Civil War feels suspiciously like non-fiction

It’s rare to find satire that sets out deliberately to disconnect itself from the real world. Broadly speaking, the power of satire is achieved through context. It is the parallel reality that runs alongside the world out there. It is the language of the mimic and fool, saying things that might otherwise be unsayable.

Alex Garland’s new film, Civil War, finally arrived in cinemas this past week and quickly became the top movie in America. If you haven’t seen the film (and I recommend that you do), it is the perfect synthesis of politics and satire, as well as being a loving homage to great photojournalism. It’s about a Magnum photographer, played by Kirsten Dunst, on her way to Washington to interview the President whilst America is fighting its Second Civil War. This America is a near-future dystopia, where tribalism has escalated to the point where the rebel forces of Texas and California (specifically chosen to cut across current divisions) have formed the Western Alliance opposed to the government in Washington DC.

Yet even as Civil War became the film everybody is talking about, the people behind the film have been doing their utmost to suggest that… you know… the things you might be talking about, aren’t the things you should be talking about. 

This, they seem to say, is satire without a victim. It’s certainly not about a man currently asleep in a Manhattan courtroom.

“There are no political echoes of real life,” said Nick Offerman when interviewed by Jimmy Kimmel this week. 

It’s a claim that makes some sense, at least financially. Studios want bums on seats and not just blue bums. Yet this reluctance to take a side also rings a little hollow, if not appears downright odd. A film that explores the polarising nature of the past eight years is itself presented almost as if the movie poster carries the tagline: “You had very fine people, on both sides”.

Are things in America so bad that the satirists are acting as mediators between the two sides? Or are they so cowed by the depth of the hostility that they are faking neutrality? You’d be forgiven for thinking the Second American Civil War had already started…

Yet they might well have a point. Threats of violence have always lingered around American politics but they seem to become more overt by the day. Just this week, Kari Lake told her supporters that “We’re going to put on our helmet — or your Kari Lake ball cap. We are going to put on the armor of God. And maybe strap on a Glock on the side of us just in case…”

This, remember, comes from one of the most cynical players on the stage; a woman who is a useful metric for where the political lines are drawn. She started as a Republican, switched to Independent, before leaping to the Democrats with Obama’s rise, but then switched back to the Republicans to become eventually one of the most vocal defenders of Trump.

She’s not the only one to understand what she needs to be to fall in line with the mood of the times. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas this week appeared to advocate attacking protestors, especially those protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza. He encouraged “people anywhere that get stuck behind criminals like this who are trying to block traffic, to take matters into their own hands”. Even more pointed: “If they glued their hands to a car or the pavement, well, [it would be] probably pretty painful to have their skin ripped off. But I think that’s the way we’d handle it in Arkansas.”

This is the reality that Civil War is mirroring, or, perhaps, this is the reality that foreshadows the kinds of violence we see in the movie. It results in a kind of strange doubling: where the fear evident inside the movie is being repeated outside the movie. 

The result might be one of the great political movies, not just of this decade but those decades around it. Yet its greatness lies in the way fear leaves it without a centre. Garland has produced a political movie without politics, labouring in the stuff of mere “identity” in all its vague banal turbidity. There are no policy disputes in the film. Just sustained paranoia.

In one of the film’s most advertised moments (I’m trying to make this spoiler-free), an unidentified soldier played by Jesse Plemons takes the journalists captive and interrogates them. When they claim to be Americans, he coolly asks them: “What kind of American are you?”

There is, of course, no clear, rational, or safe answer. 

And therein lies the twist. A film that purports not to be about now is very much about now. The more the film attempts to divorce itself from contemporary politics, the more it becomes just that. Jarring contradictions inside the film betray its attempts at objectivism, meaning there’s a certain knowingness about the whole charade. Of course, this is all about Donald Trump and MAGA. It’s just that everybody is too afraid to admit that. When Offerman claims there are “no political echoes”, he then says of his fictional president: “You don’t know what his politics are other than he’s full of [EXPLETIVE BEEPED OUT]”.

He might as well have winked at the audience who knew only too well what (or rather who) he was talking about.

History will undoubtedly be the judge and Offerman will be read as the proxy for Trump he’s so clearly meant to be. His nameless president has upturned the Constitution, is serving a third term (itself a debate bubbling in the Trumpian fringes where a run in 2028 is not as surreal as it sounds), and is refusing to leave office. The character might eschew any notable iconography: no red tie, orange makeup, or obvious visual mannerisms. But the language is exactly that of the forty-fifth president. The very first shot is that of the fictional president preparing to make a statement, rehearsing his line: “Some are already calling it the greatest victory in the history of mankind…” 

We should have no doubt. That’s Trump.

Civil War is not the only example of the media attempting to nullify accusations of bias. Much of America’s network news has struggled with this since 2020. CNN and MSNBC have attempted to shed their liberal tags at the risk of pandering to right-wing conspiracies. The same questions have been asked about some of the bigger newspapers, including The New York Times and Washington Post. We see it in the way the media is manipulated, finessed, and generally loyal to the bottom line. It perhaps explains the certainty they have that Trump is going to win in November, even as the polls continue to shift against him, as abortion continues to impose itself on the campaigns, and his legal woes deepen.

Yet how strange it all is, this business of fear; when journalists, publishers, and broadcasters, are so scared of the ramifications of perceived bias that they introduce real bias to their workplaces. What is the true state of a nation that denies that its satires are satirical? The scariest parts of Civil War might not be the film but the world around it where everybody appears to be living in fear.

@DavidWaywell

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