The Road to Splitsville WAR PIX FLICK: POLITIX? NIX

The Newsletter for Subscribers to THE SPLIT

Guess what! The movie Civil War opened last week and, because we live to serve, one of us has already seen it! It’s getting good, and sometimes great, reviews--

--although it’s also getting scathing, dismissive reviews. The always-astute Mary McNamara, in the L.A. Times, puts her finger on one of the problems. Owen Gleiberman, at Variety, was not impressed. And our former Spy editor, Kurt Andersen, calls it “shockingly dumb and empty. Walking Dead without zombies.”

He's onto something, especially with “empty.” (Or, as Osita Nwanevu puts it at The New Republic, “fascinatingly empty.”) Let’s delve into why, and why, even though its flaws are more cinematic than political, it still provides an adequate rest stop on the Road to Splitsville.

When we first started reading about Civil War several months ago, our response was to panic. Would this movie (by Alex Garland, a serious, smart director/writer, and a Brit) pre-empt our novel? Were we being scooped and rendered de trop and stuff like that? But when we managed to calm down and read the entire article, we breathed a sigh of relief. The film would not deal with our real-life red-vs-blue state standoff, as is done so magnificently in The Split, as we’re sure you’ll agree.

Rather—and notoriously—it is set in the near future, when the country has split (!) off three breakaway nations, at least two of which have taken up arms against the (apparently, but not explicitly, fascist) US government (comprising the “Loyalist States”). They call themselves the Western Forces, and their teaming up has audibly raised eyebrows: the W.F. consist of California and Texas. In what universe, many wonder, do these two big, politically distinct states, find common cause?

In addition, the Northwest, east to Minnesota, is the “New People’s Army” (referred to by some as being “Maoist”), and the Southeast, from Florida to Oklahoma, is the “Florida Alliance.”

It's not the universe we call “real life,” but Garland dismisses this objection. He has said the movie is not about US politics. It’s about the importance of journalists, and about the sheer chaotic hell of war. Which, fine. A future dystopia needn’t, and maybe shouldn’t, resemble our current reality.

But it has to present a coherent alternate reality of its own if the chaos it gives rise to is to mean anything, and if the behavior of the protagonists (or of any character) is to make sense. Instead, Civil War presents us chaos in a vague reality that’s less than half-baked.

This is a US after an unexplained psychotic breakdown. What we get is two photojournalists and two reporters on a road trip, from chaos in New York City, through chaos in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia, to a (pretty cool) climax at what could be called The Battle of Washington, D.C.

That’s a lotta chaos, during which you cannot tell, in many encounters, who the good guys are (if any) and who the bad guys are. Sometimes combatants are in civvies, other times—whether they’re Federal troops or not—in camo. You have no idea who is fighting whom, and for what reason. (Politico is good on the movie’s depiction of militias and insurgents.) It takes half the movie until we're permitted to consider the Western Forces as the good guys.

But then what's the status of the other non-Fed. factions? Are they anti-US? Why or why not? And how is it possible that California and Texas alone seem poised to defeat the entire US Defense Department?

We have no idea. This absence of historical, moral, and political setting gives the whole movie the purely immediate, depthless, take-it-or-leave-it context of a dream. And that means that anything anyone does feels unmoored from the sensible and the plausible. Actions and reactions have the logic of a dream, which is to say, no logic at all.

For example, we go through so much arbitrary, lawless killing, it's weird that the journos think, over and over, they'll be safe because their van says PRESS on it and they have I.D. They pull up to a gas station, in front of which lounge three plug-uglies brandishing serious rifles. Kirsten Dunst (who is terrific) negotiates their purchase of half a tank of gas for “three hundred dollars Canadian.” Regardless of what happens next, our question is: Why? Given the surrounding breakdown of law and the proliferation of assholes-with-guns, why would she and her companions assume they wouldn’t be killed then and there?

Or there’s this: The heroes pull into a town so pristine and peaceful, it leads one of them to ask if they’ve traveled back in time. Again, it’s an event out of a dream, and the indication of two gunmen on a rooftop, keeping watch, does little to make it plausible.

In one extended sequence, the 24-year-old photojournalist who’s essentially forced Kirsten Dunst’s character to be her mentor, becomes so (pick your adjective) either brave or reckless, she has to be continually dragged out of harm’s way during a vicious firefight. With this, the movie threatens to resemble a Buster Keaton comedy of narrowly-averted disasters. “NOW she’ll get killed…No? Wow…Okay, NOW, she—no? Whew! Okay LOOK OUT…Now—?”

To have these thoughts is to be alienated from the characters, and to instead watch the proceedings at a remove, as though viewing the no-stakes, violence-for-its-own-sake episodes of a video game being played by someone else.

It’s not all frustrating and perplexing. The acting is great. The visuals are striking. The scene with Jesse Plemons is truly harrowing and is getting a ton of deserved praise. (Although it, too, has its vexingly implausible moment.) There’s a scene which seems to be an explicit hat-tip to Apocalypse Now—another “road movie” escorting us through the hellish surreality of war.

But enough. Our—and your—question is, what does this have to do with the Road to Splitsville? Does it move us even a little down that road?

We think it does. Civil War, in its geographical and temporal settings, seems to promise an unflinching look at America’s current reality. (A bombed-out J.C. Penney! The Lincoln Memorial under siege!) In fact, though, it delivers a completely flinching look. By not taking sides (and not having sides to take), and by presenting war itself as the enemy, in which heroic journalists move through a landscape teeming with brutal killers not identified with any particular side, it begs every salient political and cultural question that besets us today. It could have been set in Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Mordor, or Westeros. By refusing to address our actual reality, and the possibility that in our “civil war” one side is racist, insane, and fucking evil, while the other is, if not pure and innocent, then at least more or less normal, the movie is contributing to the media both-sidesism that helped get us here, on the Road to Splitsville, in the first place.