The setting in Alex Garland’s new film about a group of war journalists traveling across a dystopian America — sundered, at war with itself — is so ludicrous it could as well been made into a farce: Portland Maoists running wild; a “Western Alliance” between liberal California and conservative Texas; American ultranationalists in hot red sunglasses and jungle-camo combat uniforms fresh out of the washing machines, whose cartoonish callousness and aggression defy analysis; a President whose puerility makes some want to spit in his face before we even knew anything he’s done and some others in awe of how he came to have that title to begin with, and whose inexplicably crooked actions (this James-Bond-villain had ordered airstrikes on civilians, disbanded the FBI, and continued his reign into a third term) erases even more of what little opacity there is of how infantile an understanding this movie has on political morality. Absurdisms here have no more basis in reality than in Monty Python (which isn’t nothing), and yet they evoke no more comedy than a Tarkovsky film.
The mystery is, however, that Garland is not an insensitive director. His Ex Machina takes an old idea — the sexualized, objectified Rotwangian technology — and uses it to cast a spell on the audience, invites and gaslights us into our own insecurities and emptiness, and finally bites back at our private areas with a nihilism that dwarfs most film noirs. His bloodthirst to kill our naivety was even heightened in Annihilation, which mounts a smarting challenge against the very concept of our biological identity and, most unforgivably, our self-justification for our own existence; its undertones of dread almost equals in measure to one of doomsday, yet it’s purely personal.
While Men wasn’t received as nearly as well, and Dredd was little more than a down-and-dirty power fantasy, there is little debate to be had about the place that Garland occupies within the modern film industry. No, it couldn’t have been strict realism that drove Garland in the making of Civil War, and it certainly isn’t the ordinary kind of poor commentary like the way Joker was. Arbitrary accusations like “shallowness” or “apolitical” are far from enough to substantiate critiques against a film like this.
The hesitation to “take sides” doesn’t excuse the underdevelopment of the political conceit. Alan Moore wrote Watchmen without “taking a side.” Yet the world he created, ridden with fears of war and irreversible destruction and death, was rich in political context, philosophical intricacies, and psychological nuances. Metropolis, an extraordinary folly of a social fable, had the audacity to polemicize against both sides of the conflict: the bureaucratic heartlessness of capital, as well as the herd psychology of labor. Fritz Lang’s centrism, notwithstanding all the romantic simplicities in his dramatic presentation, is one that takes a firm stance and doesn’t succumb easily to fears of controversy. Moral complexity is also the core of such popular cultural phenomena like Star Trek, the very premise of which is to resolve challenges, arising from clashes of equally valid philosophies, to one’s existing worldview. But in the social commentaries of today is the increasing aversion to lucidity of ideas, and an embrace of abstraction and simplification, partly to tranquilize the politically-militant from filibustering if certain elements don’t conform to their outlooks (e.g. Joker, Barbie); and it seems that Civil War is but the latest victim of this long-standing trend.
As the saying goes, “War is nothing but a continuation of politics by other means”.¹ War is no neutral matter. In fact, nothing ever really is. Some accuse Civil War of manufactured neutrality (no faster way to do it than a California-Texas alliance), and still some others celebrate Garland for it. However, it’s not exactly neutrality that this film embraces or tries to valorize. From the moment when Kirsten Dunst’s character Lee Smith expresses doubts about whether her professional journalistic standards really do more good than harm, or perhaps prevents more harm than good, we see Garland paying his respects to the reporters on the ground for their courage, while in the meantime interrogating their “impartiality”.
And when Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) witnesses her mentor Lee putting her professionalism behind as she saves her from the incoming bullets, and getting killed in the process, her immediate reactions were to merely capture that moment on camera before becoming determined to exact revenge on the responsible party (in her mind, the President) by shooting at their being helplessly murdered. At the same time when Lee has learned the limits of technology to become more than the camera she uses, Jessie learns the opposite lesson — the technology had become a shield for her to protect her from herself. Similar to the soldiers depicted, animalistic belligerence has taken over, hiding behind an empty banner of duty or objective integrity. A distance has been created in the photography, not only between the spectators and the participants in the action, but also Jessie and her true feelings.
This premise seems all too workable, except that it fails in practice. It isn’t helped by Spaeny’s tabula rasa acting, but the bigger impediment is the way the characters were designed in the first place: beyond their seeming familiarity with each other, they don’t seem to us like they have any past (or, if any, one that’s engineered). Which was particularly true for Spaeny’s character, whom some of us may have even suspected for spying or other ulterior intentions, given how abruptly she was introduced (a red flag in whodunits) and how little else we know about her aside from what we saw.
