"Civil War" the new film project by Kirsten Dunst and Alex Garland
Is this a thought-provoking new cautionary tale, or an accerationist fantasy?
In theaters now is a new film featuring Actor Kirsten Dunst featuring the nightmare scenario of Americans at war with each other.
“Every time I survived a war zone, I thought I was sending a warning home: Don’t do this,” a photojournalist laments in Alex Garland’s speculative thriller, Civil War. “But here we are.” Like her namesake Lee Miller, who captured on film the Battle of Alsace and the liberation of the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps in the Second World War, Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) observes and chronicles the worst of humanity. America has collapsed, as the Western Alliance, struck between California and Texas (with a little help from Florida), closes in on Washington DC and a president (Nick Offerman) who’s given himself a third term.
Lee, alongside fellow Reuters reporter Joel (Wagner Moura), New York Times veteran Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), and Lee superfan Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), vows to land the only story left in this wasteland of a country: an interview with the now-doomed president. British writer-director Garland, with his valuable outsider perspective, shoots exactly as if he were making a modern war movie about a conflict elsewhere. Civil War is its own warning home: don’t do this.
And yet it falls frustratingly short, having collapsed into the same thematic issues as Garland’s previous work, 2022’s Men. There, the director had Jessie Buckley chased around a small village by men with the same face (specifically, Rory Kinnear’s face). It may have effectively monsterised men, but it never dared to question the system that empowered one gender to commit consequence-free terror and subjugation. Civil War, too, decontextualises violence and deliberately tosses the entire idea of power out the window.
We’re never told what this conflict is about, who might be oppressed, or what freedoms have been stolen away. All we’re given is violence. And, to Garland’s credit, he’s made an utterly convincing war film about a war that’s yet to break out, having relinquished the taut control that made his more traditional sci-fi films, Ex Machina and Annihilation, feel so eerie.
There is some value in showing us what America could potentially become if we continue to divide against each other. There’s value in making the death, destruction and damage look and feel real, as if it’s something tangible and that it has consequences.
But that’s only telling half the story. It would be more honest to tell every why we having these conflicts because in order to resolve them, we need to address the source of them — and this movie doesn’t do that.
This is a point that I’ve made before. I’ve directly stated that the Civil War is already in progress. It’s just a mostly Cold War right now, carried about by Lone Stochastic Terrorists. We’ve only had one serious mass event so far - the January 6 Insurrection.
But there could certainly be more.
I’m not alone in that view as Jeff Sharlet’s new book “Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War” makes clear.
An unmatched guide to the religious dimensions of American politics, Jeff Sharlet journeys into corners of our national psyche where others fear to tread. The Undertow is both inquiry and meditation, an attempt to understand how, over the last decade, reaction has morphed into delusion, social division into distrust, distrust into paranoia, and hatred into fantasies—sometimes realities—of violence.
Across the country, men “of God” glorify materialism, a gluttony of the soul, while citing Scripture and preparing for civil war—a firestorm they long for as an absolution and exaltation. Lies, greed, and glorification of war boom through microphones at hipster megachurches that once upon a time might have preached peace and understanding. Political rallies are as aflame with need and giddy expectation as religious revivals. At a conference for incels, lonely single men come together to rage against women. On the Far Right, everything is heightened—love into adulation, fear into vengeance, anger into white-hot rage. Here, in the undertow, our forty-fifth president, a vessel of conspiratorial fears and fantasies, continues to rise to sainthood, and the insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt, killed on January 6 at the Capitol, is beatified as a martyr of white womanhood.
Framing this dangerous vision, Sharlet remembers and celebrates the courage of those who sing a different song of community, and of an America long dreamt of and yet to be fully born, dedicated to justice and freedom for all.
For Trump. For Ashli. For the “J6 Hostages.”
They will fight.
The anger over “Stop the Steal” has not dissipated. The wound has not been healed. Millions of Americans still believe that some massive fraud has been perpetrated on them — and exactly what they may be willing to do next is unclear.
We commonly dismiss these people as cranks and crackpots. But they are legion.
Q: If he were to lose again what would that mean for the country?
A: We’d have an uprising. There’s too many people that are ready to go now.
Q: What does that mean, can you be specific?
A: Civil War.
Q: You think it will be a Civil War if Trump loses again?
