Counter-Review: Civil War

As with most things I find myself liking while everyone else is at best, like my daughter, conflicted, I find myself starting from what the question of what the film thinks it’s doing. The beginning is instructive here. We start in an uncomfortable close-up on Nick Offerman’s nameless President. He is strangely awkward and tentative as he works his way through describing a military victory. Gradually, however, his delivery grows firmer and more confident until it attains a swaggering, brusque confidence. Eventually the scene switches, and we are looking at the President on television, now delivering his remarks in a suitably statesmanlake cadence. Our view expands, and we see a haggard Kirsten Dunst in a hotel room at night as explosions rock the cityscape outside her large glass windows. She carries a camera, which she raises to her eye, pointing it at the President on the TV screen, lining up her shot. Click.

Which is to say that this is a film about the production of the image. This fact frames most decisions the film makes—certainly its choice of protagonists, with the two leads both being war photographers, one of them working a pointedly analog setup of an SLR camera and portable developing kit just to highlight the root mediality of this. As Christine notes, the film makes savvy use of this, alternating between fast-moving, tense action sequences and still photographs, sound cutting in and out to emphasize the contrast between event and image. Even its structure as a travelogue of a journey from New York to Washington pushes it towards a disconnected series of images.

This provides crucial context for what is proving the most controversial aspect of the film: its willful disinterest in the actual politics of the titular civil war. The primary rebellion is the “Western Forces,” an alliance between California and Texas that deliberately cuts across the lines most likely to divide an actual American civil war in the near future. Even within that, there’s little clear sense of who, exactly, is doing what. The film’s tensest sequence, in which the characters are menaced by Jesse Plemons, who demands to know where they’re from and shoots the characters born outside of the US, never actually identifies what side he fights for. The other most intriguing characters, a pair of rainbow-haired soldiers pinned down by a sniper, ostentatiously refuse to disclose what side they’re on. Offerman’s President reveals no political positions save for autocracy.

The absurdity of this defiant effort to produce an apolitical film about an American civil war has proven vexing for critics. Even those willing to grant the notion of apolitical art—and I’m on record rejecting the possibility entirely—are struck by the impossibility of this task. Garland, who is not an idiot, can surely see it as well. But the quixotic attempt serves the same purpose as those sonic cuts, highlighting the act of representation, making us aware that we are looking not at an American civil war but the image of one.

In this regard what Christine highlights as the film’s strength—its repeated arrival at chilling, harrowing images—is the whole of its point. As his previous film Men’s differently striking denouement shows, Garland is drawn to a certain primal directness, and that’s on display here, as he forces the audience to stare at images of grotesque violence and cruelty for uncomfortably long times. It’s clear that Garland has, as Death Grips puts it, seen footage, and is compelled to communicate that horror.

But Civil War is not some simplistic moral parable along the lines of what Dunst numbly describes as a warning against the violence of war. Quite the opposite, it is fascinated by the thrill of its own horror. One of its most striking images comes when, amidst a pitched final battle to take the White House, two characters—Dunst’s writer colleague played by Wagner Moura and protege played by Cailee Spaeny—exchange frenzied grins at the thrill of what they are doing. All four of the lead characters (the core cast is rounded out by Stephen McKinley Henderson playing Dunst’s mentor) are blatant adrenaline junkies, even as they are repeatedly staggered by the traumatic nature of what they are compelled to do. And the film joins them in this thrill, devoting the lion’s share of its $50 million budget—a record for A24—to a series of spectacles, all shot with a lush “every frame a painting” approach to cinematography that befits the omnipresent theme of image production.

The ordinary shape of this tension would be ambivalence, but that’s not quite where Garland settles. For one thing, there’s the image that provides the film’s major throughline—its bookending by Nick Offerman, who in its final scene is dragged out from behind the Resolute Desk to be summarily executed by the Western Forces. Wagner Moura’s character shouts at them to stop, insisting he needs a quote. “Please don’t let them kill me,” Offerman blubs. Moura glares down at him and offers a succinct “that’ll do,” and we cut to Spaeny as she gets her shot, the credits rolling over a gradually developing photo of soldiers posing with the President’s corpse in the Oval Office, a tacit completion of Dunst’s opening photograph of the hotel television.

