Marc Andreessen: How Movies Explain America

Los Angeles, in a lot of ways, is sort of—you could describe it as the archetypal American city.

The reaction from the audience is extreme laughter. You were laughing during the most violent sequence for 20 minutes.

We're excited to have the Modern Situation crew back for another episode on movies. Marc, thanks for joining again.

Yes, excited.

We wanted to go deeper into some of our favorite movies. Marc, I know from watching movies with you that one of the genres you enjoy is movies about Hollywood. We wanted to start with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Why don't you talk about what's so remarkable about it, or why you wanted to talk about it?

The reason I like movies about Hollywood is that they tend to be very entertaining because, of course, the people who make movies about Hollywood are from Hollywood, and they may know where all the bodies are buried. They tend to put them all in the movies. They're all rather spectacular Hollywood movies.

For people who haven't seen them, I would recommend Mulholland Drive. It's one of Erik's favorites. And then The Player, which is also an all-time great. There are, of course, a bunch of famous ones like Sunset Boulevard, but the iconic Hollywood movie now is clearly Once Upon a Time in Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino.

The reason I like Hollywood movies is because there are a handful of cities that have a claim to be the ultimate American city. New York City is one of those. I think San Francisco, where we are, is one of those in some ways. Los Angeles and Las Vegas also go on the list. By the way, for Las Vegas, see Bugsy. We'll talk about that another time. That's the iconic Vegas movie.

Los Angeles, in a lot of ways, is sort of—you could describe it as the archetypal American city. There's a great book we'll put in the notes called Thinking Back to Los Angeles, about the creation of the city of Los Angeles. You could argue that Los Angeles is the ultimate American city because it was the ultimate “fake it till you make it” thing. It was the 3rd of the cities.

Very specifically, it was desert. There was absolutely nothing in Los Angeles. Literally, it was a land-development deal by a bunch of wealthy families in the late 1800s. They placed newspaper ads in Eastern newspapers. This was before photography made it into newspapers, so when there was a picture of something in a newspaper, it would be a drawing.

They would list land plots for sale in Los Angeles with line drawings of orchards, beautiful everything, and palm trees. People would buy the land, move across the country, and discover that it was just blasted-out desert. They famously created the city and carved it out of the desert.

Then there's the famous saga of how they went to get the water, which turned into another great LA movie, Chinatown. As you'd expect, Hollywood goes for a certain interpretation of history, so it was painted in retrospect as a purely evil activity. But there's actually a very straightforward reading, which is that this was what was required to create a city. It wasn't as black and white as Hollywood history has it. It was a “people are complex” story, but still a very interesting, amazing story.

Cities like Los Angeles are created every day, so that's a pretty big deal. Movies about LA, I think, when they reach the level of capital-A art, become movies about America. It's a great test bed, or a great subject—a great lens through which to look at the history of America. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is one of the top movies along that theme.

Let me start by saying: if anybody watching this hasn't seen Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, pause the podcast immediately. Go watch the movie, and then come back, because we're going to spoil the [__] out of it.

It's tremendously fun to watch if you haven't read about it. I'll also say that it's a tremendously entertaining movie. It's one of the most entertaining pop-culture movies, and it's infinitely rewatchable. The cast is ridiculous, and every frame of the thing is amazing. It's also a very fun movie.

Here's the larger significance of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, or my view of it: it captures a time and place that was absolutely critical to the evolution of modern America. Katherine, you remind me, but I think the year was 1969.

1969, yeah.

To put this in context, the movie goes through this, but it doesn't explain all the cultural backstory. It shows you what happened, but it doesn't explain the backstory. I'll just go through it.

What we now consider to be the cultural revolution of the 1960s really started around 1964 with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Then it expanded, or metastasized, to include the hippie movement, the birth of modern rock and roll, and the rise of the counterculture.

All of a sudden, everybody had long hair and beads. They were wearing suede jackets, and they weren't washing their Levi's—the whole counterculture. This was when the baby boomers were coming of age as high school and college kids. There was an incredible explosion of art, culture, creativity, and social innovation: the birth of the communes, the entire hippie movement, and going back to the earth.

This was also a world in which the Vietnam War was ramping up. There was a ramp-up in the conscription of American kids being sent off to Vietnam—non-volunteers. The anti-war movement kicked in, and the campus and college protests kicked in.

The entire thing was remembered as this incredibly spontaneous and largely positive explosion, a breaking out of the stultified cultural norms of the 1940s and 1950s—the creation of the modern, liberated American society. Alongside that were the civil rights movement, feminism, gay rights, and the whole explosion of modern morality during that period.

From 1964 to 1969, if you read the histories of the time, it was basically this glorious, wonderful thing with absolutely no downside. These kids were rioting on their college campuses, protesting in the streets, getting stoned all day, having their whole hippie thing, living in communes, and going back to the earth. They had discovered a far superior way to live. They had discovered a far superior way to coexist with nature, fight against the Man and evil corporations, and fight for the environment, the planet, and peace.

It was an incredible wave of positivity, and there's a very good argument that there was a lot to like about it. A lot of people do believe that. It was also a time of great cultural creativity, with enormous amounts of amazing art that we still have today.

Then, in 1969, the positivity came to a screeching halt. The movement basically turned very much to the dark side, and that began the long slide into the 1970s. That slide was, among other things, a slide into drugs going very bad, drug overdoses, and the shift from soft drugs to hard drugs.

A lot of people who participated in this cultural movement of the 1960s ended up dying. We’ll talk about the death later, because the movie directly hits that, but there’s just an extraordinary amount of death that followed. There was degradation, and sexual liberation, it turns out, has dark sides. Maybe it doesn’t work so well for everybody, and specifically, maybe it isn’t so great, at least in some ways.

And then, look, the 1970s were Vietnam, which was very bad; then the energy crisis, the economic recession, inflation, and this very bitter, divisive politics. In a lot of ways, this was the beginning of the political dynamic that we see playing out today. So, in the 1970s, things went really bad. The bookending movie, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, is sort of about that pivot point. I’ll talk about that. And then Boogie Nights is maybe the movie on the other side of that, right? Once the culture is sliding down the hill into chaos, madness, disease, and death, Boogie Nights captures that on the other side.

But for today’s discussion, we can focus on 1969. If you read the histories of the time, what happened was the Charles Manson murders—specifically in Los Angeles—and, for America, the Manson murders were the turning point. The Manson murders are the thing people point to and say, “Oh, that was the moment when we all realized there was a dark side to this whole thing. Oh, my God, here we go.” So let’s talk about that at length.

Let me close out this introductory part with the most amazing thing about the movie that I found. If you know the history of that period, you know that the Manson murders were super famous at the time. They’re still famous in American culture. Everybody knows that there was a guy, Charles Manson, who had this death cult; he implicated these kids to go out and kill random people. There are still all these questions about how the hell he did that. Everybody knows that he was intertwined with Hollywood, the movie industry, and the music industry—that he was part of that whole thing.

