Is Alex Garland’s š¾šš«šš” ššš§ Believable?
Civil War,Ā directed by Alex Garland. A24 Films, 2024. 1 hr 49 min.
I wrote recently about the possibility of civil war in the United States in the none-too-distant future. Shortly after my article was published, a new film directed by Alex Garland was released, its title Civil War. What is the point of Garlandās film? What is the point of making something visible? And is it the same as making something imaginable? And does the imaginable bleed into the possible, the thinkable? Perhaps to avoid such risks, Garlandās film eschews all efforts at explanation in favor of the relentless drumbeat message that it could happen here, yes, here, right here, in our own backyard. It also recycles a familiar story: a young girl, naĆÆve about politics but full of energy and ambition, is caught up in a conflict, the causes of which she never really understands. By the end of the film, she has discovered, through witnessing and participating in unimaginable acts of violence, that she too cannot claim to be on the right sideānot any more.
This is the plot of Garlandās film, but it is also the plot of an older but also divisive Civil War picture, Gone with the Wind (1939). It turns out that the civil war in the now can only tell the same story in order to make itself a āCivil Warā picture. Civil war is about affect, about sympathy, about the plight of the individual caught up in one inexplicable action after another. The point is to offer the protagonist, and therefore the viewer, an opportunity to show agency in a situation that takes it away. In Garlandās film, the protagonistās agency is much the same as that of the directorātaking photos. The search is on for objectivity. A divided country needs an absolute truth, and this is what a photograph pretends to offer.
Itās also a road movie, allowing Garland to show us an entire photo album of civil war snapshots, chosen in part for their strangeness. The most obviously surreal scene takes place in a broken-down Winter Wonderland theme park, where āJingle Bellsā sounds incessantly and innocently over carnage. Obviously, this makes āJingle Bellsā look foolish, like the only kid who doesnāt get the joke. See, thatās what happens when you donāt pay attention, when you donāt live in the moment. Nobody in the film wants to stop and think. Everything is done in a headlong rush, including the photography; photos are snapped in flashes and clicks, immediate, pressing, urgent as the rat-a-tat of the repeat-firing weapons. Wake up, the film shouts. See? See? See? Every single minor encounter is built to shock and shake, as if there is a risk that the audience will be lulled to sleep. The same concerns haunt The Zone of Interest, a film that wants to make the Holocaust visible by making it invisible. In the book on which that film is loosely based, Martin Amis writes: āUnder National Socialism you looked in the mirror and saw your soul. You found yourself out. This applied, par excellence and a fortiori, (by many magnitudes), to the victims, or to those who lived for more than an hour and had time to confront their own reflections.ā
Looking at itself in the mirror provided by these times, America discovers Dorian Gray, a devilās bargain where eternal youth has been exchanged for the soul itself. āWelcome to my young nation,ā says Benjamin Franklin, as scripted by Lin Manuel Miranda in āBen Franklinās Song.ā Franklin is contrasting America with France in its sense of exuberant possibility. What happens when a nation once young begins to feel middle age approaching? A midlife crisis? One definition of midlife crisis is āa period or phase of life transition when a person begins to question the things that they have accomplished or achieved and whether those same things still provide a sense of fulfilment and meaningā. As we all know, when a midlife crisis hits, the natural response is an effort at reinvention or rebirthāit takes a while for the ageing process to be accepted and embraced. Clearly, the war in Garlandās film is meant to be an example of such reinvention. If Shelby Foote is correct to suggest that America turned itself from a plural into a singular entity in its last Civil War, then perhaps there is some hope that a future war might also end divisions.
What happens when a nation once young begins to feel middle age approaching? A midlife crisis?
Many young reviewers on Letterboxd expressed dismay at Garlandās lack of interest in the causes of the war. Clearly, they were looking for ideological causation. But Garlandās scenario makes better sense than they think. The Western Allianceāthe rebel states are California and Texasāhas every reason to exist: itās the economy, stupidā¦ If California were a sovereign nation in 2024, it would rank in terms of nominal GDP as the world’s fifth-largest economy, while Texasās economy is now the eighth-largest, larger than Russia, Canada, and Italy. One of the dissatisfied Letterboxd reviewers described the film derogatorily as āJ.C. Penney has fallenā. But this is not as insignificant as he thinks. J.C. Penney is really dependent on wealth creation, and wealth is now strikingly unevenly distributed across the fifty states. A future in which the richer states refused to prop up the poorer states is easy to imagine in the light of the fact that rich individuals are markedly reluctant to distribute their wealth downwards these days. As mass infantry becomes redundant in warfare, there is less incentive to keep the population happy and healthy. The real civil war in Alex Garlandās Civil War is the war between the rich and the poor.
Garlandās film has a very particular division in mind: the one between liberal elite photographers and the others, the kinds of people who are likely to hunt down those who bullied them at school in order to torture them in a gas station car wash. Although the film is not about class conflict, it keeps dramatizing a felt gulf between different kinds of Americans: the kinds with cameras and the kinds with guns, the kind with taste and the kind who like Winter Wonderland theme parks. Ironically, photographers and gunmen both rely on the shot, but the former will grow up to be HG Wellsās fragile elite eloi and the latter his starving, ravenous morlocks.
The Grand Canyon splitting Garlandās America is especially searing in the scene in which the photographers are interrogated by a gunman standing over a burial pit filled with slaughtered people. He questions the journalists about their originsāare they really American? We never learn what āsideā he is on, and it really doesnāt matter, because there is a civil war inside the civil war in the film, an internal war against the kinds of people who led the Capitol riot on January 6th, symbolized by a president trying to rule for a third term (as Donald Trump recently said he might). For Garland, the civil war is merely a disguise for the sense in which liberal Americans no longer feel that all other Americans welcome them, and also for liberal curiosityāmorbid curiosityāabout those gun-toting dissidents. There is perfectly genuine fear and hatred in this film, and fear of being hated. Ultimately, this is another zombie movie, but superficially without the zombies. In fact, however, the role of the zombies is played by the well-armed rednecks stalking the landscape in the wake of the official armed conflict, and the journalists able to make a living by selling on images of violence, just as Garland himself is doing. If he has succeeded in making civil war feel more likely, this is because he has succeeded in making us fear it more.