This video is sponsored by Surfshark VPN. More in a bit about how you can get an extra four months of internet privacy for free. The problem with trying to talk about Civil War is that it's an impossible object. Civil War is a movie written and directed by Alex Garland.
It takes place at the tail end of a fictional second American civil war, conducted between federal forces loyal to the president and a loose coalition of militias led by an alliance of Texas and California. It follows four journalists as they travel from New York to Washington, D.C., with vaguely defined intentions to interview the president, who has made himself unavailable to the press for over a year. Our main character is Lee, a world-weary veteran photojournalist who finds herself an unenthusiastic mentor to Jesse, a younger photojournalist who idolizes Lee and invites herself on the voyage after a chance encounter. Along for the ride are Joel and Sammy, who are writers.
The movie is essentially a series of vignettes, narratively unconnected scenes of the journalists'experiences of an American ground war as they document what they see on the way to DC. They first encounter a group of armed men when they stop for gas, where Jesse hesitates to take photos of some looters the men have found and are torturing, to her later regret. They then document a battle between loyalists and militia fighters before spending the night at a refugee camp, where Lee starts to recognize Jesse's talent.
Later on, they pass through an idyllic small town where the inhabitants claim apathy to the war, though they clearly care enough to post gunmen on the rooftops. They then encounter two snipers fighting an unseen shooter in a house and take some more photos. While driving, they meet two fellow journalists, Tony and Bohai, and Jesse switches cars with Tony before disappearing down the road.
Joel, Tony, and Sammy find them being threatened by Jesse Plemons in his usual film role of committing and or being witness to atrocities, and after trying to negotiate Jesse and Bo-Hai's release, everyone almost dies until Sammy saves the day, getting shot and dying in the process. Jesse, Joel, and Lee embed themselves with the Western forces as they mount the final attack on the White House, with Jesse taking more and more risks and Lee panicking the whole way through, ultimately getting shot trying to save Jesse, who in a chilling fulfillment of earlier foreshadowing, takes Lee's photo as she falls to her presumable death. Joel stops the summary execution of the president just long enough for him to get a quote, and the movie ends with a photo presumably taken by Jesse slowly developing and revealing the western forces smiling around their victory like so many game hunters around a rhino. Before I continue let's take a second to thank the sponsor Arguably the worst thing about the internet is exposure.
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Okay, let's proceed. Civil War was produced by Indie Darling and frequent Alex Garland collaborator A24 for $50 million, their most expensive movie to date. Since then, it has solidified itself as one of A24's biggest successes. Their comparatively big risk met with big reward. as it has gone on to make over double its budget back and receive rave reviews from both critics and audiences.
It's a masterwork of filmmaking, they say, cinematographically gorgeous and intensely relevant to our current political climate, a stark and disturbing reminder of the horrific violence that political division can cause. Civil War is the movie America needs right now. Instrumental to the tone of this reaction is a collective sigh of relief about Garland's decision to avoid making Civil War some cerebral theory-laden appraisal of modern American politics. It's not completely clear what either the Western forces or President Nick Offerman's policy preferences are, and this, so goes the argument, is an unmatched stroke of genius on Garland's part.
Political obsession is what's gotten us into our most serious collective conversation about another American civil war in 150 years. When war breaks out, conversations about taxes or immigration policy become irrelevant to the point of absurdity. The violence inherent in war radiating far beyond the boundaries of personal belief within which political partisanship should rightly live in a functional civilization.
Someone in that house, they're stuck. We're stuck. Who do you think they are?
No idea. I'm going to spend a lot of time here talking about things I don't like, so I want to make it clear up front that these are not terms I'm interested in arguing against. Alex Garland has always excelled at striking a vibe, and as this movie relates to the feeling of violent conflict, the vibes are, I have to say, Just right.
Civil War is an extremely emotionally uncomfortable movie. It is tense, it is shocking, and overall the point seems to be to get the audience to leave the theater feeling a little sick, which is certainly a feeling it instilled in me. I think it's an extremely elegant aesthetic strategy, for example, to convey violence with sound instead of gore.
The guns used on set were shot with full rounds instead of the half rounds designed to dampen the noise in most movie shoots, which makes each gunshot in the movie feel as deafening as gunfire is in a violent conflict. This guy is your colleague? This guy here? Yes, sir. Here's my-You don't need to see the gore that results from it, because the shock to your nervous system is an unbearable enough experience that you really hope it doesn't happen again, despite knowing it will.
Nice. But some party poopers don't think this is enough for a movie to be considered good. Some uncultured swine want to be spoon-fed, want to be told which side is the good side so they can know what the movie is supposed to say.
People went into Civil War expecting the thrill of confirmation bias, of being told that your side in the ever more polarized politics of the United States is the right side. So they can move through their life without having to confront the consequences of the political divisions spreading across the world. People want this to be something that's going to talk about like their side. This is a journalistic movie through and through.
What we're hearing is what people truly think about journalism and how biased they want it to be. Comfortable in the knowledge that Alex Garland approves of their partisanship. They have to be told how to feel, have to be told how to interpret it. They can't just watch a movie and make up their own mind.
No, what did you intend by this? I need to be told so I can also have that opinion. Please, sir, can you tell me how to think?
What a bunch of chumps. What a bunch of whining, weak-willed, slack-jawed, bovine, quivering globs of phlegm. I bet they'd leap in tidy obedience off a cliff one after the other if their chosen political party said to.
This movie is about them. They're the ones who need to see it most, and the great injustice is that the point of this masterpiece will never get through to them even if they do. As one such partisan hater and a sixth-year doctorate student in mass communications, I feel well-positioned to speak to the conflict in this discourse.
Will I ever finish my dissertation? Who knows? Let's do this instead. I want to begin by staking an initial position that movies are not just the feeling you leave the theater with.
A lot of defenses I see of this movie have a kind of accusatory tone, an implication that if you don't like this movie, it's because your nerves just couldn't hold up in the face of seeing your home destroyed on screen. It has been really funny to see every American get very uncomfortable who's never had a problem when the battle, even if it's fictional, has been elsewhere and got a little too close to home. It's an argument that reminds me of a lot of horror discourse. For a lot of people, it's not enough to just dislike horror. They have to make their dislike everybody else's problem too, right?
The idea is that no reasonable person would want to watch destruction and murder. and so horror must just be feeding off of and encouraging deviant behavior in its audiences. The counterpoint to this is that we don't watch horror movies because we straightforwardly enjoy mayhem.
We watch horror because looking at horrible things in a narrativized format can help us understand something about being human we wouldn't otherwise have considered. That logic cuts both ways. We also don't watch horror in order to remind ourselves that serial killers are scary or whatever. I make most of my living analyzing horror. I feel kind of sick after most movies I watch.
It's a feeling I invite. It is absolutely fair to say that Civil War does not make me feel very good about the prospect of an American ground war. But like, Neither do most war movies.
Most war movies are not made in an especially hawkish spirit. If Civil War really is a singularly good movie, if it's really worth the praise that's been lavished upon it, it has to do something other than make me feel sick. This is where, if you and I were talking about this at a bar after watching the movie, the conversation would probably organically progress to how Civil War represents journalism.
The reasonable location in which it looks like we should seek our thematic tiebreaker. and figure out what this movie is really trying to say beyond war bad. What are these people, these journalists, doing for this movie? What is their role here, narratively and thematically? And this is the point at which Civil War starts to be an impossible object.
The point at which this video became an absolute pain in the ass to write. It is extremely hard to talk about a story that seems as uninvested in its own thematic stakes as Civil War does. which is large part of the reason I personally consider this movie something of a creative failure right out the gate.
The spectrum of discourse surrounding Civil War is wider than I think any director would reasonably intend. Typically, when you make a piece of art, there's some intention to say something about the human condition. that only the least media literate audience members could miss.
That's especially the case for war movies or any other story that relies on some kind of understanding of the political landscape it was made in. There are always going to be people who don't understand that Starship Troopers or Robocop is a satire, but if you're Paul Verhoeven and you're making Starship Troopers or Robocop, you're probably not hoping that those people constitute a commanding share of opinion about the movie. It's one thing to leave certain plot points up to interpretation, it's quite another to allow every interpretation of the core theme of the movie to carry equal weight.
Negative reviews about Civil War usually accuse it of not saying anything. I don't think that's entirely fair. At least I don't think it articulates what the movie really fails to do.
After all, this is not nothing. We do have a whole movie here. There are actors emoting.
There is sound design. There's frame composition. There's a lot to evaluate in this movie.
I do not think the problem is that Civil War isn't saying anything. I think the problem... is that any coherent interpretation of it requires you to either ignore something that's there or add something that isn't. Perhaps the most preposterous examples of the quest to make Civil War make sense are the interpretations that require us to forget this movie takes place in the United States.
