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Green & Red: Podcasts for Scrappy Radicals
The Timely Resistance of 'One Battle After Another..' w/ Organizer Matt Leonard (G&R 478)
00:37:12
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to Green and Red Scrappy Politics for Scrappy People, a regular podcast on radical environmental and anti capitalist politics. Brought to you by Bob Bozanko and Scott Parkins.
- [00:14]
B
Welcome to the silky smooth sounds of the Green and Red podcast. Your co host, Scott Parkin. Bob is out of the office today, but I am joined by my friend and comrade and friend of the podcast, Matt Leonard. Welcome back to the podcast, Matt. And we're going to be talking. It's Oscar season and we've been meaning to do this show for a while, but we're going to be talking about one battle after another because we've really, we're super, we're movie fans and we really want to talk about it. Matt is an organizer and an activist and a movie fan. So we're going to be talking a little bit about one battle after another, which is up for a bunch of Oscars.
- [00:58]
A
Super glad to be back in the podcast and especially talk about pretty significant pop culture, political intersections.
- [01:08]
B
Yeah. And a lot of people in our community have been really excited about this movie when it came out. And so we're going to talk about it, we're going to take it apart a little bit and I think we'll have a little fun here and there'll
- [01:17]
A
probably be tons of spoilers if we had a. Not a spoiler.
- [01:20]
B
Yeah, it's true. And just to throw it out there, Matt has also came on and did a show on andor with us last year too. So it's Matt's a little bit of one of our folks to talk about pop culture at the Green and Red podcast. So one battle after another. It came out last fall. Noted creators is the director Paul Thomas Anderson, who's known for directing Boogie Nights and the Master Magnolia and films like that. It's based on a novel by Thomas Pynchon. The novel was Vineland, which was written in 1990. And then it stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Chase Infinity, Tiana Taylor and many others. Some of the themes that we see in the movie that we'll probably talk about including include the, the rise of authoritarianism driven by a racist agenda and including like racist secret societies which I hope we'll get the touch on resistance rooted in community. Those are like two of the really main obvious themes. The other two that I just want to note is there's a whole element of the disappointment of radicalism, of disappointment of radicals. And then the other piece, which I think is important, which is a little is political but less in your face political, is just like the non traditional families. And I think there's something important to.
- [02:44]
A
I was offering based on a book that came out what, 30 years ago,
- [02:47]
B
but I do think the 35 years ago maybe.
- [02:50]
A
Yeah, but the timeliness of it in, in the Trump era and when we're seeing rising authoritarianism, not just like the hyperbole or rhetoric or fear of that, but seeing real tangible authoritarian practices being put into place all around us in the US and internationally. I think the book offers, the movie offers like a some good thought provoking stuff on what forms of organizing and activism and resistance have people done throughout history, what makes sense, what's been effective, what can we learn from it. And it's not perfect. It's not a documentary. Even though it's got parallels to like historical social movements, it's not made by activists or organizers or revolutionaries. I'm always a pretty low bar when it comes to Hollywood trying to talk about social movements. But I do think it's definitely a movie worth watching and raises a lot of good questions for revolutionaries and organizers to think about and grapple with. And plenty of debate has come from it too.
- [03:45]
B
Just to throw the plot out there. It's set in alternative version of the United States involves leftist revolutionaries and the government's largely successful efforts to take them down. And then the aftermath. It takes place in two different time periods and if we're thinking about it is the French 75, which is like the radical militant group were doing their actions, if you want to call them that, in the heyday of the Obama years, just to put that out there. And then we fast forward till 16 years later to where the remnants of the French 75 are mostly living underground. In the plot it should be noted that main character and main supporting character. The main character is a guy named. Has two names. He's played by Leonardo DiCaprio. He's both ghetto Pat Calhoun and he's the bomber. He's also called the rocket man. And then when he's in his underground life, he's known as Bob Ferguson. And then a lot of the plot centers around the relationship that he has with his daughter who is targeted by government forces for reasons that we'll probably get into. She is being pursued by a corrupt military officer played by Sean Penn named Colonel Stephen Lockjaw. And then we see a lot of elements around the French 75. We also see a lot of elements around a sort of community based resistance as the. As Lockjaw is involved with a number of security agencies which actually target undocumented people and so we see this community resistance of undocumented folks. The community resistance is actually led by a character named Sergio San Carlos, played by Benicio Del Toro, who's also like a karate instructor, which is awesome.
