On the eve of the 2016 election I was living outside of Billings, Montana, caring for an aging Mormon couple’s columned mansion. Snowed in and alone in the home, I would spend my nights brushing against seven-foot-tall Christmas Nutcracker soldiers, swimming in a heated indoor pool, and watching horror movies in the basement while drinking dark brown beer. Or, I always meant to watch the movies, but in reality was too afraid. I did not want anything to be too loud. I did not want to feel totally subsumed by a narrative, incapable of responding to my surroundings—which could, at any point, turn deadly.
This is a fear I have never felt abroad, living and traveling alone in the remote areas surrounding Istanbul or Kathmandu or Hanoi or Reykjavík. This fear feels specific to my lived experiences in America. Across America. Anywhere in America. It is a fear I feel when I walk home alone at night, when I open my first floor windows in the middle of the day, when I take the train too early in the morning, when I turn down a street I have not seen before on my bicycle, when I go “too far” North or South or East or West, and when I get in a cab or a Lyft, when I go to an airport, when I sit alone anywhere. Of course it is a fear I feel when I read the news, but also when I teach in my classroom. When I go to a rural gas station, when I am on a hike. When I go to a concert. When I go to a theater. Especially when I go to a theater.
These fears seem excessive, even as I mostly am able to ignore them. But I have had a gun to my head; I have seen my friends jumped in the night. In my personal life I have seen enough to be afraid—but also I know there is always, especially in America, worse that can and will happen, if not to me than to someone else. It is a concrete brick of fear, one that I drag around, as if tied to my ankle with a shoelace.
Near the midpoint of the new A24 film Civil War, a ragtag adventuring crew of journalists, who have up to this point made their way through a jolly gauntlet of rebelling but seemingly apolitical factions (the film does not give clear motives to any of the three warring regions), meet an active shooter hiding in a house decked out with the tell-tale Christmas decorations of the conservative rich. Watching, I thought instantly of that mansion in Montana. The fear.
Throughout this scene, a carol can be heard softly in the background. While our protagonist, Lee, squats in the grass, hiding from the sniper, the flowers around her focus and unfocus, as if through a camera lens. It is a visual the film uses often, and from the first scene of the film: Nick Offerman’s President, first clarified, then muddied. We are seeing more of ourselves here; we are seeing less. I am leaning into memories of shooting a rifle as a child in Idaho; I am leaning out into disbelief that anyone in this film has felt a gun kick against a body under ten.
Our protagonist is Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), a middle-aged photojournalist, made famous by her shot of the “Antifa Massacre” in college. She is accompanied on her quest to film the first interview with the U.S. president in fourteen months by our supporting cast of Joel (Wagner Moura), the hopeful interviewer and a lusty self-medicating cowboy; Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a soft-spoken veteran journalist; and Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a 23-year-old aspiring photographer from Missouri, who looks and acts fifteen, and whose choice of skinny jeans feels supremely and distractingly millennial.
The film had been sold to me as a conversation on the ethics of journalism, but watching it felt like a romp. My favorite Alex Garland film is the Danny Boyle-directed, Garland-penned zombie flick 28 Days Later (2002), and this film feels tonally aligned. Civil War is also about the bonds of a small, similarly-intentioned community. In 28 Days Later, the group is bonded by survival, while in Civil War their connection seems primarily centered on shared pursuits of ego, and the thrill involved in that quest. Both films are adventurous road trips, much more than the satires they aim to be, and both play with the personal and the universal through intimacy. They disclose through interpersonal relationships—zoom in; they propel through apocalypse—zoom out.
Despite Garland’s insistence that he does not want to glorify war in film, he does, and in interesting ways. The characters are happiest in the heat of their work while bodies crumble around them—in one scene, Joel even reaches longingly towards far off gunfire, a bottle of liquor in his hand. Moreover, Garland also brings up the old archetype of the young man seeking purpose in violence. Make a name for yourself is unvoiced but ever-present onscreen with Jessie, who—spoiler—takes the final money shot of the murdered president over Lee’s body. Lee, who has just martyred herself, pushing the girl aside and taking fire while Jessie captures her mentor’s final moments on film.
“Lee” is ostensibly a reference to Lee Miller, the WWII-era photojournalist. But to me it felt more like a half-conscious gesture towards Robert E., a connotation that sticks. The film, however, lacks acknowledgment of this old-world, Confederate invocation. This missing attribution haunts the viewing and illuminates the ways in which this is a film made of “lack.”
