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March 12, 2025 - I Don't Speak German
01:05:24
UNLOCKED! Bonus 13: A Few Good Men (1992)

With apologies for our latest recent hiatus, here's an old bonus episode - formerly just for patrons - in which Daniel and Jack chat about 1992's A Few Good Men, a military courtroom drama written by Aaron 'West Wing' / 'Social Network' Sorkin, and starring Kevin Pollack and some other people probably. We're still alive and the show will be back.  We appreciate your patience. Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent.   Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1

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Time Text
This is I Don't Speak German.
I'm Jack Graham, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he/him, who spent years tracking the far right in their safe In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
So, I have no idea what number bonus this is.
I want to say...
I believe it's 13. It's 13. 13. Fuck, yeah.
Because we did two Batman.
We did two Batman.
Yes, indeed.
So, yeah, it probably is 13. I'll go with 13. That'll do.
It sounds convincing.
Bonus episode 13 of I Don't Speak German.
And it's another movie one.
Yeah, because the last one was a bit depressing, wasn't it?
The last one was about...
Kyle Rittenhouse, and you accurately predicted that he would get off.
And that's got a kind of application, I think, to what we're going to be talking about this time around.
Yeah, I've been looking at a lot of legal filings and issues lately.
In fact, we're going to...
Come back to Dear Rittenhouse, I think, in episode 100. I think we might touch upon Dear Rittenhouse in the course of this one.
I think we will, yes.
There's a particular character who...
I've been re-watching the Rittenhouse trial footage this afternoon.
And I was like, hey, do you want to do this bonus episode?
We had already talked about doing A Few Good Men because I just got it in my head to like, yeah, let's do a legal movie because I'm stuck in thinking about Legal issues, apparently.
Yeah, I was going to say, what could it be that's been making you think about legal things and courtrooms and trials lately?
I don't know.
Geez, Sainz v.
Kessler, Armand Aubrey, Rittenhouse, and now this Michigan teenage shooter thing that's happened.
Yes, yes, and also Ghislaine Maxwell.
Also Ghislaine Maxwell, although I haven't been following that much.
Focused on that, but no.
No, I mean, you know, I haven't been.
Watching that one.
But yeah, no, we're in an age of big name trials, apparently, all of a sudden.
Yeah.
Real life courtroom drama.
So yeah, that's what we're talking about.
So we're going to talk about Aaron Sorkin and Rob Reiner.
A movie.
Yeah, a movie from 1992. Which was the year I left school.
That was my last year at secondary school and my first year at college.
1992. I was 16 in July of 1992. Wow.
You finished early then, I guess.
Or is that more standard over there?
It's a bit different here.
I think you guys over there, you have it in two, don't you?
You kind of have high school and then college is what you call university.
Whereas we kind of split it into three.
We have school and then we have further education, which is also called college, which is a couple of years.
16, 17, 18. And then university, higher education.
Right.
18, 19, 20, 21, that sort of thing.
At least that's how it used to work.
As I say, it's been so long since I've been in the education system that they've probably changed it all by now.
I don't fucking know.
Yeah, we do high school, which is like 14 to 18. And then you go into college, and then that's four years.
And then if you do any post, post, you know.
The undergraduate work, that's, you know, however long that takes, usually like 10 years, if you go on.
Yeah, that sounds sensible.
No, we don't do it that way.
No, God.
It's far too uncomplicated.
No, we've got to split it into three.
Yeah.
But yes, that was the, yeah, because some schools in Britain, you stay at school until you're like 17, 18. I think they call that a sixth form.
College, school, I don't know.
I do not know.
Don't worry about it.
It's not important.
Fair enough.
I don't know why you're even making a big deal out of this, Daniel.
Why did you get onto this subject in the first place?
Well, I was, this came out in 92, late 92, and I would have seen it on like, I actually saw it on pay-per-view in early 93 or like mid 93, whenever it was released.
So I would have been like 13 or so when I saw this movie.
And I feel like it's, you know, it made a big impression on me because of the time in which I saw it, because it was kind of the first, like, Oscar-baity movie that, like, I kind of saw and understood on, you know, a first viewing.
You know, like, it just hits you at that, like, moment in life, I think.
And so I have a fondness for this that the film really just ought to serve for the slightest, you know?
So, you know, but I've rewatched it many times over the years and, you know, sat down to rewatch it recently and went like, wow, there's a lot here.
So definitely not for us to talk about.
Yeah, no, I saw it back in the day.
I suppose it would have been like 1993, probably a video rental.
I don't really remember.
Yeah, I remember seeing it several times for some reason.
I can't think why.
Maybe I really liked it.
This was a big movie at the time.
Yeah, it was a big deal.
It was a huge hit.
It made $240 million on a $40 million budget, which doesn't sound like a lot in 2021. Well, maybe in 2020, those are big numbers, right?
During the middle of the pandemic.
But it doesn't sound like a ton, but that was a huge movie at the time.
Thinking about it, for me, it was probably Jack Nicholson.
I was probably watching it on the strength of him.
Nominated for Best Picture.
I mean, it was kind of one of the big awards-based pictures at that time.
Yes, yes.
Because it's very, well, it's a movie about ideas and ethics.
Big, big, big ideas.
Very thoughtful, yeah.
Yeah, no, so...
Like the Nuremberg defense.
Well, I mean, that is it, isn't it?
I watched it several times back in the day and watched it again for the first time in years, decades, probably, just in the last couple of hours in preparation for this.
And, yeah, it's shit.
And it's deeply, deeply stupid and deeply, deeply offensive.
And yeah, basically it is championing the Nuremberg defense and lampshading it, but nevertheless, that's what it's saying.
Right.
But only with respect to Americans.
I think that's the all-important wrinkle, isn't it?
Right.
It's the Nuremberg defense, American exceptionalism edition.
Let's put it that way.
But Jack, he's mirror engaged, sir.
Don't you understand?
Mirror engaged.
This is not something we need to interrogate any further.
He's mirroring gauge.
Therefore, the shooting was justified.
Therefore, yeah.