- [05:33]
A
So I was going to offer a couple. It's pretty clear, like the French 75 are loosely modeled or inspired by Weather Underground or similar sort of movements like that, more militant movements. And it's interesting that from the trailer is like, I expected a little different movie. It portrays Pat as a washed out revolutionary or former revolutionary who's become stoner Bob, right? Yeah, he's a stoner. He's drunk. He's lost his politics or hope or something. And it's a bumbling idiot. And I expect it to be a little more comedic from the trailer. And it actually was quite funny. Like, the character is pretty comedic. But I thought the depth of the movie surprised me about clearly the relationship with his daughter. The role that Lockjaw played, Sean Penn, the military guy who has a striking resemblance in many ways, or an archetype to Bovino from ice. It was hard, especially the Minnesota Minneapolis surges, to not keep thinking about that Lockjaw character. Every time I saw Bovino, the movie was made.
- [06:32]
B
It came out in 2025, so it was probably shot in 2023 or 2024. It's hard to. Bavino was. He was in the. He's in the Border Patrol. And maybe when Paul Thomas Anderson and the other writers were working on it, they did have knowledge of him because it's such a striking resemblance. And it's almost like Sean Penn hung out with him to learn, see his characteristics, physical and verbal, whatever else.
- [06:56]
A
Yeah, it is. It's uncanny. Even if it is just like the archetype of like super toxic masculinity who's been put into this sort of what this means to be a man in a military powerhouse and be right. And that's an archetype that. To be frank, the character is horrible, but Sean Penn plays it so well just in the way he walks. It's like literally his ass is clenched so tight and every little subtle facial expression just conveys this horrible human being. And I think Sean Penn's a fabulous actor and he just nailed that character. And it's almost as if, how did Bovino end up in the role that he had being the face of some of the most extreme displays of sort of fascism and brutality in the US in recent years? Because he has those same traits of toxic masculinity, military.
- [07:46]
B
That military conditioning. I guess you could Say too fun fact. Greg Bevino went to my college and he went to high school in the town where my college was. And so I was like overlapping in space with Greg Bevino when I was in college in the late 80s and the early 90s. The other thing is that there's actually some actual homage to actual historical events. I just want to touch on is the French 75 is definitely based on the weather, Weathermen. And the actions that we see them do are very reminiscent of the weather on the ground. The bombing of the courthouse, the bombing of the senator's office, all of that. And then the bank robberies are very much out of the Cymbeline's Liberation Army. Actually, there's a scene where Wood Harris's character, Wood Harris is most known from the Wire. He plays one of the sort of leaders of the French 75. His character's name is Laredo, where he has a shootout and tear gas goes off in the house and starts a fire. That actually happened to the SLA in May 1974 in Los Angeles. And then the. When we get into this, the sanctuary movement is one Sergio San Carlos says, I got a little Latino Harriet Tubman situation going on at my place. But it's. It's takes us back to the 80s with the Sanctuary movement when people are trying to flee persecution in Central America. Also, there's a lot of community. Community organizing that remind. I've heard other commentators have reminded them of the Black Panthers. And so I just want to, like, put that. Put that out there, too. And I think showing that those structures existed actually really important.
- [09:27]
A
Yeah. I was going to add, this movie is not meant to be a documentary of biography, but clearly is taking cues from those movements you named. But even Perfidia, who's a main black character, black female leader of the French 75. She, the actress Tiana Taylor, very clearly says that she was really inspired and read a lot about Assata Shakur as, oh, how do I help understand this character? And obviously it's. The storylines are not the same, but there are some parallels of a militant, someone who ends up going underground, having to live exile.
- [09:59]
B
Although Sada Shakur didn't snitch out all her. Exactly.
- [10:03]
A
And I think there are some really fair criticism of that, too. That particularly for Perfidia and as another character, Jungle Pussy and a few others, that there is a sort of like hyper sexploitation, hyper sexualized writing for many of those characters. And I think that's an interesting, complicated, maybe poor choice from Paul Thomas Anderson, the director on it to me, that felt like, wow, we have these really powerful black female characters and leads that are in many ways leading this movement or leading this cell, at least. And it felt like an aesthetic choice playing into some of the classic blaxploitation film aesthetics of the 70s. That just felt like a trope that wasn't all that useful and did need to go there. I think there's some elements of the sexual tension with Lockjaw that were actually fascinating about power. And I thought that was a creative thing to play on. But it also felt like it somewhat undermined, like, the power of those characters by making it be so sexualized. So we're just a little crazy. We're wild. We just want to shoot shit, to shoot shit.