Like, this can't just be a movie about war journalism, because if it were just a movie about war journalism, there would be no reason to set it in a speculative America instead of some other conflict that actually happened. If you're trying to comment on how journalism actually behaves in war, and how it can affect policy for good or ill, it would actually probably be better to set it somewhere else. Perhaps Somalia, where well-intentioned media attention to the famine and related civil war there helped spur a UN peacekeeping mission with heavy participation by the US that by all accounts made things worse until we finally abandoned it. Many such cases. If you're not trying to make a statement about journalism and are instead trying to say something about voyeurism or competition or some other vice of the journalistic profession that could be expanded to fit the general human condition, then there is additionally no reason to set this movie in the US.
This interpretation says that the reason this movie is set in America is simply to get butts in seats and we shouldn't read into it any more than that. Loath as I am to intentionally alienate people who happen to click on my videos, I gotta say, fellas, this interpretation sucks. It's really stupid. If a movie called Civil War, set during a modern American Civil War and released during an election year, is just a cynical bait and switch to get people to give A24 and Alex Garland their money, then this movie wouldn't be worth the oxygen it's taking to talk about it. We should not accept cynicism as a routine element of our artistic experiences.
Besides that, whatever you think of him, Alex Garland is as much of an auteur as we're likely to get in the modern film industry. The setting of this movie is not a small detail designed to be adjusted according to demographic need. It is instrumental to the entire premise of the movie.
A24 did not make the decision to set the movie in the US. Garland did. And he is, if nothing else, a sincere artist whose creative choices I will be taking seriously.
God, imagine thinking you're defending a movie by saying its director has no artistic integrity. Raise your goddamn standards, people. I am quite struck by people's refusal To read into something and to ask, is it just fucking ignorance on my part or is it intentional? I'd have to be really ignorant about American politics to not know the politics of Texas and California. Off the charts ignorant.
And I'm not. Not that ignorant. So let's consider the arguments that are actually trying to engage with the text.
Let's take the interpretation that Civil War is a straightforward love letter to journalism. That journalists can individually be compromised, jaded, often self-destructing and crass, but that their job is ultimately extremely important and something we shouldn't take for granted. In the end, Lee doesn't just die in the line of duty.
She specifically dies protecting Jesse. She died protecting the new generation of journalists. It's a job so important, it's worth dying to ensure someone will be around to do it. And if the movie makes us feel that, it may lead us to think about why it's important.
Okay, that's coherent enough, but does the movie agree with this? Well, we certainly don't see these journalists publishing anything. We don't see the effect of their work on the world.
If anything, we're told the exact opposite of this interpretation, in a line by Lee that really couldn't be a clear indicator of what a waste of time she thinks her job is. Every time I survived a war zone and got the photo, I thought I was sending a warning home. Don't do this. But here we are. There really is, at the end of the day, nothing in this movie to indicate that we should think of journalistic work as being of any consequence at all, much less important.
So let's incorporate this fact and take the opposite reading, that Civil War is a critique of journalism. That it's about how modern journalism is a profession of voyeuristic exploitation dressed up as an institution of societal goodwill. That in pretending the information it curates is objective fact, Journalism distorts reality in a way that directly contributes to the escalation of violence that we see before us.
But if this switch was all these parallel characters'acts amounted to, the film would almost read as a commentary on the harrowing toll of war journalism, an ode to the sacrifices they make rather than a critique of their underlying philosophy. But that's not what Civil War is. This is a critique.
A point made hammered home in the climax of the film when Lee tackles Jessie to the ground to protect her from incoming fire, only for Jessie to photograph Lee's final moments as she crumples lifelessly to the floor. This moment solidifies Jessie's transformation from the rookie to the veteran. That's pretty appealing to me.
I can see how that would work as a theme conceptually. So do we see any evidence of that here either? Do we, for example, see these journalists encouraging violence to get a more dramatic photo? or exchanging visibility to questionable people for access to information? Well, no.
They certainly refuse the impulse to take humanitarian action, but this isn't presented as a categorically bad thing given the circumstances and the overall brutalist tone of the movie. Lee's trauma pretty clearly comes at least partly from the horror of knowing war is simply too large, too complex an issue to be counteracted by individual acts of heroism. This is war.
Torture and murder is what happens in war. These people are disconnected from their humanity, that much is certain, but you can't say the things they're recording aren't happening. It probably wouldn't occur to me to diffuse this situation by turning it into a photoshoot, but I can't say for certain, given how the movie presents it, that we're supposed to understand it as being morally the wrong approach.
Of the five people in this scene, only one of them has a gun and has demonstrated a willingness to commit violence. As long as these people are here to record the events of the war, they're not going to be able to do anything. they should probably record the events of the war. What else are they supposed to do? War is hell, didn't you know that?
But that's fine. Just because the movie lacks explicit ethical boundary crossing doesn't mean it can't be critical towards journalists. I can imagine ways in which the practical results of emotional numbness or a violent kind of voyeurism would be very possible to convey visually. But Civil War doesn't follow this path either.
Instead, the movie is going to great lengths to humanize these people in a way it humanizes no one else. Only the journalists are allowed to be complicated here. Alex Garland's visual language tells me explicitly. that these people suffer, that they have empathy, that they're skilled professionals, that they are people whose potential deaths we should dread and whose loss we should mourn. Every frame of this movie is basically indistinguishable from the photos Lee and Jesse are taking.
The cinematography is literally built to match Lee and Jesse's photographic eye, and both are meant to be composed as beautifully as possible. So if it's a critique of the inherent distortion of a voyeuristic eye, then what am I meant to understand about the difference between how these events are really going down versus how these journalists are representing them? Ah, but see, it's actually a meta-commentary. Garland is making a point about how we decontextualize and aestheticize other countries'wars.
He's doing the same thing the journalists are doing. That's why it's so genius to leave political specificity out of the movie entirely. All the combatants are framed as equally reprehensible.
That would be an interesting read if it didn't require us to, once again, edit Garland's movie for him. If all you knew about the movie was what's said about it online, you'd never expect that it's actually fairly expositional about its worldbuilding. It's not hard to figure out the broad strokes of what happened here. An elected president turned into a fascist authoritarian, dismantled the institutional checks on his power, including journalistic protections, and at some point ordered airstrikes on American citizens. Given all the information we have, it's pretty clear that the president here is a would-be dictator.
who should certainly be removed from power. Unless you think Alex Garland is holding space for dictatorships to have some potential social benefit, then he is claiming a very clear political position, which is that authoritarianism is bad. This is why I'm so baffled by the insistence that this movie doesn't contain any political bias, that we have no way of knowing anything about what happened or what kind of ideology is to blame. Just because the politics here are not very provocative doesn't mean they're not there. I'm especially perplexed about the insistence Which I see often, that the reason Jesse Plemons is so scary here is because we don't know anything about his ideology or why he's doing what he's doing.
When we watch Jesse Plemons berate the group, we aren't thinking about his stance on X, Y, or Z issues, and whether we disagree or agree with his cause in spite of his methods, because we haven't been told about what those stances are. He's racist. The word is doesn't sound American. He's literally racist. He's out here shooting people because they don't look like whatever he thinks a real American is.
Central American, South American. It's the most famous scene in the movie. It was a very lively meme for a while. You open your mouth and tell me where you're from.
Just make sure it's clear fucking English. Asking a Hispanic guy with an accent what kind of American he is, South or Central, is a racist question. He's racist. This makes me feel insane. Like I feel like I watched a different movie from everybody else.
This politics thing is a line of argumentation that I think unjustly drives a lot of discourse surrounding how annoying the lack of information in this movie is. So I'm going to try and articulate what I think people are trying to say when they say this movie is empty or says nothing. The problem is not that I don't know enough about the political situation here.
I know plenty. I am not angry because Alex Garland didn't say Orange Man bad, largely because that's almost exactly what he said. Do people not know an Orange Man metaphor when you see one? Some are already calling it the greatest victory in the history of military campaigns.
I don't care about the likelihood of a Texas-California alliance. I don't care for searching for clues about the ideology of the Florida alliance, or what it means to be a Portland Maoist, or why the loyalist states chose the-Oh my god, I don't care. I am, as a person who enjoys suspending my disbelief and using my imagination, very ready to accept the idea that the point here is that there is a war, not why there is a war. No, the information I need and am missing is not about politics.
It's about the journalists themselves. A couple years ago, Alex Garland made a movie called Men that I really like. It's this movie about a woman named Harper who's fresh off.
potentially the worst breakup scenario imaginable from this guy who threatens to press his own off button if she leaves him. And when she does, he follows through. She takes herself on a vacation to the English countryside where she inadvertently awakens like a pagan god of some sort that appears in town in the form of these leering, condescending, vaguely threatening men. At the end of the movie, this thing, this primordial man. births every man Harper has met in the village until it finally becomes the ghost of her husband who it's implied she then kills. I've been driving myself insane over the past few weeks trying to figure out what the point of Civil War is, trying to figure out what the events of this movie mean for the themes that I assume Alex Garland, like any sincere artist, is trying to convey to his audience.