Well, I hate to do this because it feels like cheating, but I'll read for the audience a message that I sent to Daniel on our private WhatsApp group while I was in the middle of watching this movie.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, poor Daniel gets a message from me that says, Oh, my dear, sweet, merciful, weeping Christ.
This fucking movie.
And that was in direct response to the bit where, what's his name?
Kevin Pollock says, why do you like them so much?
And Demi Moore swings around and she gives him this piercing stare and she says to him, it's because they stand the post and they say, nobody's going to hurt you tonight, not on my watch.
And I just thought...
Yeah, because Americans are in dire, desperate danger of being invaded and killed by Cuba.
Right, exactly.
And the best that Kevin Pollak has in response, his answer is, because they beat up on a little kid, because he couldn't run very fast.
You know, there's certainly no moral heft given to one side over the other in this.
Yeah, yeah.
The correct answer to her, because that's his response to her rhetorical question just earlier in that scene.
Why do you hate them so much?
The correct answer to that is, because they're fucking murderers?
Right.
Indeed, indeed.
Although I think the film argues that they didn't have any reason to believe that Santiago was going to die, given that.
But they are a part of this system.
I don't know.
It gets complicated because ultimately what we are given by the film is what we're given by the film.
Ultimately, we're sort of treated to that as a justification.
But they willingly engage with this system that does these things.
Well, this is why I did think that old Rittenhouse might pop up.
Because one of the things about the Rittenhouse verdict is that...
I'm no expert on American law, so I don't know.
But people have been saying about the Rittenhouse verdict, you know, stuff like, well, like it or not, agree with his politics, agree with what he did or not.
Ethically, putting all that to one side, just legally, it was the right verdict, right?
Because he didn't go there with intent.
People have been saying things like that.
And that is kind of what this film says, isn't it?
It kind of says, well, they're not murderers because they didn't intend.
And this is a bit...
I mean, I don't want to sort of skip right to the main thing, but this is one of the big apologias for the brutality of empire.
This is what the Israeli state says.
This is what the IDF says.
This is what the apologists for them say when people talk about...
The violence that they enact upon the population that they keep in apartheid conditions, in occupied territory, illegally occupied territory.
And they fire into crowds of people protesting and they say, well, we're not aiming at anybody.
We're not trying to kill anybody.
Et cetera, et cetera.
Right.
And this is Sam Harris's big argument.
Sam Harris's big argument is about, well, no, Chomsky doesn't know what he's talking about because he doesn't understand the differences that the American empire, when they bomb people, they're not trying to kill people.
They're not aiming at people specifically.
So it's completely different.
It's morally completely different.
And I'm sorry, but if you, you know, you've got a guy who is, firstly, he's known to be.
To have breathing problems.
It's explicit in the film that he keeps having problems because he has chest pains and breathing problems, etc.
You've got this guy, you attack him in the middle of the night and you stuff a fucking rag down his throat.
It doesn't matter if you're doing it specifically because you intend to kill him.
If he dies, what you did was some species of murder.
It's not first-degree murder, maybe, but it's still murder because it's a...
Totally foreseeable, predictable outcome of brutalizing somebody in that way.
Right.
In exactly the same way that firing blindly into a crowd of people, if people die, that's because you fired blindly into a crowd.
The entirely foreseeable outcome is that people are going to get hit with bullets and die.
Absolutely.
I think in a way, and again, not necessarily defending the film, but I think it is interesting that the film actually presages some of this conversation and actually ends up being more woke, as it were, than many more recent films, is that it actually immediately starts questioning the system that put this into place as opposed to just making it about the kind of intent of the two soldiers that are involved in it, right?
I think there is something to the fact that This film, like, criticizes, it doesn't criticize the, like, American occupation of Guantanamo Bay.
It isn't questioning that at all.
No, no.
But at least it is.
Completely for granted.
It's just a given.
It's obviously a right thing to do.
It is saying that Jessup, that Jack Nicholson's character is ultimately responsible for this and that this system of Code Reds is the thing that is ultimately responsible for it, which I think is the right answer here.
Although, you know, I think that just being drummed out of the core is not necessarily the appropriate response to their actions as well.
And I think that is, you know, that's just a nice bit of...
Hollywood horse shit there.
They just get off, you know, basically unscathed.
Like, okay, well, you can't be a Marine anymore.
But, you know, you're going to salute Tom Cruise for the first time on his way out of the courtroom.
And that means everything's okay, you know.
My God, the cheese.
The cheese.
Yeah, it's a bit like, I don't know if you know the movie Scent of a Woman.
I do.
Yeah, Al Pacino as a blind ex-Marine, actually, who, you know, who finds...
He's planning to commit suicide, but he finds the will to go on because he has some nice conversations with Chris O'Donnell.
I suppose that's how he realizes that life's worth living after all, I think.
Anyway, at the end of that, Chris O'Donnell is on the point of being expelled from his posh prep school because he won't tell the principal who...
Who dumped paint on his car or something?
And Al Pacino makes this speech to the school where he says, well, yeah, okay, he's covering up for somebody, but that's just because he's not a snitch, and that's honorable.
And the school board are so swayed by that that they say, okay, that's fine.
That's how that works.
We're going to not punish you because you're not snitching on classmates.
See, it's an honorable gentleman, you know, behave in a certain way.
I mean, then again, then again, Mark Zuckerberg didn't get kicked out of Harvard.
So, you know, the failures of institutions to properly police their own is definitely a thing, you know.
I like to imagine that Jessup ends up on the nascent Fox News a few years later, in the Oliver North vein.
He served a few years in the brig, and then he comes out and he's like, and now I'm going to talk to you about freedom in America.
That's right.
His punishment is not going to be particularly severe, even in the confines of this, I don't think.
It's said in the movie that he's sort of on the point of...
I don't know, becoming one of the Joint Chiefs or something like that.
I suppose that's over, isn't it?
Except, you know, because it's 1992. If it was now, it wouldn't matter in the slightest, you know.
Right.
Just look at what Steve Bannon...
You can look at Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn and everybody else.
You know, I guess at the time this film was set, I don't know, this would have been...
I mean, Clinton would have just come into office.
So, you know, that guy, he's never going to support our military in any way.
I was going to say, you know, if it was under the first Bush, then maybe he gets pardoned on his way out of office.
