The Violent Provocation of Alex Garland's Civil War (2024)
Alex Garland’s Civil War is not what you’d expect from the trailers and discourse. It is more a formalist provocation and exploitation film than an ideological treatise on the current political state of the United States of America. This is not exploitation, however, in the way people typically think of trashy 1960s and 1970s B-movies—this is an A24 production, after all. Nevertheless, Garland is trying to provoke the viewer with how the violence is depicted on screen and, in doing so, Civil War taps into the lurid thrills that such explicit content can generate in the viewer. The goal is to make us wonder why we’re so obsessed with the idea of civil conflict in the United States in the first place.
Civil War presents a new American civil war as a rollercoaster ride for the viewer. The film’s central character is a war photographer, Kirsten Dunst’s Lee Smith. Along with her colleague Joel (Wagner Moura), the old veteran journalist, Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), and a young aspiring photographer, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), Lee heads to Washington, D.C. to photograph and interview the President (Nick Offerman) before the separatist Western Forces of California and Texas overrun the government and its forces.
With the film’s scenario, Garland exploits the American upper middle-class’s fascination with civil conflict and violence, which has reached fever pitch after the contentious presidential elections of 2016 and, especially, 2020. As a foreign observer just over the border to the north—Garland, a Brit, is a foreigner as well—it’s obvious to me that many Americans seem to fantasize about open conflict within the United States. Think about how many op-eds and cable news stories fixate on the slippery slope towards a future American civil breakdown, the commentators and pundits nearly frothing at the mouth over the violence looming in America’s near future.
At the same time, most of these same Americans are divorced from the actual reality of violence such that their relationship to potential civil conflict is more like the relationship between a viewer and their entertainment: it’s prurient fantasy. It’s no wonder Garland focuses on journalists in the film; the chattering classes are the ones most fixated on this scenario, and most benefiting from the conversation surrounding it. Thus, Civil War provokes a certain kind of viewer by giving them exactly what they want. In doing so, the film poses the question: if this sort of violence and destruction is what we fantasize about, what does that say about us as human beings?
The movie is horrifically violent in moments and frequently grotesque. Much has been made about the terrifying scene featuring Jesse Plemons as a soldier (it’s never explicitly said what side he’s on, though we assume he’s with the federal forces, whether as part of the army or a paramilitary unit). Donned in blood red sunglasses and with a big gun, Plemons’ soldier is pouring lye on a mass grave when the central characters come across him. He then interrogates them at gunpoint, asking, “What kind of American are you?” The characters don’t know what he wants to hear, and neither do we as viewers—although we soon learn that he’s xenophobic when he kills a Hong Kong journalist—which gives the sequence its unbearable tension. We know he’s a maniac, but he’s also an American maniac with a fixed idea of America in his mind. If the characters don’t conform to that vision of America, then blam! they’re done for.
The scene may offer a grotesque vision of American polarization, but it is accurate in the broad strokes. America nowadays is organized around the same principle: what side are you on? This is the primary question many people want to know about those around them, and the answer to the question informs how they will react. Civil War isn’t interested in the specifics of the sides; rather, it’s preoccupied with the general fact of polarization that divides them. The film exploits American polarization without much interest in the ideological or societal underpinnings of said polarization. Instead, it’s investigating the gut response that forces people to distrust, even hate, the people on the wrong side.
Garland’s approach to the film likely explains the film’s mixed reception within online progressive circles (mainstream critics were favourable towards it, and general audiences like it too, as the solid box office returns and 7.5/10 current rating on IMDb indicate). Civil War is not apolitical, but Garland’s refusal to map the warring factions in the film onto the ideological factions of 2024 has given the film a liberal centrist veneer. This idea that the film is centrist is off base, but understandable considering some comments Garland has made in promotional interviews. Nevertheless, as I have already noted, the film is not interested in the specifics of the sides, such as who is conservative or progressive, or Republican or Democrat, etc. The film’s murky account of the political camps in this imagined civil war is not due to some centrist argument about the modern world. Rather, the film is interested in the dynamic of polarization. It is not interested in diagnosing political polarization in our contemporary moment.
Disinterested in politics as the primary motivator of conflict, Civil War instead turns to emotion and imagery. At the heart of the film are the provocative implications of seeing the kind of urban warfare that we’re used to seeing (through our newsfeeds) ravage Iraq, Gaza, and Ukraine instead occur along the East Coast of the United States. Like many visual provocations, Civil War is not conveying its ideas through explicit dialogue or overt messaging, but rather through the feelings, implications, suggestions, and associations of its audiovisual approach. It uses its violent images and musical juxtapositions to thrill the viewer, but also make them think about their relationship to violence in our media.
Combat in a real civil war is not like a cool music video, but presenting separatist soldiers executing federal forces while De La Soul’s “Say No Go” plays over the soundtrack brings the entertainment factor to the fore, which forces us to confront the contradiction of sound and image. Garland’s approach underlines that many viewers treat political conflict as another form of entertainment. Garland likely knows how the old line goes: Washington, D.C. is Hollywood for ugly people.
The film’s focus on the emotional implications of its imagery is why it’s key that our main character in Civil War is a war photographer. Images suggest meanings, but they don’t explicate them. War photographers take photographs of brutal conflicts to demonstrate the problems in the world, but these photographs rarely formulate a solution or even diagnose a problem. The photographers simply document them, attempting an objective remove from what they are witnessing.
