How to Both-Sides a “Civil War”

Years ago, when I was a freelance journalist desperate for work, I went to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, on a press junket for a big-budget disaster movie. The movie was “2012,” and it was directed by Roland Emmerich, the German box-office savant known as the Master of Disaster. During one event, I sat in a cushy conference room at the Four Seasons with other journalists, eating comped elk chili and sliders, while some New Age-adjacent writers and other self-appointed experts—“2012-ologists,” they were called—briefed us on the coming apocalypse. They were there to put a pseudo-academic sheen on the movie’s cosmic premise, presumably, although no one—not the journalists, not Emmerich, not even the 2012-ologists—seemed to take what they were saying either seriously or literally. Their (erroneous) story was that the ancient Mayan calendar ended abruptly with the year 2012, which was said to be an omen portending—well, no one could say exactly what, but presumably something very big and very bad.

This was a thin premise for a film—little more than an excuse for Emmerich to do what he did best, which was conjuring world-famous landmarks onscreen and then, with campy extravagance, blowing them up. (In “Independence Day,” he destroyed the White House with an alien death ray; in “2012,” he would smash it again, this time with a mega-tsunami.) In the movie, the cosmic conspiracy theorists are proved right: the year 2012 ends not with a whimper but with a bang, or really a sequence of cataclysmic bangs all over the globe. We were in Jackson Hole because one of the V.F.X. money shots in “2012” is the eruption of a supervolcano lurking beneath the surface of Yellowstone Park. There really is a Yellowstone supervolcano. Like the other spectacular plagues in “2012,” including unprecedented solar flares and continent-splitting earthquakes, an eruption that buries much of the Mountain West is something that could happen in real life. On a long enough time line, it very well might. But of the day and hour knoweth no man, least of all Roland Emmerich. In any case, at the Four Seasons, Emmerich did little to conceal the fact that what had drawn him to the subject was not Mayan prophecy but what has come to be known as “pre-awareness.” “2012 is this date, you know, which there’s a lot of ideas about,” he said. “And we chose the destructive one.” It was, in other words, the popular freakout of the moment, repurposed as a form of buzzy I.P.

Press junkets aren’t what they used to be. Last week, I saw “Civil War,” the new film by the British writer and director Alex Garland, in a plain ground-floor screening room on Sixth Avenue. (No elk chili this time. Not even popcorn. And no experts providing historical context.) “Civil War” is not a campy disaster movie. It’s taut, carefully paced, colorful but not overstuffed. As a war movie, it’s closer to “The Hurt Locker” than “Glory”; as a road movie, it’s more “Badlands” than “The Road.” Aesthetically speaking, the film is finely crafted, full of lovely and harrowing images (the wildflowers next to a sniper’s trench; the chassis of a crashed helicopter in an abandoned JCPenney parking lot). As prophecy, however, it’s not so illuminating. Like an erupting supervolcano or a catastrophic solar flare, a second American Civil War is something that really could happen—an unlikely prospect but, still, terrifying enough to be worth worrying about. Yet wars are not random acts of nature. Instead of just hoping for the best, we can try to prevent the worst, if we’re willing to face some hard questions.

The film takes place in what appears to be a very near future, if not an alternate present. (The phones, which don’t work, and the weapons, which very much do, look like today’s models.) The dramatic setup is that of every Pixar movie: unlikely fellow-travellers set off on a high-stakes quest. Here, our heroes are four American journalists, led by a war photographer named Lee (an exhausted-looking Kirsten Dunst), who has racked up accolades and traumas abroad and is now covering a grisly conflict at home. According to a map put out by the film’s U.S. distributor, when the action of “Civil War” begins, nineteen states have seceded. A tyrannical President in his third term (Nick Offerman, who doesn’t go out of his way to act like Donald Trump, but also doesn’t go out of his way not to) is clinging to power, and Lee and her companions, two other weathered veterans and a wide-eyed newbie, want to approach him for an interview. To get to him, they need to travel from New York to Washington, D.C., which will require not a three-hour Acela ride but a death-defying odyssey in a beat-up Ford Excursion.