A: Oh yes, I do. I know with people that I talk to. I’m a church goer, and I love God more than my life, but there are things that I do for God that I don’t do for anybody else and I know that God needs some help here.
So, Holy War.
This is fairly common talk among those on the Right.
Q: Do you think we’re getting close to - I’m not saying this hyperbolicly - cause people are saying it all over.
A Maga #1: Civil War?
Q: Civi War yeah.A Maga #1: I’ve said that numerous times. I’ve thought that a long time. I think they’re gonna push the wrong button pretty soon. Or one of these days and all hells gonna break loose. If it goes the wrong way and they go after ammunition and guns, the way they already have, there’s gonna be trouble.
A Maga #2: We’re here for the people. We’re ready to take our country back. We’re ready to take the people that shouldn’t be in office, and put the people in that need to be in.
A Maga #3: I don’t know what’s going to happen.
A Maga #4: I don’t question that there’s already been a national divorce. I mean, you go to any Thanksgiving. Your family members — there’s no question — I mean, this is crazy. People wearing Trump stuff, we’ve had to be in hiding for the last two years because we don’t know if somebodies going to freak out if they know that we’re a Trump supporter. Y’know Hush Hush, ya gotta keep it on the down-low because you don’t know how somebodies gonna react to that.
Yeah, you don’t know if someone might be upset that their sister, mother, aunt or cousin may have nearly died of sepsis during a failed pregnancy - thanks to Trump.
People might be a bit upset about that.
They might be annoyed that a Trump supporter murdered 51 people in Christchurch that streamed on live video.
Tarrant, a white supremacist, gunned down worshippers at two Christchurch mosques during Friday prayers in March 2019. He left dozens of others with severe injuries in the attack, which he livestreamed on Facebook.
The following year, Tarrant pleaded guilty to 51 counts of murder, 40 counts of attempted murder and one count of terrorism. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, the maximum available sentence in New Zealand.
This shooter wrote a manifesto in praise of Trump.
One of the suspects in a pair of deadly New Zealand mosque shootings wrote in a manifesto that he supported President Trump “as a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose,” according to The Washington Post.
The suspected shooter reportedly wrote in a more than 70-page manifesto that he somewhat supported Trump: “As a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose? Sure. As a policy maker and leader? Dear god no.”
And then another Trump supporter killed 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue.
Four years ago today, a heavily armed man went into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and opened fire, murdering 11 people and injuring at least 6 others in one of the worst anti-Semitic attacks in American history. The accused perpetrator, 46-year-old Robert Bowers, was fixated specifically on HIAS, a Jewish organization that helps immigrant refugees in the United States. Prior to the massacre, Bowers allegedly posted multiple comments on social media referring to “caravans of migrant invaders,” a false specter that had been heavily hyped by President Trump and his allies at Fox News. “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people,” Bowers wrote on Gab, a hub for far-right hate. “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” (Bowers pleaded not guilty to murder and hate-crime charges and is scheduled to go on trial next year.)
Another Trump supporter killed 23 people at an El Paso Walmart.
Ten months later, a 21-year-old named Patrick Crusius carried out a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, where he allegedly murdered 23 people and injured nearly two dozen others. Most of the victims were Hispanic Americans and Mexican nationals. “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” the young white man stated in a screed he posted online just prior to the rampage, echoing the migrant-invasion theme frequently espoused by the president and his reelection campaign. Crusius also subscribed to “Great Replacement” theory, then a focus for Tucker Carlson and other Fox pundits who warned ominously of an endangered white American population. (Crusius confessed to police but later pleaded not guilty; federal and state trials for him are pending.)
And yet another Trump supporter killed 10 people at the Buffalo Top Market.
There’s no such thing as a lone wolf — an appellation often given, in error, to terrorists who act alone, particularly those of the white supremacist variety. There are only those people who, fed a steady diet of violent propaganda and stochastic terror, take annihilatory rhetoric to its logical conclusion.