And thinking about his other movies, I'm struck by how comparatively easy they are to understand despite or maybe because of how intensely surreal they are. Men struggles a little on the off-ramp. Its narrative doesn't always coalesce.
Its symbolism isn't quite as coherent as my taste would like it to be. A lot of people didn't like this movie at all. On one hand, the least imaginative among us were annoyed at the suggestion that manhood could be anything less than completely honorable at all times.
Big surprise. On the other hand, some people were disturbed by this vision of the inherently female act of birth being portrayed as a horrific and repellent gore fest. They thought this was itself misogynistic imagery, a disruption of the themes the movie had been expressing up to that point.
And additionally, they didn't care for the suggestion that Black misogyny is indistinguishable from and in fact encompassed within white misogyny. I'm not convinced by this racism accusation. Misogyny as we understand it is a hegemonic power.
It is very much embodied in the British colonial tradition, and because of that, the ability to perform a certain kind of misogyny is the rare token of societal belonging that has historically been completely accessible to and in fact encouraged among non-white colonized people. I don't know, that's how I took it. The other argument is difficult to counter if you're intellectualizing the plot, trying to connect each dot to another to make it make logical sense.
That's arguably a failing of the movie, but I think the theme does clarify. when you take the surrealism on its face. Men is a little difficult to dissect, but what it absolutely succeeds at is in creating an extremely uncomfortable, disturbing atmosphere that does, in my opinion, speak to a completely understandable and effective reading of patriarchal pathologies. Insecure masculinity is obsessive about the female ability to create life and the sexual power it understands female biology to have, which in the misogynistic mindset is so overwhelming that it justifies the amount of control that patriarchal oppression seeks to impose on the female body.
I have decided that you are an expert in carnality, someone who has... explored all the things that they can do. These things now exist in my mind.
I'm not sure exactly what, if anything, is meant to be implied in a one-to-one allegorical sense by a pagan man-god that gives repetitive, self-obliterating birth to itself, but I am compelled by this illustration of insecure masculinity as itself consisting of all the things it both desires and fears in its ghoulish understanding of female nature. Masculinity is itself vulnerable, obscene. organic, fertile, fluid, volatile. In projecting all these qualities onto femininity, misogynists reveal their consumptive fear of the role those qualities have in defining the human condition, not just the female condition they think they're describing.
Misogyny obsesses over controlling those features in others, and in doing so, gives itself passive license to exhibit those same qualities in exactly the grotesque way it imagines it sees in the female body. This is monstrous behavior. Misogyny is an ideology that makes it impossible for men to connect to women as people.
It is an implosive quality for both the men who subscribe to it and any relationship it touches. Harper never really had a husband. She had a predator in her home.
Her journey is one of recognizing how pitiful misogyny is and that pitying the misogynist does not and should not translate to tolerating his command over her thoughts and movements. James, what is it that you want from me? Your love. The kind of surrealism Garland typically uses is really good for these kinds of social commentaries, these aspects of our culture that are difficult to demonstrate in logical terms because they're ideas that fundamentally defy logic.
There are a lot of reasons we have misogyny in society, but none of them have to do with the fact that we have to be able to demonstrate it in a logical to do with misogyny making any kind of logical sense or being practically beneficial in the way that like oxygen is beneficial. It's the kind of fixation on the internal contradictions of human constructs that shared in Annihilation, which is one of my favorite movies. This alien life form can't be understood as coming in either peace or in war because peace and war are human constructions that this creature is incapable of recognizing. The shimmer which distorts and refracts the most basic building blocks of biological life itself removes the boundaries by which we prefer to understand the world and by extension ourselves. We might not always feel consistent in our minds, but at least we have a consistent physical reality.
Annihilation casts even that assumption into doubt. What if the consistent nature of your body was as much of an illusion as every other human assumption? Where would you find your own identity in that scenario?
What if there really is no reliable way to know who or what you are? Alex Garland's movies never end on a note that you could describe as hopeful, but I think a lot of people take them overly literally. These are movies that question the extent to which concepts like hope, or despair are even very important or useful.
The point of Ex Machina is not that Ava is going to become the Terminator and destroy the world. The point of Annihilation is not that Lena is going to become the Terminator and destroy the world. These are fables, not histories, and their endings are plot moments that are built to call our attention to the power of existential ambiguities that our culture as it exists now isn't built to respect. They are genuflections, almost, to the kind of unknowable immensities of consciousness that will drive our behaviors, whether we acknowledge them or not.
And that's really cool. So, we have two avenues of interpretation for this movie, neither one of which is very well supported by the text. Either Civil War is a movie about how American journalists are flawed vessels for the truth who sacrifice their lives and humanity to bring us the information we need to jointly run a society, or it's a movie about how American journalists are exploitative scavengers who are industrializing the capture of people's pain.
It can't be both, because those are literally mutually exclusive ideas. Journalism cannot be both useless and powerful. Its practitioners cannot be both strictly opportunistic and strictly self-sacrificing. The information about the journalists that we need to break this tie, to really make this an exploration of the complications within journalism and what that means for ourselves and society, is what Garland leaves out of the movie entirely.
In fact, he goes to considerable lengths to scramble this information. Consider the time period this movie takes place in. What is it exactly?
There are no political figures in this movie from our own world to timestamp anything. President Nick Offerman is clearly built to evoke a Trumpish kind of figure, but he is not himself Trump. There is no Biden here, there's no DeSantis, there's no Gavin Newsom, there's nothing to suggest when exactly this alternative version of America branched off from our own.
And that's fine, I'm not criticizing that decision, that's just what the movie is doing. Similarly, the equipment everybody is using, whether weapons or phones or cars, are basically of our own time. which I think makes it fair to interpret this movie as taking place in an alternate 2020s, maybe an alternate 2030s. In the first act, we see flashbacks of Lee photographing Iraq circa 2003, and also photographing a necklacing, which was a popular torture and execution method in certain African countries during the 80s and 90s. So right off the bat, we're really pushing the plausibility of Lee's age here.
If Civil War takes place in an alternate 20s, Then we're watching her over at least a 30-year career, throughout which she appears to be the exact same age. But then we're also told an additional piece of her biography. When you were in college, you took the...
Motherfucking legendary photo of the Antifa massacre. Then you became the youngest ever magnum photographer. If Lee took the motherfucking legendary photo of the Antifa massacre while she was in college, then assuming Antifa emerged in this reality at the same time it emerged in ours, she was not also able to shoot the Iraq war or the apartheid protests because she would have been a baby. This is just a demonstrative exercise.
I'm not actually interested in- parsing the temporal logic of a work of fiction. My point is that this is the information the movie is giving us. This is in the text, and it's a decision that is doing something. Whether he means to or not, Alex Garland is saying something about Lee in his decision to not bother making her age logically track.
Namely, he's asking us to ignore certain aspects about what we know about journalism in our own reality and trust that this construction of journalism he's spinning into existence will ultimately serve his creative. point. It's because of this nonsensical construction that we don't get to know things about these journalists that would clarify what exactly they're doing here.
Who is their audience? What kind of story are they working on? What kind of journalistic institutions does this alternate version of America have?
Maybe Reuters got bought out by eccentric billionaire Elno Husk in the year 2027. Maybe they've since been sending their field reporters on assignments to describe the breakdown of Western values as they're expressed in people's soda preferences. we literally have no way of knowing. It is impossible to say whether these are good journalists or bad journalists based on what the movie tells us.
All we really know is that a couple of these journalists are skilled at photography. Absent any further information about what these people's actual contextualized relationship is with their job in this dystopia, our only recourse, the only thing Alex Garland allows us to assume is that these are normal journalists. What the fuck? He's a normal journalist.
The scene in which we learn about Leigh having taken the motherfucking legendary photo of the Antifa massacre in college takes place over a conversation during which Jessie is developing her film on the road with a travel kit. There's a lot I don't know about photojournalism, so I interviewed a few journalists over the course of my research for this video and was confirmed in my suspicion that this detail is not an accurate reflection of photography in the field. Nobody does this anymore. Film is extremely temperamental. It is expensive, it is unstable, and unwieldy at the best of times.
And no modern conflict photographer would use film where SD cards and DSLRs are available. I don't think Alex Garland included this detail because he doesn't know that. At least I hope he didn't.
I think he included it as visual shorthand to express what photojournalism is to him, which is first and foremost a skill. Not just anyone can be a photojournalist, he's saying. Photojournalism is precious.
It is something that requires commitment to a certain kind of esoteric knowledge of light and chemicals and machinery that Jesse has and we presumably do not. This is a scene that defines these characters as professionals, that distinguishes them from simple audience surrogates. The photojournalist might be our point of view here, but this scene makes it clear that we're not supposed to completely identify with them, because they're doing something that most of us can't and wouldn't if we could.
because it's way too risky. Being a war photographer is an insane thing to do. The insanity of that job is the reason Walter Cronkite once described war correspondence as the most glamorous position in the field of journalism. It's very easy to idolize the courage of people who risk their lives in service to any principle. And journalism is a profession that relies on the principles of free speech and public access to information for its authority.
