Civil Review War

I’ve enjoyed Alex Garland’s work over the years, both as writer for Danny Boyle on 28 Days Later, Sunshine and The Beach and as writer-director of Ex Machina and Annihiliation. His thoughtful, visually striking, near-future science fiction (as most of his films are) is my kind of entertainment. So I had been thinking I’d get along to Civil War, even though its reception had been mixed. My cousin was visiting last week and had liked it, so I took that as my prompt to go along on Saturday night.

What an incredible, visceral movie it is—and so different from what I’d expected. See it in the cinema, for the soundscape if for nothing else (although the closing scenes are gutwrenching on the big screen, too). I’ll have to watch his last movie Men now, not least because I love its co-star Rory Kinnear. (It flopped, but then Annihilation went straight to Netflix, and that was terrific.)

I came out of it wondering what on earth people are thinking when they say that it lacks context or is an example of “bothsideism”. The context is the entire last decade—or two, or three—and anyone who can’t guess the politics of the filmmakers isn’t watching too hard. If you come away not knowing exactly what the movie’s fictional U.S. President represents, then you must not have seen Jesse Plemons’s character doing what he did on behalf of the “right” kind of Americans.

With perfect timing, a thread on Metafilter popped up a review by Vicky Osterweil calling it “a piece of radical-centrist, middle brow bothsideism”, “deeply mediocre”, and “by some margin the worst” film Garland has made. Although I feared for my blood pressure, I couldn’t help myself, and started reading it. A few paragraphs in, I already wanted to throw things.

How arrogant to write that “Garland clearly has no idea what fascism is”: that someone who wrote and directed this movie over a period of years hasn’t thought as deeply about politics as some blogger critic. The same critic who says that this fictional president disbanding the FBI is the equivalent of “defunding the police”, suggesting that she clearly has no idea† which prospective president is most likely to do exactly that. (†I’m exaggerating for rhetorical effect, but I don’t think she was.) The FBI is a potential threat to presidents in a way that riot cops on the streets aren’t, as one particular ex-president is acutely aware. And so this fictional president has disbanded it—so? What matters is what he’s replaced it with.

As for “if the president really was a fascist then the insurgents would be heroic, or at least demonstrably on the right side of history … there is no such respect paid, and they are just as violent and bloodthirsty”: it’s pretty clear who’s on the right side of history by the end. It’s also clear that being violent and bloodthirsty goes with the territory of being at war. The “civil” in civil war doesn’t refer to politeness. World War II was fought against the most unambiguously fascist of all fascists, and at the end of it the “good guys” had carpet bombed cities, and they’d nuked two hundred thousand people, and the people they’d liberated had strung one of Europe’s most famous fascists up.

Garland is too good a writer to put flashing neon signs throughout saying “good guys this side, bad guys that side”, although it’s pretty clear which side some of the characters lie on. One of the ways he’s good is that he doesn’t force exposition down our throats, but instead has people talking the way they do in real life: when one character mentions the “Antifa massacre”, she doesn’t immediately add “in which the police massacred Antifa protesters”, because why would she need to. And yet some commentators have given this as evidence of bothsideism, of it being unclear whether Garland means Antifa were massacred or did the massacring. Think about the usual power dynamic and take a wild guess.

 

I left Osterweil’s review there overnight, but this morning forced myself to read beyond the opening paragraphs so that I couldn’t be accused—by myself, mainly—of criticising something I hadn’t even read. I kept track of further thoughts along the way…

The movie’s secessionist alliance of Texas and California, far from being implausible, is not at all beyond the realm of possibility. Not All Texans are like their politicians, and the state’s politics are the way they are in large part because of redistricting and other Republican shenanigans. If we’re in the realm of civil war, it isn’t impossible to imagine Republican control of Texas breaking down and the two states as allies. (Let’s not forget that they’re actually allied right now, along with 48 other states.) This is all supposed to be set about twenty years from today—the “Antifa massacre” was when Dunst’s character was the age of the young reporter—and we’ve witnessed much weirder geopolitical shifts over the last twenty years.

Osterweil accuses Garland of having “no idea what fascism is” and then cites his thanking of Helen Lewis in the credits as evidence. I understand that Lewis is seen as a Bad Guy in trans circles because she’s said, in essence, “trans women are women and trans men are men, but let’s be cautious about bad actors taking advantage of access to women’s refuges”, which, sure, is an argument that one can take issue with, but it isn’t evidence of being fascist: come on. She was deputy editor of the New Statesman for several years not that long ago. Accusing her of being fascist is the sort of 1980s student politics hyperbole that had so many shying away from the word for thirty years.