Specifically, for people who know anything about that, the Manson murders are also famously known as the Sharon Tate murders. There was this incredibly vivacious, attractive, bubbly, enthusiastic young blonde actress named Sharon Tate, who at the time was famously married to Roman Polanski, one of the leading New Hollywood movie directors of that time. They were this New Hollywood glamour power couple. Sharon Tate, among other people, was one of those murdered.

When Tarantino first announces the movie, he comes out and says, “Quentin Tarantino is going to make the movie about the Charles Manson murders.” If you’ve seen any other Tarantino movie, like Pulp Fiction, for example, you’re just like, “Oh, my God, this is going to be horrible.” The Manson murders are bad enough, but turning them into a Tarantino-style mass slaughter of violence—Reservoir Dogs, blood and guts, basically a super-high-level exploitation movie, as he’s done in the past—it’s just a horror show.

I was personally worried about it because my wife got excited to see the movie. It was going to star Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, it was going to be about Hollywood, fashion, design, and all this creativity. She was like, “We’ve got to go see this movie.” And I was like, “We can’t go see the movie, because you’re going to be so traumatized by what he puts on screen. You’re never going to want to see a movie ever again, and you’re going to hold it against me for the rest of my life that I didn’t prevent you from seeing this movie, because it’s obviously just going to be a complete horror show. It’s just going to be a disaster.”

Sharon Tate’s family came out when the movie was first announced and basically said, “Wait a minute, hold on. We don’t want the memory of our family member, whom we still love many decades later, turned into fodder for Hollywood exploitation.” And then there was this amazing thing that happened, and nobody knew anything about the movie: Tarantino, at least the way the story is recorded, actually let—I think it was Sharon Tate’s sister, or maybe somebody like that—read the script. Immediately, the family did a 180 and came right out and said, “We completely approve.”

I remember reading that at the time, and I was like, “What the hell? How is it that they could possibly get the Tate family, of all people, on board with putting this on screen?” Of course, that leads to the movie turning into a valentine to Hollywood and to America, and specifically to Sharon Tate. It really restores her memory in an amazing way.

Yeah, that’s right. He did something very smart in the movie for those of us who love Tarantino and follow his work. I think the common theme was, “Oh, God, this is going to be horrific,” especially if you’ve read about the Manson murders and know how gruesome they are. That was the dominant theme.

But he had made a few films in between, and I’d say the last other fantastic Tarantino film was the revenge fantasy Inglourious Basterds. It’s extremely gruesome, but at the same time it’s a revenge fantasy of what could have happened—what could have happened if someone had killed Hitler.

At the very beginning of the movie, there’s a scene with Leonardo DiCaprio—also at the end—but in the scene at the very beginning, it shows clips from all his films, and he has the famous flamethrower from Inglourious Basterds. If you’re a Tarantino fan, you’re like, “Wait, wait, wait. Which direction are we going in? Are we going into gruesome violence with no purpose?” Which, I would argue, is how Tarantino is always misunderstood. “Or are we going in a different direction, a little more fantastical, a little more what could have happened?”

For those of us with eagle eyes in the theater, I think we kind of knew, especially as you said, the family said it was great, it was going to be fine. We kind of knew, okay, this film is not going to be nearly as bad, and Tarantino’s going to take us in a different direction. But he did put that little Easter egg in there for us in the first 10 minutes of the film.

It’s funny you bring that up, because I completely missed that when I was watching the movie. I just thought it was a throwaway: “Oh, yeah, I see him with the flamethrower. That’s funny. Ha-ha.” It didn’t even for a minute occur to me.

We’re going to spoil it. Let’s just say that the flamethrower plays a critical role—a very critical role. Have you ever been happier to see the flamethrower get taken out than at the end of that movie?

But I just enjoyed the movie so much when I was watching it. I knew it had to be something amazing that I wasn’t expecting in order to get the Tate family on board, but I was still sitting there in a state of dread for the entire movie.

Anyway, to spoil the movie, Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood basically tells you the story of the Manson cult in Hollywood at that time and how it all intertwined. It takes you all the way up to the night of the murders, but then he takes a left turn in history, as he does. It’s an alternative history.

The Manson cultists who, in real life, killed Sharon Tate, in the movie go to the house next door, which is Leo’s house, where his friend Brad Pitt is.

And Brad Pitt’s character—by the way, I don’t know if you know this, Kevin. Curious if you know the backstory of the Brad Pitt character. He doesn’t quite say this in the movie, but it explains a lot. Tarantino’s conception of him is that he’s basically the most deadly man in the world at that time.

He’s not just a war hero, but a Green Beret—a super-highly decorated, basically super soldier—who has become a Hollywood stuntman. So, basically, the Manson killers walk exactly to the wrong house because, number 1, they’re up against this guy who spent the preceding, whatever, 20 years killing people for America—basically Captain America. And number 2, it turns out Leo still had the flamethrower in his garage.

Well, there’s also the backstory that you’re not totally sure how good Cliff is. There’s a whole backstory of whether he killed his wife, which is actually in the film and also in the backstory. He is, as you said, a very deadly person.

But that final scene—there’s no way you can anticipate it. Even if you knew, “Okay, maybe it’s not going to be as gruesome, or there’s going to be some sort of revenge fantasy,” there’s no way you can anticipate how genius the run-up to it is, and then also the final scene.

Because there’s this whole other thing that happens in the movie where you forget that you’re watching a movie about the Mansons. You forget that you’re watching this horrific thing that it’s supposed to be. There’s a 30-minute scene of Rick Dalton, who’s aging and losing his place in Hollywood. He has this moment where he stars in this kind of cheesy Western with an 11-year-old girl. It’s a movie within a movie, and it’s probably the best encapsulation of what happens to actors in Hollywood.

So you kind of lose track of the fact that you’re watching a movie that’s supposed to end in this horrific violence. Instead, there’s Sharon Tate at the Playboy Mansion, dancing, representing this new generation, while there’s this old generation of hypermasculine figures who can’t get work. It’s a genius movie within a movie where the little girl says to him—and it’s probably one of the most memorable lines—“That’s the best acting I’ve ever seen in my whole life.”

Even if they’d stopped the movie there, it would have been just as brilliant, right? But then it goes on to this other sequence where you’re like, “Oh, yeah, we’re about to see the most gruesome possible violence.” I wasn’t alive in 1969, but I can imagine it’s like if that happened to Jennifer Lawrence, or to Margot Robbie, who’s actually playing her. It would just be this horrific thing.

But you kind of forget because there are all of these beautiful, hilarious sequences that run up to it. You forget that you’re watching a movie that’s supposed to end in this horrific violence. And, of course, I’ll let you continue, Marc, but it doesn’t. It ends in a different type of horrific violence—not the female-on-female violence that characterized the Manson murders, which I think is another kind of subtext of the film.

It’s just how gory and violent the actual episode is, but you don’t actually see that. So I’ll let you continue, but there’s a whole other part of the Hollywood story that’s really fascinating.

Yeah, that’s exactly right. And, by the way, pop quiz, Katherine: The little girl actress—who was she pretending to be in real life?

I don’t know, actually.

Jodie Foster.

Oh, is that who she’s supposed to be?

Yeah. She’s not under that name, but that’s basically who the character is supposed to be.

