The Politics of Alex Garland's "Civil War"

Do I have thoughts about this film? Yeah, I have a few....

Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash

[WARNING: THERE BE SPOILERS AHEAD.]

Last year the trailer for Alex Garland’s Civil War was so disturbing that it inspired the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World to write about it:

I saw Civil War last weekend, and you can hear some of my thoughts about it on this episode of Space the Nation with Ana Marie Cox (who loved the film so much she has started her own Substack about it).

My quick take is that it’s a really good film with strengths that vastly outweigh the weaknesses. But the weaknesses are real and they are mostly about the film’s politics and/or the avoidance of politics. That makes it grist for the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World.

Let’s start with the strengths, which are considerable:

• I know it’s early in the year but Kirsten Dunst deserves all the awards for taking the underwritten part of photojournalist Lee Miller and making it her own. It’s an unglamorous performance — Dunst consciously gives her character Resting Middle-Aged Face, a move many actresses in their forties would likely resist.¹ In doing so, however, she also gives her character the gravitas and scar tissue necessary to carry a film that could be viewed as “What if we made A Star Is Born but for photojournalism?”

• The most disturbing element of Civil War is the matter-of-fact way all the journalists accept a U.S. civil war as given. It is not shocking to them, it is simply a great story to cover. Dunst’s character utters a few comments about covering wars abroad to remind those at home about its horrors, but those are pretty rote. The movie is mostly about the adrenaline rush that some reporters get from covering a great story. The nationwide destruction and mayhem is observable but not commented on by the protagonists, a choice that makes the carnage that more affecting.²

• The sound effects are great and disturbing.³ The Bulwark’s Sonny Bunch is correct on this point: “The action, when it occurs, is tense and loud, as loud as I can remember a movie being in the theater since I saw Heat at the AFI Silver sometime in the late-’00s.” There are single gunshots in this film that are designed to be shocking.

• The final, fifteen-minute battle set in Washington, DC is incredibly well done, a seamless mix of fx and live action.

• Garland’s message that civil wars often devolve into local grievances is portrayed well in the film’s middle section, particularly in this scene:

That scene ties in with the political science literature on civil wars, particularly Stathis Kalyvas’ work. As he argued in his 2003 Perspectives on Politics essay:

I begin by highlighting a simple, though consequential, observation that appears to be as common as it is theoretically marginalized: civil wars are not binary conflicts but complex and ambiguous processes that foster an apparently massive, though variable, mix of identities and actions—to such a degree as to be defined by that mix. Put otherwise, the widely observed ambiguity is fundamental rather than incidental to civil wars, a matter of structure rather than noise. I trace the theoretical source of this observation to the disjunction between identities and actions at the central or elite level, on the one hand, and the local or mass level, on the other. This disjunction takes two forms: first, actions “on the ground” often seem more related to local or private issues than to the war’s driving (or “master”) cleavage; second, individual and local actors take advantage of the war to settle local or private conflicts often bearing little or no relation to the causes of the war or the goals of the belligerents.

I am pretty sure Alex Garland would endorse that view.

Now, with all that said, this film is imperfect. You’ll have to listen to Space the Nation to hear my criticisms that are intrinsic the film. But I think my other objections boil down to three issues, one of which will fade over time.

First, the marketing for this film has been an irritating exercise in misdirection. The trailers were legitimately shocking, and suggests that the film is going to be primarily about the war itself. Despite the title, however, Civil War is really about covering the war. It’s a journalism movie at heart more than it is a war movie, but it used the tropes of a war film in the marketing. It is not quite as bad a misdirection as, say, the Thelma and Louise trailer, but it’s enough of one to disorient some moviegoers (and critics).

A related way the marketing has been a bit of a misdirect is how Garland and Dunst and others have tiptoed around the question of whether the film overlays onto current political divides. Garland and Dunst and A24 have a movie to promote, so I don’t blame them for some of their mealy-mouthed interviews about the politics of the film. But they are being mealy-mouthed about a pretty important question dominating the current political discourse, and that is a bit aggravating.

