Military Movie Madness From Predictive Programing To Blowing The Whistle
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We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in.
Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want.
We think too much and feel too little.
More than machinery.
We need humanity.
We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat.
As if that's the way it's supposed to be.
We know things are bad, worse than bad.
They're crazy.
You've got to say, I'm a human being.
God damn it.
My life has value.
You have meddled with the primal forces of nature.
Don't give yourselves to brutes.
Men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think, or what to feel, who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder.
Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men.
Machine men with machine minds and machine hearts.
Thank you.
Haha.
Showtime!
It's time to buckle up for making sense of the madness.
And who loves you and who do you love?
Hey, everybody, Jason Burmes here.
And you know, for those that know the intro and have been with me for a while, you know that last part is from one of my favorite movies of all time.
Stands up to this day.
Christian Bale's Gun Maverick00:15:01
In fact, probably my favorite Stephen King adaption.
I know I'm going to get a boot in the Arnis from the Shawshank people, but hands down, I'm a running man guy.
And they've remade the Running Man.
Now, let me say this.
I started reading the novel while I was on the road in Plains.
Have not finished it.
However, it was vastly different.
This new adaptation, which better hold up, gosh darn it, looks wildly different from the 80s Schwarzenegger pick and already I can tell is following much more the novel that Stephen King wrote.
Now, I got a treat for you guys today.
I know you saw the thumb.
I'm not sure what the expectations are.
But we got a guy who I was lucky enough to get to know in the past like year plus or so.
When I was doing that show for today's news talk now, Pulse, and good luck over there, Mike and company.
You know, that guy gave me free reign to say and do whatever I want and interview really interesting people like this guy.
The Bayes Lit Analyzer.
I tell you to go follow him on X, but he's not there.
So you can't do that.
And I thought we had just done a show, a rather heated one, over on Johnny Vedmore's Truth Bomb podcast.
And I didn't know what to expect.
I'd never watched one.
I'd heard it was kind of like a game show.
I want to ruin it for everybody, but it is tooth and nail.
And there is a screw job.
That's all I'm going to say.
There is a screw job.
Actually, there's kind of multiple screw jobs that we can get into when you look at artificial intelligence and how it's run.
And the topic that he had chosen to discuss at one point was Apocalypse Now.
And, you know, you just have a vast knowledge of not only, you know, film, but literature.
Very impressive on your Shakespeare stuff.
So I thought to myself, let's widen it out.
Let's talk apocalypse now.
Let's talk all these different military movies, the criticisms, the predictive programming, the narratives, and everything.
So, Baze, let everybody know who you are, how you kind of got started in this arena, and what your overall feeling of kind of this military representation in cinema has been over the years.
Yeah, thanks for having me, Jason.
I really appreciate it.
I've been a big fan for a long time.
And I'm at Bayslid Analyzer on YouTube, you guys, of course, again.
And I basically started off covering the, and I still cover the canon of literature.
The point was to make a channel that is long form.
I only do live and to talk to adults about literature.
There's so many things in terms of cultural references and movie references where essentially literature is misquoted, or there's a sort of misguided attempt to understand literature in a cultural context.
So I wanted to go back to the sources of many of these things and discuss them.
And I've gone through, we've done Greek, Roman, Old English, Romantic period, Romantic, English Romantic poetry, neoclassical modern literature, postmodernism.
And then we started, I started doing movies and looking at film versions of a lot of these, a lot of these literary works.
And that sort of has taken us into movies.
And so we kind of still do both.
But in terms of the military aspect of where the Hollywood industry has gone, I think that this is a continuation of the classic traditions of literature, of course, and film is simply the newest medium.
I'm not sure where film is going to go.
There haven't been that many revolutionary techniques that have changed Hollywood, especially recently, for something completely new.
But we take literary aspects of war going back to, you know, this is in the Old Testament, of course, and in Homer's Iliad, Homer's Odyssey, and all the way through Shakespeare and all the way up to now.
Now, of course, the military-industrial complex has had a pretty explicit complicity in terms of propaganda.
And I think that predictive programming and the revelatory aspects of film have been especially important for people to understand.
Film has kind of gone away in terms of its popularity with the advent of especially the smartphone over the years.
And of course, with social media, it kind of has taken away from film.
And the Karanka in 2020 really almost killed the movie industry in a number of ways.
But one of the things I know you want to talk about tonight, which is Top Gun Maverick, really revitalized Hollywood.
And we're going to see where that's going to take us.
I think there's a healthy skepticism of films now, but it's still important to watch such things.
You can't turn off from these things.
And again, with Top Gun Maverick, we see the events in Iran that have just happened.
And we read that into Top Gun Maverick.