- [11:01]
B
So about. There's this line where she says, the guns is the fun. I'm all about the guns.
- [11:06]
A
Yeah. And I felt.
- [11:09]
B
And the classic meme from the movie, honestly, is Teyana Taylor's character, nine months pregnant, shooting a very large machine gun.
- [11:20]
A
I was gonna add too, on the Sensei character that to me, like one of my favorite characters and storylines or subplots of the movie, that these sort of flashy, showy militants and radicals who are often, particularly in Pat's case, very bumbling and idiotic, years later, they are having some questions, like, what did they accomplish? They're having self doubt about their movement impact, about what it meant to their family and their personal lives. And Sensei is just this, like, deeply rooted in community. No ego, no bullshit, just organizing in so many levels, like knowing all the resources in this community who can do what, giving everyone a role, empowering them. And when shit hits the fan and the riot cops are coming in or the military are coming in, he's got a plan for everything. He can activate all of his networks. He's thought it through. He's cool as a cucumber. And to me, that was just like a amazing character, but also just such an interesting model to say. A lesson that we can learn that sometimes the glamorous, showy leaders are actually not the backbones of our movement, but the folks who are just doing the real work in real relationship, in community, get shit done.
- [12:29]
B
The other thing I want to, though, just want to touch on for a minute is because no film is original, right? We're at the point where we don't have original films, but we do have a lot of homage. And so one battle after another is no different. And so just to throw a couple of the films out, which is homage, like talking about robbery of the Banks. There's a lot of homage to, like, the film Dog Day afternoon from the 70s, which is a classic bank robbery movie, which we're supposed to actually do an episode on at some point, is the Politics of Bank Robbery. And then Running On Empty, which is this film from the late 80s, which starred Christine Lahti and Judd Hirsch, and River Phoenix, which was about a family of weathermen who, like, live underground. That's their life underground 20 years later. There's a lot of. There's a lot of homage to that as well. And then the. There's two others. There's other three others I really want to touch on. One is the Searchers, which was like a classic John Wayne, John Ford movie from the 50s, which is about two guys who set off to rescue a young woman, and it really dives deep into the racist foundations of America. And then the other, which is really obvious once you think about it, is the Big Lebowski, because Bob Leo's character is like this stumbling stoner Bob, who runs around through the whole movie in his bathrobe. But there's also another important piece, which is the Big Lebowski is actually also about its portrait of disappointed idealism. And I actually feel an ex radical who's gone to seed, and I feel like, in many ways that Leonardo DiCaprio's character is based on Dave Lebowski.
- [14:00]
A
Yeah, that. I think parallel is very real.
- [14:03]
B
Yeah. And then the last one, that's an homage, I think, is really important to note. And there's even a scene in the movie where Bob is watching. This movie is the Battle of Algiers, which is Kilo Pontecorte's classic film about the Algerian resistance to the French to French colonialism. It's about underground cells resisting the French, and the French 75 are very much portrayed as, like, these underground cells which are resisting the American government and American colonialism in this sense, if I'm not mistaken.
- [14:36]
A
I think Paul Thomas Anderson even named the Battle of Algiers as being a big influence in. Yeah, yeah, yeah, go ahead. Thank you. I think the movie sparked a lot of debate, both, I think, by, like, activists and organizers and revolutionaries. And there's. You just share with me. There's an op ed in the New York Times by the daughter of some Weather Underground folks critiquing the movie. And at the end of the day, that's what good movies should do. Right? I don't know that, like, a movie that doesn't spark some controversy and debate and criticism is as useful as one that does. This movie is Pretty mainstream, very mainstream. Like winning a slew of awards or nominations, that everything it touches. And so I think to be able to get that many people's interest and eyeballs talking about some of these dynamics, then the criticism that goes with them has been really valuable, particularly in the Trump era, where I think there is a lot of people who are feeling some degree of disillusionment or hopelessness or uncertainty of what it means to act and resist. I think this movie is one of the. One of the ways, one of the things in the popular consciousness that's helping people think that a little more.