But...
No, it's 92, so it would have been set.
So, yeah, Poppy Bush, just, you know, let him out, let him out.
That's right, yeah.
January 19th of 1993, he gets pardoned.
As nauseating as this is, it is positively woke by the standards of the way Hollywood cinema treats these things now.
Yeah, absolutely.
Because it has the most rudimentary discussion.
It pauses for a moment over these issues.
Which is more than I think Sorkin would ever do again in his career in a way.
It's funny.
This is one of the first big things that Aaron Sorkin did is put him on the map.
He had been a playwright in New York City for 10 years or something like that.
I believe it's his first film that he wrote in the first big...
Kind of his first writing thing for the screen at all.
And, you know, built his career.
He goes on to write The American President a few years later, which that's the Michael Douglas bangs Annette Bening and he's the president.
Like, that's what that movie is, you know.
Notable for the fact that the Oval Office set was also used in Nixon, a film that you and I appreciate.
Yes, indeed.
Which I love the idea of comparing those two movies as approaches to the American presidency, literally filmed on the same set.
You know, in The American President, it's got this glow of warm and homely welcome about it.
And in Oliver Stone's Nixon, it's this haunted gothic castle.
Almost never shot in color at that.
Almost always.
Even when it's in color, it's in deep shadows as opposed to the sitcom version of the presidency, which then he later did for real in the West Wing.
In the West Wing, yeah.
I can't really talk about the West Wing because I've never seen any of it apart from a couple of scenes here and there.
Yeah, that's about all I've seen in the West Wing.
But I was a fan of Sports Night, though.
That was another sitcom that he did, but I haven't revisited that since in at least 15 years, and I plan to keep it that way.
West Wing's not a sitcom, is it?
It's a drama, isn't it, I thought?
It's a drama, but it's in that kind of sorkin-y, like comedy, you know, sort of the thing that this does where it's like, oh, we're going to do a movie about a murder trial, and it's got softball games, and it's got kind of quippy repartee, and, you know, I think that's part of what made this film kind of stick.
With audiences.
And certainly for me, I mean, I think this is the first time that I had seen a movie that had this kind of, you know, this kind of the quippy dialogue, which, you know, now is just so tired and overdone.
And like the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe just does this.
Constantly, even when it makes no fucking sense.
And here it's kind of used as a way of sort of like demonstrating, you know, Caffey, Lieutenant Caffey, Tom Cruise's characters, you know, just sort of boyishness, you know.
But there is a lot of kind of clever back and forth in the dialogue here.
And there's a lot of...
Clever turns of phrase.
And I think that that's kind of what made Sorkin stand out at the beginning.
And I think that that's what the West Wing was really kind of aiming for was we're going to do this kind of drama, this White House drama.
We're going to do it.
We're going to have like clever.
We're going to have people who really kind of incisively quit back and forth with each other.
And that's kind of the thing that sold Sorkin.
He's sort of the, again, the more adult version of a Joss Whedon in this weird way.
And I think that's the thing that I think made A Few Good Men kind of his, I don't know, different among its peers at the time.
If you look at other films of that era that were of this kind of like Caliber, Oscar-caliber movie.
You don't see that same kind of facility with language.
And that gets presupposed into the indie revolution a few years later, the Miramax stuff.
But yeah, sorry.
I do think that the dialogue felt fresh to me at the time, maybe because I was a kid when I saw it.
But even now, I kind of rewatch it and think there's a reason that people gravitated to this.
Yeah, I can see it.
One of the things I noticed on this rewatch was that it's credited as screenplay by Aaron Sorkin based on his play.
And I suppose that means this started as a stage play.
It did.
Yeah, I was wondering how much of the Sorkin style pre-exists in his work as a playwright.
And, you know, that's maybe why people in Hollywood took notice.
Or how much of what we see on screen is a stage play that's been, so to speak, punched up, you know, for Hollywood, for movies, given all these extra notes, like the crackling repartee dialogue, etc., and things.
And that's kind of stuck with him.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Sorkin tells the story as I understand it.
Yeah, go ahead.
Go on.
I was just going to say, it was definitely very influential on every other writer working in Hollywood.
Yeah, I mean, you know, this is an era of, you know, kind of the beginning of that, like, where the screenwriter was king for about three years.
You remember, like, Joe Esterhaus and, you know, all those kind of, you know, there were these big name writers, Shane Black, after Lethal Weapon.
There's about a five-year period where screenwriters were king and they were getting these huge advances, more so than they would ever get before or since.
But Sarkin tells the story, as I understand it, and I'm no great expert on it, but my understanding is that it was optioned as a film.
I think he wrote a treatment and he was approached by producers at the time, in the late 80s for this.
And then he said, no, it has to be a play first.
And so he got some kind of special dispensation to stage it as a play first.
And I don't know if it's like...
That was what he was comfortable with, and that's the only way he knew how to write it.
Or if suddenly he wanted it to be based on the stage play to give it extra gravitas or what the issue was there.
My understanding is that the play version and the screen version go hand-in-hand in a lot of ways.
There's only one actor who actually appears in both versions, from what I understand, and that's Joshua Molina, who would go on to be on Sports Night, and he plays...
Tom, who is Colonel Jessup's assistant, and he has, I think, three lines at the very beginning of the film.
The moment where Jessup says, you know, Tom, call up the Oval Office.
We're going to retire.
We're going to stand down and give away this island to the natives or whatever.
That's Joshua Molina, and he's like the one guy who's in both versions.
Yeah.
One thing that really struck me is how just everybody...
Well, it's not quite that everybody talks the same.
I mean, everybody has an unrealistically...
You know, crackly, quip-laden, smart-aleck, retort style of speech.
Almost everybody, except the people who are very definitely, you know, not like that.
Like Markinson, like the Markinson character.
He's just straight down the line all the way through.
The J.T. Walsh character.
But it's not quite true to say everybody talks the same, because...
It really is incredibly noticeable.
And it was that scene you just mentioned where it's the flashback scene near the start where you see Jessup react to the business with Santiago offering to testify about the firing across the border into Cuba.
And Markinson says, let's transfer him.