And I’m bringing it up because she represented New Hollywood. Jodie Foster in that era was a rising child star. Then she had her breakout role in Taxi Driver, where she gave an incredibly revelatory acting performance. So she’s representative of the new, so-called New Hollywood, with the much more naturalistic acting style that took over from the much more stylized style of the ’50s and ’60s.

You’re bringing it up because, to your point, part of the story there was Rick Dalton trying to get out of making clichéd, hackneyed genre stuff, where he just plays the same tough guy over and over again. The running joke up until that point is that Rick Dalton started out his career as a tough-guy movie star, and then, over the years, that archetype is fading in 1969. So he was increasingly being cast as the bad guy.

The thing is, the bad guy is the one who gets punched and knocked out; he’s not the guy who punches and knocks people out. He’s on this downward slide, and he has absolutely no idea how to adapt himself to this new world.

And again, the way the movie intersects with the other part of the movie is with Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate living next door to his character. He’s like, “Oh my God, if I could just figure out a way to get invited over for a barbecue or something, where I could meet Roman Polanski, the leading New Hollywood movie director of that time—if I could just get cast in one of his movies, then I could stay relevant for the next decade.”

He had absolutely no reason for Roman Polanski or Sharon Tate to give Rick Dalton the time of day, because he represented the past and they represented the future. Until, of course, at the very end of the movie, Rick Dalton saves her life. Then she invites him over.

That’s the significance of him being invited over at the end of the movie: It’s his entrée to New Hollywood, having basically been taught by Jodie Foster, as an 11-year-old, how to act.

So, basically, it all comes together. It’s such a genius way to do it.

Anyway, the macro relevance of this just restates the thesis: If the Manson murders were where the cultural revolution of the 1960s went bad, then Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood is the fantasy, or the love letter, to a different America in which that didn’t happen, and things kept going in a much more positive direction.

By putting the ultimate positive direction on screen, in my view, he really highlights how bad it was that that’s not what happened. The tragedy of the Manson murders is not just the tragedy for the people who were killed and for their families—it was a profound tragedy—but the tragedy was basically for all of Los Angeles.

If you talk to people who were around during that period, things got dark in Los Angeles very quickly. People were so freaked out by the Manson murders. They didn’t know how many other serial killers were running around; they didn’t know how many other cults there were. Everybody all of a sudden had to lock their doors. People stopped going out.

By the way, this was the beginning of the heyday of the serial killer, with Ted Bundy. It was the beginning of this wave of these things where people got really serious and freaked out. Then, generally in America, as I said, that was the beginning of the downward slide in the ’70s.

By making the positive what-if counterfactual so clear, it highlights and illustrates, in a way that maybe nothing else has been able to do, the darkness that actually played out in real life.

Totally. I went back and watched the beginning of the sequence because it’s actually a long sequence of violence. What I remember so much is that I read the reviews beforehand—not knowing, because they try not to have spoiler alerts—and critics were very divided. It was, “This is so violent. This is extremely violent.”

What’s funny about seeing it in the theater—which I’m so glad I saw in the theater—is that the reaction from the audience, and again, these are people who went opening week and really wanted to see this movie or were Tarantino fans, is extreme laughter. Yes, you are laughing during the most violent sequence for 20 minutes.

What’s really funny about what’s happening on screen, too, is that Cliff, who’s the stuntman—and again, this is a spoiler, so turn this off; I’m going to go into detail—takes an edible, or LSD. I can’t remember if it’s an edible or if he smokes an LSD cigarette.

He smokes an LSD cigarette.

Yes. So right before these guys come in, he’s high as a kite, which is also a funny part of it. And the other part—you have to love Tarantino—is that he’s so particular about details.

The music playing when they come in is this psychedelic-rock band, and he shows the transition of the ’60s through music throughout the entire thing, which is really important. In that scene, he’s listening to the Supremes singing, “Set me free, why don’t you, babe” It’s this perfect moment of “Set me free,” and these guys come in. He’s high, and he’s like, “Is this real?”

But Cliff’s response is laughter. He’s laughing at these women. These women have their knives; they’re ready to do the deed, and he’s laughing.

I think in some ways Tarantino always has these takes on masculine violence. Can you take the power out of whatever situation in history by using this extreme violence? It’s about to happen, and there’s a—I won’t ruin the pit bull part, but there’s something where he siccs his pit bull on these women.

Let’s ruin it. Let’s ruin it. We’re ruining it.

Okay, he siccs his pit bull on these women. Watching it again, you’re like, this is fascinating, because if the Mansons had been met with laughter—instead, they were met with, “These are the most evil people. They’re taken by the devil.” They were met with fear.

And to Marc’s point, that set off serial killers. It gave power to this extraordinary evil for decades. I think the point of it is: What if Cliff, the most masculine, deadly man in the room, had just been high and laughed and sicced his pit bull on these women, who are kind of silly and high themselves, and the whole thing had become a comedy?

It turns into 20 minutes of sheer hilarity, absolute hilarity, even though it’s the most violent thing you’ve probably seen in the last several years. He actually beats one of them to death with a telephone. It’s just the funniest thing you’ve ever seen.

And the flamethrower shows up, right? I mean, it’s very—you could not conceive of the type of violence it meets.

It meets the most horrific violence that we know is coming. That’s the backstory to this, too: what really happened. So you have this weird emotional response if you know what actually happened. It’s so tragic.

I always think it’s interesting that it was the Manson Family. They called themselves a family. It was a perversion of the family, and they actually killed a woman who was 8 months pregnant, starting a family.

That’s a whole other narrative to this, but the fact that it’s met with even more extreme violence—and at the time it was during Me Too as well, so it was violence against women. But, of course, everyone wants that violence to happen because you don’t want the alternative to happen.

It’s this very strange moviegoing experience that is both delightful but also has a lot of mixed emotions. That’s why I think critics were so divided on it. I loved it, but that’s why I think critics were divided on it.

Yeah, and then if you toss it up one notch, it captures your point. It’s the ultimate square in the form of Rick Dalton, still putting Brylcreem in his hair and trying to be a James Dean tough guy when that’s not what the world wants.

And then there’s Captain America, an icon of the American military, at the time of Vietnam, when the military was not viewed with the level of respect that American culture has for it today. The fact that those 2 end up beating and roasting a bunch of hippies to death at the height of the counterculture makes it an incredibly crowd-pleasing movie.

As you said, it happened very close to the peak of woke, during our cultural revolution of the last decade. I don’t know if it’s properly characterized as a reactionary movie, but it definitely was not the moral arc of other attempts at art during that time period.

Totally. Even the final scene, as you said, of him getting invited over, and her being sort of blissfully unaware that any of this has happened—I mean, that’s all part of the magic of it. She has no idea that any of this has happened, and you see the camera sort of pan up.

It genuinely feels like this is, in the same way that Inglourious Basterds was a revenge drama of what could have possibly happened, also the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood story—what could have happened. It was a weird moviegoing experience in 2019 to be surrounded by people who were laughing, who loved it.

It kind of went against everything you were reading in the news, which was that no one agrees with this alternative history. It’s just a brilliant film. I’m excited—there’s a sequel coming, right, Marc?