Then we have some decent points about the stance of the film being that of “war photojournalists and conflict reporters”, the people who see the horrors of war up close and end up with PTSD as a result. And… yes? This is bad, why? Apparently because a lot of Americans have a shallow understanding of foreign conflicts, and so war reportage is an inadequate teacher. Why this invalidates a story about war reporters and their PTSD, I’m not sure.

Again we’re reminded that the politics of the movie are “totally nonsensical”, just to rub it in. Tell you what’s nonsensical: a handful of hijackers crashing jumbos into the tallest buildings in New York. A grifter real-estate magnate turned reality TV star ending up as populist president of the US. Britain leaving the EU as the result of a knife-edge indicative vote in which the winners represented 37.5% of the electorate.

The paragraph about “processing images of the January 6th coup” is just incoherent. Osterweil represents the attack by Western Forces on the White House as “anxiety … about right wing militias destroying the government” when by this stage it’s clear that the WF army (no “militia” is going to have the resources we see massed for attack in preceding scenes) represents the “good guys”, the ones out to get the fascist dictator. To call this “nonsense” is… nonsense. As for comparing Civil War with the “more powerful political resonance 45 years on” of Dawn of the Dead, as if that proves anything: get back to us in 45 years, eh?

Osterweil claims that Garland’s movie “talks about the polarization of American society as equally arbitrary and ahistorical as it is elsewhere”. Effectively, this is accusing Garland of believing that conflicts elsewhere are “arbitrary and ahistorical”, when he clearly believes nothing of the sort, as no thinking observer would. What he clearly believes is that however much you think your civilised society has good reasons for its polarization, when the result is war the results are devastating for the vast majority of the population and leave the victors picking over ruins. How is that “middle-brow”? Hey, let’s all visit DC and enjoy those middle-brow war memorials before we head down to the arthouse for a middle-brow screening of Apocalypse Now!

Near the end of her review, Osterweil notes in back-handed approval the “undeniable effects of pleasurably imaging the collapse of American hegemony and order”, saying that “though the narrative itself is fundamentally reactionary it can’t help but mobilize much more insurrectionary desires in the audience”. Poor Garland; he makes a whole movie where the fascist president who drove the slide into civil war ends up shot in his foxhole at the end, and he “accidentally” appeals to people who think fascists should be overthrown. What could he possibly have been thinking?

Well, we do have examples of what he was thinking, and although his talk of his born-again centrism does get a bit exhausting (but having to repeat himself in interviews with different outlets is hardly his fault; that’s the promotional game), it seems to me that his viewpoint is being misconstrued. As he repeatedly says, he’s centre-left. In British terms, that’s mainstream Labour, a social democratic position. With those views I can’t imagine he has ever or would ever vote Tory, and so to call him reactionary, or his film as being intended as such, is a sign that you’re missing the point. He has an important point to make about the tension between a politics of the centre and a politics of deliberate polarization, in his interviews and in his movie, and it isn’t just that the Overton window has shifted to the right.

When the extremes split the centre over some wedge issue or other, they encourage those in the middle who would once have considered themselves political neighbours to see each other as political enemies, which leads to the polarization we see around us—so polarization isn’t cause, it’s effect. Perhaps, if we’re particularly unlucky, it leads to civil war. And civil war is destruction, it’s death, it’s both sides losing in so many ways—except ideologically, for whichever side ends up victorious.

There are no guarantees about the winning side of a civil war being the “right” side, either. Take off the U.S. vs. Confederacy blinkers, Garland is encouraging us, and look elsewhere. Look at Spain, where the fascists won a civil war and ruled for forty years. Look at England, where the parliamentarians won (yay, democracy!) and then Cromwell ruled as a puritanical dictator and brutally reconquered neighbouring Ireland (whoops). Look at France—vive la révolution!—and the Terror, the rise of Napoleon, and war across half of Europe. It isn’t middle-brow to hope not to live through times like that, or to warn of the dangers of times like that.

But perhaps all that matters to you is ideology: in your daily life, in your entertainment, in your own work. Then you might not enjoy Garland’s movie, and might criticise it along the same lines as Osterweil. But what do you want? Do you want every depiction of war on screen to have clearly flagged “good guys” and “bad guys”, to argue that violence is always worth it as long as the bad guys lose, and to reassure the audience that their specific delineation of good and bad is objectively correct in every way?

Like Garland, who has been criticised elsewhere for saying it, I have one or two right-wing friends (who would find the idea that somehow their ideology has rubbed off on mine hilarious). One of my oldest friends I would no longer even describe as centre-right: he seems to be drifting into ideological positions that 30-40 years ago I would never have imagined him capable of. But you know what: I wouldn’t want to see him hanging upside down in a carwash with his face beaten to a pulp. I wouldn’t want to see him shot, or the streets around him reduced to rubble. I wish him a happy and peaceful life. Call me a middle-brow bothsideist, but I wish that for most people.

 

Edited from my comments at Metafilter.

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