Chatter: The Legacy of “The Hunt for Red October” with Katherine Voyles

The Lawfare Podcast

The Lawfare Institute

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4.7 • 6.4K Ratings

🗓️ 17 December 2024

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Shane Harris makes no secret about his love for the film version of this Cold War submarine thriller, based on the Tom Clancy novel. It’s his favorite movie. So he was delighted to welcome fellow obsessive Katherine Voyles to the podcast. A PhD in English, Voyles writes about national security in culture, as well as the culture of national security. She and Shane talked about why they love the movie, their favorite scenes and characters, and how the story influenced--maybe even created--an entire genre of fiction. They also discussed why it is, actually, a Christmas movie, and their mutual admiration for the martini.

Voyles’s writing has appeared in in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Task &

Purpose, Small Wars Journal, and War on the Rocks. She also works for the Department of Defense.

In addition to the greatest movie of all time, essays, TV shows, books, and restaurants discussed in this episode include:

Colson Whitehead’s “The Way We Live Now” https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/11/magazine/the-way-we-live-now-11-11-01-lost-and-found.html

Deutschland 83 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4445154/

Garrett Graff’s The Only Plane in the Sky https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Only-Plane-in-the-Sky/Garrett-M-Graff/9781501182211

Lauren Wilkinson’s American Spy https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/253471/american-spy-by-lauren-wilkinson/

Saltie Girl https://www.saltiegirl.com/

Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The following podcast contains advertising.
0:04.4	To access an ad-free version of the Lawfare podcast, become a material supporter of Lawfare
0:10.8	at patreon.com slash lawfare. That's patreon.com slash lawfare.
0:18.2	Also, check out Lawfare's other podcast offerings, Rational Security, Chatter, Lawfare No Bull,
0:26.9	and The Aftermath.
0:32.5	This is Chatter. I'm Shane Harris. This week, Catherine Voils on the legacy of the hunt for Red October.
0:40.3	There's part of me that wants to say that there's something hopeful about Red October, especially at the end when they're sitting together and they're both telling their fishing stories and Rameas is successfully defected.
0:55.8	It's about homecoming, right?
0:57.6	It's about coming home to the home that you want to choose on the timeline that you want to
1:03.5	choose it.
1:04.3	And there's the great last line where his Exo looks at him and goes, you arrogant ass, you've
1:10.2	killed us,
1:10.9	and then the torpedo hits them. But that's it. It's like in the movie, if there's any,
1:15.3	like, real villainy, it's somebody's own arrogance.
1:21.5	This is a globe-trotting story that is at the end of the day about people's relationships to each other
1:29.9	as mediated by really complex institutions.
1:40.2	Catherine Boyles, welcome to chatter. It is so nice to see you.
1:44.7	Well, it is nice to be seen and I can't wait for our conversation.
1:48.4	Me too. So the listeners should know that you and I have had like an ongoing like Twitter DM conversation for like some years I feel like like now, about our mutual love and interest
2:03.7	of many things, including spy and espionage fiction, of which you have written a lot about,
2:11.9	martinis. We will often send each other pictures of delightful martinis that we're drinking.
2:18.5	I'm not sure how that started exactly, but I'm very glad that it's the thing that we do.
	...

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