There is indeed. There is indeed, which is going to be just incredible, I’m sure.

But also, Tarantino is so funny. You guys may both remember this, but back before the internet, and even back before DVDs and video rentals, if you didn’t see a movie when it was in the theater, you didn’t see it. It might show up on TV 2 years later, but they would have cut all the good parts out and stuck in all the commercials.

So you basically had 1 shot to see a movie in the theater. If you wanted to see it again after it was out of the theater, you couldn’t. There was this genre of paperback novelizations of movies. What you would do is buy the paperback novelization, and you could read that as many times as you wanted.

I had a shelf of these things when I was a kid—Star Wars and all these things—and read them all about 14 times. Tarantino, being a child of this era, actually wrote a paperback novelization of the movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

He specifically wrote it as a paperback novelization, and it came out in paperback as an homage to this. But, of course, being Tarantino, it actually turns out it’s not just a paperback novelization.

It turns out it’s like an entirely new novel. It’s actually funny because the novel is set in the same world as the movie and goes much deeper into the themes of the movie. But he doesn’t care at all about having the plot of the movie actually appear in the novel. He just throws it away right up front in the novel: “Oh, yeah, yeah, and then Rick Dalton roasts a bunch of hippies in his swimming pool that night,” right? So the plot isn’t the point of the novelization.

Very few people have read it, kind of just by virtue of how he came up with that, I think, because people didn’t know what to make of literally a paperback novelization in 2022, or whenever it came out. But I think it has a reasonable claim on being a great American novel. And the reason specifically, Katherine, I think he does write a lot is because it goes much deeper into all the themes that we’re talking about.

It goes really deep into the transformation of Hollywood that was happening at that time. It goes really deep into the making of the Western show that happens inside the movie, which is actually a real show called Lancer. It is actually a real show with that setup and with those actors. It goes much deeper into all the characters, and it goes deeper into the Manson Family. So, yeah, it’s really amazing.

By the way, I should also say that the movie does have a scene in which it is left ambiguous as to whether or not Cliff Booth killed his wife. The wife is played by Rebecca De Mornay, who is in the movie for maybe 30 seconds and almost steals it. She’s just hysterically funny, and she plays the meanest wife in the world. She’s hectoring and screaming at Brad Pitt, and they’re literally on a fishing boat, with Brad Pitt holding a speargun in his lap.

In the movie, it’s set up as basically a speargun accident following this argument. Did Brad Pitt actually deliberately kill his wife or not? Of course, in the novelization, it makes it very clear: yes, he did. [Laughter]

For those of you who have only seen the movie, it turns out the Cliff Booth character actually has a real dark side. And, yes, the hippies picked the wrong house to stumble into.

We were talking offline about how there’s some relevance to today. Is the connection that the 2010s, to some people, were seen as a sort of glorious march toward progress, and then, whether it’s the 2020 Floyd riots, or more recently the Luigi Minion murder, or the murder of Charlie Kirk, there’s this moment of, “Oh my God, this thing has gone off the rails”? Is that kind of the connection?

Yeah. I would say that, whichever side of the political and social spectrum you’re on, the world that we live in today is a much darker version of what everybody thought we were going to be living in. I mean, for people who were 100% on board with the social good—so, back up a second. To your point, I think there’s a very direct analogy of, let’s call it, 1964 to 1972 or something, with the re-election of Richard Nixon.

That cultural revolution that happened during the ’60s—the hippie, Vietnam kind of revolution—I think that what we in America have been through over the last decade is sort of another version of that. Our version of that started around—I would date it to 2014 or 2015—and that era basically ended in November 2024.

Obviously, if you’re on the right, you’re like, “Oh my God, thank God that’s over.” And, you know, the world keeps moving on. If you’re on the left, of course, you’re like, “Oh my God, what just happened? How did the revolution, the imperial revolution, go so bad?”

That is precisely what happened at the end of the revolution in the 1960s. Specifically, if I mention 1972, Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, and it was a hard-fought race—very dramatic and so on, right? But then he was re-elected in 1972 in a landslide. I don’t even know what to call it; it was like a 49-state landslide or some crazy thing. It was just an overwhelming landslide.

The American people basically rose up and said, “Yeah, no more of this. It’s over.” The echoes of how this played out are just profound. They’re echoes, right? It’s not exactly comparable. Iraq and Vietnam played different roles, the economy has developed in different ways, and Trump and Nixon are different people. The social movements are different, and times have changed.

But there was a cultural revolution. It was glorious or terrible for some period of time, and then it ended. It was just a sequence of events where it was over, and you were out the other side in a new world.

I would argue that’s exactly the process that kicked off in ’69 with the Manson murders, then was bookended in ’72 with Nixon’s re-election, followed by the slide into the 1970s and then into the ’80s. That transformation is precisely the same kind of transition that we’re going through right now.

I think it’s either thrilling or horrifying people in a very similar way to how the end of the ’60s either thrilled or horrified people. Hey, Katherine, would you agree with that?

I would. I also, since you mentioned Vietnam, want to transition to the best Vietnam War film ever made.

Okay, everything we’ve said up until now is milquetoast compared to the extremely controversial claim that Katherine is about to make. Please.

It is by far the best Vietnam War film ever made. It incorporates every Vietnam War film ever made, including The Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, and Apocalypse Now.

The best Vietnam War film ever made is Tropic Thunder. But it also happens to be one of the best films about Hollywood. Actually, I would say that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, while it is an incredible film, is more about America. Tropic Thunder is also about America in different ways and reveals a lot about America, but it is by far the best Hollywood film ever made. I’ll let Marc talk about why that is.

Well, let’s date it. Tropic Thunder was what year?

It was 2008, which is actually very important, because 2008 was also the year when we had a POW from the Vietnam War running for office against the first Black president in history. That is a very important context for all the themes dealt with inside of Tropic Thunder, which of course is a comedy. It’s a satire, but it satirizes everything in the before-times 2008. It came out during an election year when those 2 themes were on display. But I’ll let Marc get into the summary.

Well, it is, although I’m going to differ. I think it’s very funny—maybe the funniest Hollywood movie of the last 25 years or something. It’s just an incredibly entertaining movie.

For people to have a sense of how much things have changed, one of the most amazing things about it is that the great actor Robert Downey Jr. plays the entire movie in blackface. [Laughter]

Not only does he play the entire movie in blackface, but I would say he extraordinarily commits to the bit. [Laughter] He’s a method actor playing a method actor—a method actor playing another method actor, playing an actor in a type of blackface.

Again, to your point on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, when the film was first announced, it was known that Robert Downey Jr. was going to be playing an actor in blackface. As you can imagine, it was the same thing that happened with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, where there was a whole kind of terror about what was going to happen.

“What is Robert Downey Jr. doing? He’s destroying his career. Who does Ben Stiller think he is, doing this movie?” No one actually knew the backstory or how it would be satirizing Hollywood actors who will go to any extreme length to win an Oscar.

But when you get into the film, it’s handled so beautifully and delicately. I was reading about how they handled it when they were producing it, which was that they invited a number of members of the NAACP.