It's a simple detail, this anachronistic travel kit, but it clarifies a lot about what Alex Garland is trying to do here, I think. It offers evidence for another potential reading of this movie that makes a lot of these inconsistencies and internal contradictions make perfect sense. And that is the potential that when Alex Garland was making this movie, he just didn't think about it that hard.
I mean, he thought about it a little bit. He thought about it enough to know the vibe he wanted to strike. He knew he wanted to make a commentary on modern political communication and the potential for a functional democracy to collapse into armed conflict. But after he decided this was going to be a movie that portrays war as being a really bad time, everything else about the script just kind of fell back on whatever his default assumptions about the world were. He made the main characters journalists because he respects the principles of free speech and history making that they represent to him.
He thought they would be a good outlet for the atmosphere of impersonal observation and weary disbelief he wanted to create. It really just isn't that complicated. Then the process is always the same with me. I write the first draft. very quickly.
This was probably like a week and a half, something like that. I write first drafts quickly because very often it doesn't work out. So I don't want to spend six months or eight months or a year working on it because it can all be wasted time.
And actually in this case, the finished, the shooting script and the first draft are almost exactly the same. There's virtually nothing has changed really. Well, don't I feel foolish? To be fair to myself, this actually was my initial interpretation. of the movie.
If you're subscribed to my Patreon, you may have listened to my immediate thoughts coming out of the theater when I saw Civil War back in May. It's an idea of what war is that's basically informed by other war movies, but then also filtered through this sort of like removed, classy, liberal sensibility. The problem with war journalism is that looking at an image is a frame that excludes every other piece of information.
It dehistoricizes the situation. By dehistoricizing it, it depoliticizes it. Yeah.
And that's what Alex Garland has made here. He's made a movie just devoid of any politics that led up to this situation because that's his understanding of what war is as a person who grew up extremely privileged in a country that doesn't have to look at war except through war photography. Shameless plug for Patreon, by the way.
As usual, I have no idea if this video will get ad approved. Upon reflection, I decided I was being pretty dismissive and uncharitable. which is what launched me into the interpretive mission I've been on for the past few months.
I wanted to take Civil War seriously. I wanted very much to find a way to like this movie as much as I typically like Alex Garland's movies. But having seen it several times now, I just can't shake the notion that this is a movie that's trying really hard to make a specific point, not an abstract point.
This isn't about political division in general. It's about the urgency of our political situation right now. and the cultural habits that are feeding it. It is an angry movie.
A weary movie. It feels like Alex Garland is trying to take a position against things that he, on an ideological level, disagrees with. I'm taking a position against things that I, on an ideological level, disagree with.
This interpretation makes Jesse's preference for shooting on film snap perfectly into place as a storytelling choice. It's not just that mainstream journalists are professionals trained in skills that set them apart from most of modern society. It's that those skills are on the wane.
that these skills are no longer recognized as a signal of expertise or devotion to a calling. It's an old-fashioned form of journalism which is deliberately trying to remove bias. More than anything, it's an appeal to the photos taken during Vietnam, which was the first American conflict that enjoyed wide-scale coverage by war correspondents and produced an immense number of photos and video documenting the carnage there. Alex Garland has a very predictable opinion of the conflict photography produced during Vietnam.
If you're going to risk your life, it has to be for a purpose. And the purpose is to warn, to show in a way that journalism was once very good at. Vietnam is a good example of a war that was covered by journalism and showed people back home what the reality of war was like and led journalism in that respect led to the end of the Vietnam War.
This is not true. It is not the case that the U.S. left Vietnam because journalists were taking photos. American military intervention in Vietnam goes back to 1955, almost as soon as France abandoned it as a colonial project. And during most of our 20 year presence there, the media was actually pretty supportive of the American government's position.
Opinions started to turn around the Tet Offensive in 1968, but opinion didn't just turn in the media, it turned in the official military opinions from which the media got most of the information it reported. It also turned in the public. But this was less because they were looking at photos of napalmed children in summary executions, and more because the economic and physical costs of the war to America were simply getting out of hand. In early 1965, when mainstream media opinion was still more or less supportive of the anti-communist project of the war, the death toll of American soldiers in Vietnam was around 200. Ten years later, when the communists finally took Saigon, the toll was 58,000. Of course, this pales in comparison to the over 1 million civilians killed, but horrific civilian deaths were happening consistently for the duration of the war, not just its end.
Soldiers'deaths have always, always mattered more to the American public than civilian casualties, no matter what war we're fighting. What journalism did was give American politicians public relations ammunition when it became clear that Vietnam could not be won without... basically wiping out Vietnam as a country and culture altogether and sacrificing tens of thousands of American lives to do so.
Were these journalistic reports valuable and worthwhile? Yeah, absolutely. It's good that journalists were there to provide this information when it became rhetorically useful. And it's good that we have visual documentation of what happened there. But that's a very different thing from saying American opinions soured.
because of the photos that were being taken. Individual journalists during Vietnam had a really hard time getting stories about war crimes published. The My Lai Massacre didn't really break as a story until late 1969, a year and a half after it happened, when American opinion of the war had already more than started to turn. And even then, the war didn't actually end for another six years.
As Rutgers Professor of History, Susan Carruthers says, If the conventional wisdom were correct, we might expect to find that those who watched more TV were more likely to oppose the war. Yet there's no overwhelming evidence to support this hypothesis. In fact, some opinion polls in the late 1960s found just the opposite. Individuals who paid greater attention to TV news tended to be more supportive of the war. Other studies suggested that television viewers turned to the news for confirmation of their pre-existing attitudes, interpreting broadcasts.
accordingly. The United States didn't lose the Vietnam War because journalists exposed it. We lost the war because it was a bad policy that was poorly executed.
Pedantry is defined by lecturing people about things that have no consequence to the discussion at hand. What I am asking here is that we consider the idea that this qualification about journalism's role in Vietnam is of extreme consequence to the discussion at hand. It matters whether Alex Garland's portrayal of journalism here is based on historical record. or his own uncritical acceptance of national myths.
If there's any consistency to what Alex Garland's style of filmmaking is, it's that his movies are weird. They're projections of a reality that allow us to ask ourselves questions about things we wouldn't otherwise be very likely to consider. That's why it's so odd that more than anything, Civil War comes across as a very conventional movie. Civil War is not surrealistic at all, but everything about the cinematography, the way it frames all these locations, The way it pulls out color, the pacing, the upbeat needle drops over scenes of murder, all these things make me feel like I'm supposed to think of this as surreal.
It helps to know that Garland himself apparently does think of the movie and the story it's telling in exactly these terms. There was something about January the 6th that it was a disgrace, right? It was various things, but one of the things was it was a disgrace and it provoked a feeling of...
Whatever is happening, this shouldn't be happening. This just has a, has like a deep wrongness about it. Right, right.
And this is, this is a kind of, this is that writ large, I suppose. I will grant that this is disturbing to me, but not in the way that Garland seems to want me to be disturbed. What I'm concerned with is the intense fixation this movie has on war as being defined by the destruction and violation of American symbols rather than American people.
The suburbs. The shopping mall. The football stadium. The Lincoln Memorial. I'm not being glib or cute when I say I don't care about those things.
If the cost of a functioning society where people offer care and understanding to each other is a matter of national identity is the explosion of the Lincoln Memorial, then that is okay with me. I am not disturbed by this image because I don't know why it's happening and because the Lincoln Memorial is not a person. It's not even an institution. It is a statue. In Alex Garland's vision of war, people are either pretty much fine.
or all the way dead. What matters here to him is the deterioration of an idea. The metaphysical identity of America as expressed by these objects is what suffers in the course of this war, and that, he's arguing, should be understood as strange and unsettling.
American exceptionalism is a philosophy that's actually pretty amenable to certain kinds of institutionalist liberalism. The idea is not just that our country is the specialist boy at the ball. Anyone of any nation can do that, including Americans. We do it plenty. American exceptionalism is more ambitious.
ambitious than that. It's a belief that the principles upon which we were founded are fundamentally new compared with the rest of human civilization. That our special contribution to the evolution of the human species is that our cultural history is not defined by the ancients or a royal family or gods, but by reasoned consensus building and logic, which over 250 years of stress testing we've demonstrated to be far and away the most humanitarian form of statecraft. We the people. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The problem is that sustaining this understanding requires us to, as with any ideology, selectively ignore facts of history that disagree with the viability of this construction. Even the way Alex Garland talks about the first American Civil War frames it in terms of being somehow different from others. America has a history of a civil war. that was very, very delineated over a very clear issue of slavery.
And so that creates a concept of civil war in the mind. And it may be a misleading concept for the kinds of risks that exist at the moment. that don't have an easy delineation of that sort.
