Civil War Discourse In Bad Decline

The takes, sir, the takes are not so good.

— by me, Green Bay, WI

Opening Salvo

If you’re reading this, you must be one of a shrinking minority of people who think there’s not enough discourse about this movie. I appreciate your time and attention because there is a lot of discourse about this movie; I appreciate you even more having swum through it to get to me, because a lot of that discourse is Bad.

Yet even as I call the discourse Bad, I cringe at my own certainty in that evaluation. One of the steps in the evolution of my thinking about the movie has been to examine my strong feelings for it.

I loved this movie from the moment the lights went up, it’s true. I loved it at first because I felt congratulated by it (it’s a “love letter to journalism,” remember?); I loved the movie even more after I sensed a query behind that congratulation (“But are you actually doing the service you think you are?”). (I’m working hard on not falling for partners whose love is complicated by criticism but I think that’s ok for cultural objects. I do have therapy tomorrow.)

Still, leaving the theater with the hypnotic, propulsive Suicide track “Dream, Baby, Dream” playing under my thoughts, I was smitten and ready to talk about it for an hour on the science fiction/polisci podcast I co-host with Dan Drezner.¹

My big feelings turned defensive when I sought out reviews and articles prepping for the pod. First, I started to watch Eric Voss’s breakdown for New Rockstars — a YouTube channel I’ve come to love for unpacking expanded universe details in franchises I’m not very familiar with; Voss also does endearingly personal deep dives on particular movies — what else? — “The Deep Dive” channel. As soon as Voss started to laud the movie for lauding “real” journalism — as soon as he took Lee’s line about only taking pictures so “other people ask questions” at face value, I stopped watching, betrayed. The journalists are compromised! It’s obvious! That’s the point!!!!!²

Other examinations also saw the film as a salute to a kind of objectivity, they just wanted it to be less objective or, more put pejoratively, not engage in “both-siderism.” Thus the most common genre of negative Civil War reviews, Garland Didn’t Take a Side and I Wanted Him to Take a Side. These, too, infuriated me.³

• “In Civil War, Garland’s apocalyptic US features a country ostensibly stripped of partisan labels, where both the left and right become intolerant of each other and turn deadly.” [Wired]

• “In the world of ‘Civil War, we get no hint about what has pushed the country beyond the breaking point, or what makes conditions in the secessionist states different from those in the loyalist states.” [The New Yorker]

• “But, because his script refuses to explain why America is at war, Garland manages to say nothing about the nature of the conflict and nothing about journalism, in either imagery or dialogue.” [Paste]

• “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.” [AP]

There’s a place where these two genres of review overlap, a narrow piece of real estate in the neighborhood of Garland Didn’t Take a Side and That’s Good. I found one review like that:

Instead of telling us what is right and what is wrong in our modern political discourse, thereby adding fuel to our current political fire, the film’s writer and director, Alex Garland, asks us to question how our staunchly held beliefs might, if left unexamined, lead to as dire an outcome as the events of his film.

That’s from the Mormon-owned and editorially conservative Deseret News and it is probably the exact response A24 was hoping the film would get — all the better to put the maximum asses in seats.⁴

What all these reviews get wrong — from those who liked it for fetishizing objectivity to those who bemoaned this as a flaw — is that the movie does take a side in the conflict. The president is a fascist and that’s bad. I share Garland’s frustration that people need that to be spelled out:

‘What on earth you’re talking about? Of course it’s a political film.’ This president, I would say, is manifestly a fascist. He has dismantled the FBI, which legally threatens him. He’s killing his own citizens with airstrikes. And he’s a third-term president, so he’s dismantling the Constitution. I’m not sure how much clearer those dots can be drawn in terms of their implications. I’m starting to get irritated by the question.” [The Observer]

Are people so used to kid-glove treatment of would-be fascism in our current political climate that they need a character to say “the president is a fascist and fascism is bad and that’s what we’re fighting against” to prove the movie is not both-sides-ing the conflict?⁵

And when one side is “shooting journalists on sight” — as Sammy notes about the loyalist forces in D.C. — does that need to be called out specifically as something the other side disapproves?

Something Garland hasn’t been asked about but that seems like an obvious hint as to which side the movie lends its heart is how race shows up (though, it’s true that, as the AP complains, there is “scant mention of race”).

• Note: The opening water riot (rolling my eyes at the review that said there’s “no mention of climate change” in the film) is predominately people of color. The suicide bomber is a white woman carrying a traditional (loyalist) American flag.

• Note: The refugee camp that the crew overnight in is predominately people of color.

• Note: The Western Forces are integrated to a degree we do not see elsewhere — I’d point out that even the Black female loyalist Secret Service agent who’s gunned down at the end after asking to parlay is shot by a Black woman from the WF with, well, prejudice, let’s say … this seems significant.

Garland tips his hand on this most explicitly in the scene where the crew visits The Town That War Forgot (or, really, the Town That Is Willfully Forgetting War). Lee exits the surreally normal dress shop to observe to Sammy that the town reminds her of everything she’d forgotten. Sammy, who is Black, has noticed the snipers on the rooftops, policing this little slice of nostalgia. He tells her that the town reminds him of all things he remembers about what it was like before.

