[COLUMN] Alex Garland's Civil War is Apocalypse Now on the Potomac | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains mild spoilers for Civil War.

Alex Garland’s Civil War is not a political polemic, but instead a descent into madness.

The movie portrays a vision of the United States that has collapsed into Civil War, but the movie largely avoids providing any backstory or exposition to explain what happened, beyond the broadest strokes. An unnamed American President (Nick Offerman) has decided to hold onto power into his third term, and this has led to the disintegration of the “more perfect union.” Texas and California have aligned together, while Florida fights on its own front.

The film is deliberately and pointedly vague. At one point, aspiring photographer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) compliments veteran Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) for her snapshots of “the antifa massacre.” Neither character elaborates on the particulars of the event. Were “antifa” the perpetrators or the victims of the massacre? Did the event take place within the current state of war, as part of the build-up to it, or as part of something largely unrelated? Civil War never answers.

Even in terms of visual language, Civil War adopts a very shallow focus. Cinematographer Rob Hardy often shoots characters in close-up, with the background blurred behind them. This leads to some truly stunning imagery, evokes classic war photography and gives the movie a dream-like feel, but it also serves a deeper thematic purpose. Civil War is an experiential movie, not an expositional one. It is focused on the urgency and the immediacy of what is happening, not explanations.

This vagueness isn’t carelessness. Watching Civil War, one gets the sense that Garland has put a lot of thought into the internal logic of his film. Civil War doesn’t necessarily depict a literal representation of the modern United States, but a nightmarish abstraction. Garland himself has described the movie as “a war film in the Apocalypse Now mode.” It is a fairly accurate description: Civil War is Apocalypse Now on the Potomac rather than on the fictional Nung river.

The movie is populated with imagery drawn from contemporary politics. Although Garland wrote the first drafts of the script before the Capitol Riots, he acknowledges their influence. “What I had was this incredibly intense feeling that this is a disgrace,” he admits. “Later, as time went by, some of that anger fed into the project. Not so much in terms of rewriting scenes or dialogue or anything. But more to do with an internal sense of motivation. Something that felt more distant felt less distant.”

Civil War is a movie about a President unwilling to surrender power. During one interlude, militia fighters are shown wearing Hawaiian shirts, the attire associated with the real-life right-wing radical group known as the Boogaloo Boys, who openly advocate for a Second American Civil War. Repeatedly throughout the film, references are made to Charlottesville as a bloody battleground, which inevitably evokes the memory of the “Unite the Right” rally from 2017.

From the moment that the first trailer premiered, observers understandably gawked at the prospect of traditionally liberal California and traditionally conservative Texas aligning to take down the President. However, Civil War makes it clear that such an alliance is strictly one of opportunity. New York Times reporter Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) opines that the victors of the conflict will inevitably turn on one another as soon as the dust settles over this conflict.

However, this premise doesn’t seem quite as outlandish. There is a sizable right-wing vote in California, including the secessionist movement known as “Yes California.” Founder Louis Marinelli recently posited Californian secession as “an alternative to potential civil violence and civil war in the country.” This is without getting into the influence that right-wing technocrats hold over the state or the Californian Ideology as “right-wing economics covered over with a layer of hippie rhetoric.”

Watching Civil War, there is a strong sense that the central conflict is not a neatly-defined battle between a clearly-defined political left and political right. This seems to be the biggest controversy around the film, but something that feels reflective of a reality in which America’s ostensibly “left-wing” party employs draconian immigration measures, orders drone strikes overseas, and demonstrates a reluctance to fight for the rights of women and minorities.

Instead, Civil War is a literalization of what Thomas Hobbes described as “a war of all against all”, which is perhaps the inevitable endpoint of a certain strand of American libertarianism. Watching the film, there’s a repeated emphasis on the idea that there are no ordering principles for this descent into anarchy, that battle lines are not clearly established and that ideology is far less important to those fighting than the notion of power as an end unto itself.

At one point, the leads wander into a fire fight between rival snipers. “What’s going on?” asks Joel (Wagner Moura), seeking refuge among eerily abandoned Christmas decorations. “Someone is trying to kill us,” explains the spotter (Karl Glusman). “We are trying to kill them.” That is the essence of it. Joel is confused by the lack of any larger picture. “You don’t know what side you’re fighting for?” Joel asks. This is an encapsulation of one of the larger ideas simmering through the film.

