Present Tense: Civil War (Alex Garland, 2024)

I saw Civil War for the first time on the night Donald Trump got shot. I don’t know how effective the movie would have been, on any other night, but in the moment, it was terrifying.

It’s hard to remember how that night felt. Donald Trump has now lived through a half-dozen comically bungled attempts on his life, like the Road Runner outrunning Wile E. Coyote, all of them carried out — like the first one — by his fellow Republicans. In the moment, though, it felt like history. The man has a cult behind him, and when you martyr the leader of a cult, you end up with a God. It’s even worse when the cult leader survives the attempt, and is able to direct and steer the narrative of his own martyrdom.

So that was the mood, the first time Trump got shot: It’s over. We lost. He’s untouchable. My husband told me about it like he was informing me of a death in the family, and I have actually had recent deaths in my family, so I have basis for comparison. But that night, he’d gotten his Blu-Ray of Alex Garland’s Civil War, and we put it in, and spent the rest of the night staring in quiet panic at the TV screen.

Here’s the thing: Civil War certainly looks like a lot of the nightmare scenarios that have been playing in my head, for the past eight years or so. I don’t know that it has a vision or purpose, outside of concretizing those anxiety nightmares. I’m not certain that it’s ethical storytelling to just press the panic button, stand back, and see what happens — not if you don’t have anything else to say. Civil War’s message (“war bad”) is something you can get in a million other movies, and dressing it up in America’s current civil unrest entails a lot of moral and political specifics that the movie doesn’t necessarily want to take on.

Is it scary, though? Absolutely. It’s not great reporting, but it’s a really good disaster movie. So let’s assemble our final cast of players:

Kirsten Dunst!
Cailee Spaeny!
Childless cat ladies!
“What’s left of the New York Times!”
Wagner Moura!
Immigrant purges!
President Ron Swanson!
Journalists talking about the importance of journalism!
Journalists doing nothing to solve society’s problems!
Genocide!
Stephen McKinley Henderson!
The specter of fascism!
Zero evidence of any surviving trans people!
Jesse Plemons!
Really, just a lot of death!
Hawk Tuah!

So: We open on a war-torn United States. The President, played by fictional character Ron Swanson, is at war with the rebel forces of the Western front — California and Texas — and also with Florida, for some reason. If these battle lines seem nonsensical to you, well, you are beginning to see the point of the movie, which is that, once people start shooting each other, regional and cultural and even political distinctions all matter less than not getting shot.

We can talk about whether this is a good argument, and I plan to. Right now, let’s just establish what the argument is: “War bad,” and war also quite chaotic, so that once the shooting starts, you can’t always tell who is on your side, or whether the sides even stand for anything other than their own brute force.

Into all this comes Kirsten Dunst, a battle-weary war photographer who has been documenting all the terrible things human beings do to each other for her entire adult life. She’s haggard, dissociated, dead inside, reduced to eating salad with her hands like some kind of wild animal.

Harrowing!

With her comes co-journalist Wagner Moura and beloved character actor Stephen McKinley Henderson, playing, essentially, Journalism Yoda. All are headed to Washington, D.C. to interview President Ron Swanson before the White House falls to the rebel forces, which it is certain to do any day now. Along for the ride is Cailee Spaeny, a bright young thing who wants to be a war photographer just like Kirsten Dunst when she grows up.

Casting Kirsten Dunst as the human embodiment of PTSD is probably the movie’s smartest decision, and also its most depressing. Most of us can recall her as a child actor, and we can also recall that — back when Kirsten Dunst was a child actor — America was a lot cheerier and more stable than it is now. Like, it’s hard enough to live through this election without being reminded that I am the same age as the girl from Bring it On, and we are both old.

Yet even as we tour the apocalyptic American landscape, it’s Kirsten Dunst’s psyche that is our main focus, and it’s important that we all remember her younger, happier, cheerleader-comedy-making self, so that we can see how hollowed-out and devastated she’s become. Dunst clearly sees her younger self in Cailee Spaeny, and it hurts. Some part of her wants to reward the girl for her talent, and another part wants to warn her of the catastrophe her life will become. I feel the same way whenever anybody signs up for Twitter, so I get it.

I haven’t shared a lot of specific plot details here, and that’s because there are none — in fact, there isn’t really any plot. The journalists go somewhere; upsetting things happen, and people die. They go somewhere else; more upsetting things, more dead people. They get in the van. They travel to a new location. Upsetting things continue to happen, both at that location and on the journey. “War bad,” is the plot of Civil War, and seeing all of these deaths portrayed in clear, visceral, (literally) photorealistic detail will certainly convince you that this is a true statement. It is not, however, a complete one, and now we can talk about the world outside of the film.

Is Alex Garland a TERF? I mean: He’s a white British man in his mid-fifties with self-identified feminist politics, so it makes sense to ask. The noxiously transphobic columnist Helen Lewis is thanked in the credits for Civil War, along with right-wing influencer Andy Ngo. Men, Garland’s last movie, contained some pretty questionable imagery.

I don’t want Alex Garland to be a TERF. He’s one of my favorite filmmakers. I’m still not over finding out about Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead, so losing the Ex Machina guy would be a lot. I also don’t know that Alex Garland is a TERF; I don’t have anywhere near enough evidence to make the accusation. But the fact that there is so little evidence concerns me. In 2024, when anti-trans animus is fueling large parts of American politics, Garland made an explicitly political movie about America, and I still don’t know where he stands.

The political instability of present-day America has its own specific history, and I’m sympathetic to those who feel that it’s irresponsible to comment on the situation in a manner that implies both sides are the same. One of the sides has Nazis on it. One doesn’t. It's a fairly obvious distinction.