And there are other kinds of civil wars, which happen a lot in the world at the moment, which are really just a fracturing and a fractionalization into competing angry groups in localized... areas. And the fact that the previous civil war here was fought so clearly should not make one understand, one understands, or believe one understands all the dangers of civil war, because that's what they look like.
There is a clear issue in effect. And truthfully, there is a right and a wrong, and lots of other civil wars do not break apart so easily. So there's no question the civil war was fought over slavery. You never know who needs to hear you say that.
What is subject to a lot of question is- what slavery meant to the combatants, whether southerners'attachment to slavery and northerners'rejection of it was more a disagreement about ideology, economics, political power. There are so many ways to justify oppression, and fighting oppression is often as much a practical choice as it is an ideological project. It's not as if the North declared themselves the unilaterally anti-racist good guys of history, and the South was just like, mm-hmm, sounds good, that's right, we're the villains here.
Don't let us win! Slavery was not a clear-cut issue at all in this period of time. The confusion around what kind of meaning it should hold for the country was the reason we fought a whole war about it.
And that confusion is not different from how civil wars happen elsewhere. It is not the case that other countries have simply been more petty than us before now. There's another example I hesitated to include here because it's not technically Alex Garland that said it.
But I'm going to anyway because I think it's representative of the kind of routine laundering of history that led Alex to the idea that a second American Civil War would somehow be wronger than conflicts elsewhere. In 1876, the United States had the most disputed election ever up until the last election between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden. All of the same things that came up in this last election that led to January 6th were at issue there. Polarization was everywhere and eventually they got over it.
So I'm going to try and end this on an optimistic note. Do you think that if they could do it once 150 years ago, that there is a possibility that things will right themselves and the ship will right themselves? Or has the internet and everything else that's come along since changed that?
Categorically, yes, I absolutely do think I mean, I really fully do think that. Okay. So, the thing about the Hayes election is that it was a direct product of the South refusing to accept Reconstruction attempts to codify racial equality.
Racial equality was a cause a lot of Northern politicians weren't especially invested in either, which made Reconstruction haphazard, ineffective, and very vulnerable to harassment of freed slaves and violent non-compliance to federal law. That election was a backroom deal to avoid the threat of another conflict by agreeing to make Hayes president if he officially removed federal support for Reconstruction, which white southerners had been violently revolting against since the war. Reconstruction had essentially failed by that point anyway, but that doesn't change the fact that the result of this election was basically federal approval of the ability for southern white people to exploit, disenfranchise, and murder black people legally for another hundred years. We didn't just get over it.
The Hays election is not an argument for our ability to center ourselves back to reality after a confusing political snafu. More than anything, the Hays election is an argument for the efficacy of terrorism. This is the kind of attitude that's extremely reliant on faith in the status quo. It's basically an assumption that any peace we've experienced is because of the inherent stability of the system as a whole and not our personal good luck to not be a Black person in the post-reconstruction South.
It's an appeal to the idea that America's history is defined by its best intentions. The myth that journalists were responsible for the U.S. abandoning Vietnam is an idea that's very useful as evidence for the validity of a certain kind of centrist liberal ideology. It kind of positions journalists as principled democratic adversaries to warmongering states.
The suggestion here is that the proper antidote to waging war is information. That information, especially visual information, is so powerful that it can neutralize any national propaganda with unvarnished truth. The shot of the camera functioning as the civilized liberal version of a gunshot. He's not in there. The reporter's moving out.
In this conceptualization, journalists represent the only legitimate form of aggression in liberal ideology, which is rhetorical. War waged by other means. This is the reason war correspondents are in a cultural position to be understood as glamorous to begin with. They become celebrities among the educated class, essentially the only people who, in the center-left imagination, are entitled to valor or honor in violent conflict.
This is a tricky point for me to articulate, so I want to reiterate that the problem I have isn't in having appreciation for what war correspondents do. The thing I'm trying to underscore. is what happens when we elevate people like war correspondents to a position of abstracted archetype, a character that symbolizes the liberal virtue of a free press, and then treating that symbol as reality.
My problem is that the logic I see being used to talk about journalists and conversations about this movie is the same as the logic right-wing nationalists use to talk about the military. The people that are actually putting their life on the line to show the world what's really happening. Strangely inspirational, you know, because it's like, we do need these people, we do need these journalists on the front line, you know, who are ready to cover the story and sort of do what it takes to tell the stories that need to be told.
We have journalists at the fourth estate for a reason, it's not arbitrary. They are actually guarding against something. They're guarding against fascism.
They're guarding against extremist forces being out of control and not being properly checked and balanced. They're doing something simple alongside all of that, which is showing enormous physical courage. Huge, huge physical courage.
And I do admire that. This is just support the troops language. The military is a bunch of good-looking young people. who are going out to defend the country under the riskiest of circumstances and doing crazy things in defense of their country and the international order.
That's awesome. That's good stuff. We are not engaging with the reality of how journalism participates in conflict here any more than nationalist conservatives are engaging with the reality of how soldiers participate in conflict.
Journalists are warriors of idealism in this construction. Their job is inherently antagonistic. It's just that they're dominating the enemy with information instead of violence. Is that bad?
better than wanting to punch your enemies in the face? Probably, but it's still a mental framework that assumes the best way to resolve a conflict is by insisting your fantasy is reality until the enemy just tires out and agrees just to get you to leave them alone. Like, let's sit for a moment and really internalize what it means that Alex Garland appears to think that the purpose of war photography is basically to compete for the most iconic image of violence. On some level, I wanted a story where a writer and a photographer were...
At the end... Get the iconic thing, which is what reporters are chasing, of that conflict, of that moment, the sort of summation of it. That's certainly the basis for the critical interpretation of Civil War, the idea that this movie is about journalists as cynical scavengers.
And I agree that Garland does seem disturbed by the idea that a voyeuristic eye can rob you of your humanity. That regarding events primarily as potential still images requires a degree of compartmentalization of an honest human reaction. And I agree this would be a compelling theme if competing for the most iconic image of violence was what photojournalists do. I see the cliche, if it bleeds it leads, invoked in a lot of discussions about this movie, but in real life that phrase is subject to so many qualifications that it's essentially meaningless.
If you're a principled reporter, you can't just say or publish whatever. That's what ethical standards are all about. In wartime especially, if a reporter is too negative about their home country's military, if they focus a little too much on civilian casualties or military incompetence, they're not always, but certainly more likely, to be screened out of future assignments and banished to the fringes of the profession. This kind of backdoor censorship basically directed the entirety of American coverage of the Iraq war.
This is because a military public affairs team recommended that since the internet and other precursors to social media were making it harder to reject media coverage entirely, like they overall successfully did for the Gulf War. America should embed reporters with troops so that the story of the war became directed by the experiences of soldiers rather than the people they were ordered to kill. The inherent distortion of information that must come from military screening did not go over well with a lot of journalistic institutions.
The Washington Post refused to comply with this system altogether for a while. But in doing so, they were essentially giving up the best available access to any information about the war. Even disregarding censorship entirely, certainly not every war photo that's taken gets published. And there's very much a point at which images of death and destruction, things that bleed, are rejected entirely.
During the Iraq War, it was also policy not to show dead American soldiers or their coffins on TV or in news publications. And the most stomach-churning atrocities, the things that really shock. are always going to be too traumatizing to publish to a wide audience.
We don't want news reports to physically assault people. One time in high school, I was in Borders. Great way to date myself, mentioning Borders. So anyway, I was in this Borders and I picked up a book about war crimes in the Second Sino-Japanese War.
That was the kind of thing I did when I was a child. And I flipped to the photo insert in the middle and I straight up passed the fuck out. I woke up on the floor surrounded by people asking if I was okay.
It was super embarrassing. Historian of journalism Daniel Howland's spheres of journalism are a good way to illustrate something like the reality of how journalistic ethics are determined. Howland suggests we think about journalistic standards as existing in three spheres. The first he calls the sphere of consensus, which he describes as the world of apple pie and motherhood. Everybody can agree that apple pie and motherhood are good things.
So journalists feel no great need to investigate those ideas or act as impartial judges of their benefits and drawbacks, and are in fact potentially pressured against investigation by the second sphere, the sphere of deviance. The sphere of deviance is where things like communist newsletters live, reporting whose truth or falsehood is secondary to its rejection of motherhood and apple pie. Between these two spheres is the sphere of legitimate controversy, which is the area where things like balanced reporting reporting, and impartiality become things journalists start to concern themselves with.
When things are controversial and we aren't certain about what they mean to society, we turn to journalists who are supposed to give us all the information until we can reach consensus again. So the decisions about what to photograph or report on are always informed by a lot more than what's going to be the most shocking image, or even the facts of what's happening in any given conflict. Determining what good journalism is or should be is never ever an isolated, objective, predictable, or even morally straightforward process. Being a war correspondent means having to participate in the unfriendly alliance journalism as a profession has with institutions that have a very vested interest in controlling information. It also means adapting to the different scales and methods of journalism that become available with new communication technology.
