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/411/ What Kind of American Are You? (Patreon)

Published:
2024-05-16 10:56:29
Imported:
2026-06
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On Alex Garland’s new film, Civil War.

[Patreon Exclusive]

The boys discuss a film that seems designed to say something in the context of a US election year. But what? We ask:

What kind of film is this: a dystopian fantasy, a war movie, a road movie?

Why the focus on the media? Does the film celebrate or satirise journalists?

Does Garland’s dystopia tell us anything about the landscape of US politics today?

Why is political polarisation between liberals and populists seen in terms of civil war? 

What would a civil war look like in geopolitical terms, along the lines Garland suggests?

What side would you choose?

Links:

Where will America's Civil War be fought?, Michael Lind, UnHerd

The Civil War Will Not Be Mediated, Nina Power, Compact

Civil War is a terrifying film, but Trump: The Sequel will be a real-life horror show, Simon Tisdall, The Guardian

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Comments

Brian Gonnella

great ep, way better than the Chapo read of the film. 1 minor note: in the film, i think they blew up the Lincoln Memorial because they were taking fire from loyalist forces using it as a fortified position. maybe this changes the symbolic implications, maybe it doesn't. but there was an internal rationale to it.

Pier Paolo Tamburelli

The atmosphere you describe sounds a lot like Haneke's le temps du loup, which is a masterpiece, in case someone is interested

SpartaFC

Alex Garland strikes me as a director with quite strong intellectual, perhaps philosophical pretensions in the manner of a Bergman or a Tarkovsky - but is really only a middleweight intellectual at best. That is to say the “conscious” elements of his films are usually interesting ideas that are subsequently developed in a sometimes weak and inconsistent way. Where he has real talent in my opinion is his “unconscious” grasp of his subject matter, that is to say the way in which his skill as a visual artist uncovers much more interesting ideas and especially moods adjacent to his narrative. His films to their great strength leave plenty of room for these elements to breathe as well. The contrast between these “conscious” and “unconscious” elements and his strengths in that regard is especially clear in MEN as noted by Phil (very unoriginal and tedious conscious message, very interesting and evocative stuff between the lines), but I think is true of CIVIL WAR too even if the conscious narrative is slightly stronger than in MEN. It’s the ambiguities, some of which Garland himself seems oblivious to (hence saying “this is about fighting fascism”) which really make CIVIL WAR come alive when it does so. It is interesting but perhaps inevitable that Garland overestimates himself as an intellectual, but seems to underestimate his poetic intuition which is at its strongest in ANNIHILATION (which, notably, is one I believe he didn’t write himself). One final thought: whilst the “disbanding the FBI” line does sound like liberal licking-daddy’s-boots nonsense, I would note that the character who said it was the older NYT-affiliated journalist of the group, so might this have been an acknowledgement that establishment media and bodies like the FBI are indeed fully aligned organs of power in the US and beyond, or simply an unconscious confirmation?

Ghost Runner

The remark about disbanding the FBI is ambiguous as was the line about the antifa massacre. Perhaps the disbanded FBI became part of a regional militia fighting what is left of the federal government.

Mouldy L

The supposed ambiguities in this movie (antifia massacre et al) are just Garland's attempts to cover his tracks in what is a very unambiguously liberal hysteria movie in the vein of Paul Lynch's Prophet Song, or Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. I couldn't help feeling that I was watching these journos wishing events into existence, as if the horrors of the world existed only for the glory of some media class aspirant. The heroism of the soldier is replaced by the heroism of the cultured, educated photo journalist, whose weapon of choice is: The Truth. The movie as a whole is a kind of January 6th for liberals, the first January 6th being a kind of forum theatre piece which here gets rewritten as Hollywood revenge fantasy against Trump. It reminded me of Eisenstein's October, his storming of the winter palace recast with liberal media as the Bolsheviks. The contrast with October is how deliberately anti-climactic it is - because Trump doesn't deserve anything as grand as a storming of the winter palace. I can't help feel that Garland laments the fact that America won't get someone as massively evil as say Hitler, and that the depressing empty feeling the movie leaves me with, is this sense that it'll have to be one of the lesser, less cool, less tasteful, own brand tyrants like Gaddafi.