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The Big Idea
From the moment I heard of Alex Garland’s Civil War, I knew I was going to have to go see it, and I certainly wasn’t enthusiastic when the first stories about it came out. It was very hard to take seriously a movie about a purported American Civil War that fails to explain its causes, and posits that a Texas-California alliance somehow has come together against an ideologically-undefined President—though we learn early he tried to claim a third term in office and abolished the FBI. That’s a lot of blanks to have to fill in! But repeated positive reviews made me a bit more optimistic that the movie would have aspects relevant to our real stability and what I write about in More Stable Union. I’ll try to minimize spoilers here, but apologies in advance. You should have seen it by now!
So how’d it do? Meh. B-/C+. It’s a very good movie in a technical sense, thus deserving its good reviews, but to me its big plot hole—why this war is happening—lowers the stakes and under-informs Americans about the real dangers of mass violence, which is a real disservice. But let me start with the good points!
It’s a good movie. Every actor nailed their part. The writing and direction were excellent, the battle scenes quite realistic, including in volume, and the juxtaposition of war’s flotsam and jetsam with more normal Americana was quite convincing and as disturbing as intended.
Welcome to the life of the war expat! I’ve never been a war correspondent, but I have been a relief worker, and the movie’s portrayal of journalists and expat war workers resonated with me to the point of causing flashbacks—not bad ones! Trying to keep one’s detachment in the midst of a war, the balance of competition and cooperation between people all racing for the same story or contract, the top-flight hotel experiencing power outages, the all-night bar crowd—it rang very true to me. This really is a movie about war correspondents more than it is a movie about an American civil war; they could have set it in Mogadishu or Kyiv and gotten a very similar movie. It might even have been better had the journalists been foreigners, especially if they needed to hire an American “fixer”—an ubiquitous presence in a war zone, almost always a ridiculously-overqualified local who can’t get a better job in a wartime economy.
And before I complain too much: it’s not essential to a great war movie that we know why the war is happening! Blackhawk Down will not educate you about Somalia. Apocalypse Now, which is similar to Civil War in that both are basically horrifying road-trip movies, definitely won’t help prepare you for an exam on the Vietnam War. Many of the best war movies are just about the experiences of a unit or individual who neither knows nor cares why this madness is happening around them.
But there’s a limit. When I see a M-1 Abrams blasting a gap in a fortified wall of the White House at an intersection I walk through regularly, I damn well have a right to know how and why it’s there! SPOILER ALERT! SKIP TO THE NEXT PARAGRAPH! Suicide bombers have no tradition in American political violence, so when one waving an American flag blows themselves up at the beginning of the movie, and it appears to be something that’s become distressingly normal, you owe it to me to give me some sense of why this person did that. We don’t even know whose side they are on! The movie starts with all our journalists in a relatively-secure New York, and we don’t even know who’s in control there.
OH CRAP SORRY ANOTHER SPOILER SKIP AHEAD AGAIN! If you’ve only seen an ad, you’ve seen Jesse Plemons play a very menacing-looking—well, soldier, militiaman, rebel, criminal, we don’t really know—and you still don’t know after the scene is over! But I’ll tell you, the scene includes a mass grave full of civilians. And we have no idea why they were killed. Sure, they may all have been slaughtered by Plemons and his comrades for some reason, but a defense attorney at a war crimes trial could claim these people died of other war causes like airstrikes, disease, or famine, and Plemons et al are just burying them—though small field sanitation pro tip, you can see a running river in the background, and that means their mass grave of decomposing bodies is way too close to their water supply.
Plemons evinces a deep distrust of foreigners from a certain country, but even that can be understandable in context. If there really was an American Civil War, you can be damn sure there would be foreign governments interfering for one side or another, and belligerents’ mistrust of foreigners would be quite justified. For all the menace and tension of the scene—and there is a lot—it’s cheapened by our not knowing what it’s really about.
The lazy rejoinder to this is, “people in war often don’t understand what it’s about,” and that point is hit on at several points in the movie—and comes up in a lot of other war movies too. That’s pretty ironic given we’re observing this war from the perspective of journalists, who certainly should know—or think they know—better than most given that’s their freaking job!
I haven’t really observed the “we don’t know why we’re fighting” trope to be true. Of course people can have the cosmic “why is this bad thing like a bomb blowing up my house happening to me,” question, but we have that question about every bad thing that happens to us. I’ve seen people in war question why this fight is happening here, now, but that’s not the same as not knowing why there is a fight. That’s usually pretty easy to answer: belligerents always can tell you how the other side was the aggressor responsible for this ugly mess.
Finally, I’ve gotta say something here about the logistics we see in the movie. As the Texan-Californian forces assemble for the final assault on Washington, we’re treated to images of F-35s, attack and cargo helicopters, and M-1 tanks all moving out to finish off the President’s loyalists. This was the moment I almost completely lost the thread on the movie, even as many of the subsequent combat and action shots were very realistic and well-done.
These things use aviation fuel—basically leaded kerosene. You don’t fuel these bad boys up at a gas station! You need sophisticated military logistics chains to keep this technology operating—and you need a road and rail network to move it all on. To use a squadron of F-35s, you need all your pilots and maintenance airmen to have stayed together on the same team, continued access to aviation fuel, functional air traffic control, factories full of skilled workers still producing sophisticated munitions, the aforementioned road and rail network to bring those munitions to your airbase… you see where I’m going here. Don’t even get me started on how a navy would continue to function.