There's another movie called Kandahar with Gerard Butler that also touches on that with Stuxnet.
So there are a number of things that I think it's important to keep in mind because it's not just, there's a lot of propaganda and it's not just predictive programming.
A lot of things we find truth in art where there's some sort of symbiosis or a middle way between those things, but it's important to keep our eyes open.
So, you know, since you started with Maverick, I was probably going to try to end with it, but who knows if we'd even get there.
And it is the most modern example because although Iran is never named specifically, the entire layout is a nuclear-capable Muslim nation that supports terrorism in the mountains.
And there's a ton of other subtexts there, not just preparing you for that strike, but also paying homage to quote-unquote Skunkworks.
and Lockheed Martin, briefly, the battle between man and machine within the military, which, by the way, is one, folks, it's machine.
They've already decided that's the whole thing.
But at the same time, playing up this human element because they need you to do that to support these things with Tom Cruise saying, damn that drone technology.
I'm going up there.
So, you know, initially when it happened, I gave it a review and I gave it a positive review other than the fact that they were playing the trope of this, you know, Muslim military power and us bombing them unilaterally.
And now it comes to fruition.
And when that movie's released, it's about a year and a half before the elections, May of 23, or May of 22.
I'm sorry.
May of 22, exactly.
And it was a big pushback, right?
From the stuff that was out there and being pushed.
And it did well financially.
So what's your take on that?
It also played into the 80s nostalgia value of the first one, where obviously the Ruskies are the enemy.
And lo and behold, yet again today, they are also the enemy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that one of the major things about Top Gun Maverick is that people probably don't consider.
And this might be something that goes under the surface because we have heard so much mythology of Hollywood in terms of the advertising, the storylines that override even the film, the films themselves.
One of those things, one of those elements is the fact that Hollywood really was in trouble during 2020 in the sense that, yes, we were bombarded with all of the messages from the celebrities like singing, you know, John Lennon's Imagine and all this stuff.
And there's certainly a machine for that.
I mean, that was purposeful.
But even they couldn't escape the whole lock-in at home aspect of the thing.
And then that became its own mythology of, look, we're all the same.
We're all locked in at home and, you know, all that.
But Top Gun Maverick was being made with Tom Cruise despite all of those things.
And do you remember there was the leaked audio of Tom going crazy on the crew?
And that was, I really think that was an attempt in the same vein as in 2007 with Terminator Salvation.
I think it was 2007, Terminator Salvation.
Oh, with Christian Bale?
With Christian Bale.
Wait, hold on.
Let's put some context on these things because I think they're two wildly different things.
I do too.
Yeah.
So for those that don't know what happened in both those instances, let's do the Christian Bale one first because it's not politically significant.
It's Christian Bale on set, and it was one of the Batman films.
And I think it was like the lighting or sound guy was either talking to the background, and he just...
Yeah, it's Terminator Salvation.
Terminator Salvation.
Sorry, yes.
Yeah.
And he goes wild.
And it's one of the most spectacularly hilarious pieces of audio from a Hollywood.
Now, let me say this about him quick.
Although Tom Cruise got into acting at a young age, Christian Bale is a child actor.
Empire of the Sun.
He's been in this business literally, you know, while he might have been wetting the bed, folks.
He's that young in that.
Now, the Tom Cruise one, it leaks out also, I think, still kind of during the time period where COVID is at, you know, that heightened fear level.
Yep.
And basically, you know, these guys are allowed to do this because they're doing all the protocols to keep us safe.
And a member, I think, what was it of the food crew or whatever?
They had, they weren't wearing a mask or whatever, you know, because they're human beings and they want to be human and it's ridiculous.
And Tom Cruise dressed them down like he was six foot tall and not 5'3.
The take I have on the Tom Cruise thing is that if you listen to the audio, I might be wrong about this, but if you listen to the audio, he is chewing out the crew, but he's not chewing out the crew for being, you know, quote unquote unsafe in the thing.
It's because they're breaking the protocols that the studio has set in.
And if they break the protocol, and that's that's a whole other thing.
You could argue that like it shouldn't, of course it was all whack in the first place, but but that if they break the thing, the studio will shut them down and then they won't be able to have the film.
And he's employing, I don't know, 5,000 people in this thing and putting their kids through college.
And you can't, somebody has to keep doing this.
So it's the way that I take it.
Now, I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, of course, they shouldn't have been doing it in the first place.
No, listen, I get it.
I remember when that video leaked on that Hollywood set where that catering crew is like, you know, I'm on this side and I can't be open.
And over there, they have everything going on because they're privileged holly weirdos.
I mean, that's just, that's another just whole fascinating.
The German Salvation one is funny because Christian Bale is freaking out at the light guy because the lights are too bright.