Jessie evokes another old set of values, too, when she admits to Lee that while sitting at gunpoint earlier in the film, she felt more afraid than she’d ever felt—but also more alive.
As Jessie steals her hard-won shot of the dying president, there is, behind Jessie’s camera, a slow smile. There are currents of manifest destiny in the entire team’s—but particularly Jessie’s—entitlement to a proximity to glory that Garland must be aware of. But the approach does not feel nearly critical enough—if critical at all—of our nation, which is inured towards the suffering it inflicts. There is a push against the complacency of the nineties, our Prozac nation. There is a desire to make a feeling. Even a bad one.
But it would be easier if the feelings the film inspired were all bad. While watching Civil War, I could not stop thinking about how pleasurable I found it, how perfectly suited to my aesthetics and interests. It reminded me of old favorites from the sixties and seventies, spanning responses to American war-mongering as vast as Apocalypse Now (1979) and Dr. Strangelove (1964). But I thought most of director Roger Corman’s Gas-s-s-s (1970), a more absurd story than even Strangelove, in which a deadly gas kills everyone over the age of 25, and the youth proceed to create a society as chaotic, violent, and meaningless as that of their elders. Similarly, I was reminded of first-person shooter games, or even the relentless scrolling motions of TikTok. We see the world from behind Jessie’s lens often, and the click, click, click over gunfire only contributes to the gamification of the narrative. The film does an effective job of keeping our audience response to the horrors deadened, impacted only through the characters’ emotional responses.
The imagery evokes citizens’s nightmarish visions of recent America—January 6th, Charlottesville, even 9/11. But it also pulls from our deeper roots in crimes against humanity. The specter of Vietnam is palpable, as is the historical American Civil War. Jessie’s black and white photos seem in truth to be as spiritually linked to footage from the 1860s as they do to WWI or II or anything that’s happened in the past 20 years of our occupations of both Iraq and Afghanistan.
But the most dangerous part of this film, to me, is the ways in which it uses such an utter facsimile of reality to tell a story that feels resoundingly untrue.
Early in the film, during one of Lee’s flashbacks (her guilt never explicitly alluded to again), we see a Black man constrained by a tire and set on fire. In a film full of corpses and violence that never feels scripted but instead choreographed to imitate—without ever mirroring—the images we see on television, it was one of the few moments that truly jarred me. The film is careful to skirt any real discussion of American politics, but an image of a Black man’s death is hard to look away from in this country, and the depiction seems a careful play on our emotional energy and—even as a white audience member—pain, especially in a film called Civil War. In that moment of immolation is Nick Ut’s shot of Phan Thị Kim Phúc as “Napalm Girl,” her melting flesh, that runs in the back of my mind. There is also Aaron Bushnell’s young frame in flames. There has been much conversation around Garland’s ‘apolitical’ film, but this early scene is anything but, and still it does not aspire to be comprehended, or even to help us comprehend. It sets the tone for a film that does not understand its subject or itself.
There are far too few civilian deaths in the film, barring a sterile depiction of a mass grave. We do see a president’s aid crumple like an inflatable man on the side of a road, click. We see children and families in an encampment. Click. But we do not see the babies die. And, in a country where one in three women are raped—Weinstein’s conviction was overturned the morning I went to the theatre—and where Roe v. Wade has been overturned and a miscarriage can carry criminal penalty, we see no sexual violence, or even explicit misogyny.
The film, and the audience, exists in that precious early aughts landscape where equality is assumed—Lee is as respected as Sammy and Joel. Jessie is objectified for her youth—there is some weak indication that if Joel were not trying to sleep with her she might not have made it on the trip to DC—but her boundaries are never truly crossed. The one time we find her in trouble, she is made masculine, a little boy still weeping at the violence of two strung-out men. There is not even an allusion to the things men do to women when there is no one to see.
In Montana I remember watching Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) on my laptop, just outside of the reach of the wealthy couple’s fully soundproofed home theater. Miller’s story felt in most ways more true to me than Civil War. The cultish community, the subservience, the rapes. The trailer to Miller’s prequel, Furiosa (2024), played upon my arrival at Civil War last night. I was late; my friend who arrived before me sat three seats in from the left in the back. He gestured innocuously to the interior seat, but I said I wanted to be closer to the aisle, in case. He shrugged, but not without understanding.