They invited a number of different, thoughtful critics and said, “You have to see this film first.” It was again the same sort of thing where everyone saw it first and said, “Don’t worry. It’s perfect. It’s hilarious.” So I’ll let you continue, but they handled it in a way that was really thoughtful.

Did they have to apologize in the 2010s? I remember Jimmy Kimmel had to apologize for blackface, or one of these people. Or did they get away with it?

Interesting point. So they didn’t. When it came out, it was so clearly satirizing white actors who were trying to win an Oscar. It was clearly satirizing everyone. It was universally beloved, so much so that Robert Downey Jr. was nominated for an Oscar.

That’s a whole other backstory: they petitioned the Academy as a joke, saying “For Your Consideration,” and the Academy actually nominated him for an Oscar for the role. It was so beloved—what he did and how brilliant the role was—that no one cared. But I believe it was 2017 or 2018 when a new crop of young people came through journalism and said, “This is horrible.” They tried to cancel him.

You might know Marc better than I do in terms of how he handled it, but they clearly did not cancel Robert Downey Jr. for satirizing the role he played.

Just to fill this in, and then we’ll get to the Vietnam aspects of this—the war-movie aspects—Robert Downey Jr., a white American actor, plays a white Australian actor who is a method actor. I think he was loosely inspired by Daniel Day-Lewis, sort of that super-elite kind of actor.

There are a couple of scenes where you see Robert out of character but dressed up as the Australian actor, who has, I forget, translucent green eyes or something, this very striking look, and a very plummy Australian accent. So it’s a white American actor in real life playing a white Australian actor playing a Southern Black man in blackface for the entire movie.

On top of that, Robert Downey Jr. often improvises throughout his movies, and I think a fair amount of the portrayal was him in the moment, which is fairly incredible when you see it, because he’s fully out of this world. He’s actually in the movie—inside the movie—in a platoon with a young Black actor whose name I can’t recall, but he’s just impressive. The way they play off each other is brilliant.

His name in the film is Al Pacino, a rapper who becomes an actor. There’s a whole other thing there.

One thing everyone remembers in the film is the fake trailers before it starts. He’s Alpa Chino, the rapper, and he’s selling a drink that he calls Booty Sweat. What’s so brilliant about the film is that they not only satirized Hollywood in the movie; they were the first Barbenheimer. They marketed it in so many funny ways and did incredible things before and after the film.

They made Booty Sweat into an actual drink and marketed it throughout the entire Oscar campaign. They went so far. I mean, the only film that’s done this as exceptionally as Tropic Thunder was Barbie. They figured out how to turn every aspect of the film into marketing genius.

The other smart thing they did, by the way, was cast Tom Cruise. Ben Stiller plays a guy named Tug Speedman, who is based on a dumb Tom Cruise. His name is Tug Speedman—where did they get that name? It’s Tom Cruise.

They also have Tom Cruise in the movie as the producer, who is based on Harvey Weinstein: Les Grossman. They didn’t want anyone to know Tom Cruise was in the film, so they actually sued any paparazzi who took pictures of him beforehand because they wanted people to come to the theater without knowing that Tom Cruise was in it.

Of course, he wrote his entire role. He improvised it and wrote it; it was sort of Tom Cruise’s brainchild. They originally offered him something else, and he said, “No, no, no. I want to play Harvey Weinstein.” It is genius.

They did so many things to make sure that the entire cult of the movie outside the movie was Hollywood-produced. To Marc’s point, you have this method actor playing a method actor who is trying to get an Oscar through his method acting, who ultimately ends up getting nominated for the Oscar and losing to Heath Ledger the year Heath Ledger died, when the award was given to him. They could not have done it better. It was a 20-year project.

That’s the other very interesting thing: Ben Stiller had been working on this since the ’80s, and it was only that year that they were finally able to get it made. It’s this brilliant commentary on all of Hollywood. We can get into the Vietnam stuff, too, because I think it’s also commentary on that. It is the best Hollywood film ever made, even in the fact that they were able to successfully sway the Oscars.

Well, it was also, Katherine, to your point, the flip side of the Tom Cruise image issues at the time. This was after the run of controversy around him, Scientology, his personal life, and all those things. There was a run of very bad publicity, and a lot of people in the industry were worried that he was not going to be a bankable movie star anymore.

I think this role in this movie was basically his recovery from that, which was pulled off absolutely perfectly. Of course, he then went on to be an even bigger movie star than before.

Totally. It’s a great career resurrection in the middle of this.

Just in terms of how much times have changed—or, as somebody once said, the past is a foreign planet, or another country—you’ve got an American actor being nominated for an Oscar for a character performing in blackface in 2008. It was directed by a Hollywood filmmaker who’s obviously a genius, but within 10 years, Ben Stiller subsequently became one of the wokest Hollywood figures in the years that followed.

All through the last decade, Ben Stiller has been to the left of Che Guevara on every social and political issue. I don’t know—I’ve never met him. I’ve been a great admirer of his art, but I wonder how much of his shift to the far left, politically and socially, was a reaction to having made this movie.

The other thing is that everyone focuses on Robert Downey Jr., but there are at least 4 other untouchable things that happened in that film. When the film came out, the people who were most upset in 2008 were disability advocates because of the commentary on, I believe, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Forrest Gump, and Raymond and Raymond.

The character is Simple Jack. The line that’s said—and again, I’m quoting the film—is, “Never go full [__],” which was okay to say in 2008, except for disability advocates, who were very upset about it. They were sort of on the fringe in 2008, but that was actually the thing Ben Stiller had to apologize for.

They didn’t test the film on Simple Jack, but it was commentary from Robert Downey Jr. in blackface saying, “Everybody knows,” and then saying the line, right? Tugg Speedman doesn’t play it as he should. He does the full Leo DiCaprio, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, full-on performance. He does Rain Man.

The other thing that happened, which I think people didn’t realize, is that it’s so much a commentary on Vietnam War films because a lot of Vietnam War memoirs in later years have been proven to be completely disingenuous. People said they went to Vietnam but didn’t go to Vietnam.

In the storyline, the guy whose memoir the movie Tropic Thunder is actually based on is a member of the Coast Guard who never got sent to Vietnam and worked for the sanitation department. That’s a whole theme in the movie. There’s also this brilliant commentary on veterans’ issues, and I think some veterans’ groups were upset about it.

There were also people who were very upset with Tom Cruise’s portrayal. It was before we all knew who he was portraying and everything, but there were people who were very upset because they felt that it was a stereotype. Pretty much every character had people who were upset, and again, these were fringes; it wasn’t mass commentary. But they managed to insult every protected group in a way that everyone was like, “Well, yeah, but it’s satire, right?”

It was a totally different time in America, but it wasn’t just focused on race relations. I mean, we had a Vietnam POW running for president that year, and basically a mockery—the greatest mockery of a Vietnam film ever made. In some ways, this film was so perfectly timed for the era we were living in.

Well, we still have to this day—let’s not name names on what is otherwise a fun, fun podcast—but there are sitting United States politicians in serious offices who literally faked Vietnam War records. That’s not over; that’s actually still the case. So, to your point, there were many people who served in or around Vietnam, and then there were people who made up completely fake stories and rode them for the rest of their careers. The movie, among other things, takes direct aim at that. And I believe the guy wears a hook the whole film.