- [15:42]
B
I'm glad you brought up that New York Times op ed which just came out a couple days, two days ago, actually. It's called the Popcorn Resistance of One Battle After Another. It's by Hope Reeves. She's a freelance journalist by. Her parents were weathermen who later became college professors, which is par for the course for many of the weather on the ground. But I think that's a really. I think this film has been a conversation starter for people, at least in political circles, progressive political circles, and then it's also an opportunity to talk about other things. And Hope Reed was pretty critical of the film in that op ed and a little bit of an emotion, I would say an emotional journey as well. And there was a lot of things in the film that really related to her. But her being able to publish that op ed in the New York Times is also important because she also frames it very much in terms of what we're living with today, like the resistance to Trump. And she actually has a quote from her mother, Susan Hagedorn, who said, our intentions may have been naive, but the government. But what the government was doing, lying to the country, killing Southeast Asians as well as her imperialism all over the world needed to end. She said, but these are dark times, darker even than we were facing then. Why aren't young people saying no to this madman and this whole authoritarian regime? Why aren't you putting your privilege on the line to defend those who can't defend themselves? And so I think it's an opportunity to say that message. And other than scrappy podcasts, you don't hear enough of that in definitely a corporate mainstream media.
- [17:19]
A
I'm curious, like, think like other pop culture, the movement or the moment we're in. And like how pop culture, obviously one battle after another, I think is huge hit. I was interesting. I remember when it came out, there was a slew of articles coming out saying it's a flop box office disaster and Citing really low box office numbers. And it was all from right wing bots or smear sources. And I'm like, I don't know a ton about the economics of Hollywood, but this doesn't seem like a flop. This seems like those are really strong numbers. It's been out for 48 hours and it felt like it had to be a very coordinated effort by the right wing, by someone to try to build that sort of framing and understanding that like, hey, this movie's a flop, don't watch it, don't go see it. And to me that's always a little telling that, okay, the authoritarians, the Baptists, The MAGAs, the GOP, the right wing corporations don't want you to see a movie probably for a reason. Hopefully it makes me want to see it more because I think the numbers have clearly come out. It's been an economic success, huge viewership. But it's interesting. They definitely struck a nerve and a threatening nerve for a bunch of the right wing.
- [18:28]
B
Yeah. And those folks are really adept at. They have their own media machine. Right. And so they're able to sway anywhere from 30 to 50% of the country with what they put into their media machine. Influencers, social media, Fox News, the other right wing. The other right wing news platforms. And so it is interesting that they, and they probably tried to sink it too. And then they're probably also trying to influence the. That 30% that watch their corrupt right wing media outlets just not to pay to go see it. I'm sure it was partially a counter advertising campaign that they had going on there as well because those folks don't want to see anything about radical revolutionary type groups, even if it's something of a dark comedy.
- [19:19]
A
What other thing about the movie you mentioned early on was the sort of secret societies. Oh yeah, was an interesting subplot or twist too that there is this. They never really elaborate a whole lot, but you get into it that it's a sort of like super wealthy secret society of a bunch of white supremacists. White collar white supremacists. They, whether they're billionaires or whatever it is that Lockjaw, Colonel Lockjaw is really trying to get into.
- [19:44]
B
The Christmas Adventurers Club.
- [19:46]
A
Yeah. Which is an interesting name, but I think it's another telling thing. Lockjaw is clearly a horrible person, but in the end, the fact that he had a sexual relationship with Perfidia was a part of his unraveling in the club raises the question, at least for him. The complicated relationship he had to around Race and power, but also like his yearning to just. To actually have belonging, to be a part of something. And he just. His entire life, like, his goal was to be part of this elite club that almost mattered more than anything and ultimately is what ultimately would kill him. Yeah, like, I thought that was a very interesting little, like, subplot. And I admittedly haven't read the book, so I'm assuming that's part of the book. But I don't know what. What liberties Paul Thomas Anderson might have taken.
- [20:33]
B
I think I haven't read the book either, but I do. My understanding is a lot of liberties were taken with the book. Who knows if that is something that's just that everyone who knows who's read the book would know that. But I'm not sure. I guess my answer is I don't know.