For example, the few decades that constitute the old-fashioned journalism Alex Garland is so nostalgic for here are not just a matter of us having been more principled then than we are now. It was possible because there were very few mainstream media outlets and access to media exposure was very gatekept. The kind of uniformity of information media networks were able to impart onto the American public in the TV era had never happened before, and we have absolutely no reason to expect it to ever happen again.
We also have no reason to think of this kind of information landscape as normal or natural in any way. And though it was a more stable time for American citizens, that doesn't necessarily translate to a more informed time. It was better for the same reason it was worse, which is that when consensus was necessary for the stability of the country, it was comparatively easy to manufacture by expanding or contracting media access as needed. There are a great many b******.
bad things to say about social media, but I expect that if smartphones had existed in the 80s, it probably would have been harder for the U.S. to give training, supplies, and financial support to Central American death squads. It's the same reason international journalists aren't allowed free access to Gaza at all. Alex Garland has precious little to say about that.
I checked. But his silence about an ongoing genocide after supposedly making a movie that's anti-war makes total sense considering what he expresses about his opinion of journalism in the text of the movie. At a certain point, whether the movie is supposed to be supportive or critical of journalists becomes almost irrelevant, because the only clues we get regarding the motives driving these people do not accurately describe what journalists do.
The line I see quoted most often in positive reviews about Civil War is one that's clearly meant to be taken as the cold reality of journalistic ethics. We don't ask. We record so other people ask. Want to be a journalist?
That's the job. Hey. Almost everything journalists do is ask questions.
We do not want journalists who just passively accept everything their sources tell them. We want journalists who investigate. The crime rate in Venezuela is down, I believe, a little bit over 60% over the last several years.
Are you trusting the official figures from the Venezuelan dictatorship? Let's put it this way. If you're a dictator of a poor country with a high crime rate, wouldn't you send your criminals to our open border?
That wasn't my question. Are you trusting the figures of the dictatorships? Those are Maduro numbers. Who were the people with the high-powered rifles in the hallway of that apartment building? Who were they?
They were guns from Venezuela. Right. No American community. But I was asking to you about figures, numbers, facts.
Do you trust Nicolás Maduro? I trust that he does not want his. criminals to be-so you'll be leaving his numbers. And before you say anything, that very much includes photojournalists. A photo is not self-explanatory.
Its meaning is defined by the story it's attached to. As Susan Sontag says, all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions. Photojournalists also ask questions. They must know what they're looking at before they can make a choice about what to shoot and how. That's why most photojournalism really isn't about carnage.
It's about the social and institutional fallout that comes from the carnage. Most war photojournalism is, in terms of violent sensationalism, pretty boring because the point of a war journalist is not the same as the point of a tabloid reporter. It is so absolutely bonkers that these journalists aren't interviewing and photographing the people in this refugee camp.
or the town they stop in. Overall, they seem pretty disinterested in the effect of war on civilians at all. And because we don't know anything about how journalism works in this future America, or what their personal motives are, we have no idea whether this is an appropriate way for them to behave as characters, or what kind of judgment this behavior should invite from us.
There's only one person for whom this isn't the case. Lee's entire character arc is dependent on this intense cognitive dissonance she's experiencing between what she thought her job was and what she's seeing in front of her. Every time I survived a war zone and got the photo, I thought I was sending a warning home. Don't do this.
But here we are. She's been risking her life and sending these messages home, but it hasn't stopped anything. The warning is, don't do this. Don't let it happen here. Don't let it happen here.
But, but, but she is not gaining traction. It's that all of that danger and all of that suffering, suffering observed of other people and suffering that she has felt herself, has been futile. This makes enough sense for her as a character, given what we're told.
But I also feel like it should be said that if Lee thought the main point of her job was to send a warning back home, that she's not a very good journalist. I think this line is the result of Alex Garland's conflation of clean retrospective historical narrative with the reality of what history is like to live through. War photography is probably the most potent blend of art and politics that exists in modern society. The humanism combined with the practical urgency suggested in the task of capturing images of war is another reason it's a profession that's extremely appealing to a certain kind of liberal ideal.
But I think there's a lot of danger in flattening the difference between the artistic, which is abstract and implicit by nature, and the journalistic, which ideally has an immediate consequence on people's lives, especially the people you're reporting on. The oppositional motives attached to informing people about the reality of war and aestheticizing that reality is really difficult to balance, and identifying that difference is something that has to be consciously done on a case-by-case basis. not only by the photographer, but by the audience who then consumes their work.
If we don't commit to distinguishing aesthetic from reality, then the photograph really is exploitative. It becomes a device by which privileged spectators can ruminate on the philosophical question of death and suffering and feel free to do so because the thing they're looking at actually happened. As photography historian John Taylor says, photographs of the dead carry both the cool authority of record and weighted by the caption and storyline, the heat of news. Death becomes a commodity to stir the blood of the living, who for a few pence can contemplate the proof of others'mortality.
Those who act upon the fantasies otherwise fed by the press and television, who choose to visit the scenes of death, and even steal from them, are considered to have transgressed, and are castigated as ghouls. In contrast, it is legitimate for photographers and reporters to pick over the remains, and we as viewers, if we are so minded, can surreptitiously take vicarious pleasure in the horror of it all. This is not- pure horror.
It is distant from experience. It is death constructed on the picture editor's desk. Taylor doesn't think this describes all war correspondence or photography by any means, and neither do I. In the conversations I had with journalists when I was writing this, one thing that became very clear is that war correspondence is a job of intense emotional investment.
Emotional investment is necessary to find stories and report them accurately. You have to care. And sustaining that care is something you can only do if your interest is in some way altruistic, because only that kind of conviction can carry you through one trauma after another. People who record war zones because they're just looking for adventure, or the fastest way to fame, or feeding their own morbid curiosity don't last in that profession.
Nightcrawler isn't a documentary. If she's being a good journalist, then when Lee says, it's a great Photo Jesse. She's commending her for capturing the emotion of the moment and honestly representing the subject to the best of her abilities. But we don't know whether that's actually what Jesse did, because we don't know any of these people, and therefore don't know what their deaths mean other than, oh, that sucks, oh no. All we know is that the camera was in focus and the subject was framed properly.
What story is this a part of? Alex Garland is required to do very little in this movie, but he is. absolutely required to tell me a story. Not even because that's what movies do, but because that's what journalists do. Part of the reason the Jesse Fleming scene is so good is because we know Tony and Bo High a little bit. It's really upsetting to see people with established personalities get terrorized and murdered so unceremoniously.
And I think Alex Garland does successfully pull some of that anxiety out here by choosing really expressive actors. And the parts where we get to see people act like they're not real people. acting like human beings is when the movie is best.
Repress. Cool. Now I understand why it's written on the side of your vehicle. But the relative value of the story being told and how that value is determined is only part of the complicated and culturally situated nature of information in society. Regardless of our intentions, when any of us produce any kind of media, we're all still bound by the structure of the medium we're using.
To take a photo of something is to objectify it by default, to literally turn it into a discrete object of study. Photos aren't just records. Even if we could somehow excise the perspective of the journalist that took it, in a very real way, looking at a photo of something materially changes the thing being looked at.
In order for the kinds of images that war photographers take to do their intended job, they have to be intentionally de-objectified in the mind. Basically what I'm saying is that photos of Holocaust victims are not about you. We have to understand these photos as belonging to their subjects and the conflict they're in before they belong to our personal understanding of abstract ideas like the nature of death or hatred or violence.
I think Alex Garland and I share a sort of dark fascination about horrible things. I wouldn't be surprised to hear him say that he was also the kind of kid who casually flipped through books about Japanese war crimes. But I also think this is the kind of fascination that can easily turn into self-absorption by means of a sort of monastic commitment to witnessing, to sitting around and torturing ourselves so that we can claim we know something about what it is to suffer, and that we are therefore more enlightened and more grateful for what we have. As if we're the point, right? Journalists in Vietnam didn't take these photos so that people in the future could use them to quietly reflect on the nature of war and mortality.
They did it to change policy. The point was not to change opinion so that America never looks like Vietnam. The point was to change opinion so that Vietnam didn't look like Vietnam.
To take a very modern example, the Associated Press documentary 20 Days in Mariupol does function, on one level, as a warning of how fast daily life can deteriorate in a conflict. But that's not its primary goal. Its primary goal is to be an irrefutable record of the beginning of Russia's war in Ukraine and the war crimes committed therein, so that we know there are people that exist right now who are being attacked and need help. Alex Garland tells us visually how disturbing the lack of humanity in journalistic work can be, but then refuses to let his characters display any humanity over the course of their work in ways that would be very typical for a war journalist.
I think about my daughters. They were born into a world at war. I wish I could see them now. But all I have is a satellite phone to make short calls to editors.
We tell them Mariupol is under siege. Russians are killing civilians. We are holding up.