You would. What was his name?

I mean, this movie is so brilliant. It’s so brilliant, and the levels of commentary are remarkable to this day.

Yes, yes. Cute. I mean, maybe this bookends the previous conversation: this was clearly made before the culture, before our version of the culture revolution. It’s an ancient artifact. I would say only now are we re-emerging into a world in which a movie like that could be made. For the last probably 13 years or so, a movie like that would have been totally off-limits. We’re coming out into a world now where movies like that can get made again.

Yeah, Jimmy Kimmel’s not going to bring back The Man Show.

[laughter]

Or return to his roots. For people who followed—or, for people who don’t get the reference, for anybody who followed the recent Jimmy Kimmel affair and all of the outrage—it is worth going on YouTube and looking at clips from a Jimmy Kimmel show 20 years ago, which was literally called The Man Show. It’s worth it just to get a sense of the long and twisty road that some of our highest and most famous public figures have followed.

A tale of 2 comedians, right? Because it’s him and Adam Carolla, right? Their careers have detoured dramatically since.

Yes, that’s right. 2 other films we wanted to discuss were Oppenheimer and Fight Club.

So, let’s start with Oppenheimer, just because it’s more recent. I’ll make the case: I’m an enormous Christopher Nolan fan. I’ve seen all his movies. I love all his movies. I think they’re really tremendous.

I say this as someone who thinks Tenet is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. I sat through Tenet with a giant smile on my face the entire movie. I thought it was absolute magic. Obviously, I love Inception, and I love many of his movies.

I think Oppenheimer was an incredibly well-made movie. It had colorful performances, was put together really well, and was tremendously interesting to watch. I will argue that it did not reach our level of capital-A art. I think it actually fell quite badly short on morality and, ultimately, importance to our culture. But I’m happy to give you my take on that.

Let me just start by saying, Katherine, out of the gate, would you agree with me on that, or would you like to take the pro side that Oppenheimer was greater?

No, I agree with you. I probably have different reasons than you as to why I didn’t think it worked. I should preface it by saying that I had hyped this movie so much that my expectations might have been ridiculously high. When I finally saw it, I was like, “Meh.”

But I do think it’s interesting that Robert Downey Jr. finally won the Academy Award for Oppenheimer. He deserved it for Tropic Thunder. He was fantastic in that movie, and if not for Heath Ledger, he would have won it for Tropic Thunder. I feel like that would have been the role he should have won it for, but he was fantastic in Oppenheimer as well.

So, to your point, there were many good performances. My criticism is probably different from yours, but it has a lot more to do with the actual storytelling and filmmaking than with the content of the work.

Okay, got it. So, for people who haven’t seen it, we’re going to spoil it. Robert Downey Jr. plays a real-life guy named Lewis Strauss, who was a pretty high-ranking, important person in the government in the 1950s and 1960s. He ended up overseeing Oppenheimer, having Oppenheimer’s security clearance stripped, and basically being booted out of the military-industrial complex after Oppenheimer had basically led the creation of the atomic bomb. The movie goes through that whole story.

It’s a fantastic performance. All the performances in the movie were fantastic. Cillian Murphy was outstanding as Oppenheimer. Benny Safdie, one of the Safdie brothers, played Edward Teller, and all of those performances just stole the movie with their portrayals. Teller was a real person and the creator of the later hydrogen bomb.

Anyway, fantastic performances and fantastic direction. I will argue, though, that my critique of the movie involves the following claim: Lewis Strauss is actually the hero of the movie.

Yes, maybe go into that history so people understand, because that is definitely not the takeaway from the film.

Yes, that is not what the film intended. I think the film intended to contrast a great man, Oppenheimer, with an aspirant to greatness who fell badly short in the Lewis Strauss character, who brought the great man low in a fundamentally unfair way. The movie sets up both Oppenheimer and, specifically, Albert Einstein as the key moral authorities of the era with respect to the use of nuclear weapons.

Both of those claims are deeply incorrect on substance. That’s my critique of the movie. My critique is not about its execution or any of the performances. My critique is that the morality of the movie is very badly upside down—upside down in a way that flatters our current politics, but very badly upside down in terms of what actually happened at the time.

The movie basically tells the story of Robert Oppenheimer, the person who ran the Manhattan Project and created the atomic bomb, who historically gets credit for helping to end World War II. The only 2 uses of the atomic bomb in wartime to date were the 2 times the United States dropped a bomb on Japan in 1945. There’s still debate about this to this day, but generally accepted history, I think, is that this ended the Pacific theater conflict sooner than it otherwise would have and prevented the need for a land invasion of Japan. Conceivably, it saved a million lives or something like that.

Now, by the way, this meant dropping atomic bombs on 2 civilian cities. The morality of the time was quite a bit different from ours today. But that’s the history of it.

The Manhattan Project was this assembly of the finest minds in America, many of whom, by the way, were refugees—not Oppenheimer. His character, in reality and in the movie, was German Jewish, but his family had arrived much earlier. A lot of the other key members of the Manhattan Project were Hungarian Jewish refugees who had come to the United States from the Nazi rampage through Europe and basically helped arm the United States. Edward Teller was an example of that.

So, the movie tells this amazing story of the Manhattan Project. But specifically, the arc of Oppenheimer—I guess the conventional—let me back up for a second. I think the first half of the movie is quite historically grounded, and I agreed with that interpretation of history.

And so it is the following. The first half—and I think the movie is maybe a little bit schizophrenic, and I should give it a little bit more credit than I was—but the first half of the movie is actually one of the only recreations on film of how thoroughly saturated American elite culture and society, and the American research establishment of leading experts in the 1920s and ’30s, was with communism.

Specifically, it recreates this sort of thing. There’s actually a joke in the movie—a line that’s one of these jokes that’s not really a joke. A lot of the movie takes place at UC Berkeley, and there’s a joke in the movie: “So-and-so on the Berkeley faculty is a communist.” Somebody else says, “Yes, half the Berkeley faculty are communists.” Everybody knows that. It’s completely taken for granted.

Of course, the politics of that aside, the issue becomes: now they’re working on a classified weapons program. The United States is variously at odds not just with Germany but also with Soviet Russia, and there’s this very big concern that the effort is inventing this superweapon. There was a very high degree of concern that the secrets of the atomic bomb were going to walk out the door from Los Alamos and end up in the hands of bad people.

One fear, obviously, was that they would end up in Hitler’s hands. But another fear was that they would end up in Stalin’s hands. And, by the way, spoiler alert: that’s exactly what happened. [Laughter]

In fact, the nuclear secrets walked right out the door. The concepts of the atomic bomb, and then the specific wiring instructions for the atomic bomb, actually made their way out the back door of Los Alamos into Soviet hands, and Stalin got the bomb very quickly after that. It was directly derived from the work that happened on the Manhattan Project.

It turned out that the Manhattan Project really was riddled with communist spies. These famous names in history, like the Rosenbergs and David Greenglass—you can go through and read about it if you want—but the fears of all the people who were worried about this were actually correct. That is what happened.

