GROSS DISTRACTION - Alex Garland's mythopoeia
Civil War is a film about photojournalism. About war photography. Also peripherally about a near-future war in America.
CIVIL WAR, director ALEX GARLAND, cast KIRSTEN DUNST, WAGNER MOURA, CAILEE SPAENY, STEPHEN MCKINLEY HENDERSON, production company DNA FILMS/A24, released 2024, 109 MINUTES.
The war in Alex Garland’s hit movie Civil War is there to provide a vivid, hyper-kinetic backdrop for an ethical melodrama. And it is hyper-kinetic - the movie is optimised for IMAX, emotionally as well as aesthetically.
Garland takes every aspect of his relatively simple scenario and amps it up to a kind of feverish over-statement. This is recognisably Garland. Everything is in some way heightened, everything is elevated to archetype.
A short list of things that are amplified, dialed-up, overstated in Civil War:
The violence - highly photogenic brutality in every direction.
The photographers’ constant proximity to the action - and no waiting around.
The level of access granted to the journalists by combatants and officials.
The uniformly dysfunctional, darkly damaged psyches of the journalists involved.
The iconic, gallery-quality, award-winning nature of the photography.
Narrative elements are asked to stand for something grand, something universal. When we encounter this in art we usually call it ‘allegory’. And allegory is important in film - we don’t want things to just be things all the time - but it’s a tough one to pull off. Like the rain in a Kurosawa movie - it actually has to be meaningful. By the end of this movie we’re not convinced.
There’s a secondary element of the narrative that is illustrative: the rookie photog - Cailee Spaeny’s Jessie - straight from college, who tags along with our hardened crew, shoots everything on 35mm, on a vintage Nikon that used to be her dad’s. It’s a detail that betrays the whole method. Garland takes a hip affectation - the obvious absurdity of shooting a 21st Century war on film - and elevates it, gives it a kind of nobility. Analogue here stands for authenticity, the uncynical perspective of a newbie. Jessie is unworldy, unjaded, undisillusioned - we can tell because she has to wind on after every shot.
A pair of journalists are at the centre of the story - of this hyped-up mythopoeia. Kirsten Dunst’s grizzled photographer Lee and Wagner Moura’s hopped-up wire service journo Joel both give us the most extreme expression of what they do - to the point of blunt caricature. Lee is an ethical void, motivated by an un-enquiring, dry-as-dust “we record so other people ask” rationale. Joel is unhinged: “…this gunfire is getting me extremely fucking hard.”
We recognise the type - from other movies and from actual wars - especially the one in Vietnam, of course - neurotic dead-centre for this kind of examination. Witnesses to slaughter, scarred or destroyed on our behalf - for our understanding or excitement or entertainment. We know they’re not normal. They know it (Don McCullin, so often a model for these characters, certainly knew it: “…I became totally mad, free, running around like a tormented animal…"). The locations are familiar too. Hotel bars, a stadium refugee camp, road-side mass graves etc. Garland is not afraid to recycle the glamour of earlier visions of hell - Apocalypse Now, Salvador, Full Metal Jacket, The Killing Fields, The Year of Living Dangerously… (it’s a long list).
And it’s a compelling, not to say Shakespearean, idea. A disinterested witness, at the side of the stage, risking death - corporeal and moral - to bring us these vivid images of man’s cruelty - somewhere between fool and chorus. The photographic image, modernity’s contribution to the interpretation of conflict, is testimony and judgement in one click. Garland can’t add anything here, though. His witnesses, reduced to cliché, are blank, circulating the killing fields like automata, like video game characters. Civil War aspires to the status of tragedy but doesn’t quite make it. There is no hero here, no great figure brought low, nobody of any stature to grieve for. And in the climax, even Jessie, the ingénue, unjaded no more, can do nothing but create another image - as if that could achieve anything.
Civil War blew the doors off in its first weekend - and is now the biggest A24 release by a mile.
War photographers sometimes claim that their work is, of its nature, anti-war. That their audience will be so apalled, so affronted, by their images, that war will be put into retreat, defeated. Virginia Woolf believed this. Susan Sontag disagreed.
I hesitated to make that videogame reference - I know a lot of people have made COD comparisons - but there’s something about the characters here. Dunst in particular looks off into the distance with a kind of frozen, cutscene expression that’s pretty scary.
Civil War wasn’t shot on IMAX but is apparently amazing on an IMAX screen.
I’m pretty sure Jessie’s Nikon is here for a reason - Garland’s referencing an old Hollywood shorthand. For decades, photojournalism was the hip profession of choice and the Nikon F was the camera of choice. A pro device that was sexy, quickly communicated ‘serious’, ‘insider’ and ‘effortlessly with-it’. If Jane Fonda or Dennis Hopper, at their hippest and weirdest, needed a camera, it was always a Nikon (in earlier Hollywood it had always been the Speed Graphic, the huge press camera with the blinding flash bulb).
It occurs to me that setting this film in America might be a clever, profit-maximising act. If the film had been set elswhere - God forbid, in China’s orbit - it would certainly have been banned in multiple markets.
I called Civil War a melodrama at the top of this review but maybe it’s a ‘vibes movie’. It’s certainly heavy on cheaply-acquired emotion. The critics mostly called it ‘apolitical’ and either loved or hated that but perhaps it’s a weepie?