I’m also fairly certain we are supposed to think that Jesse Plemmons is a bad guy for shooting those he decides are not “American,” but will leave that off my evidence list for Garland wanting us to cheer for the Western Forces because to the degree the movie “both-sides” anything (and, ok, this is part of what people are picking up on)… Garland is interested in how civil wars devolve the further you get from the instigating act or political watershed. He wants us to see that the further you are from the front lines in both ideological and physical senses, the more difficult it is to tell one side from another. The Plemmons scene suggests this. The winter wonderland scene spells it out.

I want to talk later more about how Garland has confused his own point in interviews; I’m saying that pre-emptively now because I feel like I might get a barrage of Garland quotes and impeccable logic against my read. Those arguments will destroy me, as they say, and I will be tempted to destroy back. Did I not just do some destroying of other arguments just now?

And all that destroying brings me back to my growing discomfort at feeling so sure about this movie’s message. Because, in the end, a kind of both-sides-ism undergirds the movie beyond even Garland showing us the fog of war.

I don’t think Garland’s larger, existential point is the both-sides argument that negative reviews are responding to, however. I think the reviewers who want the movie to be stronger in its condemnation of fascism are participating in what Garland warns against: The easy comfort of believing you’re right… even when you’re right. My own anger at other, wrong interpretations of the movie is a shadow of the whole problem with righteousness. I don’t want to hear the other side. That’s bad.

Righteousness curdles as soon as it grabs a gun. It begins to sour, perhaps, as soon as it stops seeing the other side as worthy of dignity.

I believe that’s what Garland is saying when he notes (okay, okay), “At a certain point, the specifics stop mattering. . . . [the war] stops being, in a way, issue-driven, and it just becomes anger.” I repeat my initial point, louder: He is not saying no issues matter and war is bad no matter what side you’re on or what you’re fighting for. He is saying that being on the side of good and right and true won’t keep you from becoming a war criminal.

To me, the loyalist side being so clearly Bad makes the whole movie more complicated and more interesting: It asks us if we have the stomach to take up arms against evil ideas without losing our own humanity in the process. I believe we are supposed to cheer the death of the fascist president at the end of the movie — to take as much satisfaction in it as Joel clearly does (did I mention how the journalists aren’t really objective? They are not objective.). Then, our satisfaction brimming, Garland shows us the image of the soldiers who did the killing posing and grinning over the president’s dead body.

Are you okay with this?, Garland asks. We idealists sometimes talk about what we are willing to “fight and die for,” and, personally, I have thought that willingness to die for something is the ultimate gauge of how much you believe in it, right? After thinking a lot about this movie — too much — I wonder if the true gauge of our idealism is what we’re willing to fight for… especially if that fighting turns bloody.

Then the question becomes not what are you willing to die for, but what are you willing to kill for? And if you’re not on the front lines — so few of us ever are —for what ideal are you willing to have other people kill in your name?

Garland isn’t saying there no ideals so important that they’re worth killing for; I believe he’s saying there are ideas that important, and that’s for us to struggle with.

Here is Another Correct Take (ie, it essentially aligns with mine).

HumInt:⁶

• Civilwarland in Bad Decline, by George Saunders. Not directly related to what we’re talking about though I may have to try to tie it in, it’s such a delightful and yet sobering read.

• “Looking at War,” by Susan Sontag. Some philosophical underpinning for my argument that Lee (and Jessie and Joel) are not objective, though, yes, I get it, Garland has said things that sound like they’re supposed to be.

• The Leiber Code, authored by jurist Hans Leiber, codifying the Union rules of combat. On the plus side: It “requires the humane, ethical treatment of civil populations under the military occupation of the Union Army” [Wikipedia]. Yay! But also a bunch of other not-as-enlightened guidelines, including the summary execution of captured civilians suspected (suspected) of espionage, starving non-combatants, and bombing mixed populations without warning as “surprise may be a necessity.” These tactics can be considered humane, Leiber says, as, “The more vigorously wars are pursued, the better it is for humanity. Sharp wars are brief.”

1. I, uh, forgot to post the free version this weekend. Should be up tonight (it’s 5:30pm CT now, give me an hour.)

2. I understand that Garland himself has contributed to the understanding of the film as a story about Awesome Journalists Being Awesome. I think Garland is an unreliable narrator of his own movie and I want to talk about that more but just bear with me as this being a catalog of my own reactions.

3. In many of the examples, I was too mad about what I saw as a basic misreading to make myself read the entire review; maybe they get more sophisticated.

4. I think all the interviews with Garland, the cast, and everything put out by A24 officially needs to be read through the lens of “How can we not alienate half of America?” Garland has hinted as much:

5. His choice to put Texas and California on the same side speaks to his lack of understanding of American politics — and a kind of sweet idealism — more than it is proof that he was trying to obfuscate the politics of the movie:

6. Background reading