'Civil War': The Death of Truth in a Decaying Empire
Alex Garland has made a much more interesting movie than the one he keeps talking about in interviews
When freshly bar mitzvahed Danny Gopnik meets the highly esteemed but elusive Rabbi Marshak at the end of A Serious Man, the ostensible font of wisdom offers him this: “When the truth is found to be lies, and all the hope within you dies . . . then what?” The old rabbi is trying to quote Jefferson Airplane (and mostly succeeding), but it’s not clear if this is simply to acknowledge the teenager’s listening habits or if he hears a kind of profundity in “Somebody to Love” that he feels is worth acknowledging. Perhaps both. But the then what is the locus of belief formation—belief in each other, belief in a cosmic order, belief in a personal mission, and belief in countries. Bonds and commitments of any kind take belief, and the argument for perpetuating them is that it’s better to have them than to confront that void of then what.
Alex Garland’s Civil War is about the then what, as seen through the final days of the American empire as depicted by the journalists who see their duty above all as documenting the truth of how it all happened, of packaging reality either for their employers or that they can sell to get the chance to do it again. They see a nobility in their service to capture and to shoot all the capturing and shooting so that the consumers can ask the questions about what all of this means. That is, if they can get past the paywall.
I’ve seen this movie described as frustratingly centrist and a love letter to journalism. I don’t see either here. For all of the months of bickering online about how the movie highlighting Americans killing Americans doesn’t have enough politics, that it refuses to acknowledge the dangers of something like January 6th in an attempt to flatten polarization into equal blame, I wondered if those particular complainers sat through the first 30 seconds of the movie. The very first images are of a demagogue president played by Nick Offerman who has appointed himself to a highly disputed third term. As if this is too subtle (and apparently it is), he is practicing a speech about how what remains of the United States has just accomplished not only a major victory (they haven’t) but one of the greatest victories in the history of victories. I wonder: who could be the model here?
This practiced speech is interspersed with images of real life riots and violence across America over the past few years. A few of the brief flashes are another source of online commentary because they were provided by Andy Ngo—a fairly maligned visual propagandist using media distortions in a way that is both antithetical to the set of protagonists Garland introduces in the following scenes but also completely in line with the media ecosystem that benefits the disputed president we have just met. A president like this, Garland suggests, gets this far because propaganda, distortions, and, above all, noise have drowned out truth and reason. Does this Commander-in-Chief believe these lies as he practices his own lie about victory? I doubt it. But it’s the truth he prefers to believe and certainly it’s the one he’ll pretend to believe when the cameras are rolling.
And, though the movie thankfully eschews Christopher Nolan-like exposition dumps explaining how exactly the series of escalations led to what we’re seeing, I don’t think it’s too difficult to put together some plausible backstory. An ostensible populist rides genuine resentments toward a gridlocked government alongside the disinformation age into a close enough election that he refuses to leave office—likely with some help from outbursts of strategic violence against the kinds of people who liken themselves the grown-ups-in-the-room. Likely then a splintering of military allegiance both reduces the threat that this self-appointed President poses and paves the way for states with large enough, self-sustaining economies to secede. In the subsequent, additionally self-appointed term, the three or so factions that once made up the United States, battle it out until at last those final symbols that once represented this country are too riddled with bullets to retain any residual power. When God1 is dead, when our symbols are dead, and when our identities are no longer linked, then what?
While the movie plays out in the final days of that death, the prolonged final breath of the American experiment, its characters are smart enough to know that they have lived in a decaying empire for a long time. It’s maybe all they’ve ever known. The inevitability of the final act is in some ways its greatest horror. I’m not sure how any of this is divorced from our current political moment, how it sanitizes key players, or why anyone would want Alex Garland to be more didactic. That Civil War’s story is told through war photographers (from amateur to veteran) allows for him to diagnose his sense of the root cause of American decay: the erosion of truth. He goes further than this: truth is ostensibly noble, worth capturing, and in this noble act, it can allow for the masses to make informed decisions. In the twenty-first century, any one of us has more access to truth than ever before, right? So how did we get here?
Garland told Polygon:
When I said I was going to do this, a friend of mine in the film industry said, ‘Don’t do that, everybody hates journalists.’ And it really stung me. I see journalists as a necessity. Saying ‘Everybody hates journalists’ to me is exactly like saying ‘Everybody hates doctors.’ You can’t hate doctors, you’re screwed without doctors. That’s just a crazy position to maintain!”
This may be where Garland’s intentions and the baggage I brought to Civil War as a sort-of journalist myself diverge. Do these characters really believe that their pictures of dead Americans, mangled First Family members, collapsing monuments, etc. will change the course of history—in particular when the course of history that led here was a rejection of the kind of truth that good journalists have always provided? Lee, played by Kirsten Dunst, doesn’t think so. And perhaps this means she pushes back against Garland’s intentions in a way that is more persuasive than is his worldview. This arc makes for a more interesting movie than the one Garland describes on the press circuit.
Lee is simply too smart to buy the romanticism of what she does or what her legacy might become. She’s too horrified when she sees that her colleagues will wax poetic about truth but they’re really thrill-seeking. She knows that these pictures won’t make a difference in a post-truth world because she’s been living in one her entire life while pretending that she is serving a higher purpose. The final collapse of the decaying empire is not just a story but a confirmation of everything her belief system has told her would never come to pass so long as there were people like her in it. The real truth? Andy Ngo is probably more impactful in this timeline.
This is, of course, to say nothing of the fact that journalism is a construction of truth-signifiers, which are then packaged and edited in whatever form a consumer eventually sees. Maybe this isn’t what Garland wanted me to take away from his epic, A24’s boldest gamble yet to see if there is still an audience for mid-budget movies for adults. But as the end credits roll, ask yourself how much truth was captured in that final image. Ask yourself if truth can be conveyed in a meaningful way as our empire wobbles again this election season. And even if you do capture it, then what?
I particularly liked Garland’s inversion of Apocalypse Now when the protagonists finally make their way to the core of the heart of darkness and meet the man so many worship but see the pathetic nature of power rather than anything quasi-mystical.