Civil War: A Tedious, Confusing, Laughable Self-Own
A movie that can only happen when you're sky high on your own supply
I have not read anything on Civil War. I intentionally kept myself ignorant of the dialogue surrounding this movie so that my reaction to it could be untainted by the rabble of the unwashed A24-boot-licking masses. I wanted to give a reaction that was pure, and I sit here now writing this unaware of anything but my own impressions. The only thing affecting the objectivity of this review is my abject rage at the world this film imagines we live in, or could live in, or maybe might be at risk of living in should we not wake up and start looking at reality.
It is the fight for reality that is the true warfare of this movie, as a group of four members of the press make their way down from New York to DC. Why are they going to DC? They need a quote from the president before he dies. Why do they need to hurry? Because his death is inevitable. Why is his death inevitable? Because the opposition is winning! Okay, got it.
Except I don’t. Who is the opposition? The president here is the bad guy, right? Who is he fighting against? The “Western Front.” Ah, that kinda makes sense. So he’s in the East and then people in the West are his opponents. How far west? Seems like California and Texas are against him, and I guess they are driving all the way out east to kick some ass and take some names. But also Florida is against the president. I think? Sometimes it seemed like they were against the president, sometimes for, and sometimes it sorta felt like they were considered another country. Also the Western Front flies an American Flag with two stars. Are those stars for California and Texas? What about the other states, are they just “Did Not Participate”? Seems to me that they should have made their flag more different than the standard American flag, given that uniforms are sort of optional in this war. I wouldn’t want to get plugged by friendly fire just because someone didn’t take the time to count how many stars were on my flag.
I’m being obtuse. I don’t want to split hairs, I just want to understand the nature of this war. It is a war, right? I mean it has to be they said it in the movie and it’s in the title. But what is the core of the dispute? Is it just that people are “tired of that stupid look” on the faces of everyone who lives in Pennsylvania? What exactly is animating these differences? I would say that it’s some sort of nod at the militia mindset of the Pacific Northwest, but not really - both sides seem to have ragtag gunners in both battle fatigues and Hawaiian shirts alike. Could it be racism? For a moment there’s a scene where they’re driving through burning trees that might be crosses? If they’re not crosses, then why are the trees burning? It’s not like the whole forest was burning, just like 16 trees. Is that some sort of military tactical strategy I’m unaware of? The old “burn a few trees, that’ll mess ‘em up” tactic invented by MacArthur? They also talk about Charlottesville, but we never actually know what’s happening there besides “good hiking” and a university re-opening. The latter might have been a cover story, but who knows? Did the person who wrote the movie know? Do I care?
I do care, I suppose, because this movie is definitely saying something about me and my fellow Americans. It is obviously a warning, and a dire warning given that I’ve read reports of people calling out of work after seeing this movie so that they had “time to process.” When I heard that I thought it was a joke; a run-of-the-mill overstatement of harm from the NPR crowd. But now I’m thinking I might have to take the day off as well, because I need to process too. Not emotionally, but logistically. I need to pore over that script to understand what the hell this movie was supposed to mean.
Then again, if I’m looking for meaning then I guess that I could step back from this bizarrely incoherent plot (even by Alex Garland standards) and focus on what the movie stood for. What it was attempting to signify from like, you know, a semiotics standpoint. It is clear from the jump that this movie is about the brave men and women who wake up every morning to don their kevlar, adjust their scopes, and tighten the chin strap of their helmets to race out to the front lines and protect our country. That’s right, this movie is about the heroism and sacrifice of our most beloved branch of the armed forces government fourth estate, the media. As Julian Assange once said, “One of the hopeful things that I’ve discovered is that nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies.” Assange was referring to the cold-hard lies of fact, but there is another type of lie, and that is the one of characterization. And boy-howdy does this movie give a characterization of the media that is unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Just imagine The Hurt Locker but instead of the US Army disarming bombs, it’s the media disarming them. And instead of bombs, they’re disarming is the bomb of people not seeing pictures of - get this - soldiers being shot and killed in battle.
To demonstrate just how how heroic - bordering on messianic - the sacrifice of the media is, we get a scene of Kristen (Kirsten?) Dunst taking a bath and thinking about all of the people she stood and took pictures of as they were shot or burned alive or beaten to death with bricks. There’s no doubt that’s hard for a journalist. Probably harder for them than anybody else, given how close they are. Sheesh, the only people who that was probably harder for was the actual people being burned, stoned, or shot to death.
But those aren’t really people, are they?
Not in this movie, and perhaps by extension not to journalists if I’m to believe the portrayal presented in Civil War, where journalists chase pictures of gore, death, and ultra-violence like Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt chased tornadoes in Twister. And you’ll feel like you’ve been in a twister after coming out of this one, with all the whiplash you’d expect from being pulled one direction to the other in terms of how you should feel about our main characters from scene to scene. Sometimes we are supposed to relate to them; “it’s like their camera is MY eyes” they want you to think. But then we’re supposed to see them as something far greater than us; a rare breed of saintly witnesses who not only put their bodies at risk to get us the pictures we crave, but also their minds. You can’t get out of these situations without a shattered mind, that’s for sure. Well, except for that period right after they take photographs of people’s friends and family and spouses being shot. Right after that happens, it's completely normal for a journalist to push that all to the side and knock back a few celebratory drinks. Better not have too many though, lest you let word of your hot scoop slip out. You don’t want to give away the fact that you’re secretly going to the WHITE HOUSE to talk to the PRESIDENT because others might follow you. And they do, such as when two fellow…media…people? Catch up to the protagonists and have some WILD times. It’s all fun and games even though they’re deeply embedded in enemy territory, they still have a few moments to do the old climb-in-and-out-of-each-other’s-cars-while-they’re-moving trick.