And Jessup instantly goes into this great big, long, incredibly convoluted Utterly asshole-ish monologue about not doing that.
And it was that scene in particular that put it home to me, how Jessup is just Caffey just a few years down the line.
They're the same person.
They're just the same person, apart from the ideology.
They're the same personality type.
Jessup is Daniel Caffey 20 years down the line.
There's something to that, for sure.
You know, like, I mean, it is, I mean, they both rely on this certain, I don't know, I don't know if charm is the right word for Jessup, but he's got this kind of like, I mean, he is charming in his own way, but certainly in that scene, it's just like anti-charm.
It's just like, I'm going to quip at you and you have no ability to respond in kind, right?
I mean, he even has this, you know, later on, one of the more famous scenes in the film is the, you know, I eat breakfast 5,000 yards or, you know, 300 yards from 4,000 Cubans who are trained to kill me, you know, and the, you know, I just realized something, Kathy, she outranks you.
There's nothing like getting a blowjob from someone that you have to then salute afterwards.
It's like, Jesus fucking Christ.
You know, clearly a manipulation, you know, clearly meant to be, you know, this is something he's just saying casually.
But, yeah, what an asshole!
It's clearly meant to be intimidating to her, isn't it?
Because she's challenging him.
So clearly he's gone into sex talk because she's the only woman at the table, probably the only woman for 100 miles, actually.
And he's deliberately trying to intimidate her with that kind of talk.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I'm sure that's conscious on the part of the writer.
I'm sure he knows precisely what he's doing, what the character is doing, and the writer is making him do that deliberately.
But also...
It's just the whole thing.
And right, not just with Jessup as well, because it's true of Jessup and it's also true of Caffey.
Caffey is just a total dick through much of this because it's the archetypal Hollywood, you know, young, callow asshole comes of age and learns to be slightly less of an asshole.
Let's all give him a round of applause story.
But it's constant, which is you're meant to be kind of formally disapproving of the asshole-ish.
And at the same time, it just reeks of adulation.
The writer loves this stuff and he loves the people doing it.
And you're meant to as well.
You're meant to relish it.
You're meant to think it's really funny when he's playing softball and he's kind of saying, Dawson and Danny who?
Am I supposed to remember those names for some reason?
Yeah.
Well, he actually does exactly the same thing to Galloway because she balls him out at one point and he says, wow, I'm sexually aroused.
Exactly the same thing that Jessup does later in the movie.
And again, I'm sure the writer's conscious of it, but also the writer thinks it's really fucking cool.
Definitely.
Also, it's hard to not note that this is coming at Demi Moore, who was one of the highest paid actresses in Hollywood, or would be a few years down the line.
And was, you know, kind of at the peak of her fame at this point.
It was probably a big part of the reason that, you know, this movie got the budget it did, was her participation in it.
Because, I mean, you know, she was huge at this point.
Yeah, she was.
They all are, really, aren't they?
I mean, Cruise is huge in 1992. Nicholson is, obviously, he's not hot shit the way the other two are, but he's what gives the movie its sense of seriousness and gravitas.
So you get to, you know, Tom Cruise gets top billing, which I'm sure pissed Nicholson off.
And then you get Nicholson, and then you get Demi Moore III, which, naturally.
Yeah, but it's got, you know, it's got loads of secondary roles which go to actors who would get top billing in anything else.
It's got Kevin Bacon.
A lot of them didn't really, this was their first kind of big, you know, like Kevin Bacon.
This was one of his first dramatic appearances.
He was known as this kind of like teeny bopper comedy guy up until this.
I mean, the very first thing he ever did that was, you know, any kind of, that had any kind of like dramatic heft at all was his Small role in JFK, you know?
And then he does this like a year later and then suddenly he's, you know, dramatic actor guy.
But like Kiefer Sutherland was, you know, again, kind of another like teeny bopper actor.
She'd be getting juniors in this for like 10 seconds.
He was a nobody at that point, you know?
Yeah, I noticed that.
Yeah.
Cooper Gooding Jr. sitting across from Tom Cruise.
And of course, it's a few years before Jerry Maguire.
Right, right.
And I mean, he gets on the stand and he's just another actor.
Noah Wiley, who would go on, I think he's in ER. I think it's either ER or Chicago Hope.
He was in one of the big medical dramas for a number of years and he becomes a big star, like a TV star, but he's...
He's one of the guys on the stand for, you know, one of the pivotal scenes.
And so there are a lot of little actors like that, you know, strong through the movie.
Aaron Sorkin himself has a cameo.
He's the asshole bragging lawyer at the bar who, in one scene, you know, when...
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, when Caffey is on one of his, I think, three separate...
Wandering around on his own sulking sessions that he has in the course of the movie.
That's how you know it's a serious trauma for a serious actor, Jack.
It's the sulking sequences.
He goes off by himself and looks pensive.
Maybe in the rain, in the third one.
That's how you know.
Right.
And that's the one where he gets to, he gets his full, like, Willy Loman, you know, bottle of Jack Daniels.
That's when you know he's at rock bottom.
He has two-thirds of a half liter of Jack Daniels there.
When he pulled the bottle out of his raincoat this time, when I watched it this time around, I really thought, wow.
Wow.
Either Tom Cruise...
Tom Cruise is either a really, really, really great actor, and he's decided to play Caffey as doing that for effect, or Tom Cruise is a really, really, really, really bad actor, and I think it's the second one.
You know, I feel like there is an element of camp to this that, like, I mean, you know, and my favorite kind of, like, you know, signatory of this is that at the end it does the, like...
Full-on, you know, kind of big orchestral score.
The camera kind of swoops up and then you get the end in like the script, right?
Yeah, in Hollywood, old-fashioned Hollywood script.
Yeah.
And I feel like there are lots of like nods to old Hollywood here that struck me, that struck me on kind of rewatching it, particularly kind of courtroom dramas shot very much like.
Like kind of one of those old, you know, kind of legal dramas.
And I think there is a kind of element in which, you know, it is meant to be, you know, we're kind of doing this kind of new hip dialogue style, but we're doing it in the frame of something that feels very kind of old-fashioned and traditional.
And I think that's kind of how it achieved its sort of cachet.
