Civil War is brilliant, but the bad guys are mostly offscreen
Civil War is brilliant, but the bad guys are mostly offscreen
Yes, Americans are enraged. But what about the people and companies enraging them?
I really hope Civil War can be a cautionary tale.
The movie is full of really good filmmaking: taut storytelling, tense action sequences that depend not on CGI but on skillful direction and suspense, an Oscar-worthy performance from Kirsten Dunst, and if the characters are a little cliched, well, it’s a genre film so that’s part of the package. So it will probably get a wide audience, which is good, because its message is important. Namely: that war is hell, it’s foreseeable in our country, and we need to step back from the brink before it’s too late.
To convey that broad message, the film keeps some things intentionally vague, and scrambles others. We never learn how America devolved into war—more on this below—and its world is an amalgam of our actual political order. The rebels/ insurrectionists aren’t MAGA: they’re from an unexplained alliance between California and Texas, apparently the pro-democracy “good guys.” The president is a little Trumpy—he dissolves the FBI and serves a third term in office—but he’s not Trump, and is not the focus of the film. He’s a placeholder.
This is probably a good idea commercially and propagandistically. If the film were just an anti-MAGA screed, that would limit its audience and kneecap whatever chance it has to reach a lot of Americans with its warning that we could be on a path to hell.
Moreover, there is incendiary rhetoric and action all across the political spectrum: left, right, center, libertarian, and whatever concoction of weird the Rogan/IDW world is. Just listen to an angry centrist rail about wokeness or trans people, or an pro-Palestine activist rail about genocide, or a Roganite in his echo chamber rail about Fauci. To be sure, America’s anti-democratic crises can’t be both-sidesed. The excesses and extremes on the Left pale in comparison to the ones on the Right. And as shrill as MSNBC can sometimes be, it is nothing like Fox News in terms of inaccuracy, incendiary rhetoric, and platforming of extremists – let alone further-right outlets that consider Fox News to be sellouts. But while the Right may have the most extremism, it doesn’t have a monopoly on it.
I see it all the time—which, since I’m a journalist/writer/teacher, is often in the relatively harmless context of hate mail and online comments. Especially in the context of Israel/Palestine, I get intense, angry vitriol from left, right, and center – which, as I’ve noted elsewhere, is deliciously ironic, because I often can’t tell which side it’s coming from. Am I a naïve, self-hating antisemite, or a coddler of Zionist genocide? Am I engaged in false equivalence because I mention the Palestinian citizens killed in Gaza, or because I mention the Israelis killed on October 7? I often can’t tell until who’s complaining until I’m a few sentences in, since the rage and even the rhetoric is often identical. And if Civil War is about anything, it’s about where that rage can lead.
Here’s one small proposal. I challenge myself, and anyone reading this, to think twice before reaching for the most powerful possible word to describe one’s opponent – words that might include fascist, traitor, genocide, antisemite, racist, globalist, and many others. (Feel free to add more swear-words to reflect on in the comments.) It’s not that these words aren’t sometimes accurate; they sometimes are. But in our online and over-screen-timed age, we reach for the big rhetorical guns too quickly. Just the rage in the comments and emails I receive… that, more than any point the rager is trying to make, is what stays with me.
This isn’t to say we sometimes shouldn’t be angry. Progressives are right to get mad about systemic racism, anti-democratic forces, corruption, and the climate crisis. Conservatives are right to get mad about our nation’s loss of moral center, about economic stagnation, and even about the immigration mess, though that anger is often laced with conscious or unconscious racism, Christian Nationalism, and simply false information about crime or jobs. Even IDW centrists are right to get mad about censorship, government collusion with Big Finance/Pharma/Agriculture/Etc, though their echo chamber is even thicker than others, and they often mistake the deck chairs on the Titanic with the iceberg up ahead.
I’m only saying anger, itself, is not a source of wisdom or value, and that it can lead to dark places. I’ll say more about this next week, I hope, so I’ll leave it at that for now.
If Civil War shows what’s similar across the ideological spectrum, it also showed what differs.
First, if there is a civil war brewing in America, it’s notable that only one side is arming itself for it. I’ve worried about this for some time. The hard right is loading up on military-grade guns and ammunition, and the left is not. If the militias ever come for coastal gay Jewish journalists like me, we are all dead. Because we are literally outgunned.
I don’t have a policy prescription here, and I can say it’s been a subject of heated debate in my own household. But it terrifies me, especially when I wake up at 5am with a shot of cortisol in my blood.
Relatedly, the most powerful and chilling scene in the film—it’s part of the trailer and has been widely discussed, but you can skip this paragraph if you don’t want to read about it—involves an far-right militia type played (and under-played) chillingly by Jesse Plemons, who has long excelled at creepy characters. Plemons’s character isn’t affiliated with the government or the “Western Forces.” He’s on his own. And his brutal, cold, sociopathically intelligent bigotry is bone-chilling. Whether Trump wins or loses this year, it’s people like this that I am personally most afraid of.
If there’s one place where Civil War misses, though, I think it’s in the absence of the people who should know better: hard-right media and the plutocratic Republicans who are foolishly funding Donald Trump.
After all, rage isn’t just “rising” in America — it’s being provoked and amplified. Turn on Fox News at any moment in the day or night, and you will quickly be exposed to angry, extreme rhetoric that plays fast and loose with the facts — and it’s even worse on the further-right. At first I had thought the Murdochs were doing this for ideological reasons, but the post-2020 election lawsuits revealed it was mostly for economic ones. Which seems even worse. Really, it’s just greed? The reckless irresponsibility of these mega-corporations is astonishing, and for all our sakes, I hope it doesn’t go down in history for being so.
Likewise the cadres of CEOs and other one-percenters who are supporting Trump despite copious, clear indicators that he will unleash massive chaos on the world that will be largely bad for business: withdrawing from NATO, instituting steep tariffs, weaponizing the DOJ to go after political enemies, building concentration camps, deporting a million people. (David Leonhardt did a great exploration of this phenomenon just this week.) Have they not learned from Brexit that a nation can economically self-destruct, to the detriment of big business as well as everyone else? Let alone the unpredictable chaos of empowering tens of millions of heavily-armed, often Christian Nationalist nativists who have been brainwashed into believing that Covid, climate change, trans people, and Black Lives Matter are the sinister creations of a global cult of pedophiles?
Do they think that’s just going to go away?
This is the only piece of the puzzle that Civil War refused to play, and it left a big gap. Again, I understand the reasons for it: to the extent the film gets specific, it loses its capacity to convey its broader message. And yet, it’s unfair to only blame the people who eat this garbage. What about the people who are feeding them? People who are smart and informed enough to know they are lying and distorting and playing with fire, but who do so nonetheless?
Those are the people absent from Civil War, and I think they’re the most guilty of all. We meet a lot of folks in the movie, from righteous journalists to racist murderers. But we never meet the people who, if civil war really comes to pass, will be the most responsible for it.
Happy Passover for those who celebrate. Over at the Forward, I wrote a bit about how to host a Seder with people who have strong, differing opinions. I also checked in with my good friend Pastor John Hagee, who said that Iran’s strike on Israel is the beginning of the war between Gog and Magog. If you’re reading this on Thursday, I should be on CNN tonight during the 10pm hour, though these things often shift at the last minute.
Thanks for your support!