Wait, if you haven’t seen the movie you’re probably really confused by what I just wrote. Don’t worry, you’ll be twice as confused when you see it. Because shortly thereafter, we’re back into HIGH THREAT MODE and EVERYTHING IS FALLING APART. This one is serious, almost enough to end the careers of those who used to live glued to the camera day and night just to feel that rush. In fact it gets so bad that one of the characters - I don’t know who he is but I think he played Pablo Escobar in Narcos? He is like a symbiote of Pedro Pascal and Mark Ruffalo - anyway he is so messed up that he screams in slow motion and then drinks vodka and passes out. But not to worry because more than being traumatized he is PISSED that they weren’t on time to get the BIG STORY. How absolutely exhausting.
Exhausted. That is how this movie made me feel. It felt like the end of a rope for me with a certain kind of movie, like a silent bond was made the moment the credits rolled down when I promised myself I would no longer suffer this pedantic trash. This is a movie made for people who have convinced themselves that they can feel however they want to feel at any time - even when it conflicts with how the felt five minutes ago - and everyone else is not only supposed to accommodate that change, but they are supposed to celebrate it. Because that is who the “sides” are in this movie. Real people - the ones who have real thoughts and real feelings and real passions - and the other people. The idiots, the rubes, the ones who are driven not by purpose but by base instinct. These people deserve no nuance, they deserve no excuses, they deserve no consideration. They are blanks, void of soul and bereft of right. They exist as shaping tools to be used to craft one of the real people’s narrative. There is no consideration of the pain of being, only that of witnessing. There is no celebration of believing anything, only the celebration of declaring belief.
It is this reason that this movie is such a tremendous self-own. To see what arises when one loses sight of how absurd their narrative has become, to see what notions one can attempt to express through film when they truly believe that people actually give a shit. It is a perverse and spectacular solipsism; a childish belief that one can toggle the truth of themselves and the meaning of their actions at will. Of the 1h49m runtime of this movie, much of the reel’s real estate was spent of what were presented as arresting shots of captured black-and-white stills displaying the horror of warfare that arises from reckless rhetoric. Rhetoric about what? It doesn’t matter. The evil kind. What is evil? The opposite of good, and if I am good, then it is the opposite of me. We are told by this film to believe in one moment that the media is traumatized by the cost of their courage. The next minute, we watch them passively snapping pictures of people as the life drains from their body. The next, we see them toasting and high-fiving and shouting “what a rush!”
I can’t say if I was the only one in the theater who left disgusted. There had to be a few there - even “true believers” - who had to have felt the tiniest pull of moral magnetism on the compass of their conscience. The idea that taking these pictures is as likely to emerge from moral fortitude as it is from a place of libidinal voyeurism is nowhere to be seen. The feeling that an entire industry - the one responsible for telling the stories in just the right way - might be spinning their own story a bit is banished from the film. This insight into the antisocial nature of this work is barely noticed, and because of this oversight, we are for once able to see in the full light of day the true engine that powers this machine: narcissism.
Throughout the film we get a rare glimpse at the unmasked conceitedness, selfishness, shameless exploitation of misery, and the extreme sense of moral superiority that illuminates almost every step of our protagonists journey. They not only endanger themselves, but more often others - usually those actually engaged in the armed conflict who are likely not there for a pulitzer - in their rabid pursuit to own a picture of some man’s death. More over, they want his death to be named after them. Not him. Is it impossible to trace the psychopathy of “journalism” that we see in Nightcrawler to this? Or do we think that war reporters are somehow innervated by something different?
I know I toe a fine line here. Certainly I am not suggesting that journalism and war photography are meaningless pursuits, far from it. But what I do suggest is that we take this movie as a cautionary tale about how we allow the media writ large to spin not only the stories they report on, but the meta-narrative of themselves. This is the story that has the most spin of all. It’s hard to find a movie that tells a balanced truth about the media - they are usually either heroes or villains. A healthy human knows that most other humans are usually somewhere in the middle. And yet we still treat newspapers like our home sports teams, reporters as our angelic faultless heralds, and treat the facts transcribed into columns of the New York Times as nothing more than a sobering objective relay of information, untainted by any outside emotional proclivity. I am so glad I saw this dogshit movie, for finally I can stop imagining just how morally perverse and intellectually deranged people like Dunst’s character are.
The people in their stories do not matter to them. The people they claim to report those stories to do not matter to them. They matter to them. Many do a good job. Some are monstrous. Often it is hard to tell the difference. Be on guard.
Two notes:
the one historical factual event listed in this dystopian future movie was “the Antifa Massacre” lol
The scene with Jesse Plemons was very good. Only character in the whole movie who seemed to understand the stakes and act in a way that is expected given the circumstances.