Director Alex Garland's “Civil War” is a series of horrifying set pieces — torture by gas station attendants, summary execution of journalists, an invasion of Washington, D.C., led by California and Texas.
The new film “Civil War” is a cinematic achievement. Director Alex Garland has made a movie that might be worse than a real American civil war.
Perhaps that was Garland’s intention. His film is a series of horrifying set pieces — torture by gas station attendants, summary execution of journalists, an invasion of Washington, D.C., led by California and Texas — that add up to a warning: If we don’t steer away from our current path of political conflict, Garland suggests, this could be the end of the United States.
To be fair, there’s established logic in this message. As Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran wrote: “When we perceive the end in the beginning, we move faster than time. Illumination, that lightning disappointment, affords certitude which transforms disillusion into deliverance.”
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But “Civil War” never provides the illumination or certitude that inspires action. It’s too Hollywood, which is to say it’s too unoriginal and violent.
Indeed, the film is so over-the-top that it feels uncomfortably, well, Putinist. These days, the Russian and Chinese governments routinely promote the idea that the U.S. is headed for a bloody civil war that will destroy the country. “Civil War” brings that propaganda to cinematic life.
If the U.S. does have another civil war, it will not resemble the new film’s vision of warring armies advancing on Washington. That’s an anachronism, owing more to the 1860s Civil War than modern warfare.
Nor will it involve fights between specific states. Our most bitter fault lines are not about geography but ideology, race, gender, age, class and education. A civil war will map those divides within our cities and our neighborhoods.
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Indeed, the real challenge of the next American civil war will be perceiving whether it is a war at all. Such a conflict will be fought with cyberattacks, disinformation and psychological warfare. The battlegrounds will be legal, with warring factions seeking to cancel each other’s rights and prerogatives, and global, with our enemies funding and fueling the conflict while our allies seek to intervene and negotiate peace.
For these reasons, it’s time to retire the idea of California “secession,” even for Californians sympathetic to making the state independent by peaceful means. Let’s face facts: The Golden State is never going to break away and fire on Camp Pendleton, like South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter in 1861. We have no military and no offensive warfare beyond Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Fox News appearances.
No — if California ever becomes an independent nation, the more likely path will be through a U.S. government meltdown. Unfortunately, that scenario is possible. It is easy to imagine a fascist president, with a compliant Supreme Court and Congress, using his military to punish cities and states he doesn’t like. Such a president might invoke executive powers to shut down Congress (as Donald Trump attempted on Jan. 6) or government agencies that won’t bend to his command.
In such a circumstance, California, without representation in Congress, would have to take on the duties of a nation, and over time would naturally drift away from the disintegrating U.S. to become a separate republic.
To make a believable movie about such a real American civil war would require a filmmaker with the virtuosity of the late Akira Kurosawa, whose 1950 film “Rashomon” famously tells one story from multiple, contradictory perspectives. Or perhaps the San Fernando Valley auteur Paul Thomas Anderson (who used a similar technique in “Magnolia”), or Drew Goddard, who made the Lake Tahoe noir “Bad Times at the El Royale,” could manage it.
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Garland’s film never comes close. We never get to know the civil war’s combatants. Instead, the director tells his story through the narrow perspectives of four journalists who come off as callous, selfish or vaguely ridiculous. As the president is about to be executed by California and Texas soldiers, one journalist asks the soldiers to wait a second because “I need a quote.”
The film feels unimaginative because the idea of another American civil war is so old. Marvel made a much smarter film on the subject in 2016 when feuding superheroes turned on each other in 2016’s “Captain America: Civil War.”
But watching Garland’s “Civil War” made me think of the 1997 satire “The Second American Civil War.” That cable TV movie, with scenes filmed at the state Capitol in Sacramento, envisioned a future that looks too much like our present, with Idaho sparking a civil war in a country badly divided by race, immigration, politics and media nonsense.
Like Garland’s film, it hid from the harder questions by putting journalists at center stage. But for all its goofiness, that 27-year-old film was the wiser, more relevant and more responsible movie.
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“The country is falling apart,” says a TV producer in the satire. “We don’t need exclamation marks.”
Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.
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