The Hunt for Red October

Unclear and Present Danger

Jamelle Bouie

Tv & Film, Society & Culture, History

4.7 • 660 Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2021

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is the first episode of Unclear and Present Danger, a new podcast by Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times and John Ganz, a freelance journalist writing a book on American politics in the 1990s. It is a podcast about the political thrillers of that decade, and what they said — or did not say — about the United States in the last years and immediate aftermath of the Cold War. We’re going to cover a wide range of movies, but we thought we would begin with a paradigmatic example of the genre, John McTiernan’s The Hunt for Red October, based on the best-selling Tom Clancy novel.

A quick correction: In the episode, Jamelle said that McTiernan went to jail for tax evasion. This was incorrect. He actually went to prison for lying to the FBI.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, this is unclear and present danger.
0:24.8	My name is Jemel Bowie.
0:26.4	My name is John Gans.
0:28.3	And this is a podcast about the Cold War, America Post Cold War, and about the movies
0:34.8	that came out of that moment.
0:37.4	A moment of triumph, anxiety, and eventually fear what would just happen. and about the movies that came out of that moment.
0:42.7	A moment of triumph, anxiety, and eventually fear of what would just happen next in the world.
0:50.9	Yeah, I guess we're going to talk about a bunch of the political thrillers that were released in the 90s and what they say about America at that time and hopefully what they can tell us about
0:57.4	America today.
0:58.7	If you are of a certain age, you will remember the deluge of movies from the late 80s, the early 90s,
1:06.0	up to pretty much the 9-11 era just before it that were all about America's place in the world
1:12.8	in one way, shape, or form or another. I think the movies that stand out most of people,
1:18.4	our movie is like Air Force One or in the line of fire. But this is more or less an entire
1:24.9	genre of film. And so we thought, um, as two people
1:29.8	who write about politics, who care about the politics of this era, John, you're writing a book
1:34.4	about, uh, American politics in the 1990s. That's right.
1:39.6	We thought it'd be interesting to cover this from the perspective of the movies.
1:45.5	And so we have a whole list of stuff we're going to cover.
1:48.0	But today, we're going to start with what I think is one of the best of these films.
1:54.0	And I think in a lot of ways, an emblematic one, one that very much defines the genre.
2:00.6	Other filmmakers take elements from it, certainly.
2:04.4	And one that is, I think, thought of with quite a bit of fondness from audiences older and younger.
	...

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