Tell our families we love them. So when I say I want more context in this movie, what I'm saying is that Alex Garland needs to let his journalists be journalists. Because if we don't know how the people they're photographing fit into the story they're trying to tell, then this is not a movie about journalism. This is a movie about the Western forces'triumphant invasion of the US Capitol. but really weirdly paced, where the main character doesn't show up until 20 minutes before the end of the movie.
The difference in perception that comes from the medium you're consuming is the reason the entire concept of inventing a Civil War to make a movie about it set my teeth on edge before I even knew Civil War was about journalists. One of the main arguments in defense of this movie is how anti-war it is. It is true enough that certain scenes in Civil War make violence seem scary and stressful, and that's good. But I'm troubled by the willingness people have to equate plain emotional discomfort to being actively anti-war.
Violence does not have to seem fun in order for people to act in violent ways. More than anything, for people to think of violence as a legitimate option, it has to seem both effective and somehow distant. To the extent that a movie can seem anti-war.
It does so by counteracting these qualities, by making war look both ineffective and deeply personal. And Civil War is not consistently successful at either one of those tasks. Yes, certain individual scenes are very good at this, but any success it has at building this as a theme is seriously compromised by how it sensationalizes violence at the same time.
And yes, Civil War is sensationalistic. Oh, that's not so much. This topic in particular is one of the things about this movie that makes me feel insane. Making violence seem upsetting is not synonymous with de-romanticizing it.
Even among movies that have a reputation for being pro-war, the cinematography of Civil War is intensely romantic. How else am I supposed to understand a slow-motion sequence of driving through a burning forest set to Sturgill Simpson? Garland likes to name drop.
come and see as an influence on Civil War. And let me tell you, Civil War is no come and see. Aesthetically, it's far more closely related to Apocalypse Now, which I think is super funny given how he also likes to name drop Apocalypse Now as something he wasn't trying to do.
Apocalypse Now is not exactly an anti-war film. It's a very brilliant film. It's a very clever film. It's not exactly anti-war because it's quite seductive and it's quite romantic. Oh, we spent a while here staring at this very nice picture behind me, which reminds me of Apocalypse Now.
Me too. It's like the top is Apocalypse Now and the bottom is our movie, I guess. On a similar note, not glorifying or romanticizing violence is not the same as looking at violence objectively. Come and See is certainly not a movie that romanticizes violence. but neither is it just a straightforward portrayal of war.
War is never straightforward. It is a product of the particular ideologies and identities of the people who wage it and are victimized by it. Perspective in Come and See is extremely important.
It's not just a movie about why war is bad generally. It's specifically a movie about the Nazi occupation of Belarus and the specific atrocities the Nazis committed upon these people in particular. The violence in Come and See is certainly not visually appealing in any way, but it's still not an objective portrayal of war.
Quite the opposite. It is monumentalizing. It is a reflection of the insanity-inducing depths of loss that these actual historical events represent, and accordant grief for the people who actually died there. Come and See has a very clear and very subjective point of view. It is part broadcasted funeral.
and parts scream, and it deserves better than to be understood as just an exercise in making the nebulous concept of war look bad. The issue is really that the task Alex Garland is attempting here is in a very real way unachievable. To self-consciously turn something like war into art is itself a romanticization of war.
The sin of subjectivity was committed the moment you decided to make a movie. To turn war into art is to turn it into a commodifiable object. something to be observed, considered, consumed, culturally celebrated, traded, spectated.
That is what a spectacle is. Holy shit, guys. This fucking scene.
Wow. And spectacles can be good in both superficial and serious ways, but they are not the same as reality. And they tell us very little about the emotional truth of war. Because there is no overarching truth of war. outside the thoughts and experiences of people who fight and die and suffer in them.
During his press tour for Civil War, Alex Garland expressed that his goal with the filming of this movie was to record the events happening on screen as if he too were a journalist, simply representing things as they happened. And the film is trying to function like a reporter itself. So it's trying to remove its own bias and just showing you a sequence of events in the way a journalist would.
Dude. You made the movie. You decided what was going to happen, and then you put those things in front of the camera so that you could record them.
The only reason we're here is because you asked us to be. There is no civil war. You made it up.
Alex Garland is representing an inherently subjective human experience here, and then denying his own hand in the creation of the thing he invented. It's like that quote by John Berger about the female nude in the Western art tradition. She is not naked as she is. she is naked as the spectator sees her. You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her. You put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.
And it's here, I think, that what Civil War is actually saying, the something that is amid all this nothing starts to emerge. I think that thing is appropriately best articulated by a picture. one of a series that A24 posted on their Instagram account depicting various AI versions of American cities in conditions of military occupation and ruin. They're all sterile, soulless, procedurally generated garbage, but there's one in particular that's trying to invoke an image of Echo Park in LA, five miles from my home.
Echo Park is a tourist trap that makes its buck by offering rides on these little two-and four-seater paddle boats shaped like swans. It's kind of kitschy, but cute. An icon of the LA tourist experience.
The kind of thing you do right before you learn what a pain in the ass it is to get a good view of the Hollywood sign. There are a lot of things wrong with this image. This is in no way the LA skyline, and even if it were, it's way too far away to represent a small pond that's right next to downtown Los Angeles. This gunboat makes no sense. It has no far side.
Uh oh, fellas, you're about to take on water real quick. But there's one thing that really elevates this into high absurdism. Friends, this is a real swan.
The Echo Park paddleboats are very stylized. They have less fidelity to realism than a carousel animal. I recognize nothing in this picture.
This is not my home. This is not even my planet. And I'm not going to act like it is just to massage the reputation of a $50 million movie I'm paying money to see.
That idea is, in a very real way, offensive to me. I resent being told that I need to shut up and pretend this is LA under military occupation when what I am very clearly looking at is an anonymous sunlit pond in which two guys with a vague military aesthetic are driving a boat that shouldn't work with unclear intention in the serene wake of an enormous, indifferent swan. This image haunts me. It's not just that the image itself is wrong. That's a lot more forgivable than the course of events that had to lead to it existing in the first place.
What really gets under my skin, the thing that really creeps me out, is the idea that someone prompted a computer to make this image and then multiple people on the path to publishing it just couldn't be f-cked to take two seconds and actually look at the thing they made. One of two things happened here. Either nobody distrusted the machine long enough to check its work, or worse, they did check it, but we're so slavish to the idea that algorithms can never lie that all these errors effectively became invisible.
Alex Garland wrote Civil War in 2020 and was playing with the idea as far back as 2018, which means we know he didn't write Civil War with AI. But I'm really not that comforted by that idea because it suggests what I think anybody who pays any real attention to the film industry should expect, which is that the film industry already contains an ethic that prefers the kind of thing AI makes. AI makes crowd pleasers. For the sake of this video and only this video, I will define a crowd pleaser as a piece whose first priority is to have something for everyone, even if those things are fundamentally oppositional in concept.
Where the point isn't to present a coherent visionary whole, but to hedge every bet just enough so that as many people in the audience as possible are impressed at least once, and then focus on the thing they liked to the exclusion of everything else in the piece. This is what AI does, right? It tries really hard to follow the prompt in the most visible way it can, because that's the only way it knows how to make you happy.
The end result is always somehow both overworked and lazy. There is always so much in every single corner. And because of that, there's usually at least one thing in an AI image that'll hit a little pleasure center in your brain, even if it's just something like the color palette or a particular texture. The American film industry has always resented the fact that it has to associate with artists.
The fact that business people are typically not very good artists is the only reason Hollywood has ever taken a risk on anything. The crowd pleaser is what Hollywood really exists for. It is currently the holy grail of film financing. Every successful crowd pleaser is further proof that filmmaking is just a matter of tweaking a formula, that the right algorithm will- Finally do away with all these pesky artists and give the people what they really want Whatever that is but in practice a crowd pleaser really isn't a reflection of algorithmic precision So much as it's just a lot of discrete objects that suggest the idea of a story and then ask you to fill in the blanks Simply imagine the movie you would have liked to see I don't think Alex Garland's goal here is to make a crowd pleaser but I do think the ideological position he's trying to defend in Civil War is where crowd pleasers come from.
Civil War is a movie that fetishizes the aesthetic of gathering and transmitting information with no apparent thought at all to what information is actually for. We've got this idea that reality is something that just exists around us to be objectively assessed and verified, that humans are simply complicated computers, that perform better when provided with more variables. It's a construction that says truth is something that lives independently, out there somewhere, and that communication should rightfully be developed with lossless transmission of that truth as both goal and ethical principle. I think what's important in training AI and growing an AI is to make sure that it is as truthful as possible and maximally curious. Because I think if that's true, then I think it'll probably foster humanity.