And because, and I just covered a book this afternoon by Frank Langela, his audiobook, his memoir on, it's called Dropped Names.
And he really, I haven't read many memoirs like this from Hollywood where he's pretty open about criticizing various people.
And he basically makes clear that everyone in Hollywood, as we knew, as we already know, but everyone is like this.
And that what they now call everyone, everyone's apparently a narcissist now.
But back in the day, it was just, they're either a diva or a baby or bitch or whatever.
And they are extremely neurotic, as you, as you would know.
I mean, everyone would know that about Hollywood.
And that they really do act like this, but it's almost a game of wits with people.
It's almost a test with people.
And he says that this is the only place where these freaks would end up.
There's, this is it.
Like he, he's, he's going out with Ava Gardner at one point.
She's old and she gets this, she gets this, uh, she's like, has this guy in her house who's promising her the world and how she's going to be on the cover of Vanity Fair?
And she's already a has-been.
And then Frank Langella is her friend.
And he's like, I think this guy's taking you for a ride.
I think he's a snake.
And she says, yes, but it's all I've got.
You know, so they'll do anything to stay in the spotlight, of course.
And we all know that a lot of the celebrity news and a lot of the relationships that you see are also synthetic.
They're also fake.
And another Christian Bale thing with this, I just rewatched The Prestige the other night, which is a great film.
It's amazing.
But that really does hit on something that we don't think about, which is that there's a scene where he and Hugh Jackman go to watch this Chinese magician who makes a fishbowl appear.
And there's no way he could just, you know, materialize it.
And they learned that they watch him after the set and they watch him coming off of the stage and then backstage and then going to his carriage.
And he's still an old man.
And Christian Bale says to Hugh Jackman, this is the real performance.
The performance is not on the stage.
The performance is offstage because the guy is carrying the fishbowl between his legs.
And the only way to make this believable is for him to do it all the time, his whole life.
So, in other words, Hollywood continues offstage.
This is something that we see in relationships, in the fake relationships, and all of the news.
You have Frank Lynn Joe talks about how a lot of people that he, a lot of the actors will put out back then newspaper messages or political messages.
But when you meet them in real life, they are nothing like that.
Of course, because they're acting, but they don't even, they didn't even write the things they're put up.
They can't, he says that Carrie Grant, for instance, who is this magnetic alpha male in movies and who's very good looking.
He was from Bristol, where I went to drama school.
2001: A Space Odyssey Revisited00:14:37
And he's this, you know, great personality.
And he says that Mel Brooks had lunch with him one time.
And then five minutes later, he was like, never let that guy in my office again.
He's the most incredible boar.
He's just a piece of wood that they inserted a personality into.
So I think that, you know, with a lot of these press releases, a lot of them are fake or another form of performance.
But that ties into the political aspects of this, you know, and what's released at times that I think is supposed to be relevant to us.
Well, you know what?
And it's interesting you kind of talk about the social climbing aspect of Hollywood, the neurosis, the phoniness of it, because that can bring me to really the first movie that I did want to talk about today.
And it is a movie that starts during the Revolutionary War.
It's what a lot of people don't know about from Stanley Kubrick, Barry Linden.
Although you see right on the poster, it got four Oscars.
I think it's an underwatched and misunderstood film in a lot of ways because it is slow-paced, but it tells the tale of this guy who is basically, you know, a simpleton that got thrown into the Revolutionary War that hates it.
Can't stand being there.
Not particularly witty or smart, is taken advantage of a bunch and then becomes into a social climbing predator and gets into the aristocracy.
And I mean, this has not only the Revolutionary War and that aristocracy, but there's the famous duel sequence in which you may be indifferent or dislike this guy throughout, but that's a moment of emotion no matter how you take it.
We're going to get into some other Kubrick films because obviously Dr. Strangelove, one of my favorites, but also Full Metal Jacket, probably his most well-known war film, if not most well-known film.
What's your take on Barry Linden?
Well, I covered Barry Linden in one of the Stanley Kubrick streams I did.
I've covered, you know, you kind of have to start with Kubrick if you're doing film.
And the interesting thing about Barry Linden is that I believe that he was allowed to do this film because of what he had done, you know, with Doctor Strangelove and with 2001 A Space Odyssey, mainly that film.
And there's a great book called Kubrick by Jason Horsley that deals with this, with all this stuff, especially with the AI aspects of Kubrick.
Kubrick's two big passion projects that he never made were AI artificial intelligence, which ended up being taken up by Spielberg, and the other was a Napoleon movie.
And this was the closest thing that he could get to a Napoleonic movie because they were, they had already, as happens in Hollywood, a bunch of the same movies will be made at the same time just because of people talking or because how ideas come up.
