:50:46] Like a patriarch killed by anti-communism.

[00:50:49] His brother himself, instead of just a fellow citizen, it's his brother is the CIA agent.

[00:50:55] I love using the family structures and family connections to make social connections more real for an audience.

[00:51:03] That's A plus Chad writing.

[00:51:06] And I think we have to say for the listener that there is a infamous scene with a dentist in this movie.

[00:51:14] Is it safe?

[00:51:15] Is a thriller with a capital T on point politics because it's about killing Nazis.

[00:51:21] I highly recommend Marathon, man.

[00:51:24] It's a classic for a reason.

[00:51:25] Yeah.

[00:51:26] And that scene, that torture scene, man, that'll stick with you.

[00:51:29] You know, you could find, you can come up with a lot.

[00:51:31] They make a lot more grosser torture porn these days.

[00:51:34] But that scene is real.

[00:51:37] Yes.

[00:51:38] Effective.

[00:51:40] All right.

[00:51:40] Ben, Matt, I've had you on for so long.

[00:51:44] Thank you so much for coming on the show today.

[00:51:46] Where can people find you?

[00:51:47] Where can people find Justice Warriors?

[00:51:49] You can find me on X, the everything app, home of free speech.

[00:51:53] And you can find Justice Warriors basically at any bookseller at bookstores.

[00:52:01] You might have to ask the bookstore to order it for you if you care about that.

[00:52:05] Or you can just order it online through most bookselling platforms.

[00:52:09] Matt, where can people follow your little tidbits of wisdom?

[00:52:14] Yeah.

[00:52:16] You know, I'm pretty much on all the social media apps.

[00:52:18] Matt Boar is easy to find.

[00:52:20] Yeah.

[00:52:21] All right, folks.

[00:52:22] That was Struggle Sessions.

[00:52:23] Have a good one.

[00:52:24] Peace.

[00:52:25] Peace.