Civil War doesn’t make that clear, or at least, doesn’t make it clear enough. I walked away from my first viewing thinking I knew what the different sides represented — President Ron Swanson speaks in Trumpian rhetoric, is on his third term in office, has called for airstrikes on U.S. citizens, executes journalists on sight, and has disbanded the FBI, so I’m pretty sure he’s the fascist — but critic Matt Zoller Seitz, who also felt sure he knew what was going on, came out of the movie with the opposite reading. Obviously, there is tactical vagueness being deployed.

That said: I’m also frustrated with some of the left-leaning criticism, which seems to imply that the movie is wrong for condemning violence, or to believe Garland is under some obligation to produce pure revolutionary propaganda about the glorious uprising to come. This essay by Matt Lynch, for instance, rips into Garland for making movies about misogyny and “how it’s hard to be a sad woman sometimes” (because filmmakers with a genuine interest in women’s interior lives are, I guess, so common?) and complains that “the only victims of harrowing, brutal violence that we see on camera until the final moments are people of color.”

I don’t know what to tell you, about that complaint, except that it’s literally just untrue. The first big, violent set piece in the movie centers on two white men who are being tortured behind a gas station. Before that, we see a suicide bombing in a crowded city street, with victims of many races and genders; right afterward, we see a white soldier shot in the head while he’s sitting in his own blood, sobbing and pleading for someone to help him.

This kind of writing routinely lures me into defending things I don’t even really like, because the writer is so concerned with proving their political bona fides by writing a takedown of the movie that they’re not even really watching the movie. Even if the movie is bad, your criticism still has to be good, or there’s no point.

The final thirty minutes that he's talking about depict an armed and bloody raid on the White House, and I hate to tell you this, but: This guy's parents worked in publishing. He has, so far as I know, never worked a 9 to 5 job in his adult life. He lives on Patreon money and has reviewed roughly 80% of the movies on Letterboxd. If this guy tried to pick up a gun, he would throw his back out, and he likely knows this. There is no purpose to this kind of thing, and no politics. It's just pointless, nihilistic, 13-year-old-boy-level glorification of violence that he will never engage in and which he almost certainly wouldn't survive.

It bothers me when anyone splits the world into Right and Wrong, when they glorify rage and hatred and revenge as motivators, when they find ways to dehumanize their enemies. You only do that when you’re trying to convince young people to sign up for a war. If those young people go to war, they will die, and those who don’t will come back scarred for life, physically or mentally or both. Propaganda exists to get you so high on your own righteousness — or so drunk on hatred of the enemy — that you forget that. Armed conflict happens; it may be inevitable; it may even be justifiable, but I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t dread it. People who write the rationales for warfare are rarely the ones headed for the front lines.

War bad; war very bad, and anyone telling you otherwise is trying to get you to die for their cause, so tell them to forget it. Yet war sometimes finds us. War is happening, right now, in Gaza; I don’t talk about it much, because the world is not generally improved by me sharing opinions on things I don’t understand, and because every time I look at a headline, the sheer extent of the violence is so massive that my mind goes grey around the edges and I can’t really comprehend it. Nothing is served, though, if I pretend both sides are equally violent; there are tens of thousands more deaths, more civilian deaths, on the Palestinian side.

Everyone who fights does it for a reason, and I like to try to understand people’s reasons, because living in a world of reasonable people whose motivations I can comprehend is less scary than the alternative. But I would be lying to you if I said every reason was good.

A disaster movie is a controlled burn; you destroy the world to tell a story about saving it, identify some real or imagined flaw in the body politic and let it tear everything apart, just so that you can watch people put it back together again. It’s an inherently optimistic genre, or at least it was, back when Tommy Lee Jones was solving racism and outrunning a collapsing skyscraper in the name of volcano management.

The time when Tommy Lee Jones did that was long ago. Racism — outside of the world of Volcano (1997) — kept existing, and kept on being a problem. Climate change has continued and intensified and gotten faster; on the day you will read this, my weather forecast tells me, it will be 76 degrees in November in upstate New York. Xenophobia kept happening, pandemics kept happening, the election of charismatic leaders who turn anxiety into rage kept on happening, and maybe it will happen again today.

No disaster is ever really over. It all adds up. The body politic, like our own bodies, does not necessarily fall apart under every assault — but it gets older, and it gets scarred, and all the little problems and pains keep adding up over the years. Every body has a time limit, a certain number of adverse events it can survive. When that number is up, it will just stop working.

I don’t know if America has stopped working. It felt possible that it had, the night Trump got shot at for the first time, and it feels possible again today. What I admire about Civil War is its bleakness. It lets the bottom fall out; it tears everything apart and refuses to put it back together. What I fear, about my fellow Americans, is their willingness to do the same thing.

If and when the bottom falls out, it won’t be good for anybody. Some of us may not be able to believe that until we’re already there. We need to see the worst happen to believe it can happen — but what have the past ten or twenty or thirty years been, if not an exercise in seeing the worst-case scenario play itself out, over and over and over? After so many years of setting things on fire and blowing them up, when does the turn come, the part where we come together and fix it? Turn the TV off, step out your door, look around you. Try, now, to give some happy ending to the disaster in which you live.

Civil War is on Max. The Elizabeth Bishop poem I'm thinking about is over here.

If you want a disaster that's somewhat more uplifting, over at Xtra, I have conducted a scientific investigation into the many trans genders of Godzilla.

That's it for the no-longer-Halloween Special! I'll go back behind the paywall next week, but I had one more movie to cover, so I covered it. Disaster movies are always a little too long.