Is “Civil War” Apolitical or are Politics Just Weird?
“The so-called ‘Western Forces’ of Texas and California have suffered a very great defeat at the hands of the United States military.”
With the utterance of these words in the premiere trailer for Alex Garland and A24’s recent blockbuster “Civil War”, Nick Offerman’s fictional US President captured the attention of moviegoers everywhere.
In fairness, it’s a meaty line. It feels packed to the brim with the promise of not-so-distantly-fictional world-building. What could have transpired to turn the US military against two of its own states? What would have to happen for the diametrically opposed political bastions of Texas and California to put aside their oceans of difference and fight for the same cause? What might that “cause” be?
The answers to those questions… Aren’t in the movie.
“Subverted Expectations” or Blatant False Advertising?
For some, the lack of answers and world-building found in the film wasn’t a huge surprise. Some of the more media-savvy trailer viewers may have seen such a shocking, unimaginable state of affairs as a clean indication that the film would be uninterested in exploring the central conflict of the titular war itself, so dramatic and too-big-to-get-into-in-two-hours was the lip survive paid to the landscape of the conflict.
Movies that claim to be (and market themselves as being) about “big” things have a long history of not actually being about those things, but rather the fallout around those things. It’s “Swing Vote”, which spends the entire film hyping up the importance of Billy Bob Thorton’s vote, only to end on him cheekily slipping into the voting booth and not telling us who he voted for. It’s “It Comes At Night”, never actually showing us what “It” is, focusing instead on paranoia and mistrust. It’s “No Country For Old Men” forgoing any of the promised on-screen action or confrontations in order to explore themes of morality and fate in surprising, subversive ways.
In the case of “Civil War”, it’s ignoring the details of the war itself in favor of a broader conversation about the dissemination of information, the people that disseminate the information, and the shape that that information has to take in order to be disseminated.
At times, it gets a little obnoxious with how far it’s willing to go to obscure the actual steps taken to get from where we are now to where this thing takes place, teetering on the line between artistically vague and deliberately obtuse — the ambiguously named “antifa massacre” and the entire existence of the Western Alliance being two egregious examples — but never does it feel half as “apolitical” as a lot of folks keep insisting it is. The weird thing about its politics is the shapelessness of it; politics are all over this thing, but they’re gaseous rather than solid, spreading in any direction they’re able to and filling up negative spaces without any real regard for what those spaces are.
That’s kinda the point.
Everything is Political… Kinda
The movie seems convinced that politics are external rather than internal; an atmosphere that’s going to exist no matter what and contort our lives into different shapes, rather than an actual landscape we construct based off of values and desires. That may be a bold assertion in the form of a tough-to-swallow pill, but the film does a great job of embodying it in a whole smattering of different ways.
One idea that really stood out is a sort of meta one — one that isn’t at all new but that did get me thinking about this movie’s reason for being and the state of art/entertainment/culture in general. A good bit into the movie, our grizzled journalist character tells our wide-eyed POV character that their job isn’t to have opinions or feel anything, but to depict what’s going on so that others can make up their own minds. This is a pretty un-controversial and long-held perspective on journalism, but, metatextually, it also seems to point toward the film’s views on art, and, subsequently, itself:
Art shouldn’t be didactic or pedagogical, but should be a whole and thoroughly rendered point of view slapped down on the table for people to examine with all their biases and philosophies at the ready.
At least that’s what “Civil War” seems to think.
In a meta way, this seems to be not only the thesis statement of the character, but of the filmmaker. This is a 2024 film about an American civil war, and instead of expansive world-building and exploration of different manifestos and figureheads, it opts for a boots-on-the-ground series of “objective”, contextless vignettes. It’s not making a case, it’s not taking a moral stance — it’s just trying to “send a message home”. Which is cool, but it also begs the question: What happens when everyone thinks their job is just to be objective so that others can make up their minds?
What’s Our Role In All This?
We’re all closer to being journalists than ever before, albeit journalists with no codified ethics or best practices. We amplify stories and events that we deem important to audiences and followings, however large or small, on a daily basis. We share things around, we lightly editorialize, and we make noise, all in the hopes that it’s going to be a drop in the ocean of general consensus and something real will happen as a result of our depictions of the world.
I’m not trying to make this a “social media bad” tirade — that’s boring and I don’t even know if it’s true — but I am trying to tie this to the image of Kanye, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and countless other “thought leaders” (yikes!) constantly gassing up the idea of “free thinking”, and then, ironically, having nothing to actually say when pressed for their “free thoughts” other than “free thinking is good!”. It’s that image of the snake eating it’s own tail.
What Now?
A lot of our stories these days are about storytelling. We think about thinking. We talk about talking. We assume that just making an idea accessible is enough, but is it? Once it’s accessible, don’t we still need to actually access it? Is it fine to just observe and report in hopes that others will do something if everyone else is also just observing and reporting?
The primary characters in “Civil War” seem convinced that simply telling a story is the be-all end-all of participating in society — even one in the midst of existential crisis. The peripheral characters that actually engage in and shape the conflict in question seem less like active participants in the world that make meaningful choices and more like byproducts of a landscape that is going to exist as it is either way; while the few combatants and politicians that we get glimpses of seem to play their parts like clockwork, the only characters that seem to have have real, fleshed out options regarding what they might do next are the characters responsible for either telling the story or not. This could be seen as a casualty of perspective — every story has to ultimately choose who and what it’s about, and not ever ancillary character can have an ocean-deep inner life — but I think it’s worth discussing just how set the world of every vignette int the film seems to be. Our protagonists stumble into a particular corner of the conflict, occupied by broadly-drawn representatives of some archetype that would likely exist in this situation (militant secessionists, self-focused abstainers, desperate despots, etc.), all of whom seem more like pre-programmed participants in a simulation of a conflict, playing out their designated roles rather than responding particularly to anything happening moment to moment. These are moments and environments and scenes that are going to play out as they play out witbh or without our protagonists. The only question is whether or not they’ll be photographed for the world to see.
This sounds like a critique. It’s not. Through the entirety of my viewing experience and in the weeks following, I never felt convinced that any of this lack of dynamism and nuance was a result of poor craftsmanship. On the contrary, it feels like the point. “Civil War” is not a movie about how conflict comes to be or how it evolves or resolves — it’s a story about roles. It’s a story about the ways in which we all fall into situations that are larger than us but still massively impact our day-to-day lives. It’s a story about the currents of the world that we didn’t make but have to stay afloat in, and how our collective philosophy prepares us (or doesn’t prepare us) to exist meaningfully in those currents when they start getting out of control.
This isn’t a review. If you want my review: I liked it. The gunshots were very scary and the scene in the forest looked good. But if you want to share in my month-plus of pondering over where our mirrors-on-mirrors-on-mirrors state of internet watchdogging is taking us, let me know your thoughts below.