Such was the case on Saturday, when a teenaged white supremacist named Payton Gendron opened fire in a supermarket in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, killing 10 people, while livestreaming the carnage on the live-video site Twitch. Prior to the shooting, he had posted a 180-page manifesto in which he laid out his rationale clearly: He was an adherent of what is called Great Replacement Theory, the idea that white people, in the United States and white-majority countries around the world, are being systematically, deliberately outbred and “replaced” by immigrants and ethnic minorities, in a deliberate attempt to rid the world of whiteness. It’s a conspiracy theory that has inspired terror attacks in New Zealand and Pittsburgh, San Diego, and El Paso – an ideology that marries demographic panic with the idea of a cunning, nefarious plot. Reading through the document, what struck me hardest, however, was how very close the killer’s ideas were to the American mainstream – the white-hot core of American politics.
That’s because it is the core of American politics.
These ideas are the same ones we see coming from the Boogaloo Bois whos members have staged Drive-by shootings of Federal Officers.
SAN FRANCISCO — A former U.S. Air Force staff sergeant and alleged member of the "boogaloo" extremist movement pleaded guilty Friday in the fatal shooting of a federal security officer in the San Francisco Bay Area amid large 2020 protests against police brutality.
Steven Carrillo, 33, changed his plea to guilty to a federal murder charge in the killing of David Patrick Underwood and to the attempted murder of Underwood's colleague after federal prosecutors last month agreed not to seek the death penalty.
The men were shot on May 29, 2020, while they stood in front of a federal building in Oakland as hundreds marched on the streets.Dressed in an orange jumpsuit in federal court, Carrillo read from a plea agreement, admitting to posting messages on Facebook a day before the shooting asking anyone if they were "down to boog" and saying he was ready to act and not just talk. He also admitted firing 19 rounds from a homemade AR-15 rifle from the back of a white van being driven by a man he connected with online.
"I aligned myself with the anti-government movement and wanted to carry out violent acts against federal law enforcement officers in particular," Carrillo said.
The entire point of the Boogaloo Bois is to stage a New American Civil War.
Let me also point out that the first violence of the Floyd Riots - the burning of the Minneapolis police station, was done by a Boogaloo as part of a multi-state effort coordinated over Facebook.
US attorney Erica MacDonald said on Friday that she had charged Ivan Harrison Hunter, a 26-year-old Texas resident, with traveling across state lines to participate in a riot. The charges are the latest example of far-right extremists attempting to use violence to escalate national protests against police brutality into an uprising against the government, and even full civil war.
The case also reveals the extent of the coordination between violent members of the nascent far-right “Boogaloo Bois” movement operating in different cities across the country.According to the criminal complaint against Hunter, on 26 May, as intense protests broke out in Minneapolis over the killing of George Floyd by a city police officer, a “Boogaloo Boi” based in Minnesota posted a public Facebook message: “I need a headcount.”
Hunter, a resident of Boerne, Texas, which is roughly 1,200 miles away, responded: “72 hours out.”
Another “Boogaloo Boi”, based in North Carolina, posted a public message the same day: “Lock and load boys,” he wrote, adding, “the national network is going off.”
Lots of the violence of the Floyd Protests which were blamed on BLM and ANTIFA, but were actually perpetrated by Boogaloo Bois.
An ex-Marine turned “domestic terrorist” who played a major role in the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots in Columbia that injured law enforcement officers and destroyed police cars has been sentenced to two years in state prison.
Joshua Barnard, 28, of Florida and Columbia, is the first person sentenced to state prison in the Columbia riots that followed George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, said Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott, whose deputies joined Columbia police officers to protect the city’s downtown business area in May 2020 as waves of anti-police riots swept the country.“Once a police car was attacked, he took a police jacket out of the car and gave it to the rest of the rioters,” Lott said. “He was inciting the crowd — probably one of the main inciters of the riot. They intended to burn the Columbia police department down.”
And here’s an ex-Boogaloos who has a reaction to this new movie’s trailer.
So right off, he think this might be a “good movie” because it’s not a “Left v Right” movie it’s just the “People v Totalitarianism” - which means it’s really Right-leaning.
He notes that some of the “Patriots” in the movie carrying long weapons are wearing Hawaiian shirts - like Boogaloos. He argues that the Boogaloos are “over” and have become “Kind of cringe” - which is bro-speak for “embarassing.” He argues that Boogs are really just acting out what I would called the “Fight Club” fantasy of trying to turn the dullness of your boring plodding day-to-day life into some kind of action-adventure by acting out.
He ain’t wrong there.
The movie seems to be the U.S. Army and Air Force against Civilians (Boogs), so he likes it.