What Elon Musk is describing here is a child's fantasy. Machines are not capable of being curious any more than they're capable of honor, spite, greed, charity, or any other vice or virtue. Not because we can't program them to model behaviors that get us to- to perceive these qualities, but because those are qualities that require the being displaying them to be situated as a subject in the reality it's reacting to. There are such things as facts, but our assessments of facts are not reflective of a core unifying truth about the world. Truth is not a matter of systematically removing subjectivity until we reach a view from nowhere.
There is no view from nowhere, and even if there was, there would be no way for humans to transmit that truth to each other that doesn't involve some kind of interpretation, some exchange of perspective. Reality is not simply around us pre-existing. In a very real, material sense, reality is something we make with each other.
The only way to get a machine to behave with what we call morals is to give it a set moral ideology to begin with, which can only make the machine eat its own tail. until it's manually updated with more reality than its human makers situated in a human environment have agreed upon. What I'm seeing in Civil War and in film generally is a shift toward applying this fantasy of perfect information to the art world too. It's a fantasy that's quite literally disdainful of human experience that considers the human mind fundamentally malformed and in need of correction.
Under this philosophy, it's not important. what a movie is trying to say about society or human experience, whether it's speaking to a cultural moment as a participant in that moment, whether it's developing genre trends, trying new things, or even aesthetically composing itself in an interesting way. Because those things aren't important. Those things are subjective, and we've evolved past subjectivity. What's important is that a movie self-consciously transmit allegiance to a pre-existing conception of truth.
The fact that journalistic ethics are always bound and in fact defined by their personal political and technological environments is dismissed as irrelevant noise. Civil War tells us that whether we think journalists deserve our applause or our criticism, we should rightfully be engaging with them based on our view-from-nowhere abstracted journalist archetype rather than the culturally situated context that determines both the information journalists produce and the way we consume it. Does that mean we're sacrificing accuracy for the sake of coherence? Sure.
But doesn't everything just get a lot easier when we declare the map is the same as the territory? Alex Garland likes to say he hopes this movie is the beginning of a conversation, that people being unwilling to have conversations with each other is the reason we're as politically divided as we are. And he hopes this movie inspires us to talk with each other. It's a phrase that gets echoed a lot in reviews, but the way I see people talk about this movie, and especially the dismissive... condescending, mean way I see a lot of people who like this movie talk about people who don't, makes me wonder how tight everybody's grasp is on the concept of a conversation to begin with.
This is not the attitude of a group of people who have internalized the humanist message of a sincere work of art. And why should they bother? Civil War is not a movie that seems to imagine the American people as especially worthy of conversing with. And Alex Garland himself seems perfectly willing to excuse himself from the standards to which he holds everyone else. If the left wants to combat right-wing extremism, it needs to be in the business of winning elections.
And you do not win an election without usually persuading people of the other side to come and join you. And you don't do that by screaming at them and telling them they're unethical. Some people on the far right and some people on the far left will dislike an attack on polarization. But...
I dislike them. So I'm in some respects picking a fight. Part of the aggression is, yeah, bring it on, idiots.
You know, bring it on, morons. I have to think that whatever impulse is keeping Alex Garland from noticing the internal contradictions in his own words is the same one that gets people to say civil war is at once one half of a conversation. and also a mirror.
The creativity of an honest conversation, the foundry in which reality is welded together, is in the exchange between different perspectives. A mirror is kind of the diametric opposition to this process. If you put a mirror in front of someone, the only conversation they will be able to have is with themselves. Ideally, a conversation is the process by which we collectively make a reality that, at least to a tolerable degree, reflects and respects the perspectives of everyone who has to live in it.
You know, democracy. But civil war is not a democratic experience. If anything, it's kind of an act of emotional terrorism. And like, that's okay. I think there's plenty of artistic merit in terrorizing an audience.
Induce more heart attacks. But if you're gonna terrorize your audience, don't pretend you're inviting them to love their neighbor. I don't buy that contradiction any more than I buy the idea that a movie can be both gorgeous, but hard to watch, that it can be action-packed, but doesn't glorify violence. Horrible to sit through, but full of scenes that'll make you go, wow.
It's a testament to the idea of A View From Nowhere that we think there should be such a thing as an objective film about war to begin with. Despite its corporatism, the American film industry is still very attached to the idea that film is a medium that can change the world. Changing the world is a very useful marketing asset. And yes, it is absolutely true that stories about war can help us.
process it and think critically about it. But if just showing people images of carnage with enough emotional remove was all we needed to end war, then war would have ended a long time ago. It's the way we think and talk about war that needs to change, because war is a product of the human need to find meaning.
And the search for meaning is not something you can brutalize people out of with images any more than you can with bullets. It reminds me of that documentary, The Act of Killing. During the 1960s, the left-leaning president of Indonesia was overthrown by the national military with support by the Anglophone world, especially the United States. Big surprise.
Under the new leader Suharto's direction, local gangsters in concert with the military murdered, at the very smallest estimation, half a million suspected communists, students, intellectuals, atheists, and ethnic minorities. The gangsters who committed the mass killings have never been held accountable, and in fact still de facto rule Indonesian localities, extorting and oppressing the locals. with the authority of their proven ability to murder with no consequence. Joshua Oppenheimer, director of The Act of Killing, said the country felt as if I'd wandered into Germany 40 years after the Holocaust only to find the Nazis still in power.
Indonesia also became an excellent location for American business opportunities though, so yin-yang I guess. The movie focuses on a gangster named Anwar Kongo, as he and his murderous friends are invited to film a movie recreating their crimes in whatever genre and style they like. These are pop culture devotees.
People who were raised on American genre trends, people whose behavior is informed in no small way by what they saw on screen. The movie they're creating is supposed to be fun to make and to watch, a celebration of their violent overthrow of the communist government. These people have no shame of their actions to speak of. Really the only time they ever seem to think about their murders is to laugh about it.
Kongo is singular in that he's willing to talk about nightmares and the angry ghosts of the dead, but can't seem to pinpoint what exactly it is he's haunted by. After all, he won. He got the life he wanted. His ethic of merit through superior violence worked out very well for him.
When it's time for Kongo to act in the film as one of the victims, though, something weird happens. He has a panic attack. For the first time in his life, he is invited to feel what his victims felt. And all at once he gets it. He understands the crushing reality of what it is he did.
The man who weeks before was gleefully boasting at the camera about his efficient methods of mass slaughter now wanders around the scene of his crimes dry heaving, his own body rejecting the impossibility of being the person he now knows he is. The thing that makes the act of killing effective is that it isn't really about murder or injustice or societal collapse as such. Really it's a movie about art. It's a movie about the process by which humans make sense of the things they do and share that understanding with each other.
It may as well be called The Act of Creation, because though the people Congo killed are long dead and never coming back, no matter how he thinks about it, it's only through participating in an act of creation that the people he murdered regain the dignity and respect they deserve, which is significantly more than any official in the United States has ever afforded them. Art is the process. by which we perform a broad-scale conversation. It's how we discover who we are in other people's world, even if we don't like the image we discover of ourselves.
The Act of Killing is a movie that explores the role of self-implication in preventing violent conflict, the importance of exposing yourself to the experiences of people you perceive to be unlike you, and honestly considering who you might be to them, not just what their abstracted image represents to you. It's an argument for judging the nature of human communication, whether through war or journalism, or just daily conversation, as a creative act. An act that is positive. Not in the sense of conveying optimism, but in the literal verb sense of positing, of suggesting an idea of what we could or should strive to be. Civil War is a movie that makes its argument based on a negative position.
Don't do this. Don't be like this. It's a rhetorical exercise that selectively removes the perspective of its speaker in a medium where perspective is everything.
There is nothing conversational about saying what we're not or shouldn't be. That's just rejection, and rejection is very easily performed with a weapon in your hand. The weird thing is that in that way, Civil War is actually a really potent illustration of the American philosophy, but not in the way that's intended.
Alex Garland thinks he's one of the journalists in this movie, but he's actually the shopkeeper. Comfortable, defensive, navel-gazing. Unwilling to consider himself a part of the world around him outside defending the right to his own complacency.
This is an anti-war movie, only in the sense that it endorses the belief that conflict should be avoided at absolutely any cost. The fact that any cost is a spectrum that includes personal annihilation is dismissed as irrelevant because Alex Garland appears to understand himself as being- mystically above the action, occupying a position where he can both diagnose society's ills and simultaneously be completely immune to them. But he belongs to a mystical realm where it's perfectly feasible to be both uniformly anti-fascist and also uniformly anti-war.
It's the kind of paradox that can only exist in a fundamentally contradictory society, a place that is bloated to the point of explosion with the gas generated by trying to contain too many volatilities, too many incompatible elements at once. That tells us individualism is best expressed by conformity to the status quo. That democracy is best enacted through punishment and surveillance.
That our outstanding, unprecedented humanitarianism can be replicated in any population of people once we've already killed them all. A place that is both spectacular and vacant in its cold, glittering brutality. As intangible as a ghost and just as overbearing. A place that is, as an object, Impossible. Thanks again to Surfshark for sponsoring this video.
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