Offerman’s character, with his slicked back white hair and propensity for constructions like “some are already calling it the greatest,” offers an unusual moment of precise reference within the willful refusal to directly engage with the contemporary American political landscape. The image of his execution is not merely an alluring image like the explosions and violence—it’s a specific fantasy, desired for its substance and context instead of as a discrete image. That we want this after everything—mere moments after we’ve watched Dunst’s character takes  bullet protecting Spaeny’s (a sequence we see through a series of photographs, paying off the foreshadowing from earlier in the film where Spaeny asks if Dunst would photograph her if she were killed)—puts paid to any notion that this film is a warning, or even to any notion of ambivalence. This is horrified desire, much like the giddy thrill its traumatized protagonists take in documenting the war. The film knows what it wants is awful, but it does not equivocate in its desire.

There is another facet to its notion of image-making that needs to be thought about, however. The core cast divides neatly between the writers (Moura and Henderson) and photographers (Dunst and Spaeny), and makes much of the specific relationships between the two categories—the partnership between Dunst and Moura, the mentorship of Henderson and Dunst, and the budding collaboration between Spaeny and Moura. It also focuses on the tensions between them—one of the film’s best beats, at least if you go by the number of times Penn has witheringly repeated it to me in the weeks since we first saw it, comes when Dunst dismisses a bit of overly poetic insight from Henderson with “OK writer.”

It will not escape attention that part of the paratext of Civil War is Alex Garland’s declaration that after it he would be stepping back from directing in favor of writing. This focus on the collaborations between writers and image-makers is, in other words, a clear externalization of his own thoughts about the various roles involved in visual storytelling. There’s an irony in the fact that Civil War is focused on the photographers, which is to say the side of the equation Garland is stepping away from, but it’s one that makes sense for a farewell.

The case can be made, and even made persuasively, that this aspect of the film is an awkward and arbitrary fit with its focus on war and its horrors. I’d argue that it’s less arbitrary than contingent, however. The writer/artist dualism is clearly a secondary theme—one that’s bled in from Garland’s larger life and thoughts. But that’s how creativity works. My writing has always drawn connections that are governed as much by the happenstance of what’s in my brain as by any notion that I’m offering the “real” explanations of things. It’s hardly a surprise that a screenwriter/soon to retire director making a film focused on the production of images finds himself thinking about the dualism of his two roles.

But the disconnect between these two aspects of the film speaks, to my mind at least, to the ways in which we often err in asking questions about what art is “saying.” There’s a reductivism to the question that is at times a useful shorthand, but that often seems to think of film as an elaborate way to spend two hours saying something that can be captured in a single sentence like “don’t have a civil war.” But that’s simply not the way that Civil War is trying to work. Yes, there are traces of Garland’s doctrinal centrism throughout it, most obviously, as Christine notes, in its complete disinterest in probing the notion of journalistic neutrality. But like its focus on writer/artist relationships this is more an ambient component of it than some sort of telos. The film isn’t about centrism any more than it’s about American political divisions. Contrary to Christine’s assertions, trying to say something is the last thing on Garland’s mind.

No, as I said at the beginning, the film is about image-making, a process it recognizes is inextricable from the acts of looking and witnessing. The various moments in which we catch sight of Garland’s obsessions and limitations are not the film’s subject—they’re just constituent elements of its gaze. One might as well say Parasite is about speaking Korean. The subject is simply the underlying spectacle, in all its terrible allure.

Is this worthwhile? I don’t really know how you’d say it isn’t. An impeccable cast that brings all four of the leads to vivid life, a decadently gorgeous direction, and a subject matter that can sustain the long extended gaze that it offers all combine to give the film a feral urgency. It doesn’t need a message to be substantial. It simply is.