I mean, you know, to, you know, how it achieved kind of both like Academy Award nominations and MTV Movie Award nominations.
Jesus.
I love the idea that it's doing something new, you know, because if you actually go back and watch those old sort of classic silver screen Hollywood movies, like, you know, they're all like repartee constantly between bickering.
Men and women are secretly into each other.
It's all crackly, quippy dialogue going back and forth, you know?
Yeah, I had not seen any Howard Hawks films when I saw this the first time, so, you know, you'll have to forgive me.
Yeah, no, I'm not having a go at anybody that likes it, obviously, you know, but Aaron Sorkin is just packaging old stuff in a slightly new wrapper.
And it's...
I think it does the thing where, you know, a passing remark that somebody makes in one scene gets referenced by somebody else to make a point in a later scene.
You know, like, I'm sorry I lost you your set of steak knives.
I think it does that like three separate times.
It does it a number of times, yes.
No, it's very obvious in the way that it's, you know.
And that is like straight out of like the Sid Field storybooks.
I don't know if you've ever like read any of those like screenwriting manuals.
This is straight out of that style of Hollywood screenwriting.
It turns everything into this You set up and callback, set up and callback, set up and callback.
If the callback can be something that the audience figures out without realizing that it's a callback, then it's even more powerful, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
I mean, one of my favorite things that is him kind of looking at, you get this very kind of very...
Long look at the footlocker, the clothes hanging up in the locker in Santiago's bunk when Caffey is in there doing the guided tour.
And then later when he goes to find his baseball bat, he looks at his clothes and suddenly it's like, aha, Eureka!
It's one of those moments.
And again, you don't necessarily notice that.
What that is doing in the first time.
I've seen this so many times, I don't even know what's good at her anymore.
It's difficult to talk about.
It's difficult for me to talk about, but I really wanted to talk about it, so I'm glad we're here.
It's a bit like that bit in the...
What's it called?
The movie about Alan Turing and the Enigma.
What's it called?
The something game?
The illumination game?
The illustration game?
Something like that?
I can't remember.
Where they kind of, they managed to crack some German code.
But it's, you know, midnight goes by.
So they're kind of, oh, it's pointless.
Now they'll have changed the code or something.
So they just throw it away.
Like, you know, this intelligence just went out of date because midnight clicked over.
Right.
It's an imitation game.
It's the imitation game.
I feel that way about the thing with the clothes in the cupboard because, you know, that's one of the first things you'd notice.
That's one of the first points you'd have.
Right.
Yeah, there's a lot of like...
Legally weird bullshit in this.
And, you know, this is, you know, obviously there's Hollywood horseshit that goes on whenever you're writing something like this.
You know, timelines get compressed, etc., etc.
But, like, in the film, I mean, it is text that Santiago is killed.
And they're at the end of his trial, like, four weeks later.
There's a line where they're like, do you think that these airmen would remember a flight from, like, four weeks ago?
It's like, hold on.
He prepared an entire murder trial in, like, six hours, effectively.
It's pretty remarkable.
Well, they prepared it in a montage where you see them, you know, bonding.
And laughing through a window.
Eating a lot of Chinese food.
That's the way to do it.
This film is very keen on the indicate passage of time and activity by the presence of empty Chinese food cartons in the background technique.
It uses it several times.
Right.
Kevin Pollack is just a treasure in general, but the reading of the line, Gadity Kung Pao Chicken, I always appreciate that.
Yeah, no.
I don't know.
Yeah, I think I'm kind of out of stuff to say, really.
Apart from the one thing I, again, I noticed on this rewatch is that there is one glaringly Non-present element, if you know what I mean.
One thing that is so conspicuous by its absence, which is Santiago's parents.
They are referred to in the suicide note that Markinson writes.
He writes to them.
But they're not named.
Nobody else talks about them.
They don't appear.
And it's because the minute you bring them into the story, it just completely overbalances the story's moral perspective.
You know, how the hell do Mr. and Mrs. Santiago feel about the fact that these guys get time served and they're basically out the next day?
Right.
Yeah, sure.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah, you know, and the only sense you get of Downey's family is Aunt Jenny, who at first we're supposed to think is some old bitty, but no, she's hot.
Really unexpected.
Wow.
What a reversal there, Aaron Sorkin and Rob Reiner.
And then she never appears again.
I think she's in the background of a couple of shots in the courtroom, but you could be right.
I can't really remember.
But yeah, no, you're right.
Santiago's, I mean, really any kind of dramatic heft to the weight of the murder at all.
I mean, and this is something that you kind of run into.
Yeah, you know, the film wants to make our, you know, Dawson and Downey, they want to make them relatable, and they want to make this like, you know, they're the kind of silent, if not heroes, at least they are the put-upon victims of the film.
And even though it wants to sort of play at this sort of moral ambiguity, it can't actually explore the horribleness of the crime without really outbalancing that concept.
Legal dramas do better than, you know, this is something that there are ways of kind of manipulating that and to, you know, kind of say, look, look, this is a Marley Gray Act, but we're making this, you know, we're making this defense out of because it's the right thing to do.
I mean, I think even, you know, To Kill a Mockingbird kind of plays with that and plays with that a little bit, you know, and that's obviously many decades earlier.
But yeah, you're right.
I never even thought about, you know, Santiago's family.
You know, it's weird that, like, I literally never thought of it until you just mentioned it.
I'm like, you know, yeah, no, but you're right.
You're right.
It can't, you know, the movie almost doesn't even...
They're not even there, like, you know, because they can't be there.
Because if they're there, they're sobbing and they're furious.
So it just spoils the end, doesn't it?
No, no.
Aesthetically, you know, their grief and rage and fury at the end, which would have to be there, you know, it just...
It just completely upends the entire schema of the film, so they have to just be edited out.
Right.
I mean, I think more realistically, if you were going to include that, you'd have to give them, you know, some, like a manslaughter charge or something like that.
You'd have to give them, you couldn't give them time served, which, again, seems unrealistic that they would get that far anyway, you know?
Yeah, I mean, it's really unrealistic.
Even worse, they'd have to have a line.
You'd have to give them a scene in which they're like, Those two boys, what they did, I'll never forgive them for.
