Returning to Alex Garland's 'Civil War' (2024) leaves a mixed impression, but its core theme is, unfortunately, more relevant than ever.
Civil War (2024). Director/Writer: Alex Garland. Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny. A24 Films. (Rotten Tomatoes) (Imdb)
Despite occasional glimmers of hope, Civil War (2024) is a terribly depressing movie; but worse still, it is largely an empty movie.
Missing are two crucial elements, which could have compensated for the film’s overall bleakness: situating the U.S. as portrayed in the film within a global system, forcing a reckoning with the possible role played by the American empire in its internal disorders; and a tangible analysis of the domestic political situation leading to the film’s central conflict. Strangely, for a movie about civil war, Civil War is remarkably uninterested in how the war came about, and it shows zero interest in what the rest of the world is doing about it.
This makes Alex Garland’s film an essentially vacuous tale, lacking any attention to political dynamics, either internal or global. And it means we cannot, for the most part, actually use the film for anything in our own hour of need. Audiences turning to Civil War for suggestions about how to think about the hyperpolarized American polity, crosscut by multiple antagonisms, will find precious little of value here.
For those content to dwell in the film’s dark aesthetics, this is hardly an issue, but for the rest of us, Civil War has limited utility as a story for our own troubled times. The shadow of its own unreality hangs over it like a stifling haze, and the politics of Civil War are make-believe politics. Clear-eyed analysis has been sacrificed for mood, atmosphere, and immediacy—perhaps in an attempt to appeal to the immediacies of our contemporary culture or out of a misguided fear of the ponderous. Whatever the reason, the absence of a convincing political narrative in a movie about one of the most extreme political situations a society can find itself in—the total breakdown of the social and state order, a condition in which “brothers turn against their own brothers”—is damning. Much of the critical ambivalence the movie has been met with surely stems from its preference for texture and affect over a structural rationality capable of accounting for itself. There is no “concrete analysis of the concrete situation,” as Lenin might say.
Strangely, it took a second viewing to even grasp that the sitting president is meant to be the villain, an authoritarian strongman, and that the invading secessionist confederacy of the so-called Western Forces, comprised of California and Texas—an extremely unlikely pairing verging on the comical—are somehow the protagonists (along with the Florida Alliance, barely alluded to). With hindsight, you can always tell which group Hollywood wants us to side with from the sophistication of their matériel; such is the industry’s militaristic chauvinism: The helicopters, fighter jets, and tanks of the Western Forces “prove” that they are better than the ragged loyalists clinging to power in Washington.
Civil War’s libertarian instincts are coupled with the intolerance of analysis typified by the drug culture: The traumatized photojournalist Lee and her sidekick, the Reuters reporter Joel (Wagner Moura), are scarred by the trauma of having to bear witness and have seen it all before; and so, Joel smokes weed to survive long nights of faraway gunfire, or drinks himself to a stupor after trading war stories with fellow reporters in a hotel that could have been in Baghdad or Kabul but is in New York. While the movie wants to say clever things about journalism, it ends up doing the profession a disservice by portraying reporters as reckless scavengers of the sensational image, in chase of the exclusive scoop, at the cost of proper analysis (which doesn’t require so much up-to-the minute news as careful, considered thought, usually in a collective).
Still, there are highlights: There is a near-unforgettable scene portraying the horror of an ultranationalistic militia in the throes of ethnic violence against those it deems intruders. The leader (“Soldier”) is played by the actor Jesse Plemons, whose ability to portray a menacing everyman brings an uncanniness. Soldier’s mere appearance on the screen signifies the suspension of normality and the arrival of a surrealist violence—or violent surrealism: Peering out from behind his strawberry-tinted spectacles, with a freshly cut mass grave behind him, he interrogates the traveling reporters at gunpoint about their ethnoracial “credentials.”
Identity politics is, in the final instance, always a politics of survival, of existence, of the right to live, and the avoidance of death.
Here then, at least, we see the logic of our times condensed and concentrated in a spasmodic moment of pure genocidal violence. Identity politics is, in the final instance, always a politics of survival, of existence, of the right to live, and the avoidance of death. Plemons’s Soldier is the ultimate identity politician, a gun-toting racist vulgarian who, one imagines, might one day wander the halls of Congress.
If Civil War is ultimately a failure, it is redeemed by such moments of clarity, almost in spite of itself. And if it never really grapples with how the descent into the madness of civil war has come about, it hints at the possibility of peace and coexistence as the band of reporters stumble upon a town seemingly untouched by the war. Are the townspeople even aware there’s a war going on?, Joel asks a saleswoman. “We just try to stay out,” she replies. “With what we see on the news, it seems like it’s for the best.” As viewers, we’re invited to scoff at them for their cowardice. But what if they are the only sane ones left in a world that has long since descended into the madness of armed strife?
George Orwell once wrote that “if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” After Civil War, we can add that if you want a picture of the future, imagine a fascist militiaman in rose-colored shades, pointing at you with a Colt AR-15, demanding to know your identity and whether you “truly” belong: “What kind of American are you?”, as Soldier asks. For this insight alone, Civil War, despite its overall unreality, approaches a kind of convergence with our own deranged times, where the specter of fascism once more overhangs.