A real civil war in America would devolve into warlordism pretty quickly as military units fragmented over divided loyalties—just as our army did in our last civil war—and as supply chains broke down. Like most modern civil wars, you’d see fewer tanks and more “technicals”—sport utility vehicles with heavy weapons.
Some units would have more trained soldiers and professionalism than others. In its own way, this devolution would make the war even worse: such forces would have a very hard time attaining a decisive victory, turning the war into a longer, bloodier, and more inconclusive slog. When you look at how bloody a war is, it’s usually less about the lethality of the weapons involved than it is the sheer duration of the conflict, especially if and when it lasts long enough for hunger and disease to become the real killers.
As dire a picture as Civil War paints, it’s actually nowhere near as bad as the real thing would be. The damage to cities like Washington actually isn’t too bad. The apparent decision of most of the organized military to support the Texas-California alliance and its ability to logistically sustain itself all the way to DC, where the President insists on holding on like Hitler in his bunker, all makes for a war that’s actually relatively quick and clean as these things go. A real American civil war likely would end up far more like Somalia or Libya or Syria, a generation-spanning, hyper-localized conflict without anyone able to actually gain the advantage needed for a reunifying victory—and no prospect of decisive war-ending intervention from outside, as in the Balkans.
This is where Garland and his film really do us a disservice. In a time when quite a few people on left and right—for very different reasons—have concluded that our existing political system and institutions have failed or no longer deserve support, I fear “Civil War” may be less of a deterrent to the idea of violence and more a message that “it can’t really be that bad.” When you don’t know why the dead died, and you see one side at least wins the damn thing while society still is relatively functional, why not conclude it’s worth a shot?
I don’t really think anyone’s going to go to war because Alex Garland made us do it, but it certainly is possible that he’s desensitizing many of us to the idea of a civil war. We don’t need that right now. He had a chance to make a really great movie, but could only manage a good, and very problematic, one.
Good Reads
I’ll still throw a few interesting pieces your way!
From his TIME magazine interview to his staff’s re-posting an ad mentioning a “unified reich,” Trump isn’t hiding his plans from anyone. And don’t listen to anyone who says “this is about the Second Reich (Imperial Germany), not the Third (Nazis).” “Wilhelmine Germany was better than Nazi Germany” is one of the only good things you can say about Wilhelmine Germany. I’ll admit current polling leaves me pretty disturbed that we’ll shrug our way into dictatorship because Biden is old and prices are higher than they were four years ago.
I talk a lot here about the serious structural problems with our security sector, but sheriffs make other cops look positively benign. More people have died at police hands in 2023 than any other year in the past decade, outstripping population growth eightfold, and rural country sheriffs are three times more deadly than other police. Oh, and some of them want to organize their own militias to watch polls this fall.
I love it when libertarians critique policing. Nathan Goodman shows us the broader societal impacts of militarized border policing. As you hear Trump talk about rounding up “illegals,” remember the border jurisdiction includes coasts, and extends 100 miles into the U.S. from any border. That means control over a significant majority of the U.S. population. Have your papers ready at the checkpoints, comrades!
On the same topic, I’ve said before that Trump has promised to invoke the Insurrection Act and use the military to launch a nationwide roundup of undocumented migrants, but I understand it’s hard to imagine what that really would look like. Radley Balko does excellent work here illustrating the magnitude of that task, and the inevitable impact it would have on the rest of us. It’s a challenge roughly twice the magnitude of the Nazis’ effort to round up Europe’s Jews.
The idea of martial law to deport migrants seems like such a crazy thing that it’s very hard to imagine what it actually would mean. My old hometown paper has a great look at what it would mean for Kansas specifically, and it’s enlightening to see it play out on a state level. A lot more will be “the matter with Kansas” when mass deportation is done with it.
Thom Hartmann in The New Republic notes research indicating that, across the U.S., UK, and Australia, homicides and suicides go up under conservative leadership and down under liberal. This holds up over an entire century! We don’t notice because the statistics lag elections by about two years. The cause? Possibly more rhetorical than policy.
The authoritarian turn of the GOP has brought some really… interesting… people out of the woodwork, including a surprisingly large base of Catholic-based authoritarian thought. But this description by Christopher Hooks of a pro-Habsburg event in Plano, Texas—the Vienna of Texas—really takes the cake.
The Austin, TX Police are perfectly fine with you shooting residents as long as your politics align with the PD. This is how death squads get formed, and Governor Greg Abbott knows that.
For those of you having a hard time committing to Biden, don’t listen to me—listen to Bernie Sanders.
Finally, I’ll admit I share Rick Wilson’s fears that Maga has the momentum, because Trump’s followers just want it more. I get it—Biden is a status quo candidate (he’s actually done a lot of progressive stuff, but that’s just not how he presents, and it won’t change), most Americans aren’t satisfied with the status quo, and so even people who don’t like Trump’s plan to upset the status quo aren’t ready to throw themselves behind Biden. All I can say is, get past this! For all its problems, “status quo” is a million times better than where Trump wants to take us.
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I tend to get a lot of nitpicking from friends when I bring up the possibility of the U.S. "going Yugoslavia," so based on your article I will now say "going Somalia." This should quell the kibbitzers. Also: that spoof Hilux advert is amazing - do we know its origin story?