CIVIL WAR Is A Good Movie With A Big Flaw (SPOILERS)
Good directors don't need to make doctrinaire art, but if they aim to persuade viewers and spread ideas they should think through their stories and audiences carefully.
Breaking the News, the seminal
critique of mainstream news, begins with Peter Jennings and Mike Wallace in the hot seat on a PBS series called Ethics in America.The two TV news legends were asked, before a panel of military officers, to ponder a hypothetical scenario in which the United States were at war with the fictional nation of North Kosan, and they were embedded as journalists with the North Kosanese. At a critical juncture, the North Kosanese company intercepts American soldiers and sets up an ambush. Would the journalists a) protect their sources and roll tape, or b) do what they could to warn the Americans?
Over the course of the segment, Wallace browbeat Jennings not just into answering a) but into the idea that, for any real journalist, that answer would be obvious. The officers listening on were predictably appalled.
This exchange crossed my mind several times over the weekend as I watched Civil War, the new Alex Garland film, which depicts modern America at war with itself. The film raises much bigger questions, but it in some ways embodies the tension between Jennings and Wallace. We learn about the horrors of this fictional civil war from the photojournalists who are the film’s protagonists. They strive and struggle to be viewpoint neutral, until the stresses and dilemmas of war make it impossible. They take pictures of the horrors around them, no matter who’s responsible or who’s protection they’re under. They do this for history’s sake, they say, and so people with political and military power might change how they act.
In a real U.S. civil war, it’s all but impossible to imagine journalists taking no particular view of the sides, even in private. It would almost surely pit a rebellion of dictatorial right-wing militants against the government and its first amendment. If in those circumstances, journalists embedded themselves with rebels and placed their access agreements and sourcing rules over the imperative to save a free society, it wouldn’t be steely professionalism. It would be psychotic. Journalists would have to cover the war fearlessly, but I’d like to believe that if the professional journalism values came into tension with existential ones, the former would give way.
I think Garland agrees with that, but it’s unclear. He seems convinced of two big arguments that don’t rest comfortably together. First, that anyone who’s fantasized about setting the U.S. on a path to social and political breakdown has lost their mind. Second, the values that allow open societies to remain free should be protected at all costs. To vindicate both views, he creates a topsy-turvy version of reality, in which huge segments of the country secede to wrest power back from a despot. He does this seemingly to underscore the importance of defeating extremism before war becomes necessary. But by failing to settle on a clear lesson, or at least to think about how to resolve the tension between the two at issue here, Garland has made a movie whose target audience is already convinced of its theses, but that sends mixed messages to those who actually do fantasize about political violence.