Civil War
I don’t yet know what I think about Civil War, Alex Garland’s latest. I’ve not read a word from others, though I have a vague sense that there are already battle lines drawn, strong readings offered, etc. I have nothing to say about that.
I do know that Garland is smart and makes smart films. I’m hesitant to trust either my or others’ knee-jerk reaction to a film that’s clearly got things on its mind, a film that is surely not what many of us supposed it would be based on trailers and ads.
I also care not one whit what Garland himself thinks about the film. He may have thought he was making a movie about X, intending to say Y, when in fact he made a movie about A, which happens to say B and C.
Like I said, I don’t have a strong take yet. I do have one possible interpretation, which may turn out to be a strong misreading. Here goes.
Civil War is not about American politics, American polarization, impending American secession, or even Trump. It’s not a post–January 6 fever dream/allegory/parable. It’s not a liberal fable or a conservative one.
Instead, Civil War is a film about the press—about the soul of the press, or rather, about what happens when the press loses its soul. In that sense it is about Trump, but not Trump per se. It’s about what happens to the press (what happened to the press) under someone like Trump; what the reaction to Trump does (did) to journalism; how the heart of a free polity turns to rot when it begins to mirror the heartless nihilism it purports to “cover.” Words become images; images become form without content; violence becomes a “story”; an assassination becomes a “scoop.”
It doesn’t matter what Nick Offerman’s president says seconds before he’s executed. It matters that he say something and that someone was there—first—to get “the quote.” The newsroom lifers and war-time photographers documenting propaganda, unable to listen to one more canned speech spouting lies on the radio, themselves become agents of propaganda. They become what they oppose, a photo negative of what they’re so desperate to capture for their audience. (What audience? Who’s watching? There’s no evidence anybody is reading, listening, or watching anymore. Outside of the soldiers and the press, everybody else appears to be pretending the war isn’t happening at all.)
The urban warfare Garland so expertly displays in the film—better than almost anything I’ve ever seen attempting to embed the viewer on the streets and in the cramped rooms of military units breaching fortified gates and buildings, made all the more surreal by its being set in downtown Washington, D.C.—is therefore not about itself, not about the images it seems to be showing, but is instead a Trojan horse for us to observe the “PRESS” who are along for the ride. And what happens between the three leads in the closing moments tells us all we need to know. One gets his quote. One gets her shot. And one loses her shot, as she does her life, having slowly awakened across the arc of the film to the intolerable inhumanity required of (or generated by) her profession. Another propagandist, though, rises to take her place. There’s always someone else waiting in the wings, ready to snap the picture that will make her name.
There, in the Oval Office, staring through a camera lens, a star is born.