Ok, so I was originally going to rant that this movie looks like just another example of wishy-washy media “both-siderism.” This is what I was going to say:
I get the strong impression this is kind of.a "both sides" project that criticizes everyone for the divisions and acrimony in the country. Unfortunately, that simply isn't true.
The project is not being done literally or using our real-life issues, it just seems to be a cautionary tale of where we might be heading, which I think is fine but not truly helpful. I think if you really just told the truth, you'd get a better result.
One side chooses to believe in a pack of deluded paranoid lies started this and is continuing to escalate it further and further. It is not the case that "both sides" have led us to this point. They haven't. That very idea is part of the problem. [I know some of us don't think things will ever fully go kinetic, but I have my doubts. There are plenty of hopped-up Neo-Right Militias out there and lone wolves to do lots of Stochastic Terrorism]
"Russia Russia Russia" was not a hoax. Trump deserved to be Impeached and removed both times. The 2020 Election was not Stolen. There might be a "Deep State" but it's full of just as many partisan Republicans as Democrats. All of those are lies.
I've written about all these issues in excruciating detail and done everything I can to make these cases. The problem is the other side refuses to listen. They refuse to believe and understand that they're being deliberately and strategically lied to for the benefit of the Oligarchs and the Stock Marketeers who want us at each other's throats over cultural issues so they can keep shoveling our money tax money into their pockets.
We are being driven apart, on purpose, for their gain. The shooting has already started, it's just been mostly by Lone Wolves. It may never escalate to Army vs Army, it may just remain a series of semi-random attacks fostered by Stochastic Terrorism.
But that is escalating, more and more, day after day, and it could truly become much much worse just as was outlined in the Turner Diaries decades ago.
Only one side needs to come to their senses, and quite sadly, they probably won't. The last thing they'll do is openly admit that they've been deliberately duped this entire time. That's the tragedy.
Now, I’m thinking it’s worse than that. This is Boogaloo Fan Fiction. This is the story as they would tell it, free of the specifics of our actual real life conflicts or consequences - but “open ended” allowing people to project their own grievances into it without any legitimate context.
This is latest version of Right-wing propaganda like the human trafficking fantasy of “Sound of Freedom” until the guy who inspired that movie turned out to be a sexual predator himself.
Tim Ballard, whose efforts to combat child sex trafficking were the basis for the surprise summer hit “Sound of Freedom,” reportedly stepped away from his watchdog organization in June after an internal investigation into sexual misconduct allegations brought by seven women, according to sources who spoke with Vice.
Ballard, who was portrayed by Jim Caviezel in “Sound of Freedom,” has denied any wrongdoing and blames “evil pedophiles” for attempting to destroy his “good name.” His character in the film is characterized as a hero and former U.S. government agent whose mission is to rescue children from sex traffickers in Colombia.
So, uh, cringe.
Blowing up buildings in DC, including the Lincoln Memorial. Yeah, that’s Boogaloo fantasy. Then my ex-Boogaloo buddies says
I hope this movie will be thought provoking and wake up the normies to think “I should be looking out for tyanny on the horizon.” I doesn’t matter who it comes from, tyranny is tyranny. And that to me is really exciting. That to me is very powerful.
[…]
It’s cool to see the Hollywood machine coming out with a piece of media that is way more thought provoking.
Yeah, that’s another Red Flag.
This isn’t “thought-provoking” any more than a Gerard Butler “Angel has Fallen”, “London Has Fallen,” “Olympus Has Fallen”, “The Sky has Fallen” franchise of super-action films. There’s not much thought here.
They aren’t addressing the underlying issues behind our conflicts, they aren’t addressing media bias and distrust, social media trolling and how people are being sucked into delusional rabbit-holes leading them to make sad deadly choices.
It’s just “Tyranical President Bad, ugh!”
They aren’t really showing us a “cautionary tale” of where America might go in the future. This is more like The Purge. This is just violence-porn. It’s a guidebook for people like this guy.
It’s the Turner Diaries - but with all the obviously racist shit pulled out and tucked over on the side.
That’s not a good thing.
Here’s another review of the film by Dan Murrel.
This review argues that the point of the film seems to be to ignore the reasons for the conflict and instead focus on the horror and loss of humanity. To make you feel the pain of the conflict in an existential way, somewhat like the D-Day scene in Saving Private Ryan managed to do with its brutal honesty. Not sure they can top that one.
