Opening Salvo
Because I love this movie, I like to focus on what it gets right more than what it gets wrong… or, perhaps, the things this movie got right are why I love it so much. Certainly, I grinned at the hotel bar scene: I’ve actually gotten drunk with other reporters at that bar, stayed at that hotel, walked out of those doors with a rollie bag nipping at my heels. I wasn’t covering a war at the time, just a war hero: John McCain during his 2008 campaign.1
That was the longest I ever spent on the road, the only time I ever embedded with the machinery of a candidate. I think my time covering Trump rallies has given me just the smallest peek into political violence — a premonition of it even more than a direct glimpse. Covering the McCain campaign will probably be the closest I’ll ever get to the reporting Lee, Sammy, Joel, and Jessie do.2 At least, I’ll use that as my excuse to say Sammy is correct to tell Jessie to sleep when she can. Perhaps this is just good life advice. My colleagues on the trail also taught me to always use a clean bathroom when you come across one, always take the free food,3 and never walk in hotel room on barefeet.
I have the inkling of more thoughts on how my experience covering McCain might intersect with the movie’s portrayal of embedded journalism (you might have an inkling, too), but I want to get back to sleep. Literally, sleep. I’m going to try to get some.
I want to pursue this obsession and the newsletter, but the last few issues have swung me off my schedule. I should know better than to write at night when I don’t have to—writing is a buzzy high when it’s fun like this has been fun. It’s hard to come down.4
So I may get off schedule a little. Civil War Everyday is my goal (which sounds funny). But it might be Civil War pretty often. I still have things to say about this movie. I find myself getting into… debates? Fights? Heated discussions? I find myself getting into conversations about it every day. (The Space the Nation Discord has temporarily become a Civil War Discord, which sounds funny.) I think about it all the time and am gearing up for a third viewing.
Why? Why? Why? I don’t think it’s a perfect movie, or maybe even a great movie. It the perfect movie for me, today. It’s sticky in my head, gumming up the works. Why? I have been doing trauma work for a couple of years, and that might be part of it. A lot of that work has been to re-examine what I thought I knew, learning about what an unreliable narrator I have been for my own life events. For years, I thought I was taking pictures with my mind, but I was really laying out images in the service of a story… a story that turns out not to be true.
Enough about me. Bedtime. Back to your regularly scheduled war.
Alex Garland’s Just Fucking With Us
One of the strange pleasures/pains of following this movie’s rabbit hole discourse has been the degree to which Garland both declares specific intentions and just kinda says, “It’s whatever you think!” As someone who desperately wants to be right about this movie, his interviews have been of little help. The film seems defiantly elliptical in some specific areas and elegantly pedantic in others—and Garland is the same way. He’s frustrated some of my readings. And I’ve learned that some of the things that felt intentional were accidental. But you know what I never thought could possibly have happened by accident….
Q: But in this film, there are a lot of answers buried and embedded in the film itself. I think it's just a matter of maybe re-watching it and listening to some of the things that people are saying. But I have to tell you, some of the dressing of the locations are absolutely incredible.
The abandoned cars and the military equipment and sometimes just the desolation. I'm sort of curious of how much of a storyline you gave each set in the back of your mind where you decide maybe what happened in that moment. And is there one set dressing in particular that was maybe more difficult than the others?
Garland: There's absolutely a storyline, yeah. Yeah, for each one, for sure. The only one that slightly falls out of that category is in this weird winter wonderland.
There's like a couple of snipers having a battle in a winter wonderland. And that was actually a “set,” quote unquote, that we found. It was all that abandoned Christmas stuff was simply abandoned in a field.
And the farmer was kind of annoyed about it because someone had done this thing, gone bankrupt, and then just left all this winter wonderland stuff strewn around his field. And he was like, “Now I've got to pay to remove it.” And we said, “Well, hang on, slow down.
We'll pay to remove it. Just let us keep it for a little bit longer and we'll shoot on it. But apart from that, yes, everything is intentional.5
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I do kind of wonder what he would make of this movie. He wasn’t a particularly sophisticated thinker — though he was quick and bright — but he loved pop culture. He also loved journalism and journalists, so much so that it was hard not to love him back. A story for another time.
Which is not very close, but it’s what I got.
This habit is deeply, deeply ingrained. My podcast co-host Dan Drezner saw me load up on tacos in the green room of his SXSW panel a hot minute after having had breakfast.
This reminds me of another reason that campaign journalism is so intoxicating, besides the intoxicants — I’ve never done a speedball but I think the mix of a writing high and bourbon might be the best chemicals have ever made me feel.
Not sure I believe him on this now!