Pressing "Play" on Civil War

I tried and failed to watch Alex Garland's movie again

Photo by Diego González on Unsplash

The Blu-ray case for Alex Garland’s Civil War lies. It identifies the name of the movie, the director, and the cast correctly. But the picture on the cover is a scene that isn’t in the movie.

Two helicopters sweep toward the Statue of Liberty. More fill the smoky sky, the skylines of Manhattan and New Jersey barely visible behind them. The Hudson, however, is clearly visible. The ribbon of water snakes to the center of the horizon. The bay and the river reflect back a bloated orange sun clothed in more smoke and dark wispy clouds. The entire case is cast in this bruised hue, a stark contrast to the lime-green letters spelling out the title.

I’m not even sure the scene is geographically possible, but it looks a lot like the poster for Apocalypse Now, which this movie resembles in only the most superficial of ways. You could call Civil War a journey to the heart of darkness, maybe, if Washington, D.C. counts as the heart of darkness. For a lot of people on both the left and right these days, it does.

There’s another half-truth above the title: “Welcome to the front line.” Ninety percent of Civil War is about getting to the front line: deciding to undertake the mission, justifying the reasons, calculating the cost, and ultimately questioning whether the results are worth the price.

The back of the case sticks to the violent spectacle. The stills are from the movie, but only the most viscerally shocking moments: Kirsten Dunst shielding Cailee Spaeny from falling debris, a sniper cloaked in camouflage, silhouetted figures sprinting across the White House lawn. A shot of cars abandoned on a bombed-out highway, a post-apocalyptic cliché that doesn’t really belong in the movie even though it’s there.

The blurb warps the plot to cater to action junkies (read this in your best trailer-narrator voice): “From filmmaker Alex Garland comes a journey across a dystopian future America, following a team of military-embedded journalists as they race against time to reach D.C. before rebel factions descend upon the White House.”

“Rebel factions” sounds like Star Wars. “Race against time” evokes 24 or Mission: Impossible. Calling it a “dystopian future” frames it as speculative fiction rather than what it actually is: true. This isn’t Minority Report or Planet of the Apes. It’s not some distant warning.

I saw Civil War three times in the theater last year. I saw it alone. I loved how the sound design pummeled me at a time I felt mostly numb. The soundtrack was propulsive. I saw myself in Kirsten Dunst.

It was April, the presidential tickets had been settled (or so we thought), and like many others, I had tapped out of the election. The mainstream coverage felt archaic. I couldn’t stay engaged in a contest between two men whose combined age predates the telegraph. Plus, the news kept sending out the wrong signals. But Civil War was on target: Dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot.

It left the theaters and I ordered the Blu-ray. I started a newsletter!

I got it in the mail the same week Trump survived the assassination attempt. I meant to write something about it then—the eerie synchronicity between the war photographers in the film, so desperate to capture violence, and the civilian photojournalists who documented the bullet’s journey, Trump being pulled to the ground, Trump pressed under the scrum of Secret Service agents, and then his incredible seizing of the moment with a clenched fist and ferocious snarl.

I wanted to write about the accidents of history that put journalists in harm’s way versus the way journalists can seek harm out. Journalists as both witnesses and participants. The uneasy line between documenting violence and feeding on it. Here was my opening line:

“Anyone in America can be a war photographer if they stand in one place long enough.”

But I couldn’t write the piece, even as I kept a collection of quotes and thoughts in a Google Doc:

• “How easily images of war are transmuted into heroism, how the blood that disgusts us on a corpse is valorized when it drips from a raised fist.”

• “No one has control over how another will react to staring war in the face… All photos of war are anti-war; all photos of war are pro-war.”

• “If Civil War fails, it fails at the impossible task of assigning any one meaning to an image. The impossible task of pinning down any one human being’s reaction to that image.”

• "Garland (through Lee) wonders how it is that violent images from across the globe don't keep America from dividing itself. But you can't show white Americans images from Sudan or Afghanistan and expect them to stop their own escalation—pictures of people who don't look like them are atrocity exhibitions: 'Look at what those people are doing to themselves.' And if you show them images of themselves at war, all they will see is how righteous they are."

Months passed. I tried to write about Civil War in the past tense, especially when Walz joined Harris on the ticket and I thought, maybe, just maybe, the country had swerved. I shifted toward something hopeful. Maybe America wouldn’t endure a sequel to its cruelty—sequels, after all, are always more violent than the original.

I thought I saw a pivot point. It was a screenshot—not even a photo—that zipped around social media: Those placards reading “Mass Deportation Now,” waved at that Republican convention like they were celebrating a national championship. (And I guess they were.)

I looked for professional still photos that snared the same ghastly vindictiveness, but it was the oppressiveness of the mass-produced signs, casually caught—no art to it at all—that showed the bloodthirstiness under the sans-serif font. You can’t see the faces of people waving the signs and that works because the people waving those signs aren’t human at all.

I wanted to write about that moment—the clearest signal yet of what was coming and maybe what could be prevented. But writing is hard. Instead, I phone-banked. I hosted a podcast urging Trump’s defeat.

And then he won.

I wasn’t going to watch Civil War again now.

Other stuff conspired to keep me from writing about politics at length. The constant to-do list of being a homeowner with a minor disaster to repair. Then the cycle of being exhausted and then resting and engaging and being exhausted again.

Then the last two weeks of January battered us all like a filthy wave pool. Slime coming at you from all sides, getting into every pore, spitting it out, fear that it would blind you or make you sick.

Then the administrative coup unfolded faster than real time. Fascism wasn’t creeping in—it’s just… here. Leftists rage at the tongue-tied Democrats, but it isn’t even capitulation.

They didn’t get a chance to surrender. The battle lines jumped over them, or maybe through them. They are still talking, unaware they’ve been sliced in half by piano wire. Just a slight push, and their torsos will slide off their hips. Viscera everywhere.

People are already dead because the world’s richest man thinks he’s playing a bureaucratic RPG, fudging the dice, cackling at his own brilliance.

So today, I finally opened the Civil War Blu-ray case. The only Blu-ray I own.

I hooked up the player I bought just to watch this movie. But I still couldn’t bring myself to watch. Instead, I clicked on the making-of documentary.

It begins with Alex Garland. Civil wars aren’t a distant possibility, he says. They really happen.

Then Cailee Spaeny appears, recalling a text Garland sent her on January 6th: “Our movie is happening right now.”

It sounds so true, but it has to be a lie. Garland wrote the script in 2020. Spaeny was cast in 2022. Filming began in March. So was this misremembered? Did Garland say something to her before she was even attached? Or does it just feel better to say you predicted history rather than simply watched it unfold?

Maybe none of that matters.

What I wonder is if Garland texted her today.

His movie is happening right now.