Murrel: This film takes the focus off the why of the war and puts it squarely on the effects of the war. And given what we see in the movie, If anybody on any part of the political spectrum actually finds themselves rooting for this conflict to happen then they need to take a really hard look at themselves because this is not a Rosy portrait, this is not an everything’s worth it kind of movie. This is a horror tale in it’s own way of just what would happen if this were to break out.
Where some may expect this to be the most political film in a US election year, Alex Garland is challenging us to see it apolitically to reconnet with out sense of dread and to see what war crimes on American soil would actually look like.
Well, the problem is exactly that many people in this country have absolutely not taken a full and clean look at themselves. And I doubt merely showing the “horrors of war” is going to wake them up. We’ve all seen lots of war movies. None of that has ever stopped the next war from happening, and frankly, there’s a certain portion of the public that gets off on it. They like it. This movie is likely feeding them just what they want. They’re exactly the people that won’t react to the humanity in this movie the right way. It will desensitize them, and help prepare them emotionally for what they think they need to do.
I don’t think this will accomplish what Garland hopes it will, not if it doesn’t give people the key to the pathway out of the delusions that are leading to this outcome. He telling good people what they already know - War is Bad. Shocker. Meanwhile, he’s providing War Porn to the sociopaths who will never get that lesson.
Now, I could be wrong, because I haven’t seen the film. It could have a surprise twist ending. After all this fighting to get to the White House and interview the “Tyrannical” President, we might find out that this has entirely been a setup.
But I doubt that’s going to happen.
I don’t really dig reviewers who decide they don’t like a movie because it’s not the one that they’ve written inside their own head, but I do have some notes.
In my take on this: Millions of American citizens have been hoodwinked, they’ve had their minds clouded by years, decades even, of strategic lies, rumors, innuendos, and conspiracy theories accusing the President and his people of all kinds of wrongful disgusting acts stoking the hate and violence.
Since were following reporters this movie could be shot as if we’re watching a series of press reports delivered on air or to streaming social media. Some private moments personal VLOGs could be included. You could have both mainstream reporters and independent fringe reporters, each with on their own take on events. We start in the present day as we’re moving toward the final assault on DC, but then flashback to previous events - where the people are seduced by cyber trolls, AI, Deep Fakes and highly paid shills to believe the lies. We see the fakes, and occasionally we get a glimpse of the truth revealing the lie. So it’s not clear exactly who to believe. In the flashbacks, we see that things began originally as lone wolf attacks. Death and Bomb threats against vulnerable targets. Then escalated to individual acts of violence and terrorism, then to mass murder which eventually accelerates further to a massive ten thousand person attack on the government that succeeded.
Then we’re off the races. Nobody agrees on who the real President is - the incumbent or his challenger. The states split along electoral lines as to who supports which candidate. Then we slowly get back to the present day with the face-off/interview with the current White House holder.
When challenged, that President would defend himself against all the wild accusations and successfully make the case that he is innocent. He would argue that he’s only doing what he has to do because opposing forces have left him no choice and no other option in order to preserve the nation, like Lincoln before him. He may not have started the war, but he has no choice but to fight and win it for the good of the country.
But he doesn’t make excuses. He doesn’t whine. He doesn’t just point fingers, he owns up to his decisions - good and bad. He admits his mistakes and takes responsibility for them. He did the best job he could with an incredibly difficult situation.
Could you go through the entire movie riding shoulder-to-shoulder with the Hawaiian shirt guys only to come to realize that they may not be the bad guys, but because they’ve been deliberately duped they aren’t the good guys either? With footage taken by additional independent journalists and activists, showing how previous releases have been deceptively edited and manipulated the President is able to prove his point. Coming to this realization just might be enough to end the conflict.
Something like that might be thought-provoking, it might make people reconsider all they’ve been told, but I’m not betting on this film doing anything like that. Not from a movie that proclaims the entire reason for the fight is:
Someone’s trying to kill us [and] we’re trying to kill them.
Here is Alex Garland interviewed about the film on the Daily Show.
He clearly has high hopes for the impact of the film. I’m less certain of that after watching the Ex-Booglaloo’s reaction. I don’t think the people that deeply need to learn the lesson are going to get it.
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