But I think that one weird thing about this movie is that it didn't, it's not that it's an artistic set piece that is basically the moving paintings of Thomas Gainsborough.
It's like walking through a museum very fast and watching the pictures roll by.
And that's purposeful.
And that's because a lot of Kubrick movies allow the story to breathe.
And because the European expanse and European warfare is so kind of, it's a kind of vast thing and so big, especially in terms of time and the continuation of warfare, that the movie sort of reflects that.
It's also a forebear of Eyes Wide Shut in a number of ways because of the decadence of the elites in the film.
They're lounging around.
They're much more, they're actually much more decadent looking in this, you know, pasty faces, kind of inbred looking people lounging around in an Enlightenment era sort of illumination.
And so I think this movie sort of gave rise to Eyes Wide Shut, and it's a movie that should be watched.
But unlike a lot of some of the other Kubrick movies, it doesn't have some of the humor that the, it does have humorous parts, but it doesn't have some of the tongue-in-cheek humor that the other films have.
And it is also, it's almost too static at times.
And I think that one thing that Kubrick seems to be doing here that Horseley talks about this, and this is, I kind of appreciate this, is that there's no real reason for Kubrick to have the creative control that he does in films.
You know, his films were not, they were not like huge, what we now call blockbuster films.
None of them really did that.
He got a start really taking over the directorship from, I forget who it was, but with Spartacus.
And that allowed him a way into Hollywood.
He'd done a couple films before they did the killing, et cetera.
And then he does Terry Southern's Doctor Strangelove.
And then, of course, 2001, A Space Odyssey, which doesn't really have any of the trappings of a thing that you would think would allow a propaganda element into people's lives because most people, most people watching have probably seen 2001 Space Odyssey, but most people probably have not actually seen it outside of this audience, especially younger people haven't seen it.
And by the way, let's talk about that just for a second.
Truthfully, you got a film that rides into the two and a half hour zone that there is no dialogue in the first like 40 minutes or so.
I remember when I watched it as a kid, just like when I watched Clockwork Orange, and even when I watched Eyes Wide Shut, you know, when I was a teenager, I was probably in college at that time, 18 or 19.
Most of the themes, other than the discomfort of watching some of them, like the discomfort in watching Clockwork Orange or, you know, again, the bizarre nature of the ending of 2001 A Space Odyssey, I'm still not grasping a lot of the overall, not only undertone themes, but the main themes in the film that are very overarching.
So, you know, I would say in order to understand those films, you probably want to see them in your mid-20s at least with a mind's eye that what you're watching, just like The Shining, you know, has layers.
Yeah, I think I, you know, when I was a teenager, I watched it because it was like, oh, it's cool to take some tabs and watch this movie, man.
You know, and then you, then I, you know, but I like film anyway, and you watch the film.
And actually, 2001 has a Barry Linden has a kind of homage to 2001 in it, or vice versa, future, it's a future set piece, which is that when the guy goes to the Jupiter and Beyond and he ends up in the weird room at the end of the movie, that is Barry Linden.
He's he's in Barry Linden world because his idea of an afterlife in the alien thing in the movie is that they give him the things that comfort him, which is like Enlightenment era set pieces and French, you know, French furniture before he becomes the star man or moon child star baby that's sent back to Earth.
I think that the important thing with all that is that IBM obviously played a huge role in the movie and Ram Corporation, you know, in terms of military industrial complex sort of programming or future programming for the movie.
And if it's true that Kubrick was the one who did the sound, the stage set for the lunar stuff, I'll say, then that is the reason why he's allowed to have creative control for all these movies.
It's very difficult in Hollywood for to give a director control and final cut over stuff.
You just, you don't really see that that often.
So the reason for the reason for that, I'll say, is that this is the same thing with Bruckheimer and Simpson in the 80s with High Concept.
They were tired of these tour de force directors in the 70s who like saw visions of the world and they wanted to make something gritty and they had creative control, but it ends up bleeding the studio.
So they were tired of the Robert Evans type of people.
They wanted that.
It's kind of like Quincy Jones with as a producer with music.
There's an interview with Quincy Jones where someone asked him, well, what about Michael's lyrics that he wrote for his songs?
What did you think of those?
And Quincy Jones was like, what?
What are you talking about?
No, no, no.
No, singers don't write songs.
I'm the producer.
I write the songs.
I make the album.
I tell them what to do.
And I think that's the thing with a lot of these guys because there's no reason why a guy as cerebral as Stanley Kubrick would have that kind of control unless he did this big thing for them and it's a kind of reward.
Well, let's talk about the direct connection just quickly between both of those movies.
As you kind of mentioned in passing, 2001 A Space Odyssey comes before Barry Linden.