But really, the real bad guy here, the real person, the real source of evil is that old man on the stand.
Jessup needs to pay for what these boys did to my child.
You'd have that overwrought scene like that, which I'm surprised it's not in there because Sorkin would have loved to have written it, except that would mean actually caring about what a non-white person has to say.
Well, there is that, isn't there?
Yeah.
But, I mean, what's his name?
Dawson.
He's the senior of the two defendants, isn't he?
He's the sergeant.
His whole deal is that he's prepared to go to prison for a long time.
You know, Caffey says to him, you will be convicted of murder.
You will go away for a long time.
And he says, you know, if a court says that what I did was wrong, then I accept that.
But I won't.
I won't go into a court and say, but I can't even, oh God, I can't even make out what it is.
What is it that he won't do?
I mean, he believes that he did his duty.
He's ratting on his superior officer, which is exactly what Santiago is supposed to have done wrong.
Well, he believes that he behaved admirably given the situation that he obeyed orders, and that's what, you know, it's Munich or God country or whatever it is.
You know, that's the code that we live by.
So he won't plead guilty to having committed a crime because he doesn't think he did commit a crime.
Because he doesn't think he committed a crime.
So he won't plead guilty.
He won't say, I have no honor because he believes he does have honor.
And if the court decides, you know, if the court decides and the court decides he does not have honor, Then he will accept the consequences of that.
But he won't say, I have no honor.
He won't say, I'm guilty of something that he doesn't think he was guilty of doing in the pursuit of his duties, right?
Which, you know, however we want to feel about that, that's the text of the thing.
But then, you know, look.
Downy is going to follow you wherever you go, man.
And this kid is not smart enough to read the back of a cereal box.
Yeah, he's implied to be seriously disabled or something, isn't he?
Yeah, no, clearly.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
He's barely conscious of his surroundings.
And you know how dumb he is because he requested comic books from his Aunt Jenny.
Yeah, yeah.
Man, this was a different era, wasn't it?
Galloway lies to him as well.
He actually says to her at one point, will they let us go back to our unit, ma'am?
And she says, oh yeah, definitely.
And starts chugging from a bottle of water when she must know that that's not going to happen.
Right.
And she's his lawyer, like in text of the film, like she's, you know, in the text, she starts off as just being like a supervisor, supervisory role, and then ends up, you know.
Becoming Downey's attorney.
So that's her literally lying to her own client.
A lot of stuff that's legally dubious, shall we say.
My point was just that it makes a point of that.
It makes a point of Dawson understanding that if he takes his stand into a trial, he could end up going to prison.
Well, he should go to prison.
I think not just morally, but dramatically.
There should be some sort of acceptance on his part.
Because it gets like the formal acceptance happens at the end where he says, yeah, we did do something wrong.
But there's no weight to it because, oh, that's great.
You've realized that you did something wrong and now you just get to go free.
Your punishment is that you don't get to be a Marine anymore.
Right.
Yeah.
He realizes that as Marines, of course, what they're supposed to do is protect the weak, because that's what Marines do.
That's the purpose of the United States Marine Corps, is to protect the innocent and the weak.
That's why you fire on Cubans when they touch their rifle.
On stolen Cuban land that you're occupying in the course of enforcing a brutal, savage, decade-long blockade and sanction regime.
It is, you know, it is interesting to kind of think like if they had stayed in the core and then real life in a few years they would be in, you know, like doing like black ops in Somalia or something, being like, this is how we protect people.
Where is your code now?
You know, unit corps, god country.
How about the impoverished brown people that you are murdering?
But it's a fascinating, like so much of what Sorkin does, it's a fascinating, and Whedon, actually, it's a fascinating window into the sort of liberal centrist mind, isn't it?
Because it's kind of horrified by the Marines.
You know, like unit corps, god country, and particularly Kendrick is a grotesque character.
And of course, you know that because he's from the South.
Yeah, no, obviously.
Obviously, yeah.
And you get the extended sequence at the start where you see Marines drilling, and it makes a point of showing them sort of blank-faced and robotic and moving like programmed robots, etc., all in unison.
And all the way through, it has this weird, revolted fascination with the whole thing.
And yet, at the same time, it's obviously...
It's obviously, it's got a massive hard-on for them at the same time, clearly.
So it's really ambivalent.
Yeah, no, I mean, it gives us this kind of officious bureaucracy and then staffs it with, like...
Comedy actors and teen heartthrobs, you know?
I mean, Christopher Guest is literally one of the supervisors that Galloway talks to at the very beginning of the film.
One of them is Christopher Guest, you know?
Would you leave the room today?
Kathy's immediate superior is Xander Berkeley as well.
Right.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I mean, there's a ton of...
Again, not just the whippy repartee, but there's a jokiness involved.
There's a kind of humanizing element to it.
But there is this sense of which...
There are all these people, these people that we're, you know, nominally supposed to like and that, you know, are funny people or whatever, you know, who are just in this kind of like inhuman system.
But because these are sort of likable people, we don't see how inhuman the system actually is.
You know, it's treated as just kind of par for the course.
I mean, you know, one of Caffey's other clients is a guy who, you know, bought a dime bag of oregano.
He buys oregano thinking it's marijuana and they're going to put him in the brig for 20 days and he talks it down to so many days probation or whatever.
And it's like...
But that's in the nice version of the military where, you know, people play baseball and there's repartee in the corridors and people wear nice white uniforms and, you know, you give an order and kind of people say, well, I don't know, shall I follow that order or not?
I don't know, really.
And everybody's smoking dope and you're all comedy actors.
That's fine.
But of course, it's different when you get out to Guantanamo Bay because that's where things are serious.
That's the outpost, isn't it?
The outskirts of the empire.
That's Hadrian's Wall.
And on the other side, there's the barbarians.
And that's where things get serious.
And as much as the liberal centrist audience might, and writer, et cetera, might be repelled by Jessup and Kendrick and people like that.
And much as the film might be condemning their methods some of the time, you know, they go too far, they get so wrapped up in their position that they go too far and they get things wrong and it's too brutal here and there.
But, you know, the film has no quarrel with their existence, with them being there.