We follow them as they head south: building-to-building combat by day, ropes of orange rocket fire at night. One day, they fall in with guerrillas in street clothes; the next, they’re following troops in fatigues. It’s often unclear who the good guys are, or whether we’re supposed to care. “West Coast forces, fucking Portland Maoists—it’s all the same,” one of the reporters says. Later, when the newbie expresses concern about whether two prisoners of war are going to survive, Lee chastises her: “Once you start asking yourself those questions, you can’t stop. So we don’t ask. We record so other people ask.” At first, I wondered whether this was meant to be Lee’s P.T.S.D. talking. Is the audience supposed to admire her stout dispassion, or suspect that her moral compass has spun out of control? Then I listened to a few interviews with Garland, in which he made it clear that his protagonist’s opinions were basically his own. “The film is trying to act like the reporters it admires,” he told WNYC (a member station of NPR, which, depending on your position in our current culture war, either is a source of objective information or comprises state-sponsored advocacy journalism). Garland had imagined the mechanics of an American Civil War 2.0 in minute detail, but he had left its causes deliberately obscure, he said, because “at a certain point, the specifics stop mattering. . . . It stops being, in a way, issue-driven, and it just becomes anger.”

But anger doesn’t emerge out of nowhere, in drama or in history. In the real world, journalists are supposed to pay attention to the root causes of Americans’ anguish: racism, runaway inequality, inadequate health care, job insecurity, and so much else. In the world of “Civil War,” we get no hint about what has pushed the country beyond the breaking point, or what makes conditions in the secessionist states different from those in the loyalist states. At the film’s première, during South by Southwest, an interviewer asked Garland about the ubiquity of firearms in the U.S.; Garland, apparently deeming the question too issue-driven, demurred, pointing out that some civil wars had been carried out with machetes rather than guns.

Garland has said that his goal was to make an “emphatically antiwar” movie. Yet “Civil War” remains resolutely incurious about what might cause a contemporary civil war in America—and thus how one might be prevented. (To oppose a hypothetical conflict without confronting the conditions that could ignite it is a bit like claiming to oppose mass incarceration while deliberately avoiding questions about crime, policing, poverty, psychology, judges, and laws.) One of the battles we hear about in the movie is “the Antifa Massacre.” Antifa stands for antifascism, and fascism seems like the sort of issue on which many people—even jaded reporters—might feel obliged to pick a side. Yet Lee tries to hold herself apart, and, by extension, so does the film. “I think civil war is just an extension of a situation,” Garland recently told the Times. “That situation is polarization.” He seems to be trying to have it both ways, using our dire politics as topical I.P. while tap-dancing around frank conversations that might get him in trouble with portions of his potential audience. It’s hard to stay above the fray, though, while also banking on the fray for relevance. Garland’s paeans to objectivity sound noble in theory, but the photojournalist’s lens has never been entirely neutral. Besides, it’s hard to say anything meaningful about a country on the brink of collapse without addressing what brought it there.

You can’t make a movie called “Civil War” without being haunted by a few ghosts, but Garland’s film seems determined to avoid looking at them. In a moment of sweaty exposition, we are told that Lee’s name is an allusion to Lee Miller, the celebrated war photographer for Vogue. (Miller arrived in France a month after D Day, which one could also call an Antifa Massacre.) But it’s impossible to hear the main character’s name without also thinking of Robert E. Lee, especially as the journalists approach the front line, in Charlottesville, Virginia. It surely reveals something about the narrow scope of Garland’s project that he could have named his protagonist Grant or Lincoln, without changing any other details, and it probably wouldn’t have made much difference. There is more exposition throughout the film, much of it amounting to “War is Hell.” It’s hard to argue with that, but it’s also hard to invest too much emotional energy in any text that’s hard to argue with.

The secessionist forces include, most notably, California and Texas; the loyalist states include New York, South Carolina, Kansas, and Arizona. As many viewers have pointed out, this makes no sense. It’s certainly a brazen narrative choice, so eager to avoid provocation that it risks becoming a distraction; it shifts the movie into a different register, if not a different genre, as if Garland had built a fictional world that resembled the real world in every respect except that, for some unexplained reason, there was no gravity. (Emmerich was being indulgent when he blew a hole through Wyoming in “2012,” but at least he put the fault lines in the right place.) In 2022, Barbara F. Walter, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, published a best-selling book called “How Civil Wars Start.” Walter warned that “the U.S. has the risk factors that we know tend to lead to civil war,” but she was also careful not to engage in “fearmongering.” In the London Review of Books, James Meek criticized Walter, in part, for being too careful. “Her text struggles to contain the tension between the view that civil war is an absolute evil, and the possibility that in some civil wars one side is right and the other is wrong,” Meek wrote. (One of his examples was the African National Congress’s struggle against South African apartheid, a struggle that is sometimes misremembered as having been entirely nonviolent.) “It is as if cherished liberal causes—democracy, equal rights, tolerance—should not be associated with the grubbiness of inter-communal violence; as if the fact that the partial victory of these causes in certain countries had to be fought for, in the literal sense of the word, is a dangerous secret.”