By the way, there’s a character in the movie, Boris Pash, who was a security officer at the Manhattan Project, both in real life and in the movie. In the movie, he’s portrayed as this white guy with essentially a stick up his butt, constantly cross-examining and not trusting the scientists, thinking that Oppenheimer is probably a spy, and so on. He’s portrayed as this over-the-top character.

But if you read his Wikipedia entry and look at what his life story had been up until that point, he’s another one of these guys with an incredibly impressive backstory of service to the country and fighting communists. Whether he was right about Oppenheimer, we can talk about. But he was right that Los Alamos was riddled with communist spies, and that this was going to lead to catastrophe, with Stalin getting the bomb.

The Lewis Strauss character was also very worried about that. Again, outside of whether he was right about Oppenheimer per se, he was right about the broader issue. That is what actually happened. All of the security concerns that set up what is portrayed as the persecution of Robert Oppenheimer were completely legitimate security concerns. In fact, the worst-case scenario actually did happen: all of the secrets walked right out the door and went straight to Stalin.

The first Soviet atomic bomb, as we now know, was wire-for-wire compatible with the U.S. Nagasaki bomb. They got literally the wiring schematics. For people who have read about nuclear weapons, it’s actually very hard to detonate a nuke. They have to be wired in a very specific way; they’re very difficult to set off. The Soviet spies in the Manhattan Project literally transferred that information to Russia, putting the bomb in their hands.

Within that, there’s this arc of Oppenheimer: was he or was he not? There’s one arc about whether he was himself a Soviet asset. It’s generally viewed historically that he wasn’t literally a Soviet asset, although I think there are still questions around that, in fairness, and we can talk about that. But then there’s this broader question: even if he wasn’t, was he trustworthy, and could he be relied upon?

There was a specific thing that actually happened, which the movie presents a version of that I think is not correct, based on my understanding of history. Oppenheimer basically worked his butt off to deliver the atomic bomb for the purpose of beating Germany and Japan. But immediately after that happened, the U.S. weapons program shifted into making the hydrogen bomb, which was going to be the big one ultimately used in the Cold War as a deterrent against the Soviet Union. It was an effort led by Edward Teller.

The accusation was always that Oppenheimer deliberately slow-rolled the development of the hydrogen bomb. His version of the story is: it’s one thing to have a new thing to take out a city and end a war; it’s another thing to have a new thing to take out the planet. Should we really be doing this?

But there’s another version of the story: you were completely in favor of beating Germany and Japan, but the minute it came to beating the Soviet Union, you got cold feet. [Snorts] Isn’t that interesting? That’s the thing you didn’t want to have happen.

Then there’s the reality that Oppenheimer’s background and political activities, and all of the people around him—including his wife, his girlfriend, and his brother—were, I believe, actual communists, actual capital-C Communists. Oppenheimer himself was embroiled in communism and communist-adjacent organizations his entire life.

He’s not known to have ever been a member of the Communist Party, although there’s ambiguity there, because the Soviets had a practice of having their best-placed assets never become members of the Communist Party. They were trying to protect them against exactly the kind of persecution that Oppenheimer had leveled against him.

In the movie, ultimately, his security clearance gets stripped and he resigns in disgrace. The movie paints this as a great act of moral heroism on his part: he wanted credit for the little bomb, but he didn’t want the big bomb to happen and certainly didn’t want to have anything to do with it.

He’s dead, they’re all dead. I don’t know that we’ll ever know what lay in their hearts, but there are very interesting questions around this.

Then there’s my most stinging indictment of the movie: Einstein was the exact opposite of a moral exemplar. Einstein was a Stalinist. He was a full-on Stalinist—not merely pro-communist, but actually pro-Stalinist. Einstein thought that American democracy wasn’t going to cut it and that we clearly needed to get to a communist dictatorship.

There’s a book that goes through this called When Reason Goes on Holiday, which came out a few years ago and goes through all of Einstein’s writings and speeches and reconstructs this history. The movie presents Oppenheimer and Einstein as the adults in the room, especially Einstein as a moral adult, to a degree that I think is bizarre at this point.

The reason it’s bizarre is that the whole thing is set up as: “Oh, my God, what if the atomic bomb destroys the world?” There’s this whole thing, with all the politics involved in that, the Soviet Union, and so forth. But we’re sitting here 80 years later, and the thing we know today—and I don’t know that any of us would choose to have the events play out this way, and maybe the world would be better without the bomb or whatever—is that World War III didn’t happen.

Basically, everybody in the military and political establishment in 1945 took it for granted that there was going to be a World War III with the Soviet Union at some point. It was going to be a land war in Europe and around the world, it was probably going to kill on the order of 200 million people, and it was going to be absolutely devastating.

In any other era of geopolitics, that almost certainly would have happened, given how tense everything got, especially in the ’60s and ’70s.

And literally, it didn’t happen. World War III is the dog that didn’t bite, and the reason World War III didn’t happen is, I think, fairly obvious: mutually assured destruction. The fact that both sides had nukes basically meant that neither side could go to war with the other, and that resulted in a Cold War but not a hot war.

And so I think if you stack up Oppenheimer and Teller and these guys, you say, “By building bombs that could destroy the world, they prevented at least 1 major world war, if not many.” And, by the way, the existence of nukes may prevent another world war for 500 years. We don’t know yet, but mutually assured destruction is still in effect. They may be causing us not to have a hot war with China—the fact that both the U.S. and China have nukes.

And, by the way, that’s all debatable, and you can argue that, but that’s the argument that ought to happen, especially with what we know today. I just thought the movie really cheated on the morality of it. It kind of presented this as: the nuke was bad, these people were bad, and the whole thing was bad, and that both Einstein and Oppenheimer were moral heroes, to some extent, trying to line up against this. I thought that really cheated the audience.

I think you and I are much closer on our critique of it. My sense is very similar to yours: It started out very strong. The betrayal in Berkeley was very interesting; you saw this complex figure and complex character. Then there’s this whole middle section on the Manhattan Project that culminates in incredible visuals and sound. The movie excels in both score and sound; if you saw it in the theater, you were like, “The sound editing is the thing that won the Oscar,” right? I think they won 10 Oscars—I mean, they won everything—but sound editing and score were just incredible moviemaking.

And then, to use your word, schizophrenic, the third part—which is all about Robert Downey Jr.’s character being a villain—sort of ends with this brilliant scene that I think everyone remembers. They show him giving a speech to all the people at Los Alamos, and then they show him envisioning bodies in Hiroshima. You see the juxtaposition; you see him losing his conviction that he did the right thing.

I feel like if they had just stopped the movie there, it would have been a commentary on, “Okay, we don’t really understand his legacy.” Instead, they had to tie it up. For writers and artists, if you don’t know how to end something, you tie things up with neat bows that have nothing to do with what happened before. It felt like the third section, on the security clearance and him being a hero, was almost the filmmakers’ apology.