It has no quarrel with the idea that they need to be there in the first place.
And fundamentally, all it's saying is, isn't it a shame that we need?
To do this.
Isn't it a shame that they need to be guys there?
And isn't it a shame that sometimes because of that, some of them turn into monsters?
It's absolutely liberal imperialism.
Well, if Markinson had been the lead on that base, he would have just transferred Santiago, and therefore the entire problem would be gone.
The problem wasn't the military imperial presence on Cuba.
The problem isn't the existence of this.
The problem is one kid who couldn't run very fast died by accident.
And if the code red had happened and he hadn't had this lactic acidosis problem with his lungs, he would have just learned to be a better Marine and ultimately it would have protected the rest of us even better.
And so there was no real Flaw to this, except we should have just had a better medical examiner on the base.
That's really the problem.
The wrong guy was in charge of the empire.
You needed the Democrat instead of the Republican.
You needed Biden instead of Trump.
You needed Trajan instead of Tiberius.
I mean, Biden is literally extending some of the terribly draconian immigration rules.
Just this week, it was announced that Biden is quietly extending some of those rules.
And every resistance lib you've ever heard of is literally like, well, what is he supposed to do then, huh?
Exactly.
Are we supposed to not have basis in Cuba?
Don't talk crazy.
Their main response to the danger faced to Roe v.
Wade.
Well, how fucking dare you exist, Susan Sarandon?
It's your fault.
It's all those 2016 Bernie voters.
If it hadn't been for the 2016 Bernie voters, none of this would have happened.
That's right.
If only the Democratic Party hadn't run Bernie as a candidate in 2016. Because if they'd run Hillary instead, she would have won, obviously.
So it never would have happened.
No, just the extended primary in general.
It was just the extended primary.
Just Bernie existing.
Yeah, just Bernie existing as an alternative.
There being an alternative that took heat away from Hillary Clinton, the anointed queen.
That was enough.
That was enough.
And, you know, that's, so it's all, they will always punch left.
They will always punch left.
None of that, and none of this perspective is ever said anywhere in this film, of course.
Like, this film is, you know, again, the best you get is, like, Sam Weinberg, who, you know, arguably, you know, like, the most, you know, you don't want to say the most moral character in the film, but, like, he's the one who's like, no, these guys are shit.
I don't like them.
They beat up on the weaker kid.
But even he's a part of the same military bureaucracy, and he's been in it for longer.
At least Caffey has the excuse of he's doing his three years to go out and go practice big law or something.
Weinberg's been in it.
He's clearly a lifer, or at least he's been in it for a number of years.
Well, you know, he's the liberal Jewish guy, isn't he?
You know, he's going to have these qualms about these things.
But you get to the end, and, you know, Dawson has his line about, yeah, we did do something wrong, actually, when we committed second-degree murder.
He finally comes to the realization that that might have been a bit morally off, you know, and you cut to Sam's face.
Sam kind of finally looks satisfied.
It's like, oh, great, he's realized that manslaughter has a problem attached to it, so I'm happy now.
I'm happy now.
It's fine.
You learned your lesson.
Great job.
I have been the wise Jew.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah.
Yeah, this film.
This film.
I feel like it's...
I mean, I stand by everything I've said, and this is a terrible, terrible film, from my point of view anyway.
But I feel like I'm also kind of being a bit unfair on it, because it is dated.
This is a dated movie.
It's very easy to look back on it from...
What is it now?
Almost 30 years later.
It's 29 years later.
Nearly 30 years hence, yeah.
It's very easy to look back on what is now...
You know, an old film, and that makes me feel old saying that, but it's true, and laugh at it.
But it is of a species of film that became very, very hegemonic there for a long time, and it's still kind of very much the progenitor of, as you say, the Oscar-bait movie, which has now got to the point of self-parody.
And I think one of the things I thought watching this is that it's almost like a parody.
It's almost like a very broad parody of what's bad about a Hollywood movie.
But I think that's partly because this sort of thing was copied.
It became the standard for that kind of movie over and over and over again in the decades since, didn't it?
Its very success has kind of poisoned its legacy.
The idea that you sort of approach a serious topic like a murder trial, but then you have these kind of like quippy Hollywood stars.
And so you're not really doing it.
You're kind of doing it, but like within this kind of like askew way and in this slightly.
Offhand way so that we as an audience are aware that we're not supposed to, you know, it's, it's, it's just this, it becomes part of the formula, you know, and this kind of like, I have a weakness for this kind of middle-brow entertainment.
I'll be honest with you.
I mean, you know, I kind of like this stuff just aesthetically.
Don't shoot me.
It's okay.
Like, you know, but I have some of the stuff I'm into, I've got no, I haven't got leg to stand on criticizing anybody else's tastes, believe me.
I kind of like this stuff.
It's just kind of like this sort of like slightly more than sludge kind of comfort food junk movie stuff.
I have a fondness for this kind of stuff.
I just spent the last couple of days re-watching The Trial of a Time Lord.
So as I say, I've got no standpoint from which to...
Well, yeah, and another trial that probably would not pass muster according to the legal standards of how actual law works.
I have a feeling one of these might be slightly more accurate than the other, but I wouldn't care to guess which one.
It's the Doctor Who one, definitely.
Yeah, definitely, definitely.
Yeah, no, I have a fondness for this kind of stuff.
And, you know, this is one that I will revisit again.
You know, I mean, it is something kind of fun to kind of put on when I'm doing something else.
But, you know, yeah, no, I mean, and it becomes endemic.
The problems that we're highlighting are not because A Few Good Men is particularly atrocious on any of this.
I mean, I don't think it is.
It's just built into the very idea of, you know, we're going to have a movie, an American-made movie that...
It's set with characters who are in the military.
They never question this stuff.
And if they do, it's kind of the crazy hippie daughter or something like that off on her own.
And then she gets threatened by a terrorist.
And then she realizes that, no, actually, we do.
We do need those men on those walls.
I mean, it's the furniture of this kind of genre.
This is the thing.
I mean, you said this at the start.
And I absolutely agree with you.
This is more...
I would characterize this as imperial propaganda.
This is absolutely the imperial culture propagandizing itself.
