Episode
Three Days of the Condor (1975) w/ Matt Duss | Ep. 58
- Podcast
- Bang-Bang Podcast
- Published
- Feb 2, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3688
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Summary
Van and Lyle are joined by returning guest Matt Duss—former foreign policy advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders and current executive vice president at the Center for International Policy—to revisit Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor , a paranoid thriller that captures a vanishing moment when American institutions still feared exposure. Robert Redford’s Joe Turner is no action hero but a reader, an analyst, a man whose job is to interpret texts rather than enforce power. When his CIA front office is wiped out in broad daylight, the shock is not just the violence, but how casually it is absorbed by “the community,” a euphemism so bland it becomes obscene. This is a film less about rogue evil than about bureaucratic normalcy, where murder is a logistical inconvenience and accountability a procedural error. What gives Condor its present-day melancholy is its faith that truth, once surfaced, still matters. The film’s final wager rests on the idea that the press, embodied by The New York Times , might still function as a check on clandestine empire. “They’ll print it,” Turner insists. The ending leaves that faith unresolved, but history has not been kind to it. We contrast the film’s hopeful premise with the Times’ recent “Overmatched” series on U.S. military power and China, which dresses escalation in the language of sober realism. Rather than interrogating militarism, the series laments America’s supposed weakness while advocating more spending, more production, and deeper entrenchment in a defense-industrial oligopoly. Condor imagined exposure as a threat. Today, exposure is often indistinguishable from advocacy. The conversation widens to the economic and ideological machinery behind permanent war: Consolidation among defense contractors, the fetishization of exqui…