“Civil War” and the last draft of history

The moment Alex Garland’s Civil War clicked fully into place was when I realized that nobody was writing anything down.

The film, a dystopian road-movie thriller about a motley team of journalists—two photojournalists, one newswire guy, and one print straggler—trying to reach Washington, D.C. before secessionists execute a fascistic three-term President so that they can be there when the secessionists execute said fascistic three-term President, is deeply obsessed with showing its two duelling photojournalists doing the work. So much of this movie is spent watching Lee (Kirsten Dunst) or Jesse (Cailee Spaeny) photograph the scene in front of us, a camera glued to their faces, or in cutaways of their photos. But they never really ask anyone a question, save for a few offhand remarks and two key instances—first, when Lee asks to take the photo of a man ‘defending’ a gas station with his trussed-up victims, and second, when Joel (Wagner Moura) sarcastically asks a cashier in a far-too-sleepy town if she knows about the civil war.

These reporters are a nominally curious bunch at best, chumming around each other or with rebels and snipers, but never really investigating or learning or reporting in any recognizable sense. Rather than acting in a manner similar to the prescriptive, rules-and-norms sense you’d find in a J-school ethics class (or in other reporter-hoo-rah film classics like All the President’s Men or Spotlight), we are instead presented with a group of adrenaline junkies who barely disguise their addiction with a patina of Fourth Estate big-headedness. They act not as chroniclers, but mythologists, hiding behind the canard that they’re “writing the first draft of history” yet not writing a damn thing, careless and uncaring to the end. Even Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), derisively referred to as “what’s left of the New York Times” by Joel, never really reports anything—not about the journey, not about the weird frozen-in-time village they land in, not about the gas station. He’s stuck in place, counselling his juniors and bearing their tired jokes about his age, trying to nudge them closer to reality as he sees it, to understand that this war-torn hellhole version of the United States feels “like everything I remembered.”

Garland as a filmmaker is, charitably, not well known for the subtle deployment of metaphor. Across both his earlier genre writing (Sunshine, 28 Days Later, etc.) and his directorial efforts (Ex Machina, Men, etc.), his films trends towards a kind of muted obviousness—his characters never park and bark per se, but they will spend a lot of time pondering their circumstances in a two-shot and hey what do you know those circumstances tend to be physicalized into some kind of corrupted or alien presence that neatly acts as synecodche for the theme. He’s laser-focussed on depersonalization, too, from the robotic simulacra of Ex Machina to the digital simulacra of Devs to the alien simulacra of Annihilation.

Ultimately, for all of Garland’s blustery breathless both-sidesy foot-in-mouth junket interviews, or that stupid fucking map A24 tweeted out, or those stupid fucking A.I. promotional images that A24 tweeted out, Civil War is, nakedly, a movie tracking that same sense of depersonalization through the total and corrupting impact of war via a group of limitlessly-arrogant frontline journalists who buy into their own hype.

[This is the point at which I should disclose that my partner is a rep for the actor who plays Tony (Nelson Lee), one of the Hong Konger journalists in the film, so I have had more time than most to think this over]

This is not to say I came away wholly dismissive of my viewing experience. I think Civil War is, if not an important film, then at least an urgent and interesting one. It looks unsurprisingly great—Garland and his regular director of photography Rob Hardy deploy their typical visual inventiveness, with a flair for the bitterly ironic. The way Americana is deployed (Go Steelers!) is utterly bleak and delightful in turn. Moreover, the film sounds evil, because it sounds like war—great care has been taken to accurately render gunshots and explosions, to fully shape how bullets pop against concrete and metal and flesh. It’s dizzyingly easy to take a quick mental hop from the fantasy violence and destruction on screen to the real, harrowing violence of recent conflict—Ukraine, Gaza, wherever—fed to us at 4K/60fps with crisp audio on our TikTok feeds. Garland couples that deeply realistic audiovisual landscape with a fairly simple visual device to emphasize moments when the journalists fall out of sync with their mission; he reminds you that a camera exists. Lens distortion halos around traumatized faces, stretching light and color away from reality and towards a total breakdown of human personhood. And, as Lee grows more and more distraught by the chaos surrounding her, Jesse charges headlong into conflict, inching closer and closer to the film’s ideal photojournalist—that is, a picture-taking automaton that bleeds.

But there exists no coherent polity in Civil War, no audience outside of the one sitting in the theatre. Naomi Fry called it “photography on empty” in this week’s Critics at Large episode, and that is fundamentally the core issue with this film’s approach to journalism—it is maniacally obsessed with the power of image, the act of picking a frame and shooting it, but it has no care for the reception of those images within its own universe, preferring to offload the reaction of those images directly onto the audience through quick and isolating still frames. There’s some light muttering during an early scene at a New York hotel regarding Lee’s inability to finish uploading her photos, but there’s never any editors checking back in, no sense of how ‘the story’ that Joel is obsessively pursuing is being received by the people who, like Lee and Jesse’s parents, are camped out in the middle of nowhere pretending nothing is wrong. The version of the United States in this film is one where information landscapes have broken down entirely, and nobody’s much interested in putting them back together. The President broadcasts to nobody. The only quote-unquote intrusions into the narrative from outside the country’s borders are an offhanded reference to Canadian currency holding far more value than the dollar, and the pair of Hong Konger journalists whose encounter with Jesse Plemons serve as a remarkably straightforward narrative escalation.

More than one person highlighted the 2004 Abu Ghraib photos that the film’s final shot plays on, with Western Forces soldiers grinning triumphantly in a destroyed Oval Office and a trophy killing at their feet, but without an audience to receive it, without any citizenry to respond to these photos of Jesse’s—these last drafts of history, the ones that show the end of America—the film’s last moment serves only as a reminder of our own cruelty. Back in the car after the scene at the gas station, while Jesse anxiously frets about not taking any pictures of the grim tableau before her, Lee snaps back. “We don’t ask. We record so other people ask. You want to be a journalist? That’s the job,” she says acidly. But, the thing about Lee in this moment is that she’s hopelessly wrong, and I think the really tricky aspect of this movie is that Garland gives away just enough to make you believe that he also thinks she’s wrong. He thinks this shit sucks! But he doesn’t want to say that he thinks it sucks. Garland is, like Lee and Jesse, pathologically committed to showing above all else. The level of brutality on display here is hard to stomach, as is the near-constant assault-on-all-senses construction of the film, but nothing on display here is out of the realm of possibility. It could happen here.

I think the way to understand this movie is that it’s not really about journalism, and it certainly isn’t about the political circumstances that civil wars arise out of—both because of what the film itself is and Garland’s steadfast refusal to comment beyond gestue vaguely at political polarization during the press junket. I think this movie slots in to a specific type of war movie that is less about war as a political engine, but war as a physical and emotional experience. One could very efficiently place this next to The Thin Red Line or The Hurt Locker and hear the pins in the lock click into place; these are movies that, if they have any sense of the politics of war, only acknowledge those politics insofar as they explain why our characters are where they are—why an American soldier may find themself in Iraq or Japan is secondary to the on-the-ground reality of being there, the stress and conflict and bullets and blood and anxiety and sweat and crushing, empty, hollow fear. They are broad-base morality plays about what we do to ourselves and each other. Civil War posits, very forwardly, that we all may be too far gone.

More tk,

Luis