And many choices these characters make, from thoughtlessly accepting Jessie the college-graduate rookie on their trip to casually referencing the so-called “Antifa massacre” to show that both Antifa and their opponents are capable and willing to commit fratricide against the other, seem desperately scripted. Garland’s avoidance of politics doesn’t confer to these characters any more personality or psychology than in religious melodramas. So when characters were struck down, we have to actively work our empathy up rather than letting it leaks out of our emotional fibers naturally. Neutrality or not, this movie may have made “context” its mortal enemy.
We don’t need a literature lecture to understand that narratives, in the most general sense, is contingent upon contextualizations for the conflicts to be justified with motivations. It doesn’t need to be a “political” narrative to have that privilege, and the inescapably political nature of some artworks makes that almost an imperative for the artists. It isn’t by the need to be politically correct that political art relies on context, but simply logos, ethos, and pathos. Garland hoped to circumvent this issue by having the logic of his political world in Civil War a faux-Kafkaesque quality, so it doesn’t make enough sense to be viewed from a political perspective. His intentions were to reflect the current reality of polarization and extremisms, and yet his approach was to contrive and manipulate the world-building not according to reality, but to his liking in his own imagination. He was betting on the politically-evasive “normie” Americans to buy “apolitical” as a triumph of virtue and artistic design, in the same fashion that Barbie did for “feminism”.
It’s also his way of saying that there’s not necessarily a “good” or “bad” side in a war, and that there’s no reason for political differences to lead to violence. The message has its share of merits: people from wildly different political positions often share the same interests and values, face the same problems in life, and have the same concerns for the community they’re in, and yet they don’t have each other’s backs. One could easily imagine a kind of humanism as a device for a lesson on greater understanding in times of troubles and distrust. Filmmakers like Sidney Lumet and Bernardo Bertolucci have explored such a humanism with a decisively sociopolitical sensibility, but they also knew how to transcend beyond it, enlarge and entrench their point into about the human condition, that in the end the politics seem like an afterthought. They make their works larger than politics by embracing it, making the whole larger, and deeper, than the sum of its parts.
But that’s not the direction that Civil War took us: almost every single character besides the leads feels like lifted straight out of a comic-book parody; maybe only the best of us can relate to their abject cursoriness, and “smart” enough to interpret that as humanity (the same flaws robbed us of meaningful understanding when soldiers forget what and for whom they were fighting for, a valid idea with an execution that leaves little to the audience for further contemplation). The characters made references to folks who pretend as if the civil war isn’t an ongoing fact, or if it doesn’t have anything to do with them. It appears as if these characters are purer than both the politically ignorant and the politically militant by trying to be politically factual. But are they? When they shoot and witness mass graves, suicide bombers, and mayhem in the streets, is it trying to to be “factual” by staying uninformed of the subjective intentions involved in these situations?
Even if we let the message stand, Garland commits a greater sin of ahistorical ignorance, the kind that’s built into propaganda films, except worse: it’s willful. His idea that the far-right and the far-left can and should take up arms against a common foe has no roots in reality whatsoever. The biggest perceived threat for the far-right in America is the so-called “far-left”, and vice versa; there isn’t really anything that’s standing in between. Left-right alliance isn’t an idea above the clouds, but it has to have a certain justification for it to be actually conceivable, especially in the American context. What is there to stop the far-right from seeing the president as an ally with the “big-government” left, for instance? What is there to stop the contrary intuition from the left? Maybe the President was too clownish to even resemble Donald Trump? Is the movie saying that the solution to our “divided house” of polarization is to pray for a bigger and sillier threat to emerge, for both the left and the right to point to as the “evil bad guy”? For an analogy, it would be as if Americans were to make an action drama about a second Cold War, and have the Soviet Union be the ally of the U.S., and the enemies of the global south, who allies themselves with their former colonizers in Europe rather than their “communist liberators”, or have India allying with Pakistan in a campaign against Ireland and Cuba (these are all, of course, imaginable, but we all know that they would be absurd without a context to justify them). There are ways to remain “neutral” in political world-building; being nonsensical isn’t it.