One of the bigger and bolder ideas in Civil War is to approach the concept of the United States in the same way that American pop culture has long approached overseas conflicts like Vietnam, treating them as abstract theatres for unsettling psychodramas about human nature and American identity. Indeed, it’s possible to position Civil War alongside other recent films like The Creator and shows like The Sympathizer as a long-overdue reckoning with America’s treatment of the Vietnam War.

Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was not meaningfully about Vietnam, but instead a journey into an American madness, a western extrapolated across the Pacific Ocean. Hollywood has spent years making movies set in overseas warzones with only the broadest possible understanding of the historical or cultural contexts of the wars that it is depicting. In such stories, the specifics are often unimportant and context is frequently a luxury.

In this context, it is probably worth acknowledging that Garland is a British writer and director. He enjoyed a long creative partnership with Scottish director Danny Boyle, and the two will be teaming up again. He has worked on quintessentially British projects like Dredd and MEN, and even his ostensibly American projects like Ex Machina tend to involve some measure of British funding. He still lives in the United Kingdom. Civil War is the work of an outsider looking in.

There is arguably a self-importance in the way that American pop culture has historically used these foreign countries to make arguments for and about itself. Lee Smith is a veteran war photographer, and Civil War reveals that she is haunted by the atrocities that she witnessed on foreign soil. However, even in hindsight, she sees those horrors as primarily important in the abstract, as they speak to a presumed American audience.

Lee insists that she doesn’t editorialize, that she leaves it to her audience and to opinion writers to explain her images. However, early in the film she admits a sense of disillusionment to Sammy. “Every time I survived a war zone - every time I got the photo - I thought I was sending a warning home,” she tells Sammy as they watch gunfire light up the sky. “Don’t do this.” She sighs, “But here we are.” Those images, presented without context, become a prophecy – it can happen here.

Civil War has been positioned, including by star Kirsten Dunst, as “a love letter to war journalists.” Indeed, the film is largely about a quartet of journalists embarking on a journey to Washington to interview the President in the final days of the conflict. The structure is, like Apocalypse Now, a picaresque narrative. In its own weird way, Civil War is an example of “a quintessentially American form”, the classic road movie.

In some ways, the movie’s refusal to provide a wider context is an acknowledgement of how characters like Lee and Joel interact with the war, as an abstract force to be experienced and documented, with the process of understanding it best left to others. Lee is searching for the perfect shot. Joel is hoping to get a quote from the President that will somehow explain or justify the madness that has taken root in the nation. Sammy warns Joel that no answer will satisfy.

While Civil War is perhaps a bit more ambivalent about its leads than the term “love letter” might suggest – the characters are frequently shown to be reckless and the resolutions of various arcs are far from uplifting – there is perhaps some power to the decision to strip away context, in the hope that it might reveal something more profound and more true hiding underneath the surface. At times, Civil War feels like a short story collection rather than a single narrative, and those short stories offer a prism through which the audience might peer.

At one point, the characters find themselves in a community untouched by war. “We just try to stay out,” explains a local shop owner (Melissa Saint-Amand), reading her book at the counter. It looks idyllic. It evokes a nostalgic reminiscence of an America long past. Lee almost seems seduced by the romance of it, until Sammy points out the armed soldiers standing on all the rooftops and the fact that the town is entirely white. It’s a paradise – but only under the gun and only for certain people.

Later, the journalists find themselves confronted by a soldier (Jesse Plemons). It’s unclear who exactly he is fighting for, beyond himself. Holding the group at gunpoint, he demands, “What kind of American are you?” It’s an allusion to a jingoistic song composed by Alber Von Tilzer during the First World War. The answer is life and death. When Tony (Nelson Lee) acknowledges that he is a journalist from Hong Kong, the soldier executes him on the spot.

It's moments like these that suggest something more profound stirring beneath Civil War, something divorced from the politics of the moment and instead engaged with something more deeply rooted within the American character. Civil War is less concerned with the specifics of contemporary political alignments or organizing principles than it is with the idea that there is a more primal force bubbling beneath the surface, finding expression through this chaos.

For all the criticisms of Garland’s refusal to engage in neat political didacticism, the result is far more unsettling and provocative than any comforting affirmation of the audience’s already-held ideology. Civil War is less a story about the specifics of America at this particular moment than it is a snapshot of the nightmares simmering in the collective subconscious. It’s all the more effective for that.