Opinion: ‘Civil War’ is more than just a reflection of America’s divisions

Editor’s note: Noah Berlatsky is a freelance writer in Chicago. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the author. Scenery More opinion Articles on CNN.

CNN
—

“Much of American artistic and cultural work about the Vietnam War, even when it engages in anti-American criticism, firmly and crudely places Americans at the center of the story,” Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote in his 2016 study, “Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam” and the Memory of the War. You could extend this adage to most Hollywood war films. Whatever they feel about war, their main goal is often to imagine and experience war as a uniquely American trauma.

Alex Garland’s “Civil War” has often been discussed as a reflection and warning of America’s current partisan divisions. This is understandable, especially in light of Garland’s phrasing in interviews, where he described the country’s current left-right divide as “incredibly dangerous.”

But whatever Garland says, “Civil War” cannot be understood simply as a commentary on current American policy. It is also part of this tradition of Americanizing the United States’ experiences in foreign wars. The film brings the experiences of foreign war correspondents and the atrocities of foreign war back to the United States itself.

Garland’s smart, ambiguous novel deftly obscures and reimagines war movie conventions, even as he participates in them. It does this in part by focusing specifically on journalists, who are observers of war in ways that sometimes parallel, and sometimes contradict, the way film viewers are observers.

The film takes place in the near future where the United States has been divided into several warring factions. Union forces loyal to President Nick Offerman are losing ground. Photojournalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and journalist Joel (Wagner Moura) decide to travel to Washington, D.C., for one last interview (despite the fact that the president has been known to shoot journalists on sight). The veteran reporters are joined by a young photographer, Jesse (Caille Spaeny), and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), an older war correspondent who is a mentor to Lee and Joel.

The political context of the “Civil War” is deliberately ambiguous. The president is an autocrat who hates journalists, implicitly invokes Trump, and is explicitly compared in the film to dictators like Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. However, the breakaway states include deep blue California and red Texas, so they do not collapse along current political lines.

Unlike the actual American Civil War, this war does not appear to have any particular racial or racist connotations. A terrifying, nameless war criminal, played by Jesse Plemons, seems to suit people born outside the United States. But as far as we know, these are just his national beliefs; There is no broader evidence of ethnic cleansing or racial genocide.

The film’s refusal to be specific can be seen as a cop out. But he’s the same kind of cop who directs most of Hollywood’s most famous Vietnam War movies. For example, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) do not spend much time analyzing or thinking about the political context of the war. Instead, they both focus on the terrifying and devastating experience of combat and on the nightmarish turmoil caused by immersion in violence. They focus on personal trauma and psychological harm in a way that makes politics and morality largely irrelevant.

Hollywood films about the Vietnam War are generally neither about whether America did the right thing, nor about how American choices affected people in Vietnam. Instead, these films are about how war affects the conflicted psyches of American heroes—soldiers in general, but also sometimes politicians and people on the home front. This is why many American Vietnam films are shown on American soil.

In First Blood (1982), an American war veteran wages war on a rural community in the United States, metaphorically bringing the war home. In Red Dawn (1984), Cuban and Central American forces invade the United States. Americans in Hollywood films are generally seen as the only real victims of American foreign policy. In this context, it makes sense to make films in which battles take place here rather than there, and in which Americans are seen as a colonized people, not as colonizers.

“Civil War” reproduces this dynamic, and to some extent questions it. Lee, Jesse and the other journalists risk their lives as they follow soldiers into combat, searching for the perfect, devastating image of stunning violence. During her first adventure in war journalism, Jessie says she had never felt so afraid, never felt so alive.

War as a coming-of-age story, or as a test of courage and genius, is common in war films – the Joker (Matthew Modine) in “Full Metal Jacket” experiences a baptism by fire that resembles Jesse’s in some ways. However, “Civil War” is arguably more self-reflexive. Jessie is fascinated not only by violence, but also by the image of violence that she can record on her camera. This fascination places her in the position of the film’s viewer, who, like her, is transfixed and perhaps moved by Garland’s tour of simulated atrocities, from stark mass graves to thunderous gunfights.

It is also noteworthy that the first significant photo of Jesse is a photo of Lee photographing corpses. The appeal of war photography for Jesse is not just seeing the worst. that it Vision itself Seeing the worst. The power of a war film is that it puts you, as you watch, in the shoes of those who are suffering. Like Jesse, you feel like the target of violence, which is both terrifying and exhilarating at the same time.

Garland’s film may seem less like a scathing critique of our current crisis and more like self-indulgence. “Civil War” does not mention nuclear weapons; He did not mention American foreign policy. It imagines that a United States controlled by an authoritarian president will turn violence inward, and only inward. But our history and American military participation around the world today attest to how unrealistic this is.

Traditionally, cinematic representations of American suffering represent the other side of the worse suffering of the people targeted by the United States. Jessie is startled, aroused, and terrified by the nightmarish images she sees through her lens. But as long as Hollywood war movies like “Civil War” focus so intensely and singularly on the experiences of Americans, they will have difficulty portraying the real dangers of American violence, no matter how horrific the images they show, or how powerful the bombs. .