And Barry Linden was a movie that he felt he couldn't do justice to unless he could do these scenes in very low light that were essentially the scenes you were kind of talking about of decadence, where everybody's in candlelight and this makeup, etc.
So what does that have to do with 2001 A Space Odyssey?
Well, NASA was heavily involved in that and at the time had the only camera that you could actually film that in.
So they had this very, very low light, high aperture camera that they had agreed to allow Stanley Kubrick to use after 2001, a space odyssey.
So even his contemporaries that were around him at the time said that was a large motivation for him to get involved in that picture.
Yeah, well, the Carl Zeiss and the giant lenses, which are very, very rare.
Think one of the most expensive things to do in Hollywood is the camera works, the camera operation itself.
And there's a movie called The Box.
Is it The Box?
The Box, by the way, by Richard Kelly, who's from Richmond, Virginia, where I am, where there's a sort of alternate version or a related version of NASA and the Moon Landings in 2001 with Frank Langella was just mentioning that sort of shows some of these cooperative aspects where we have the NSA,
NASA, and film life and almost a synthetic film life for people in a city who are going to become pawns of this sort of thing related to that.
But Kubrick was always doing movies that, you know, like, I mean, this isn't unusual.
Any artist is going to do films that speak to the human condition and have both an external drive and a sort of how that relates to us as humans.
But except for probably The Shining, The Shining is probably the most demonic, insular movie that he did.
But it's also weird because you bring up the lighting in Barry Linden, and a lot of people know the movie from that.
They know the low lighting and the sort of candlelit aspects of it.
They also did that in Milish Foreman's 1984 movie, Amadeus.
But what that also speaks to or conveys is that it's a sort of reflection of the fact that the characters in the movie have very little inner light.
They are very dry, very droll.
They don't seem to have a drive.
Even the kind of drive that Barry Linden himself has seems to be something that is foisted upon him.
And this is a critique of the Enlightenment era and where we've come from, but it's also a critique, I think, of contemporary civilization and society and where we're going.
So with Kubrick in particular, Strange Love, 2001, a Space Odyssey in a lot of ways, Linden, and then The Big Daddy, Full Metal Jacket.
There's a lot of critique of war, of the power structure within the military.
Obviously, from that film, you know, Arlie Emery, who was, or Ermie, I'm sorry, who was actually in the military and had done some work before that, kind of in that vein, was skeptical about doing this film and basically it being a caricature.
It becomes his biggest role ever.
And I would argue lets him become a Hollywood mainstay for the next 30 years of his life, quite frankly.
So what do you think it is with Kubrick?
That film, Collative Learning, Rob Ager has done a lot of great work on that.
How the first half of the film, everybody's there, but the people that are missing from the first half and the second half have kind of a shadow version of themselves or a more grown-up version.
Obviously, the crescendo of the first half is extremely dark, but the second half of the film, especially the crescendo of the second half of the film, is that much darker.
What are your overall takeaways from Full Metal Jacket?
Well, my first takeaway is why was Matthew Modine cast in this movie?
Like, this could have been any other actor.
And I think that this is one of the clever things that Kubrick does, even into casting.
Casting Choices Reveal Depths00:11:31
And it's that we have a kind of empty character that we can put our, we can sort of project our emotions onto and what we want this character to do.
But he's pretty empty.
Yes, he has the thing with, there's the funny dialogue with what's supposed to be kind of like William Westmoreland, you know, what the hell does that mean?
You know, it's like, well, it's the duality of mans or the whole Jungian thing scene, which is pretty clever.
And that really speaks to the way that the film is divided.
If you read the short timers, everybody should read the short timers.
There's a couple, there are a few other books about Vietnam that people really should read.
The movies are always pretty good dealing with Vietnam.
My favorite movie, and I think it's the best movie of all time, is Apocalypse Now.
And of course, that's becomes something different than the book, than Art of Darkness.
And it's set in Vietnam, you know, for the film.
But that's a great example because you go back and read Heart of Darkness.
And I'm not trying to sell the importance of reading, but I think that reading allows us a sort of impressionistic view of things that allow us to be there.
We're not just the problem with movies, the thing that they can't really get over is the fact that they're different from books because when you read words, we think in words, we dream in words.
In the beginning, it was the word.
Words are how we see or hear the world around us.
And so when we read books, our vista is not external.
It's in our brain, but we see things outside of ourselves.
But we create them even though we're reading words that somebody else has written.
They're also a time machine that goes directly from the brain of the person who wrote it to us through time that never changes.
But when you watch a film, the thing that never changes is the eternal youth or the eternal age of the people on the screen.
It allows actors to live forever, but it's their face.
And we can't help but accept the images that they've given us.
