to just situate the reactionary 80s action movie, the muslin guy with a gun movie a little bit more.

I think it is absolutely remarkable that, you know, it's the 1980s.

This movie came out in 1986.

It came out during the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

It came out in a context where, yeah, Jimmy Carter's right-wing turn has happened.

Reagan's come to power.

We've broken the back of the air traffic controllers. You know, we're outsourcing the manufacturing jobs. We're financializing the

whole goddamn economy. All these social programs and stuff, we're cutting it. But then, as all that's

going on, the culture is just going to spend like 10 to 15 years being an assembly line for these movies that treat crime and social disorder, not as symptoms of all that other stuff I just mentioned, but as like the cause of it in some way.

As the disease.

Yeah, as the disease.

That's what that's what Cobra says in this movie.

Like, you're the disease and I'm the cure.

Crime in all of these movies is just this like totally, like the criminals don't even have,

there's no motivation. It's just a free-floating sadism. And that's happened in this movie

right off the top where in what I think is one of most accidentally funny openings to a movie ever,

a clearly villainous character

drives into a parking lot. And the thing the movie does to indicate to you that, you know,

folks, this isn't the hero of the movie. You're going to meet him later. We're dealing with a

certified bad ombre here, okay? And the way you know that is you see him park badly, like he's

at a bad angle in a handicapped spot.

That's the other thing about this movie is it loves rules.

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