- [20:47]
A
It was also interesting with the choice of name. Like the choice of the name hints at these secret societies of elites and white supremacists that some of which we know exist, like the Bohemian Grove here in California, a bunch of which we probably don't know exist or the average person doesn't. But it was interesting that with all the sort of like right wing snowflake tears in the past decade about the war on Christmas, I thought it was a very funny choice of name, of calling it the Christmas Adventures Club. Like they're saving Christmas. That's part of the culture war that they're putting front and center. And felt like a good kind of parody of a lot of those sort of right wing efforts.
- [21:25]
B
Yeah, that's a really good point, is that there's a little bit of a dig on that. Right. On the culture war stuff. A lot of the film is focused on the French 75, both when they're active and when they're underground. And then also on the Latino Harriet Tubman situation. The white supremacist secret society of powerful men was a really good twist to put into the film and how and connecting that to that culture warrior. Right.
- [21:55]
A
And like, whether it's the Proud Boys or anything else, like, there's like the fact that these right wing societies do exist, same the way militant underground movements on the left have existed. But it does make them seem. I thought it made them seem like pretty comically idiotic. Think of themselves very high and mighty. But they were just as bumbling as anyone else.
- [22:14]
B
Well, there's like a viciousness to them too, which I think is important. I actually honestly think a lot of the Trump administration and they're probably not as secret as they used to be because of Trump. But they're very. They're not smart, but they're also very vicious. They send a hitman aft to kill Willa once it's found out that he. She's likely the illegitimate child of Stephen Lockchalk just because they asked someone to join their club and then he turned out to have an illegitimate black child and so they sent someone to kill her over that just so they would avoid any sort of embarrassment or defiling of their Christmas adventurers club. It's the viciousness which I feel like we're really seeing play out right now on our TV screens or on our computer screens with this war in Iran is. I think it's very appropriate to be honest.
- [23:07]
A
Stepping back from like the point politics from it too.
- [23:10]
B
I think what Cassie want to think about secret organizations in this the a couple. I think a couple of interesting things on the left side is that the Latino sanctuary movement, when the police come into back and cross to really looking for Willa, but also just a crack crackdown on undocumented folks is that they have a really elaborately planned escape plan which includes like riots, like sparking riots. And then the other part I thought was good that was connected to that was the escape scene where they get Bob out of the hospital and where he's in police custody, where he gets help from a bunch of unexpected sources. Nod, shake of the head, word to the wise, you're a bad ombre Bob behind the scenes communications and then he's out. And so I do want to say that they really make it look the secret organizations on the left look good.
- [24:08]
A
Yeah.
- [24:08]
B
The other is that when the French 75 guy who gets caught who runs the radio station, it's just like the kids from the neighborhood come in and put out the alarm that he's been capturing.
- [24:21]
A
I'm really glad you brought that up. That too was some of the most powerful pieces of the movie. We both heard this as longtime organizers, right. So many people are like, oh, I can't be an activist, I'm too busy or I got kids or I got a family or I got a mortgage or I can't get arrested. So therefore I can't be involved in movements. And I think this what we just showed. No, like anyone, whatever they're doing in their life, absolutely can and needs to be a part of movements. And you've got some sort of leverage, power, skill wherever you are, whether you're the nurse, the local hospital or the receptionist who's helping getting pulled into action at the right time. The neighborhood kids, even like the skateboarders, like they all had clearly defined roles of. Yeah, when the alarm gets pulled, this is the role you're going to help do to make the revolution possible on your skateboard. Knowing parkour off the rooftops or whatever it is. And I think that's something the left. It's an important lesson and we should do a lot more of. Yeah, like whatever it is in your community, culture, job, profession, figure out a way that you can be useful and valuable to the resistance to movements, to revolutions. It's not just marching in the streets. It's like leveraging your skills and resources and positionality in all sorts of creative ways.
- [25:30]
B
Exactly.
- [25:32]
A
And we need you in the streets too. But not only that, what are we
- [25:37]
B
going to say about pulling back from the political.
- [25:39]
A
Oh, take us in a different direction. But yeah, this is characteristic of Paul Thomas Anderson. But just the cinematography of the movie is absolutely, just stunning. There's a bunch of iconic scenes that the film work. The lighting, the soundtrack just creates so much powerful tension, friction, and there's a lot of them. But I was thinking about in particular, there's the. Near the end, the sort of the road scene where the camera's going up and down these big curves or the big sort of like road dips, which
- [26:10]
B
is attribute is an homage to Mad Max, the Mad Max movies. But absolutely. Yeah.