So once the filmmaker puts an image on the screen, it never changes.
And we have no choice but to accept what they've given us.
And when you read Apocalypse Now, the movie does a good idea, or when you read Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now does a great job of conveying the weird, almost transformational, transcendent ideas through words in the book, but it still can't capture it.
And it's the same with The Short Timers or Michael Harris Dispatches.
Harley Ermey by the way was in Apocalypse Now.
People know that.
If they remember that, which is before, you know, before Full Metal Jacket, he's one of the helicopter pilots.
Fucking savages.
I'll get you a case of beer for that one.
He's that guy.
And it did allow him a career.
Dale Dye is another one of these guys.
Dale Dye is in almost every Hollywood film.
He is, I was re-watching Saved Private Ryan today, and he's one of the advisors at the beginning of the movie.
And he is the military advisor on like almost all these movies.
He's in, you know, he's Platoon and all of these films.
And that is a weird meta aspect of having a military advisor, not just advising the movie, but also in the film.
But Full Metal Jacket is a great movie.
And like you said, it becomes almost satirical.
It is also, it's also very weird because it's, I can't tell whether Full Metal Jacket is actually a satire or not.
I think it may just be a parody of Vietnam.
I think that Apocalypse Now is sort of semi-satirical or maybe just hyper-truthful, but Full Metal Jacket is not, It's not, you know, we don't.
I don't know whether it's realistic or not, but it has a lot of truth in the film, but it almost ends up being a comical mirror to Vietnam, even with the harsh scenes in the film, rather than something that we are supposed to critique that's supposed to sting us.
So it's almost like a parody that folds back on itself in some sort of weird timeline.
But it's a great, it's a great example of how we kind of the general public has an idea of war in a Vietnam.
When people think of Vietnam, generally, we don't really think of books or news stories.
We think of scenes in Platoon and Full Metal Jacket.
Absolutely.
And Platoon, especially.
I'd say, you know, with one of the discomforts of war, critique movies, I guess casualties of war with Sean Penn and Michael J. Fox.
But even there, I mean, you almost get into like the cartoon levels.
And then when you get into something like Apocalypse Now, you know, there are those kind of almost satire moments, I would argue, like what happens after the Playboy Bunnies and the USO show, and you know, obviously, you know, the naked model afterwards and all those type of things.
But you know, something interesting we should probably dive into before we move on into Rambo is even that era of the USO show and Hollywood being involved with the military-industrial complex.
That was coming to an end in the sense that a lot of people didn't like Bob Hope anymore on that stage.
And he was getting angry as people were protesting the war.
He had come from an era where, you know, he was a superstar post-World War II and very much doing a lot of things with.
In fact, I've got a lot of those Bob Hope DVDs where he's actually in the Korean War visiting these guys, letting off those submachine guns.
You want to talk about full metal jackets?
They loaded one up for Bob and he's mowing down the jungle.
What do you think about Bob Hope being Candy Jones's handler?
So again, for those that don't know that story, and it's again, when you look at the military in Hollywood and you look at entertainment and narrative control and kind of these, you talked about PR creations of relationships and situations.
You do wonder whether or not a guy like Bob Hope might have actually been involved in something like MK Ultra.
You know, certainly with Kubrick and the film Eyes Wide Shut, you know, I get the feeling at the end, and some people disagree with me, but I get it from the beginning to the end.
That one of the, you know, I would say not as discussed themes is that his wife is obviously one of these mind-controlled sex slaves.
Yeah.
You know, it's pretty apparent.
And then obviously the end scene, not only with the mask being there, et cetera, but them being in the store shopping around Christmas time once again.
And the two old men that are at the party, before we know everybody's an MK Ultra sex slave, take their daughter away and walk off with her.
Yeah.
So yeah, Rob Ager, Rob Ager kind of points him out like that.
There seems to be a ring just like in the red cloak scene that's on one of the games in the background of that toy store scene.
And even the idea of the, you know, the toy is kind of, you know, there's an extreme satanic perversity of that, but that also that Bill, what's his name?
You know, Tom Cruise in the movie has been a kind of toy of these people.
And of course, the connection with Nicole Kidman and Sir Anthony Kidman seems to be obvious in the film.
And I was going to say this earlier about Kubrick in terms of Matthew Modine and casting characters, that there's a thing with casting directors in Hollywood where we think, you know, why does this person get pigeonholed in a role or why do they, why do they, you know, this person's in a role they were exactly in.
And that's because for the most part, casting directors and many people in Hollywood in the Hollywood industry don't watch movies.
And when they do, especially with casting directors, I guess you're dealing with so many people all the time.
And if you're getting work, you're constantly casting movies.
They just created the Oscar category for casting.
