Economist Writing Every Day

I saw A24’s newest and most expensive film to date, Civil War. <<Spoilers incoming>>

A brief summary: the audience is dropped into the middle of a new US civil war as being documented by a group of journalists, our viewpoint centered around a veteran war photographer played by Kirsten Dunst and her (nearly) uninterrupted, first-ballot hall of fame 108 minute RBF. (Seriously, her face is perfection in this movie, I’ve never appreciated her more, absolutely no notes.) A traveling party is formed, a road trip through a war taken on, each stop bringing the gang into contact with increasingly grim and grotesteque humanity.

The subject matter and timing of the film naturally lend themselves to interpretation, subtextual analysis, and Straussian readings. Most films tend to be pretty ham-fisted in their less than subtle themes. With regard to Civil War, there are plenty of thoughts about the underlying meanings and metaphors. Here’s mine: there is no subtext, metaphor, or Straussian messages to be unearthed. The director has pushed this concept and it’s being received as milquetoast marketing. I disagree. There are no secret themes and I think that is the absolutely radical agenda that defines and motivates the artistic endeavor. To portray a war without imbuing it with narrative, only tragic, significance. Hear me out.

There’s a million war movies, most of which have arcs and metaphors strewn throughout. The problem with making a moving about a hypothetical civil war in the modern United States is that the audience will spend so much time looking for the heroes, villains, and associated opportunities to feel morally superior that it seems almost impossible to deliver an effective portrayal of what it might actually feel like to wake up to a US civil war, with a genuinely splintered federalist system of governments and military forces. How do you make a movie that doesn’t celebrate a Civil War as an opportunity for anyone, that doesn’t unintentionally, if inevitably, enoble the prospect of such an outcome? How do you tell a story where nothing good happens because you earnestly believe such a war would be empty and horrible, with nothing advanced or achieved save the destruction of institutions and the killing of millions? Well, it seems that Alex Garland thought the best strategy was to strip a war story down to its barest bones and leave you absolutely zero metaphorical scaffolding to graft your identities or theories on to.

I think it worked. A couple points.

There are no heroes in the film. The four journalists in questions are respectively hollowed out, adrenaline addicted, naive, or looking for one last ride. There is zero allusion to nobility or moral obligation. We never learn the name of a single soldier, whether they are accomplishing a mission, pointlessly dying, or perpetrating atrocities. There’s no arch-antagonist. There are bad people, to be sure, and the third-term President that the film opens with has green lit air strikes on American citizens while filling the airwaves with empty propaganda, but he turns out to be nothing more than a standard-issue cowardly politician wholly incapable of anything save false bravado and begging for his life.

There are no political identities in the film. No left or right wing schism. It might seem that the “Western Forces” alliance of California and Texas is either a transparent political cop-out (putting the largest “red” and “blue” states together) or a subtextual allusion to a schism over immigrants (those states having the largest Latin immigrant populations), but I think there is a far simpler explanation: those are the only two states whose coalition could actually oppose a President trying to usurp the executive branch and fully subvert the constitution. Beyond their populations and economies, the raw number of military bases in the two states (especially air bases), are sufficient that a couple 2 star generals could coalesce a rival military body. There’s also a reference to Florida being an i6 ndependent secessionary state. [EDIT 4/23/24] Guess which states have the most military personnel and air force bases? California (184k+ 8 AFB) and Texas (164k + 9 AFB). Florida has the 5th most active duty personnel, but also has 6 AFB. Everyone else is a either a battle ground or a (literal) flyover state.

The film captures, I think brilliantly, the idle chaos of such a scenario. A world simultaneously shutting down and carrying on with life. Of people mostly trying to survive and wait it out. Mostly. There are some who are not sitting it out, putting themselves in contexts where they can play out their dreams to be heroes or monsters, never accomplishing anything but spreading a little extra death around. I kept thinking about the pandemic on the drive home from the theater. Millions of people died but most of our memories at the peak of the lockdown are of feeling trapped and bored. A civil war in a country this big might not feel all that different for months or even years at a time for most of the population.

The thing about the “banality of evil” is that it’s both extremely real and nearly impossible to portray in a film without comedic deadpan or ghoulish overkill. Civil War portrays a United States ripped apart at it’s constitutional seams by midwit politicians incapable of forward inducting from usurping power and committing atrocities to eventually being executed by a nameless soldier who will report their success to a command chain with no understanding or possibly even interest in putting it all back to together. That’s how the story of the United States as we know it could end. Without heroes or villains, moral or philosophic judgements, without even primary or secondary causes. The thing about a country falling apart, there isn’t always a why, just a when and how.

The lesson I took away from Civil War is that a world doesn’t have to end for a reason. It can just end. And when it does, mostly what we’ll do is watch and wait for it to start up again.