When helicopters fly in like bee swarms, we can’t help but feel a little confused as to how we’re supposed to feel, because Garland’s concept of his war is so hostile to causes and motivations — the driving force behind all conflicts — that there’s no larger picture emerging, looming over the bloodshed, and creating that sense of doom that Garland was searching for. The movie’s in English, shot in familiar settings, featured familiar faces, and yet we couldn’t feel more alienated from the situations depicted, since the film puts us at a distance with its world, like seeing photographs of wars in foreign settings.
Even when animalistic instinct eventually takes over and blurs out the need for ideology and moral cause, conflicts could not have started without the initial difference in ideas and interests, or a defined moral high ground for each side. The material conditions also has to reach a point for survival to take priority over moral concerns, so we could understand that there isn’t really any other way for these lives on the front lines. But like a well-composed shot, all we have is the idea presented, but unjustified and unsubstantiated, so we couldn’t see through the photographic surfaces to their material and emotional realities underneath. Nor do we have enough clues to answer the questions for ourselves: Why wasn’t any mercy given to the war prisoners? Why are the Jesse Plemons killing innocent civilians (his point about the “kind of American” wasn’t even brought up before Lee’s rescue attempt)? Why do soldiers forget their loyalties when they fight? Is it strictly the material conditions on the front lines suppressing their moral concerns? Or is it more about a blind sense of duty, sustained for so long that morals and ideologies go over one’s head?
Garland has too little sense of history and political philosophy for him to make the kind of acute and layered criticisms the way Bertolucci or Kubrick could. His thinking that one could divorce politics from warfare, and, indeed, from morality,² is so childish that Spielberg dramas, with all of their moral simple-mindedness, appear mature and perceptive by comparison. It’s no mystery why Garland forces Texas and California together in his daft fantasy: since that, according to him, left and right are but different ways of governance inherently devoid of morality, the only real bad guys must be people whose measures are so obviously immoral and selfish that they no longer deserve any good faith.
Suppose that you’re from Mars, take any famous photos of war (the Flag on Iwo Jima for instance), and try to deduce what they mean to the Earthlings without learning of the context. Is it possible? Can a photo really exist in a vacuum, devoid of all subjectivities, and without the context it’s actually situated in? And though it may not glorifies journalistic rectitude, Garland is too unaware of the political nature of, and the larger interests involved in, the field of journalism for this to be easily hailed by some as an endorsement of “objectivity”. In reality, there is hardly any such objectivity to begin with, which is an institutional feature by design, rather than a bug. Agenda-setting, selective priming, manipulative framing, spinning and flaks, unknowing self-censorship are functions definitional to the inner workings of media institutions, and it doesn’t matter how unbiased one tries to be. Some may think that by distancing oneself from our feelings and their interests, they can present the narratives at hand as if they are mathematical truths. But it’s actually the necessity to present a narrative at all, that we, as humans, do not have the superpower to detach our feet from the ground. It’s pointless to even play the devil’s advocate on this point, as the documented evidence is simply too overwhelming a burden for the counterargument to overcome.³
At one point, Dunst teaches Spaeny that she photographs so others can ask the questions and make up their minds; at another, she confesses that she photographs in order to tell us to never do what they do in the photos to ourselves. I reckon that that’s in Garland’s voice, with this film as the warning. Yet those who will like this movie for its decontextualization will not be asking questions; their takeaway will only be little more than “war is bad”, with no sight of, or insights on, what is it that’s actually derailing this generation of Americans into greater and greater vengeful bitterness against one another, into the historical forces at play within the prelude to a potential civil war of this kind. The question for this film was supposed to be: does Garland succeed in alarming us? But instead we ask: have you ever read any piece of war journalism that doesn’t at least spell out the claims and beliefs from both sides? Or, will the Israelis and the Palestinians stop fighting if all one has to do is simply pointing to the destructions and deaths that had already embittered them for ages, rather than thinking about the underlying conflicts of interests and ideas?
★★☆☆
Originally published at https://letterboxd.com/redmoonrising/film/civil-war-2024/
[1]: Quote from On War by Carl von Clausewitz.
[2]: See article by Ingrid Jacques, from USA Today: “Why are we shutting (conversation) down? Left and right are ideological arguments about how to run a state. That’s all they are. … You try one, and if that doesn’t work out, you vote it out, and you try again a different way. That’s a process. But we’ve made it into ‘good and bad.’”
[3]: See media analyses such as Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky; on this film specifically, Thomas Flight wrote an article that dealt with Garland’s unrealistic expectations on journalistic ethics.