However, this objectivity can often implicate the journalists in the violence they’re documenting. We get this in Civil War during an opening credits montage that shows Lee’s photographic work. A particularly provocative vignette shows Lee photographing a man trapped in a tire being lit on fire by others. She does nothing to intervene. The moral ambiguity of her own objectivity is reiterated later when Lee asks to take a photograph of a looter strung up in a barn by some men who run a gas station. Her and Jessie’s interest in the captive make the other men want to show off by killing the man; Lee and Jessie’s own role as observer has shifted the situation of what they observe and provoked violence in order to document it.
However, as regards the imagery of war photography itself, the heavy lifting is left to the audience, who can take or dismiss the photograph and interrogate its meaning or not. Civil War has a similar approach, despite clearly implicating the characters in moments. The film’s imagery sheds light on aspects of American culture and a collective obsession with violence, but doesn’t offer a clear message like an article would. The film wants to thrill us with imagery of destruction and implicate us as viewers in the violence, interrogating our own lust for violent imagery, but without offering a political solution. Thus, Civil War is more provocation than polemic, more exploitation film than political message movie, which explains why it registers so loudly, and leaves some viewers angry or baffled despite its obvious craft.
As well, the film suggests we should not assume that war photographers are noble and driven by ideological purity. Again, the film, like the characters, is operating on more primal levels. This is the other provocation of Civil War: its central characters are not uncomplicated seekers and documentors of the truth. They have their own complex and morally ambiguous motivations for doing their work. They may have political leanings and strong beliefs about truth and freedom, but we never learn what they are.
Instead, we see their desire for thrills, such as after the firefight with the Californian Boogaloo Boys of the Western Forces (another calculated use of provocative associations) when Joel gets drunk and speaks excitedly about what a rush war is. We also see their rigid dedication to an idea of journalism that ignores all moral decisions in the moment, such as Lee’s dispassionate documentation of the looter mentioned above. Jessie is caught in the middle of these two; she wants to be dispassionate like Lee, but she’s also caught up in the thrill of the situation like Joel. It’s her thrill seeking during the car race with the other journalists that leads them into the situation with Jesse Plemons’ soldier, so the film shows clear consequences to this approach. But the characters don’t learn their lessons. The film’s ending shows they’re still driven by these primal motivations as they follow the Western Forces into the White House.
Ultimately, we observe that their most powerful motivating factor is a desire to be there and to document, just like we, as viewers, have an atavistic desire to watch. Garland weaponizes this impulse, in both the character and the viewer, to link us to the witnessing of violence and force us to question why that is. He goes to great lengths to ensure that the violence in the film is thrilling, because the question wouldn’t register if it wasn’t.
For all the talk about Garland’s ideas in Civil War (or lack thereof, according to his harshest critics), it’s easy to ignore his formal chops and eye for stunning imagery. Taken purely on a formal level, Civil War is beautiful, exciting, haunting. The camera puts us in the midst of the action and moves with clarity and precision to punctuate explosive moments of violence. The scene of driving through a forest fire or the aerial shots of combat in the streets of Washington, D.C. are stunning. Several small scenes register as more exciting than most action scenes in larger blockbusters—think of the firefight between the Boogaloo Boys and the armed forces or the sniper duel in the rundown Winter Wonderland. Garland cranks up the sound to blistering levels, taking the cue from Michael Mann and Christopher Nolan before him that few things immerse an audience more than the sound of a gunshot they can feel in their gut.
By the final sequence of the film, when the Western Forces of California and Texas invade Washington, D.C. and raid the White House, we’ve fallen into the trap that Garland has set: we thrill for the bloodshed, despite the blood being shed being our own. I mean this metaphorically, of course. I’m not American, but it’s no accident that Civil War is set in America, about America, but more interested in American iconography than ideology. The image of soldiers fighting with Secret Service in the corridors of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue are meant to hit Americans on a deep, visceral level, an artistic shock and awe akin to the images of January 6 multiplied a hundredfold.
The characters are caught up in the thrill too, racing to get the quote or photograph they need before it’s too late. Are they documenting the moment before it slips away, or simply satisfying the primal urges that drive them? Are they doing both? You can read the ending in many ways. People have described Civil War as an ode to the importance of journalism. It plays more as a condemnation that not even journalism is immune to the lure of the death cult that is American polarization. How else can we interpret the ending and the characters' forgoing reason and bonds to get what they came for? Sure, these people are not monsters, but they, like us, are drawn to the image at the expense of its meaning. They need to take their photograph of bloodshed and feel the bloodrush just as we need to see blood spilled on our news feeds and feel the horror of what’s happening around the world—but for us, it’s always from a distance, with no risk to comfort or surety or safety. Civil War refuses that comfort to its characters, but still, the reality that surrounds them cannot overcome their own fascination with death. Are we doomed to make similar mistakes? Only time will tell.
What are we to make of all the film’s provocations, most notably the final moments where the Western Forces execute the President of the United States and pose with his corpse? That all depends on what our thoughts are about America as a concept and America as a reality. Perhaps Civil War is guilty of the very things it diagnoses about modern America: being more interested in thrilling us with images of violence than clarifying or reframing them. But exploitation films don’t offer answers. They rather bludgeon us with imagery and indulge in our basest impulses to thrill us, yes, but perhaps make us question our own thrill making impulses in the process.
Civil War (2024, USA)
Written and directed by Alex Garland; starring Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Sonoya Mizuno, Nick Offerman, Jefferson White, Nelson Lee, Evan Lai, Jesse Plemons.