Coop Scoop: 'Civil War' Movie Celebrates Detachment

It's vacuous trash from which we learn nothing.

April 22, 2024

By Marc Cooper

This edition is about the number one movie currently in the U.S., Alex Garland’s Civil War.

Don’t worry if you have not yet seen it.  There are no spoilers.  Mostly because there is absolutely nothing in the film to spoil.

The story, set more or less in the present or the very near future, is about an American Civil War that has torn most of the country apart.  There seems to be a vaguely Trumpian President in power. He is in his third term and has dissolved the FBI (though we don’t know if he did this because he was faced with an armed uprising or were these acts the cause of the revolt.   He is on the verge of losing the war to something called the Western Forces – an alliance between, are you ready, California and Texas!

No, this isn’t an intentional comedy. Though the thought itself belongs in a stand up act. That one detail should be enough to tell you this movie is a waste of time as it has absolutely nothing, zip, nada of substance to transmit. Oh, wait…I take that back. We do learn that War is Hell, a lot of people die, cars and buildings get wrecked, shopping malls are turned to rubble, highways are littered with shot-up cars and, in this case, we also learn that some folks in The Great Flyover of the Heartland are ignoring the bloody, rather apocalyptic conflict and are going about their usual, small daily lives.  Choosing Texas and California and secondarily Florida as the spearhead of the rebellion is an obvious, cheap and clunky ploy by Garland to not offend anybody across the current political divide and for the audience to make sure Garland is not taking sides. 

I mean, who would want to choose a side in a civil war where the oldest democracy in the world is about to collapse.

The film follows four journalists scurrying to D.C. before it falls so they can get “the big story” with one print reporter determined to get the last interview with the embattles president.  Along the way they witness extreme violence, grotesque sadism, burning forests, and they have nothing to say to each other or to us about what is going on and who is who. Of the four the two photojournalists are the real subject of the story. A world-weary veteran played by Kirsten Dunst and a much younger naïve college aged woman who Dunst takes under her wing.

But so what? We learn nothing.  There’s even an extended sequence in a civilian refugee camp and even there the film does not stoop to giving voice to a single one of them. And these reporters also, ask no questions.  It’s phantasmagorical.  Earlier in the film, when an unidentified gaggle of armed men are found torturing two captives, again nothing is explained. The younger photog wonders out loud why are they doing this.

And…then..drumroll…spotlight…stop action…close up on Dunst as she is about to speak the key line of the movie, the line that is supposed to win you over to her cynical, remote and unemotional detachment, the line that writer Garland would have us believe unlocks the central moral of the story, the money shot:  Sounding like a Ivory Tower journalism professor of 1957, Dunst lectures her mentee:  “Once you start asking yourself those questions, you can’t stop,” Lee replies sharply. “So we don’t ask. We record so other people ask. You want to be a journalist? That’s the job.”

Journalists are not supposed to ask questions? They are not supposed to provide context, even for photographs. Or is Dunst sloppily speaking only of photojournalists?  That doubt has been cleared up by director Garland in several public statements basically affirming that the sentence in question is the whole point of the movie and is precisely the correct position to understand the film and presumably journalism and maybe even the whole wide world.

Garland has said publicly, the movie is meant to be as politically objective as possible. “The kind of journalism we need most — reporting, which used to be the dominant form of journalism — had a deliberate removal of a certain kind of bias,”

“If you have a news organization which has a strong bias, it is only likely to be trusted by the choir to which it’s preaching, and it will be distrusted by the others. So that was something journalists used to actively, deliberately, consciously try to avoid. […] And then the film attempts to function like those journalists. So this is a throwback to an old form of journalism, being told in the manner of that journalism.”

Do I really need to take the above apart?  Is it not obviously just plain stupid?

Having been a journalist since 1971, I can attest to the fact that there are lot of clueless, detached and deeply cynical, not to mention, plain old mediocre journalists out there.  But they are not the really good ones. They are space fillers.

I have worked closely with many combat photojournalists while covering the wars and uprisings in Latin America.  They are the most exposed, the most vulnerable of any press corps and by definition they are the most courageous. And I know three who were killed.  This specie of reporter is most usually the best informed and also the most passionate and the most engaged. Few people are willing to risk their lives to just take pictures about a cause or a conflict that they don’t have some at least minimal stake in.  After all, their primary subjects are people, and in order to best capture them they have to know who they are politically, what is driving them etc. and how to best capture that sentiment in an image.  And given their vulnerability, they are quite often the best source for safe passage through combat zones. 

Garland has protested the accusation that the film is abstract to the point, IMHO, of being vacuous.

 “I cannot see how it’s abstract,” he told Polygon in an interview ahead of the film’s release. “There is a fascist president who has dismantled the Constitution sufficiently to be able to stay for three terms, has removed one of the legal institutions that could threaten his position doing that, and is causing violence, attacking his own citizens. It might be abstract, possibly, on first blush — but to me, that does not stand up to any inspection at all, in terms of the actual content within the film.” 

Comically, there’s more exposition in that statement than there is the 109 minutes of the movie.

There’s also some great irony in the Garland’s wishcasting about what makes good journalism. I would argue, as I have for years, that one of the primary reasons the American people are so politically immature, apathetic and irrational is precisely because of the way the mainstream media has always opted for “objectivity,” thereby releasing themselves of any responsibility to explain in depth what might really be in play because, you know, that would be partisan.  So if Garland’s little crew of reporters had been in Berlin as the Red Army deposed Hitler or near Hiroshima when the US vaporized a hundred thousand civilians, I guess they still would have nothing to say or explain. 

They would, in the words of Dunst, “not ask.”

The producers of the film and Garland clearly made this movie, as all movies are made, to make money. OK, his timing was good and he has cashed in. Bravo.  But he doesn’t seem to get that his desired muting of an aggressive press is in part what has produced the conditions that make civil war suddenly thinkable in the US.  It can be traced back to the media celebration of Trump as candidate in 2016 and the normalization of this dangerous, authoritarian imbecile during his tenure…and to a great degree, once again now during his haphazard re-election campaign.

In the film, Garland makes two references to people in the American Heartland who –apparently untouched by the violence of the conflict—just ignore it and carry on life as usual.  Too bad Garland didn’t book a ticket to Des Moines and sit out the last couple of years pondering his navel instead of making and then inflicting this trash film on a country already in sufficient pain and confusion without it.++

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