By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Alyssa Rosenberg, Sunny Bunch and Peter Suderman, the three panelists of the outstanding film podcast Across the Movie Aisle. I really enjoy the show and have been a longtime fan of their individual work.

I think that they’re a group with genuinely diverse opinions but who have a lot of love for cinema and as a result have some of the most deeply interesting conversations about the art form of any show I listen to.

The show just split off from The Bulwark’s network and is striking it out independently. Do check them out!

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Hey, Across the Movie Aisle. Thank you so much for coming on Numlock. I really appreciate it.

Absolutely.

Thank you for having us.

Yes, this is the first three-on-one conversation that I’ve ever done here, so we’re gonna have to juggle a bit. Either way, I am just such a fan of the show. I really, really enjoyed it, subscribed to the Bulwark for it when I heard that you guys were going independent. I was really excited to see what was motivating that, what opportunities you were seeing out there. It’s just such a really fun program, and I think it’s so unique in the space.

Before we get into talking about the movies, do you wanna talk a little bit about where this show came from, where it started, then what you would say your perspective on the film industry is?

Sonny: Sure.

Alyssa: Who wants to tell the story?

Sonny: The origin of the show was back in 2019. I started working for an independent film studio that’s based in Dallas, where I live now. I moved here for the job. The pitch was, “it’s like Fangoria,” but for action movies and thrillers and heist movies, that sort of thing. And one of the things I wanted to do when we came over was a little podcast network. We were gonna have some shows, some storytelling things, et cetera. And one of the things I had wanted to do for a while (and hadn’t really had an outlet for) was a show I had envisioned as like Crossfire or McLaughlin Group or something like that, but by way of movies.

So Across the Movie Aisle — I’ve always shorthanded it as Siskel and Ebert meets Left Right Center. And the idea here is that I am a conservative. I don’t know how other people would describe me, but I still think of myself as a center-right person. Alyssa is the center-left person.

Peter: Would you even say that you are a neoconservative?

Sonny: Well, I’m a neoconservative with libertarian tendencies, which is a funny thing.

Peter: “You work at the Weekly Standard,” is a good way to think about your politics? And they basically haven’t changed since you worked at The Weekly Standard. Is that fair? That’s the long and the short of it.

Sonny: Then Peter is whatever Peter is. I’ll let him define himself. But the idea here was you have three people with differing political views talking about movies and other stories about movies. The show has two segments. The first is called Controversies and Nontroversies. The second is a review. And the Controversies and Nontroversies segment was initially thought of as we tackle some dumb internet outrage of the day and decide if it’s really worth being mad about.

And that evolved into something slightly different, right? Right, guys? I feel like it’s now more about the business of Hollywood.

Alyssa: Yes, exactly. But I think it’s worth noting that our story actually starts way before 2019. The three of us were all critics in some respect or other. I was over at ThinkProgress running their culture and sports verticals. Sonny, were you at the Weekly Standard when we started or were you at the Free Beacon then?

Sonny: I think I was at the Washington Free Beacon when we met. So it must’ve been 2012 or 13.

Alyssa: The three of us were going to screenings every week and somehow just gravitated towards each other. We would sit together. We were the people who were hanging out and hashing things out together after the screening ended. When I moved to the Washington Post, I ended up bringing Sonny over as a contributor to the blog that I was working on there. They were invited to my wedding. We were authentically contentiously friends years before we started the podcast.

I think that’s been a little bit of the special sauce for us, right? We are capable of having conversations that are somewhat harder to have elsewhere because (even before we started working together) there were five, six years of trust built up in in-person conversations and discussions over beers at the really terrible bar near the former AMC in Friendship Heights. Nobody is here on this podcast to blow each other up. But it’s also not like “We’re friends for the camera!”

I think the show has always been like both a reflection of our dynamic. It’s also the way that we hang out every week, even though Sonny lives in Dallas, and Peter lives in Boston some of the time. So for me, it’s like my night out.

I mean, as a listener, I really find the appeal to be exactly that. I think that having different perspectives on something as universal as film makes the show super compelling to listen to, even if I don’t always necessarily agree with the perspective on it. What makes movies just so good to view from multiple different angles? There are lowercase “c” conservative films, there are lowercase “l” liberal films, that stuff. How do you guys find approaching the current state of the film industry from these different points of view?

Peter: Alyssa talked about how our story goes back even before 2019, when the podcast started. And just for people who may not be familiar with the dynamic of Washington that all of us came up in in our 20s, Alyssa was working for ThinkProgress, which was the journalism arm of the Center for American Progress, which is this leading democratic or democratic affiliated think tank. Sonny was working for the Weekly Standard and then for the Washington Free Beacon, these feisty, conservative journalistic outlets.

I actually started writing movie reviews for National Review for a couple of years. When I moved over full-time to Reason Magazine, which is where I’ve been for more than 15 years now, and also to the Washington Times, which is someplace that both Sonny and I wrote for. It’s a conservative-leaning paper that has undergone many transformations. If you live in Washington, your social circle and your conversations and your life are so frequently segmented by politics.

What we liked about being friends with each other and seeing movies with each other was that we saw that it didn’t have to be the case. Movies and art and pop culture, even disagreements about them, were ways that we could come together and maybe not even agree, but like learn about each other. We’re really good friends, but we also like each other’s minds. This is something that is really important and drew us all together. I have learned a lot about movies from Sonny. I have learned about culture from Alyssa. I don’t know if they’ve learned anything from me. Maybe they’ve been annoyed about how I’m fine with A.I.

Having those perspectives, it’s not just that it’s like, “Oh, that’s nice that you’re a little different.” This is a learning opportunity for all of us. It also makes the act of watching movies together much richer. When you’re watching the movie, if you’re watching it next to Alyssa, I know what she’s thinking. Maybe not what I’m thinking, but it’s like having another set of eyes. If you’re a critic, if you’re somebody who likes movies, if you are somebody who likes movies for the social aspect of them, seeing them with somebody else and talking about them afterwards just makes it so much more enjoyable. The fact that we then get to have that conversation in public for an audience that seems to enjoy this is really rewarding.

Alyssa: I have a very hard time with certain kinds of violence in movies. But I can sit in a theater with Peter, and he can tell me when I need to cover my eyes, but also when I’m gonna be okay when it’s over. And he’s always right, right? And that’s the thing that we get.

Peter: But also when we see the Taylor Swift movie, I show up, and Alyssa has friendship bracelets for us. Everybody’s bringing something to the party here.

Alyssa: Peter, you joked about whether or not we’ve gotten anything from you. And I actually think that in some ways, I’m the one of us whose politics and aesthetics have changed most as a result of doing the show with both of you. I came up in an era of lefty cultural criticism when there were real incentives for tearing things apart. And I think I, in some ways early in my career, helped advance a fairly doctrinaire vision of what political conversations about art should be. And I have some regrets about some of the things that I wrote and some non-regrets too. I did a lot of work at that point in my career that I liked a lot.

But one of the things I’ve come to believe in my conversation with these guys is that art is at its most politically powerful not when it affirms an agenda or a worldview that is defined by a political movement, but it is at its most powerful and interesting when it creates space for conversations that are not possible in conventional political formats and political venues. I think the unpredictability of movies and the inability to shove movies neatly into a partisan schema is where their power comes from.

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Numlock Sunday: Across the Movie Aisle