“Actually, no, no. I’m going to side with him. I’m actually going to paint this for everyone and side with the idea that he was actually a good man, and there’s no moral ambiguity about this figure: He was actually a good man. The real villains are the national-security hawks, the people in Washington, and the bureaucrats.” It was this portrayal of the evil bureaucracy coming for the beautiful scientist.

And it sort of mimicked, I think, a conversation that was happening in 2023 when it came out, which is all of these great AI scientists basically saying, “AI is actually going to kill us all, and I know this because I’m an expert.” It was the same sort of thing. I felt like that was also the language of the end of the film: “No, no, it’s normal for people who build incredible things to actually regret their innovation.” It just felt way too buttoned-up for a film that has a lot more complexity. If they had just ended it at hour 2, it would have been a masterpiece.

Yeah, it felt like it really wanted to conform to present-day morality very badly.

Yeah, exactly. And so that’s my long, extended argument for why Lewis Strauss was actually the hero of the movie: because he was correct. Oppenheimer could not be trusted; Oppenheimer needed to be rejected from the project. Also, Lewis Strauss is shown in the movie as being very jealous of Einstein, but if you squint, you could say he also had Einstein’s number. He knew Einstein was not to be trusted, which was 100% true.

And then, Katherine, to your point, if you read the history of those people at that time—specifically people like Oppenheimer—you realize that the people who invent the technology have no special moral claim. They have no special predictive power for the consequences of the technology, and they have no basis for a superior moral claim on the implications of the technology.

And I will say this: The movie, being made by geniuses, did have a scene that actually hit that. It was based on a real-life thing that happened: Oppenheimer, after the war, visited Harry Truman at the White House.

In the real-world histories, Oppenheimer basically went to Truman and essentially confessed enormous guilt for having built the atomic bomb and for the U.S. having dropped it on Japan. In real life, Truman—I forget the exact quote, but it’s in the Truman biographies—basically got him out of his office as fast as possible and told his chief of staff, “Never let that weepy son of a [__] in here again.”

The line in the movie is based on something Truman apparently actually said: “Robert, you didn’t make the decision to drop the bomb. It’s not on you. I made the decision.” That’s an incredibly powerful thing: The duly elected commander in chief of the country made the decision, as he should have. The scientist does not have the moral authority to decide how the technology is used. It’s our system of government that gives the commander in chief that authority, along with our elected representatives.

To the movie’s enormous credit, it did include that. It did show that. And again, in my fantasy cut of the movie, that’s the end of the movie. So they kind of nodded at it, but, as I said, they let him off the hook at the end.

Shall we close with Fight Club?

Fight Club—well, we could spend an entire episode on Fight Club, and we probably should at some point. I would just say about Fight Club: It’s amazing. I think it’s 100% true art with a capital A. It’s amazing, and it’s definitely going to stand the test of time—it already has.

It’s one of those movies that has the characteristic we talked about last time, where if you watched it the week it came out versus a year later, 5 years later, 10 years later, 20 years later, or 30 years later, it has new meanings as our society evolves. You can use it as a prism on our society at any point in time.

My social-political analysis of it would be that it was clearly intended as a left-wing movie at the time. The novel that it’s based on—the famous novel—was the left-wing anti-capitalism of that era: left-wing anarchism, a little bit like the ’90s version of Luigi Mangione. Capitalism was this horrible right-wing machine that was crushing everybody’s spirits.

In the movie, Edward Norton plays an office drone who has abdicated his life, has no future, hates himself, and ends up doing all the things that play out in the movie. The movie culminates in the destruction of capitalism. He takes down the buildings containing, I think, all the bank records or credit-card records, to wipe the slate clean and start the economy and society over again.

At the time, it was just like, “Wow, that’s a really left-wing message.” Of course, it’s David Fincher, Edward Norton, and Brad Pitt, and it’s one of the best, most entertaining, most captivating movies ever made. It’s phenomenal. But it’s fundamentally a left-wing movie.

You watch it today and you’re just like, “Wow, it’s ultra-right-wing—ultra, ultra, ultra-right-wing.” To start with, it’s a white guy, right? You view it today and you’re like, “Wow, it’s the stereotype of a right-wing, privileged white male incel,” basically—someone with every advantage in the world who, nevertheless, has built up this persecution complex.

And, by the way, the argument the movie makes about capitalism is that it’s the great atomization of society. Nobody has any type of anything, and people are just interchangeable cogs in the great machine of modernity. They’re put on an assembly line through complete meaninglessness until they die, and every concept of family and community is completely ruptured. Capitalism is the machine that does that; neoliberal capitalism is the machine that does that.

I probably shouldn’t name names, but I did talk to somebody who was involved in the making of the movie. I don’t want to represent his views specifically by name, but I laid out my theory that it was a left-wing movie at the time and is now a right-wing movie. This person basically said, “Oh, no. It’s very clear in the movie that, at the end, he greatly regrets what he’s doing. He still has regret; it’s a very sad, tragic ending.”

And I was like, “Well, if you just used AI to go in there and tweak the final scene of the Edward Norton character standing there watching the buildings come down—if you just tweaked the final scene so that he had a slight little smile on his face—all of a sudden, the entire movie becomes ultra-right-wing from start to finish.”

I’ll pause there. Whichever way you interpret it, I think that movie is amazing. I think people will be watching and discussing it 100 years from now.

To bring it back to the original thesis of this podcast—monitoring what’s going on on the internet—what went viral this week related to Fight Club was the PSAs that Brad Pitt and Edward Norton put out before the movie came out in theaters.

If you haven’t seen them, this is one thing I won’t spoil. It was going viral: Why don’t we make PSAs about staying silent in the theater like this anymore? You have to watch it. It’s like 90 seconds, and it confirms that Brad Pitt is the GOAT. He is hilarious, and he puts serious thought into everything he does, including the “Please stay quiet in the theater” PSAs that went out before the movie came out in theaters 25 years ago.

So watch it. It’s going viral again, and we should definitely make actors do those PSAs for theaters. So, Katherine, that movie came out in 1999?

1999.

Yeah, 1999, which is kind of universally—I remember it as a year of absolutely amazing movies.

Yes, maybe the best single year for movies in the last 40 years.

Yes, or longer. So, the question: Could that movie have gotten made after the ’90s? I feel like it’s the consummate ’90s film.

Right. Just as you said, the critique on consumerism—the early critique of consumerism affecting masculine traits. The whole reaction is, “We’re going to have a fight club to reclaim our masculinity, our life, and our identity.” That was the same conversation happening right now, but it was also a ’90s conversation.

The same thing was true of American Beauty, which came out in 1999. It was a similar sort of nihilism, but also this David Foster Wallace-esque idea that consumerism is destroying us, that we’re moving to the suburbs and have to reclaim something. The portrayal was always of the everyman feeling constrained: Consumerism and the suburbanization of America were destroying masculine freedom.

That was a very ’90s-coded, end-of-the-’90s film-era idea. It could probably be made now, but it would probably be made with a totally different ethos and maybe a totally different take on that thesis. The thesis is slightly different now than it was in the ’90s. Then, it was that Walmart and capitalism were destroying you. Now, it’s that tech is destroying you.

Marc, thanks so much for coming on and talking about movies again.

Thank you so much, Erik.