But it's still immensely more questioning than anything you get now.
It's actually more skeptical.
It shows more skepticism.
Even if ultimately it doesn't amount to very much in my opinion, then almost all that crop of post-Iraq war on terror movies that were supposedly so...
So thoughtful and interrogative, you know?
There was a crop of, as there was a crop of Vietnam movies in the years after Vietnam, there was a crop of movies about the war on terror in the wake of Iraq.
And like, I would say maybe one or two of them are of any value at all.
And the rest of them, the Hurt Locker and stuff like that, they are much, much worse than this.
Much worse.
Oh yeah, no, I mean, you know, because they don't just accept it, but actively like propagandize for, you know, those kinds of tactics.
Yeah, and they have the pretense of skepticism and the pretense of questioning more worked out.
They have it more down pat.
Whereas I think, you know, within its own parameters, which obviously it's coming from a very decidedly liberal, centrist, ideological point of view, within those parameters, this is, I think, genuinely...
Asking questions.
It's kind of horrified fascination with stuff like Unicor, God, Country is a genuine unease.
Whereas you get to the stuff I'm talking about and it's so performative.
Right.
But they get to be taken seriously because they're like the kind of gritty, realistic versions.
They don't have, you know, kind of Demi Moore, you know, telling jokes, you know, eating seafood off a knife, you know.
You don't have a scene like that in The Hurt Locker.
Certainly, yeah.
Or what's the...
Zero Dark Thirty, I think, is probably the main area of that.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's an obscenity, that movie.
That is an absolute obscenity.
But it does a very good job of posing as the questioning, thoughtful movie about these issues.
Right.
And it took a lot of people in.
Absolutely.
I mean, honestly, the best 9-11 movie was the one that happened, The Siege, which came out in 1998. Which I saw theatrically and I've not seen since, but I've been really wanting to revisit at some point.
But in that one, it's the CIA that gets to be the heroes of everything.
Actually, I don't even remember.
God, I need to rewatch The Siege is what I'm learning.
I don't think I've ever seen that.
I think it's Bruce Willis in it.
Bruce Willis is in it?
Hold on, let me look at this up real quick.
I think it's...
Might have to cut a few seconds here.
That's a bonus episode.
They can put up with it.
I love that the people that pay us get the shit.
I love that.
It's Annette Bening, Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis, Tony Shalhoub, but yeah, Denzel Washington, Annette Bening, and then Bruce Willis is kind of the major antagonist there.
Wow, we're talking about Annette Bening a lot more than normally.
There's a lot of Annette Bening talk in this episode.
There's a lot of Annette Bening.
It was the mid to late 90s, so therefore Annette Bening happens.
It was the Annette Bening era.
I don't have particularly strong feelings about Annette Bening.
I don't know.
Do you?
I'm quite happy to declare myself Annette Bening neutral.
Yeah, I remember liking her in American Beauty when I saw that.
I mean, I've always liked her.
I didn't even remember she was in it.
Yeah, she's Kevin Spacey's wife in American Beauty.
The main thing I remember about American Beauty is something about a paper bag or something.
Some kid makes a film of a paper bag caught in the wind and it's supposed to be really artistic.
That's basically what I remember about it.
That's all anyone remembers about it and that's probably for the best because it's Kevin Spacey and we should just not think about anything that he was in ever again.
That's probably the best way.
Or anything he's ever done.
Although we are going to do a seven one of these days, aren't we?
I think you and I. Yeah.
For a bonus.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that's a plan.
I don't know.
We just kind of do these whatever comes to mind.
We just watch it.
Whatever we feel like.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
It's funny.
I was just looking at Annette Bening.
She had a career.
I mean, then I just kind of stopped acting after a while.
So, you know.
Yeah.
There you go.
Yeah, it's funny.
I can't immediately think of any Annette Bennett performances that I was particularly impressed by, but I sort of have an impression of thinking she's good.
I don't know.
She must have been good in something I saw.
Yeah, I mean, she's good in American Beauty.
She's good in The American President.
Two movies with the word American in them that she's good in.
Well, that's one of the other tricks of screenwriting.
Just pick a random word and put American on the front and it instantly makes your movie seem profound.
Yeah, that's how it goes.
They've done that several times.
They've done that several times.
Like, you know, American Dustman.
There you go.
Oscar bait.
American Hustle.
Yeah.
American Splendor.
American Hero.
American Beauty.
American Sniper.
American Gangster.
You see, it works every time.
Every time, every time, yeah.
American Graffiti.
Yes, American Graffiti, yeah.
God, whatever happened to the guy that directed that?
I think he just faded away, didn't he?
Didn't do anything else.
Yeah, it's a shame that that guy never really had a career.
He never really had a follow-up to American Graffiti.
No, that's right.
It's always the next movie that's difficult, isn't it?
Yeah.
Really kind of making that thing happen.
I heard he kind of just kind of retired and started making toys for a living or something.
I think that's kind of where he ended up.
He works for Disney now or something, I don't know.
Just licensing toy lines.
Yeah, I think that was the main artistic thing that he managed to do with the rest of his life.
Okay.
All right.
I think we're done.
Court is adjourned.
Yeah.
I think we'll have to do another bonus.
I think it's worth doing the second bonus this month because this is fun.
This was fun.
Well, our production was a little sporadic and so on during the summer.
So I think it's, yeah, we'll try and get some extra out for you towards the end.
Well, I can't say towards the end of the year.
It's already the fucking 4th of December.
Life comes to you fast when there are trials going on, apparently.
Yes, indeed.
That was fun.
We'll do another one of these.
Maybe we'll do seven this month.
We'll see.
Yeah, we'll do seven.
That sounds like a giggle.
Another fun, goofy movie.
With murders involved.
Well, another very quintessential 90s movie that had an enormous effect at the time and fooled a lot of people into thinking it was great and had enormous influence.
And actually, when you go back at it, you see the holes very clearly.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
Great.
Thanks for listening, everybody.
And thanks for your money.
It's much appreciated.
Thank you.
You get more than a dollar a month.
That's all.
That's literally all.
It's amazing.
The value.
The sheer value.
That's it.
I give up.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
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