And so it's like, oh, if we need a strong Indian guy for the movie, we'll just go with the guy who was in the last movie as a strong Indian guy.
We'll just put him in the next one.
So there's no, the audition process is almost irrelevant.
It's just what you look like.
But with Kubrick, I think what's interesting is that with Eyes Wide Shut, it seems apparent to me that he casts Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in the movie, not just because of Tom Cruise being an actor and wanting to be in the movie, but because they were playing characters in the movie that they play in real life or in some sort of true life.
And that Nicole Kidman seems to be playing a role in the movie that she possibly plays in real life.
Now, Tom Cruise talks about the film.
I do like, by the way, however, I like that on Eyes Wide Shut, so many people will complain about the number of takes that Stanley Kubrick does with the movie.
They'll say, I was in there for nine hours and he did 4 million takes and all this stuff.
And this kind of shows the disconnect between humans in real life.
I mean, between Hollywood and real humans that, you know, when you go to your wagey job every day, you're there for eight hours and you are doing a bunch of shitty work or whatever, staring at a computer screen.
Well, a lot of it is extremely repetitive over and over and over and over again.
Yes, exactly.
And so these people do the same thing.
Shelly Duvall infamously complained about Stanley Kubrick, saying that he kind of broke her on the set of the movie because he scared her into her scream role in the shining when she has Jack Torrance coming after her.
But the point of that as a person creating a movie from Stanley Kubrick's point of view is that, look, we're going to be here as long as it takes.
We've got all this money.
The film is endless.
We can do what we want on this thing.
He has final cut.
He has final control.
So he's like, we're going to take nine hours to make something that's going to live forever.
So he's going to finally push her to the breaking point if he needs her so that on film, it reflects that because she can't act.
And so Tom Cruise is the only person who apparently never complained on the set of Eyes Wide Shut about the number of takes because he's like, look, whatever it takes, I'm here for the movie, whatever it takes.
I kind of, I get that.
But I think it, I think it's funny that nobody ever really, you know, in terms of literary work or in terms of the actors themselves ever considers that they are cast in the movie because they're playing themselves.
So in the final rung on this, let's move away from the existential stuff, the really interesting Kubrick stuff, which I love.
And let's get Hollyweird propaganda back to that Tom Cruise Maverick kind of deal.
Action Heroes Clash00:03:13
You know, there was a time when the freedom fighters were our ally, and that time was Rambo 3 when we were supporting the Mujah Hedin.
I mean, if you look at the poster, folks, you don't have to squint your eyes to see under the Apache helicopter a bunch of Muslims on horses with Rambo.
In fact, you can see this article.
Did Sylvester Stallone Ramboth really pay tribute to Osama bin Laden?
Urban Myth explained.
No, it wasn't Osam bin Laden.
It was the good people of Afghanistan.
And people tried to misquote that as the Mujahideen.
But clearly, during that era, again, when the Soviets were the enemies, it was okay to lionize radical Muslims as though they were just like you and me.
I mean, yeah, like Rambo 3 is Rambo 3 is kind of a twin picture with Living Daylights, by the way, with the Bond movie.
Both take place around, they're both filmed around the same time.
They both take place in the same place.
Of course, the big thing with Living Daylights was the opium trade with what's his name, Joe Don Baker, playing the bad guy.
He pops up again two movies later in GoldenEye as the good guy.
See, it's a rose.
Remember that guy?
Well, Rambo 3 is interesting because, yeah, again, this is a Charlie Wilson's War is a kind of movie about almost like a different movie about Rambo, where we are fighting the Mujahideen, of course.
And it does seem to be something that becomes predictive for the future and for the Big Nine event later, if there was anyone paying attention at the time.
It's also so different than Rambo First Blood, where it's anti-establishment, where it's critique of the Vietnam War.
What have you done to me?
Now it's, all right, boys, the USA today got that Sylvester Stallone money.
Yeah, we got because some damn fool accused you of being the best.
Right.
It's always.
I love 80s cheese action movies.
You know, go ahead.
It's also the plot of Iron Eagle, really.
Remember Iron Eagle with Doug Masters, which is that, you know, Lewis Gossett Jr. is like, you here for your flying lesson in the F-16?
You know, like that you could get those in the 80s.
And he straps his like, his walkman to his leg.
Oh, my dad's been captured by, you know, the Viet Cong and he's still there or whatever.
They made like five of those movies, too.
It wasn't just Iron Eagle one.
We got to find them.
So what better way than to get a bunch of teenagers to be able to do this?
And by the way, the payoff in Iron Eagle is, oh, now you're in Top Gun Academy.
Oh, well, I don't even have my learner's permit yet.
That's fine.
So Rambo 3 is kind of Rambo 3 is like kind of the same thing.