- [26:14]
A
And actually that was filmed down near Anza Borrego. I was down there for New Year's and we were like on a pilgrimage. Oh, we want to go find that road. Because it's just so iconic. And I'm sure the road itself is interesting, but not that cool. But in the film, the way they do that to build sort of tension and precarity and unknowingness was just so powerfully done.
- [26:37]
B
I got motion sickness in that theater. Watching that, I think was the point. I think it was the point.
- [26:42]
A
But, yeah, and yeah, I think, you know, a lot of his movies like, he. I was thinking about, oh, my God, I'm brain for the oil movie. There Will Be Blood.
- [26:50]
B
There Will Be Blood, There Will Be
- [26:51]
A
Blood, a similar one where it's like there's actually not that much dialogue. It's like lots of quietness and spaciousness in that movie, but the whole cinematography and everything just builds like so much emotional tension and storytelling in all that sort of silence or that space. And PTA's got master at that.
- [27:10]
B
No, no pun intended. The master. Boo. Yeah, I did think that was a great. I think that. I do think that was a Great scene. I mean there's just like a lot of gem scenes in that film. I think the one where they spring Leo from the escape or excuse me, from the hospital. I think the chase scene, it's great chasing. I think Bullet is another movie that they've mentioned as homage to that too. I think the sort of final scene. There's a theme in the movie about Bob's. Bob, Pat's disappointed radicalism and he's just become a stoner character. But then there's also this exasperation that Willa has with him over that. And the last scene is her reading a letter from her mother saying we failed. Maybe you will not. Maybe you'll be the one who puts the world right. And then the last moments gem. It's a gem of clothes. I actually thought where we see Willa heading out the door and she's just annoyed that her dad is high and he's be careful. And she's no, I won't. And I thought that was like a sort of like important thing to bring up too. And it speaks to the. Some of the family aspects of that film too.
- [28:20]
A
Yeah, yeah, that was all the family stuff. I really. I didn't pick any of that up from the trailers and I was happy to see that was a prominent storyline.
- [28:29]
B
There's a couple of other things just that I wanted to touch on. 1 I think you were talking about how we're seeing less of the sort of anti authoritarianism. I think there are a couple of. I think we are starting to see some of those films come out and I wasn't going to go into this too much, but like the film, Eddington kind of touches on similar politics. I guess you could say it takes place in the first few months of the pandemic. Includes violence and the plot, the different people playing off of their politics, whether it's liberal or conservative or radical. And so that's a great film for people to check out. Begonia, which actually has come out this year, which I think is made by some of the same filmmakers as Eddington, also really dives into conspiracy. It's a little bit of a sci fi film, but dives very much into the conspiracy and the politics, what I would call the politics of the Internet. Just. Just a couple things to touch on. And there's a lot of independent films out there which I think are really important. We just did a great interview of John Sayles, the legendary filmmaker who made me want and Lone Star and like talked about some of this as well. How there's still like an independent edge out there. It's hard for them to get funded in these days, but still, like there's some interesting stuff still coming out.
- [29:47]
A
I was going to bring up Eddington again just because that was like a sleeper movie. Like it didn't do very well at the box office. I hadn't even heard about it. Like I didn't see any marketing or promo for it until a mutual friend suggested it. Similar. I thought it was like, similar to one mouth or another in that like, it tackles a bunch of like relevant themes around contemporary politics and social movements.
- [30:09]
B
Liberal mayor whose campaign is funded by the AI data center company.
- [30:13]
A
Yeah, yeah, it's something that felt like really timely. Again, there's plenty of criticism of it, but overall I really liked it. And it's got a great cast like Pedro Pascal and Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone, some big names in it, but it just didn't really seem to break into public consciousness. I definitely think it's a good movie to go back and watch. And particularly in my organizing work, data centers, and particularly a lot of that. Those issues in New Mexico, a lot of what we're working on. And I thought that it wove together a bunch of those interesting sort of themes around the culture wars of the pandemic and masking as a proxy for that sort of Black Lives Matter protests, what it looks like to organize in really small rural towns like the indigenous and tribal and pueblo communities down in New Mexico. Whatever. We're spoiling lots of things. There's an interesting thing where they have antifa cell shows up in town and it becomes pretty clear like that is actually just a bunch of paid for astroturfing by the data center AI company trying to trigger outrage. And I think it's important to say that folks in Black Blocker antifa are not all provocateurs or from the right or plants or cops or whatever. But I did think it was an interesting choice of them. Just like in a mainstream movie, just show how clearly and brazenly corporations and government forces are to undermining social movements. Like they have no shame at all about doing violent disruptive acts and trying to pin it on progressive movements on the left, on activists. That's extremely common and probably more common than ever. More common in decades, at least right now.