Second, one of the strengths of Civil War is also a weakness in the real-world perceptions of the film: the elliptical explanation given for the causes of the civil war. This is not a film about why there’s a civil war, so I think I get Garland’s choices. But those of us watching the film will try to fill in those blanks.

Here are all the references in the film that suggest what might have happened:

1. The president has served three terms and disbanded the FBI;

2. Apparently journalists are shot on sight in Washington, DC.

3. There the “Western Forces” of Texas and California as well as “the Florida Alliance” — which does not suggest a civil war as much as a bunch of secessionist movements.

4. References are made to the “Portland Maoists and “the Antifa Massacre.”

Do these suggest any way we get from now to then? Not really, to be honest. The first two facts could have very well been a consequence of a civil war rather than a cause of it. The third just lays out the cleavages in the civil war, and let’s be honest, the map that A24 tweeted out makes no fucking sense in today’s polarized climate.

There are two ways of thinking about this. The first is that Garland is purposefully scrambling everyone’s orientation by having Texas and California team up and having the East Coast president sound an awful lot like Donald Trump. That’s fair enough! There are a lot of ways that it makes sense not to overlay today’s political cleavages onto a near-future with, you know, a violent civil war.

But the more I think about it the more “the Antifa Massacre” reference is what really annoyed me. I have seen enough sci-fi to know there are different ways one can go about world-building this scenario. Garland could have gone the “President Ellis” or “President Bartlett” route and simply created a fictional alternative timeline that occurs roughly in the present. Or he could have been a bit more meticulous in sketching out how we go from 2024 to the world he is filming.

The problem is that he did neither of those things. The antifa reference suggests that it’s pretty close to our current timeline, and something happened to get us to that A24 map. But this is unsatisfactory in the extreme — it’s the “Underpants Gnomes” theory of how to get a civil war.

Maybe, as a political scientist, this is uniquely irritating to me, but I don’t think so. As the AP’s Jack Coyle noted, the film is “loaded with the anxieties of societal breakdown and concern for the endgame to our current political extremism. But it also very consciously stepped away from the bitter partisanship of today. Civil War sparked a lot of discussion by pairing California and Texas together in battle, but that’s far from the only gesture Garland made to avoid channeling the current, highly charged fissures of American society.”

It is perfectly fine to make a film with a message that says, “civil war is bad.” To the extent that Garland portrays a modern civil war he gets a lot right.⁴ But the problem is that if one is trying to provoke a conversation of how to avoid such an outcome, there has to be some theory of how we get from here to there. And Garland kinda sorta wants to suggest it is happening from our current moment and yet not provide any plausible causal story.

One can argue, as Michelle Goldberg does (and Ana does in our podcast), that Garland’s theory of the case isn’t that hard to divine. And maybe that’s true for some viewers — the terrifying scene with Jesse Plemons is not subtle.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World, however, winds up where the New York Times’ Ross Douthat does on any political analysis to garner from the film:

Some people who dislike the movie — I am one of them — think that the underexplanation is a total cop-out, making civil strife seem like a natural disaster or a zombie apocalypse, when in reality it usually represents the extension of politics by awful but reasonable-seeming means. If you refuse to give those reasons, to explain how exactly the politics of today’s America could yield our own version of 1990s Yugoslavia, you haven’t actually made a movie about an American civil war; you just have war as a generic signifier that happens to have strip malls and subdivisions in the background.

I liked Civil War a lot. Thankfully, I also happen to agree with Douthat that the United States is long away away from an actual civil war. But I could be wrong. And that’s why, with all its flaws, it will take a long time for me to shake Civil War.

1. This is particularly true of Dunst, who burst into the public consciousness as a child actress and is best known for her more girlish roles.

2. There’s a scene early in the film when a New York hotel clerk explains to Dunst’s character that given the power outages she is better off taking the stairs, and the tone of that exchange is a note-perfect mashup of a civil war combined with polite service-sector patter.

3. Weirdly, so is the soundtrack.

4. Does he also miss some stuff? Sure. There isn’t a single drone deployed anywhere in the film, which is bizarre to me for a story about 21st-century conflict. And given how long the war has lasted, let’s just say that both wartime and civilian supply chains seem surprisingly unaffected.