Screenwriter and director Alex Garland is kidding us. Why else would the rebels in his Civil War consist of California, Texas and a side dish from Florida? Why else would the alliance of the two former, called the Western Front, with its connotations of Western civilization and the forum of white nationalists Storm frontrun against Nick Offerman as a third-term president, who thinks about Trump-like phrases during speech rehearsals but ultimately decides to deliver something more conventional?
At one moment, Suicide’s song “Rocket USA” seems to break the fourth wall with a jolt, as if to poke fun at us for focusing so much on the allegorical attribution game. Throughout the film, reporter Joel Martinez’s (Wagner Moura) efforts to figure out which side a particular fighter is on are met with scorn or worse. A foreign war may clearly define its antagonists with competing values, but each side of a civil war makes the same claim to legitimacy, what William Faulkner once called “the mouth sounds of freedom, democracy, and patriotism.” The more pronounced and pervasive these performative displays of chauvinism, the weaker the body politic.
Once a nation has reached this point, Whys and Whys becomes senseless. We are here. What remains is to see, really see, the images of photojournalists like the celebrated Lee Smith (a rewritten Kirsten Dunst; note the everyman name), to see their blunt, stark horrors and listen to the screams they provoke in our souls, telling us to stop the violence now and sort things out later.
At least that seems to be the overarching theme of the film. But as Lee says to Joel one night, “Every time I survived a war zone, I thought I was sending a warning home: ‘Don’t do this.’ But here we are.” If the horrific images are truly obvious, if we can say with certainty how many thousand words they are worth, then how did we get here? Why do we as a species keep getting here after the advent of modern photography?
There must be another reason why the film rejects any kind of visual analysis, as Richard Brody notes. So notice how Lee interrupts her (sometimes haphazardly written) road trip from New York to DC to interview the President before the rebels reach the White House so that Jessie (Cailee Spaeny, somehow not too old for this kind of role), who she’s reluctantly mentoring, can photograph a crashed and abandoned helicopter because it would make a “good picture.” Notice how she calls a photo Jessie takes—on film, to add nobility and dignity!—of a rebel shot and bleeding to death in a firefight “magnificent.” (Our four protagonists, including Stephen McKinley Henderson’s stick-wielding reporter Sammy, Lee’s mentor, join the Western Front because government troops are apparently shooting journalists on sight, which would have exposed Garland’s hand had the Western media’s coverage of events in Gaza not been so widely pilloried.) In fact, notice how beautiful the sunlight is in the scene where Lee meets Jessie to protect her from a suicide bomber charging into a crowd holding the American flag. Cinematographer Rob Hardy’s lighting design is more than just illuminating throughout—it’s downright breathtaking, even at the expense of logic, as during the final bravura sequence, a twenty-minute nighttime raid on the White House, partially lit by the office lights of the surrounding towers we’d expect to see blacked out (production design: Caty Maxey).
Yet beauty is to be found alongside transcendence, that is, leaving this world for a better one. And so, as Lee is struck down by a sniper, she looks out at the wildflowers that dot the grass she lies on, and a sublime nighttime crossing of a forest fire offers some solace in the face of death. If beauty is the only measure of her work, then the film treats war photography as an aesthetic death cult.
The ancient Greek word for civil war is stasisThey knew that no progress was possible as long as the politic imploded (although they would not have used the difficult word “progress”). Here is the secret of Civil War: It is a Bildungsroman this is clearly implied for those with eyes to see, with embarrassing explanations and all. And here is the dark core of this mystery: coming of age in a civil war means Jessie’s initiation into the abyss of human depravity. No allegory needed.
CONTINUE READING: “Godzilla Minus One” is a life-affirming crowd-pleaser with thematic complexity
TNL Editor: Kim Chan (@thenewslensintl)
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