Caveat Emptor: This post contains some spoilers for Alex Garland’s new film, Civil War. Please note that this film is not only violent, but also contains some deeply unsettling depictions of war crimes and human suffering.
During a 2003 interview, American novelist Kurt Vonnegut was asked if he believed that his satirical works had the power to change society. Vonnegut replied that satire might help people feel less crazy and alone, but that it could do precious little to change the course of history. By way of example:
During the Vietnam War … every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.
Reviews of Alex Garland’s new film, Civil War, frequently construe it as a “cautionary tale,” a “warning,” or even a “clarion call” to avoid the dark path the United States could take. If this were Garland’s intention, then the film simply fails. For starters, there is almost no exposition on how the present-day United States could fall apart in the manner portrayed by the film; the overarching political situation, namely that California and Texas have joined forces to take down an apparently despotic President, is implausible to the point of comedy. Most importantly, however, Civil War echoes Vonnegut by casting doubt on the idea that art (and by extension the film itself) can change the world.
The plot involves a group of four journalists, helmed by veteran war photographer Lee Smith (an excellent Kirsten Dunst), making their way through a ravaged, mostly deserted, but still often lovely Eastern Seaboard from New York City to DC, in hopes of interviewing the President before the capital falls to the secessionists. After the correspondents leave New York (now apparently populated mostly by snipers and cyclists), the movie quickly takes on an episodic feel. Each stop along the way to DC is a set-piece: most violent, some baffling, one unexpectedly heart-warming, one thoroughly sickening. This last features the only character in the film espousing something like an ideology, a militia leader (Jesse Plemons) who is taking advantage of the overall situation to engage in a bit of ethnic cleansing.
Lee, herself a celebrated photojournalist who has spent decades covering conflicts around the globe, is as committed as her namesake Lee Miller to recording the unvarnished reality of war. She snaps away as the unspeakable unfolds around her. But to what end? Early on in the film, the journalists have made camp somewhere in rural Pennsylvania. As they watch the night sky light up with flares and tracer rounds, Lee confesses to her colleagues that she had hoped that her work covering foreign conflicts would have done some good for her home country. “Every time I survived a war zone,” she says, “I thought I was sending a message home: ‘Don’t do this.’ Yet here we are.”
Here we are, indeed, powerless against the tides of history, and powerless especially against human nature and its propensity to violence. All that’s left is the work itself, and the courage, integrity and devotion necessary to do it well. Lee’s colleagues are astonished that she still sometimes thinks in terms of changing the world; for them, “the job” is self-containing and self-justifying. If one is fortunate enough to have been given a vocation, one simply does it. For these journalists, the antidote to despair is to stay focused on the task at hand. The work keeps them going through the dissolution of society, the atrocities perpetrated by all sides to the conflict, and even the deaths of beloved colleagues.
For every reviewer who found in Civil War a “cautionary tale,” another was left scratching her head, unable to fathom why an ostensibly political movie has very little interest in actual politics. It seems that Garland, however, has other ideas. Grand artistic statements designed to change the world are as naive as Smith’s journalistic ambitions. The war photographer should have known, as Vonnegut knew, that journalistic (or academic or artistic) integrity does not and cannot save the world. If Garland has a message, it is to attend to the work you’ve been given, no matter how much the landscape becomes a hellscape.
But as admirable as this kind of stoicism may be in its own way, it is not remotely the same thing as hope — a thing which none of the characters in this film ever allow themselves to express. One of the journalists drily opines that the fall of DC will not end the conflict, but only usher in its next phase. At no point does anyone try to imagine a post-war society. Hope, after all, has to do with the future, which we cannot control and, often enough, cannot even influence (our efforts to make the world a better place really can feel like bringing custard pies to a gunfight). Hope is, finally, a form of dependence on other people, and other people are inevitably fickle and fragile. Let us keep our heads down and stick to the task at hand, “do the next right thing,” and enjoy the good we find.
Civil War left me feeling hollow for days afterwards, the way one feels after being presented with a vision of the world that is simultaneously cogent and intolerable. As such, I find it ironic that a number of reviewers have referred to the film as “apocalyptic.” In one sense, this an apt description: the movie depicts the fiery end of the present order of things. But the English term “apocalyptic” (derived from the Greek word for “revelation” or “unveiling”) is rooted in a particular genre of Jewish religious literature — enthusiastically adopted by the emerging Christian church — that deals symbolically with God bringing an end to the present evil age and then setting the world aright. “Apocalypse” in our language has come to refer only to destruction, but in its original context it also spoke of restoration and renewal. It is a literature born of hope in the midst of crisis.
The writers of this genre were all too familiar with the rise and fall of kingdoms and the violent unraveling of societies. What they understood is that hope is necessary for human beings, but that its object must be eternal or else it will, sooner or later, be lost. It is God who brings about the new age, not us. This does not render our work irrelevant. It is precisely because he makes all things new that not the smallest action done for his sake and for the good of others will ultimately fall to the ground (cf. Mt 10:42).
It’s mercifully unlikely that the United States will dissolve in anything like the manner envisioned by Civil War. It’s even more unlikely that the rage, resentment, mistrust and, yes, the dark and violent impulses that plague our country will get better before they get worse. But more than a blind stoicism, it’s important now to set our hopes in the right place — not so that we can escape whatever trials lie ahead, but rather so that we can bear them with love (and perhaps even joy) in our hearts.
