Civil War – War, what is it good for?
Halfway through Civil War, the protagonists are confronted by an unidentified militia who asks them who they are. He has just casually shot one of their friends, so it is a rather pointed question. “Americans”, answer our reporters. “What kind of Americans”, is the retort, followed by a version of Russian Roulette where hailing from the wrong state means death.
This scene also featured in the movie’s trailer, for obvious reasons. Its visceral depiction of how the unifying signifier ‘American’ has fractured invites the audience to believe this disintegration is not only possible, but plausible. As a trailer this is effective, prompting the viewer to wonder how we got here, with the intent that they go and see the movie to find out. Which makes encoutering this scene again in the movie itself all the more disappointing, because by then, we are still looking for the answer.
That lack of an answer results from Civil War being a tale of two stories, but never being sure which of the two has primacy. Both stories appeal to very different emotional registers on the part of the audience, interfering rather than reinforcing one another. The one story is about the morally ambigious role of war reporters, and the toll this vocation exacts of its adherents. The other is about the disintegration of the United States into full-blown civil war.
These two narratives are not fundamentally opposed, but the movie chooses to treat the conflict abstractedly to make the audience share the sense of detachment the movie also implies on the part of our reporters. So as the movie begins, the civil war isn’t merely in full swing already, it is entering its concluding phase. We are introduced to four reporters (three veterans, one rookie), who each for reasons of their own decide to embark on a road trip from New York to Washington D.C., where the US president is holed up as he is losing the war. There is only limited exposition, and while this certainly adds realism, it leaves the audience struggling to work out what is going on, and how we got here.
The movie then unfolds as a ghastly road trip marked by escalating levels of violence, including summary executions and civilian mass graves. But this violence remains unintelligible to the audience, because we do not know anything about the combatants, their motives, their politics, or their victims. Snippets of information confuse rather than elucidate. Is the insurgency in Florida Maoist? What brought about the exceedingly implausible ‘Western Forces’ alliance between secessionist Texas and California? Without a plausible path between the present and the potential future Civil War evokes, it fails to land as a cautionary tale, because it does not articulate what it is cautioning against, or how this future could be prevented. We get that ‘war is bad’, but we did not need this movie to make that point, and so we are left feeling like we simply stepped through the looking glass into an alternate reality where violent anarchy has erupted “for reasons.”
One interpretation of Civil War is that this is the point, that the lack of political or historical context forces our focus onto the morally ambiguous detachment of the war reporters, who record the atrocities they encounter but neither judge nor intervene. We experience this detachment through the mirroring personal journeys of Lee Smith, the veteran reporter, and Jessie Collin, the rookie Lee has taken under her wing. Early in the movie, Jessie evidently struggles with the horrors she records, and her proximity to violence, and is counselled by Lee to harden herself. Yet while Jessie does this as the movie progresses, we see Lee travelling in the opposite direction: losing her desensitisation to violence and ultimately losing her ability to detachedly stand by without intervening. The movie seems to suggest that this detachment from the cruelties of war is shared by us, the audience, not just in our watching of the movie, but in our consumption of reports from various conflict zones across the world in real life. It is almost as if it is gleefully saying “Look at how you don’t care what happens to people”, while simultaneously depriving us of the context we need to engage our empathy.
In the end, the degree of detachment does not just prevent the audience from engaging with the conflict, but even calls into question what the motive of our journalists is for even being here. Yes, it is their job, but nobody chooses to expose themselves to these levels of traumatizing horror simply for a pay check. Lee at one point remarks that she reported on other conflicts to ‘send home a warning’, but if her present actions are a form of bearing witness, it is unclear who she is bearing witness for. Who will see the gruesomely artistic photos shot by our protagonists, and with what purpose? Presumably not the warring parties themselves, who do not need reporters to know what is going on? Nor does the movie give us a sense of a wider community, either national or international, with either interest or involvement in the conflict. Like the violence it records, the reporting in Civil War happens without motivation, but simply because it must.
Ultimately, its abstracted treatment of its subject matter causes Civil War to fail as both a cautionary tale about the centrifugal politics of the United States, and as a musing on the role of war reporting. It fails in the first because it doesn’t explain why the audience should care about this conflict, and it fails in the second because it doesn’t explain this about its protagonists either. All we are left with is the banal observation that war is cruel to everyone and everything it touches, including those wearing a bulletproof vest with ‘Press’ printed on it. At a time when people around the world are responding to reporting on atrocities in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, and elsewhere, and reporters in conflict zones are being explicitly targeted, Civil War’s nihilistic introspection rings cynical and hollow.
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If you are about press freedom and reporting from conflict zones, rather than watching Civil War, you could support Reporters Without Borders or Amnesty International.