To move through America is to travel through a forbidding uncertainty.
Expansive and intimate, narrow bands of winding backroads splinter off from small towns, suburbs, farmlands, a lattice of thinly wound concrete that tenuously holds the land together, but which cannot bind the nation that sits on top of it. A road is a certainty— mapped, firm, a path to somewhere—but places and their people are not. Resting against the side of the road— a small gas station, a sprawling suburban home, a quiet, one-street town, a church peeling against the sun, a quiet farm, an idyll— and when we see them, a haunted feeling comes over us, an unmistakable sense of unwelcome, of private space, of not knowing who might be behind each door. Our history has trained us to understand these roads for what they really are— a hidden landscape, unspoken, where anything is possible, including the worst things. Beyond the lens of scrutiny, they become unaccountable places.
But not just there— that unease, once tucked away, suddenly feels like it is everywhere, implied by every “Thin Blue Line Punisher Skull” bumper sticker on the truck driving a little too closely behind you on the highway, by every performative asshole who decides they want to “open carry" an assault rifle at the local Target1. Atrocity is always simply the private fantasy of unaccountable violence given public permission, the shelter afforded by the landscape providing the possibility of a useful camouflage to settle personal scores and unleash terrible fantasies harbored by relentless self-certainty. The threat of possible political violence is the atmosphere of our shared public life, the heavy, polluted air we collectively breathe.
Cormac McCarthy, whose prose demonstrated an unflinching and deep understanding of the madness of the American capacity for violence, wrote in his post-apocalyptic novel THE ROAD:
“He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe… Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”
It is the merging of these realities— the looming threat of violence sitting atop the surface of American life and the act of seeing the hidden country for what it is, just below its idealized self-regard— that illuminates Alex Garland’s heartbreaking new film CIVIL WAR. The fictional story of a near-future America torn apart by an implied authoritarian political conflict that leads to a complete fracturing of the nation, CIVIL WAR plays a kind of hopscotch with our present day reality, skipping past the specifics of contemporary party politics to instead focus on the real-world threat of violence that surrounds us.
When things fall apart, the act of bearing witness to atrocity, documenting it— having the courage to be the “borrowed eyes with which to sorrow” this void of indifference— becomes crucial to ensuring any hope of future accountability. Garland centers CIVIL WAR not on the political specifics of war or the strategic decisions of combat (more on this later), but on the act of bearing witness, the physicality of being present within violence, following a small band of conflict photographers and journalists as they make their way from New York City to the front lines of the war in Charlottesville, VA2 and, finally, on to Washington, D.C. and the seat of national power. With the highways inaccessible, an otherwise four-hour trip becomes a multi-day journey through America’s back roads, the scars of battle everywhere, indifferent to purpose — shopping malls, suburban office buildings, vehicles, human life— all of it indiscriminately ripped apart. CIVIL WAR understands the texture of possibility that defines our collective nightmares about a contemporary conflict in a nation where guns are everywhere, where armies are seemingly indistinguishable from militias are indistinguishable from individuals. When everyone has their reasons, reasons don’t matter any more.
Garland navigates the dance between the terror of witness and the detachment of atrocity with powerful visual and tonal control, framing the landscape as if violence were omnipresent, peeking out from behind every barren tree, atop every indifferent building, at the end of every darkened hallway, on the other side of every door. His camera lingers on absence— a car driving out of frame, for example, revealing a winding road suddenly emptied of motion, an inexplicable presence lurking in the world— America itself, just waiting for the chance to show its true colors.
CIVIL WAR is also filled with tremendous performances, but the film rests on Kirsten Dunst’s deeply moving embodiment of Lee, a world-weary photojournalist whose eyes saw and framed the very worst of humanity as she documented conflicts around the world. While her work requires her to put herself at just enough risk to get what is needed to show us the harrowing violence and its impact, the images themselves sear themselves into her memory, her tough exterior a necessary psychological restraint that allows her to keep pushing herself into harm’s way.
Garland, however, is not constrained by still images, using the powerful chaos of street level combat to thrust his characters, suddenly and terrifyingly, into the carnage of warfare, with each sequence building upon the previous one, establishing the rules of engagement and choreographing the coordinated movements of organized combatants to build toward the film’s thunderous, breathtaking finale, where history is written in blood and captured for all time. If the film’s journey toward conflict is defined by the ever-present sense of danger, the finale brings us into a true sense of the toll of the conflict— while we’ve been watching horror after horror, we’ve been complicit in an observational indifference to the pain, terror, and trauma that we’ve been shown. And then, suddenly and pathetically, it is over, and all of that suffering is laid bare as vanity, the nihilistic self-interest of power, while death remains omnipresent and indifferent.
“The film is intended to be a conversation, so it doesn’t assert too much…But I also believe that everybody understands internally why. This is also true of my country and many, many other countries that are dealing with the effects of polarization and populism: We don’t need it explained. We know exactly why it might happen. We know exactly what the fault lines and the pressures are”
but don’t let this framing convince you otherwise— Garland and his film understand the texture and truth of our country right now in a way that few artists seem willing to address on this scale— We know exactly why it might happen. We know exactly.
There is no room for detachment from atrocity. It is merciless, without reason, a force of human nature that, once unleashed, arrives for everyone. In the end, there are no politics.
In the end, there is only the end.
No pun intended although, the irony is not lost on me.
Clearly a non-coincidental choice.