- [31:47]
B
The antifa super soldiers at the end of that movie, which weren't really antifa,
- [31:52]
A
coming in on a private jet.
- [31:54]
B
Coming in a private jet with a whole bunch of fancy hardware.
- [31:59]
A
Yeah, great. I haven't watched Begonia yet. That's really Been high on my list. But I do think I remember like in 2017, like Trump era, Trump number one. I just felt like there was a ton of film and TV shows that were really sparking big conversations about the rise of fascism. Whether it was Handmaid's Tale or Man in the High Castle, a bunch of great podcasts kind of talking about whether underground and liberation front. And it's like there's a lot in the pop culture sphere really smartly grappling with like the what we're the cusp of. And I feel like there's been a little less of that sort of overt political pop culture films in Trump era too. And some of it's hard because this stuff eats in the production pipeline years in advance. It doesn't, doesn't come out the next day or the next month from current events. But I do think, like Eddington, Sinners is another just absolutely phenomenal movie of last year. One battle for another. These are all things that I think are raising some important political and cultural conversations. The question is, how do we move them beyond just conversations and help them be tools for people to be moved into action and organize and recognize these threats as not just. The rise of action is not hypothetical or rhetorical or a film set. It's actually real and we gotta.
- [33:12]
B
We live in it now. Yeah, yeah. I have one other thing I want to touch on before I wrap. I don't know if you have anything else you want to talk about, go for it. The last thing I want to note is where the title comes from. And it's memorably attributed to a statement that was released in New left Notes by the Weather Underground following the Day of Rage protests in Chicago in October 1969. The day of Rage, where there's follow up to the 1968 Chicago Police riot and then the trial the Chicago Eight. But they said, don't forget the real business of war is buying and selling. Murdering and the violence are self policing that can be entrusted to non professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as a spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the war. It provides raw material to be recorded into history so that children may be taught history as sequences of violence, battle after battle and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death is a stimulus to ordinary folks, little fellows, to try and grab a piece of that pie while they're still here to gobble it up. That makes me think of Stephen Lockchall. The true war is the celebration of markets, organic markets Carefully styled black by the professionals spring up everywhere. I just thought it was worth noting where the title of the film came from and even the statement still speaks to stuff in the film.
- [34:44]
A
Yeah, I actually read some critique of the movie somewhere that said that it wasn't really modeled after the Thomas Pichon book as much. It was modeled after the Days of Rage book about the history of the Brian Burroughs book. Yeah, Brian Burroughs history of Radical Underground, the FBI and cointelpro, which not true, but it is. It clearly takes a lot of cues from that history and yeah, a lot of parallels there.
- [35:09]
B
Yeah, the SLA and the weather on the ground play are very prominent in that Days of the Days of Rage book. So that totally makes sense when I read that book not too long ago. And so it really, it's actually how I knew that the SLA shootout in LA was how that scene and that scene at the beginning of the movie is like homage to that. I'm going to wrap wrap it there.
- [35:31]
A
The big question in my mind, with the award season wrapping up, will this sort of take best picture? Like where is it going to land? I feel like there's lots of talk of whether it's this or Sinners, but I think both are like incredibly powerful movies that speaks in many ways a lot of powerful themes around race, class, power, current political moments. Curious to see what comes out of this weekend?
- [35:54]
B
Yeah. And we will hopefully we'll put that we will put this out before the Before Sunday, folks. We've been you've been listening to the silky smooth sounds of the Green Red podcast talking about one battle after another. If you like what we're talking about, please check us out on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Bluesky. If you're watching this on YouTube, hit that subscribe button. Listening to this on audio platform. Give us a rate and review and if you really like us, go to greenbreadpodcast.org and hit that support button or become a patron@patreon.com greenrivepodcast everyone else out there, check out one battle after another and see whether you like it or not and make trouble and misbehave. Thanks Matt.
- [36:36]
A
Thanks so much for having. Sam.