Schlock and Awe

The boys are joined by writer Séamus Malekafzali, who's too young to remember 9/11 but old enough to stand face-to-face with director Peter Berg and challenge him to a blinking contest. Séamus, Evan and Jack take on Lone Survivor, Berg's 2013 sufferpalooza, which heavily fictionalizes a real-life and extremely unsuccessful Navy SEAL counterterrorism raid in Afghanistan in 2005. The boys examine Berg's Americana fetish, how the Friday Night Lights creator valorizes combat as a form of extreme sports, and the way Lone Survivor — like many a GWOT film — lies about what happened to create false stakes for its characters.

The boys swoop in on Zero Dark Thirty like modified Black Hawk helicopters with guest Spencer Ackerman, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. Kathryn Bigelow's 2013 torture fest earned major critical plaudits for its unflinching view of the GWOT's dark side, but was it all in service of an enormous lie — that torture got Osama Bin Laden? 

We tackle the biggest totem in the War on Terror's cinematic canon — American Sniper. Clint Eastwood's surprise blockbuster brought out the masses for a post-9/11 war movie by fictionalizing the already mythological autobiography of Chris Kyle, one of the deadliest snipers in history. We talk American Sniper's dehumanization of Iraqis, its deliberate mischaracterizations of the Iraq War, its superficial treatment of PTSD, and whether the movie counts as a Western.