Coming Attractions
Behind the lines with Alex Garland’s “Civil War”.
In 2017, I went to see Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk in a village a few towns over from where I was living in the Netherlands, in a place called Huizen. We took our bikes to the cinema, riding past ivy-covered houses, between tall hedges, and across cobblestones along the 8km route. The woods off to the sides of the main road held the odd tank trap, trench, and bunker where I occasionally walked our dog.
Once the lights dimmed and the film started, as the tommies walked through the streets of the titular French city, I realized for the first time I was watching a WWII story from behind the front. Huizen, like Dunkirk, was Nazi-occupied territory for a stretch of the war. As an American who had spent a lifetime watching similar stories from the safety of the US or even the UK, this was a momentary odd feeling, a shift of perspective. Even 80-plus years on, memories are still there for older locals, and some people have already forgotten.
I had that feeling again this past Friday night as the lights went down, and the action began to unspool in Alex Garland's controversial new film, Civil War. We were lucky to get a couple of tickets to see a preview of the film before its normal opening date in the city where we currently live, Barcelona. I could not help but be aware that we were watching in a place where civil war is still within living memory, where disputes still carry on regarding the memory of those killed by Franco's regime, and where artifacts of that regime are still being removed. In Catalonia, the movement for independence, intensified as a result of the war from 1936-39, is still just beneath the surface, and a controversial amnesty has recently been extended by the Spanish government to a group of pro-independence Catalan politicians. In other words, the half-life of civil war is at least a century here.
Civil War is an uncomplicated film but a complicated experience. Getting past where I was watching it and my awareness of how scenes of bullet-ridden bodies in pits might land with my neighbors, my relationship to the storyline as a long-term American expat was interesting, to say the least. As someone who has watched the past nine years in America unfold from a distance, a distance created intentionally due in part to a desire to leave America's decaying political environment, the mood of the story was both alien and deeply familiar. More about this in a minute.
The familiarity was heightened by my visceral recognition of the Georgia landscapes against which a large part of the film was shot, in and around Atlanta. These are landscapes where I grew up and went to high school, for example, in a town famous for being situated next to one of the American Civil War's largest battlefields and where a local crank/racist cultivated a particularly gross persona around his collection and sale of Confederate and KKK memorabilia from a shop on the main street. As a kid, the woods behind my house were pocked with trenches from that conflict. As I got older, the local pride in being part of this conflict, and in what it represented, faded into the cultural background, pockmarked by the occasional historic re-enactment. But it never fully faded away, and is now comfortable home territory for MAGA supporters, backers of the January 6 insurrection, and wannabe secessionists. What seemed like a movement consigned to history growing up turned out to always be lurking just below the surface.
(Warning: spoilers below the line)
Early reviews pretty much agree: Civil War is not a story-rich film. It has the feeling of being written in a hurry, using in part actors Garland has worked with a number of times. They are mostly painted with the depth of an average video game character today. We only know details about Lee, the war photographer, dragged out of her by Jessie, the tag-along who follows Lee and reporter colleague Joel on their risky dash to Washington, DC, to interview a president holed up in a besieged White House. If you're coming for a fully fleshed out script with A-plots and B-plots, etc, turn your SUV around and weave through manned roadblocks to your local bookstore. You won't find it here.
Much has been made of how vague the background scenario is, in particular the ambiguity of the conflict itself. Who are the good guys? Who are the baddies? Is this realistic? How did we get here? Which side would I pull for? People need their lore. The narrative conflict is, well, The Conflict. The sprint Lee, Joel, Jessie, and another ride-along, veteran NYT writer Sammy, make from Manhattan to DC is a learning journey for Jessie, who gets to see the horrors Lee has seen through a lens and firsthand in her international experience—a crash course in the evil of her fellow humans.
Except, this action doesn't take place in South Sudan, Gaza, or Timor-Leste. It's happening in South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee. The brutal violence against neighbors and fellow citizens is coming, finally, from inside the house. Backpack bombs, death squads, kill rooms, and mass graves confront Jessie—and the audience—with both in-your-face suddenness and unsettling mundanity, not a million miles from the eerie domesticity of Oscar winner The Zone of Interest. A Santaland drive become a sniper alley. A high school stadium becomes a refugee camp. A corporate campus becomes a free-fire zone. Suburban skylines are dotted by columns of smoke. The pop-pop of rifle fire can be heard from the empty parking lot of a derelict JCPenney*. Lee sees and feels this mind-jarring dissonance. Through her flashbacks mid-firefight and arresting black and white stills taken by both Lee and Jessie, we do too.
This is the payload of Civil War. It's more of a simulation experience than a story, more of a terrible thrill ride than a thriller. Americans don't yet have a living memory of these horrible scenes of destructive civil conflict that many other cultures carry today. It's all a fantasy story until it's not. January 6th was cosplay of a reality that may be easy to call for, but utter hell to experience if and when we're finally there. There are no two sides, no simple gray and blue, no clean and unclean, just a blur of factions and a tangle of front lines. Things can unravel fast, and the final, actual descent into chaos will do more than hurt your ears in a comfortable cinema.
*Unsettlingly similar to the one in an abandoned mall where I received my first and second Covid vaccinations, administered by uniformed National Guardsmen, while mallsoft played in the distance.