Lies in 80s Action00:05:36
I don't know.
Yeah, well, let's talk about that a little bit because in 80s action, that's where we really ramp up the beefy, muscly military guy.
You know, off air, we were talking a little bit about the precursor story to Predator.
You've got all these mercenaries that are hardcore U.S. guys down in South America somewhere, obviously very involved.
But, you know, one of the other ones I wanted to bring up, and especially because you asked the mind control question and we've talked about spies and espionage, there was a well-timed picture in between, you know, the 80s superstar and into the 90s awesomeness with James Cameron as the director, okay?
The avatar himself, aliens himself, Terminator guy himself, and it was True Lies.
And True Lies, you know, was this story where Arnold Schwarzenegger has, you know, the perfect family, and he's the modern-day James Bond.
And unbeknownst to his wife that desperately wants something outside of the mundane, you know, she's into it.
But the real subplot of the whole thing is we're not worried about the Russians so much anymore.
It's these Libyan terrorists.
And all of a sudden, the terrorists were brown and they were riding on horses jumping on skyscrapers, folks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's, people used to point out, I mean, you pointed this out many times that, you know, the obvious Big Nine symbolism, you know, of the building with the jet coming straight into it.
And the guy who looks very, very similar to Bin Laden in the movie.
That did seem to have.
There's a number of other things in the movie.
One that the guy who heads the spy network or whatever is played by Charlton Heston.
He's a kind of what's Samuel Jackson's character's name in the captain.
Is he Captain Mar What's his name?
Oh, you're talking about he's Nick Fury in the Marvel movies.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's like Nick Fury.
Or what's the senator's name with the eye patch?
God, I can't.
Oh, the eye patch, Senator.
I'm not sure.
Eye patch are you?
You're not a Texas guy.
The Texas neocon guy with the eye patch.
Oh, in this is in real life.
Oh, the Texas Neocon guy with the eye patch.
Oh, I know you're talking about Dan Crenshaw.
Yeah.
That's it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's like, he's like adult Dan Crenshaw, right?
As if Dan Crenshaw was a little kid.
No, that's true today.
He's just a future global leader.
That's all Dan.
Yeah.
They both attended Klaus Schwab's Academy.
And it is funny.
And also, it's funny because it has the idea that it has the grifter in the movie because Bill Paxton is the fake spy.
Nanosphere fake spy grifter guy who's grifting as this, you know, stolen valor, essentially, in the movie.
And so it's an interestingly very successful film and was very big.
And like you said, that was really the last gasp of the kind of anti-Soviet thing in movies because they couldn't do that anymore.
And that sort of speaks to, and the other night we were talking about Big Nine on Johnny Vedmore.
And one of the things that was weird was that, and you were talking about how they already had Bin Laden's name when that happened.
And I'll just say personally that when September 11th happened, I was living in Belfast in Northern Ireland.
I was at university and I was riding my bike down the street before classes hadn't started yet.
I was with a friend and we rode down a friend street and he came out of the house and he said, your country's under attack.
And I was like, okay, you know, he was like, no, really.
So we went up into the house and watched it and watched it and watched all the events happen.
I didn't get the interruption with the Applebee's commercial in the middle of the events with a little bit of chicken fry.
But I went and I tried to call my parents on a BT phone box and I couldn't get through to them.
I didn't talk to my parents for a week.
And then I heard about the Pentagon and all this stuff.
I saw a thing in the paper over there that one of the possible targets that they'd uncovered, I haven't been able to find this since, was the Honeywell factory, which is near where I live.
And then they started talking about nuclear weapons.
And I turned 21 three days after that.
Then as a guy over there and not being able to communicate with my family at all, I was thinking, first of all, like, are they alive?
And two, who did this?
And I remember saying to my friend, like, who was this, the Russians?
I mean, that shit's over.
Why would this be Russia?
Like, I don't know who would have done this.
And of course, they came out with the bin Laden stuff.
Bin!
Nope.
That was crazy.
That was crazy because, I mean, we were both around then.
And when you heard about hijackings, it was like Libyan guys hijacking airplanes to take them to Palestine or Paris or something for money.
It was never like, you know, driving the thing into the building or whatever.
So that was a completely new thing.
But movies like True Lies sort of seeded that possibility.
Who Would Have Done This?00:01:06
Seated the ideas.
Bazed, we have run out of time.
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You know the drill here.
Thank you, brother.
It is not about left or right.
Everything we talked about was fun stuff about right and wrong, morality.
And we gave you a bunch of great films to go watch or rewatch.
If you've really never seen some of these films, it's time to watch them or haven't seen them as an adult.
Get in on the Barry Linden, get in on the Eyes Wide Shut.