This is the great danger of any dystopian narrative, that it inures us to the hell we already live in. It sells us on illumination, the idea that we are being warned…that there is time to change. But the idea that hell is just around the corner is a fairytale. On the walk into seeing Civil War, I noted a sign on the door that insisted there were no firearms allowed; I trembled at the Security Guard eating cheese puffs; I texted a friend to let them know I was out and if I was shot to please take out my dog. When the end of the night arrived and I was still alive, we joked about the stacks of bodies I climbed over or through, grateful to not still be cowering under imagined corpses.
I was undergoing inpatient psychiatric treatment during the mass shooting in Aurora at The Dark Knight Rises (2012), in part due to symptoms caused by PTSD, and I remember my roommate playing news coverage of the event through the night. The sterile headshots of the victims as their names were read over and over. Some kind of caution, or prayer.
When the screening was over, I conveyed the content of an Instagram reel to my friend. The first half of the reel is a man walking down a street in Chicago. “This is what people think living in America is like,” the text over the video reads. The man, walking down rainbow flag streets, is sipping on an iced coffee and smiling until he hears machine gunfire and begins to scream and cower. The second half of the reel, “What living in America is ACTUALLY like,” shows the same man on the same street with the same iced coffee, only this time when the machine gun fire starts he smiles, looks, waves, and whispers softly to himself, “I hope one of them gets me.”
This was the most startling feeling while watching Civil War.
I was expecting gore, uncomfortable realism, politics with which I disagreed—but instead, I was met with a deep cynicism that hit too close to my own core. We watched in a theater full of graduate students speaking languages other than English. That night, we were the only Americans interested in a farce at our own expense. While we watched, less than a mile away from the theater, an encampment was taking shape on Penn’s campus to protest the genocide of the Palestinian people. To stop robots being built on its precious Ivy League grounds and shipped across the ocean to murder. I have seen the blood on my hands even as I have attended protests and vigils; I have gotten into fights, but still slowly the guilt is calcifying into shame. This, to me, is what Civil War is most concerned with. Here is a nation so ashamed that it cannot find the energy to truly see itself, and instead settles on this imperfect albeit too-close model. Here is a nation that cannot find the energy to be truly afraid of what it has become, instead tying the fear around its ankle, dragging it far enough behind to sometimes forget.
The “best” scene in the film—and by “best” I mean the scene that actually hit my nervous system and made my heart thud and brought up my worst memories, is in the middle of the feature. Jessie and another journalist we have just met are being held at gunpoint by a soldier (the meaning of this forever-dubious word was particularly opaque in this context) in pink heart glasses, played by Kirsten Dunst’s IRL husband, Jesse Plemons.
When Lee, Joel, and a third journalist, Tony, rush to save Jessie, they watch as her companion journalist is shot without fanfare, and then are cooly asked by Plemmons where they are from. The three protagonists answer truthfully about their respective regions—Florida, Missouri, and Colorado—but are unsure whether these answers will get them killed or be their salvation. Waiting, every character is in a position of absolute submission to the force of Plemons and his ability to inflict harm, his callous disinterest in his impact. Here is a terror that feels American. Here is a fear I believe.
Garland no doubt intended this effect to hit with the support of this scene’s backdrop mound of hundreds of corpses. The amount of them is impressive, but the surreal impact of the stacked bodies has its ancestry in 28 Days Later, and feels fantastical. If it is one of the most ambitious depictions of the horror of war in the film, it also serves as a distraction from the more honest scene between Plemons and the journalists. This conversation, held at gunpoint, is a depiction of stuckness, powerlessness, absolute submission to circumstances dictated by a hostile or malicious force, or worse, an apathetic one. To be alive then, is the horror. Jessie crawling through the corpses is a beautiful display of calm. There is a melancholy to the perfect bodies, but there is also a peace.
In the end Plemons’s gunman decides the three white protagonists are “real Americans,” but shoots Tony, who is from Hong Kong.
Funny for a film by an Englishman to think it matters where one is from in our great nation of sin. To believe that we are divided. Despite all the noise, we shore-to-shore recognize within ourselves a tell-tale realness, immersed in hopeless remorse.
When Civil War was complete I heard in my head the famous lines from Lincoln’s Lyceum Address, “…As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
The fear is that perhaps it is too late, that we have born a nation of suicides, or better yet, one great suicide—and we wake every day within its boundaries—staring into the shiny bright light of our demise. The fear is that we, like Lee, might only have enough spirit left to be grateful for our end.