In director Alex Garland’s new film Civil War, a group of journalists caravan across a bombed-out America in hopes of interviewing and photographing the fascistic president (Nick Offerman) whose third term evidently sparked the secessionist conflict. Without getting into too much specifics, the movie shows the horrors of war in ways that feel uncomfortably close to modern-day reality, all through the eyes of the reporters at the center of its, relatively bare bones, story.
Our protagonist is a hardened photojournalist named Lee (Kirsten Dunst), whose singular focus on capturing the carnage on film underlines the surrealism of the situation. A bomb goes off, killing dozens, and she waits just until the smoke has cleared before trolling around for the perfect shot. This is the story of modern warfare: not only people killing people with ever more-sophisticated killing machines, but people publicizing the people killing people, for anyone else who might care to see.
While war reportage is often valorized from afar, these characters don’t seem to bother with wondering if their presence on the front lines is making any difference for the better. To them, it is a job, and the adrenaline of that job is both habit-forming and desensitizing. Whether or not it is morally sound is besides the point — other people pay them to do it, and it gives them a purpose they’ve come to identify with. After seeing the shit they’ve seen, what else could they do?
In these ways, the journalists reminded me of soldiers. That’s not necessarily a compliment. Like many great movies about violence, Civil War turns the lens back onto its audience, to reflect on our own desensitization to seeing real-world gore practically splattered across our screens.
Could we really be all that surprised when the violence exploded into our backyards? And can we really assume, at this point, that simply reporting on the horror and inhumanity as it’s happening really do anything to stop them from happening? Or has documenting and consuming these documents become another compulsive behavior.
Seeing journalists in Kevlar vests marked “Press” on the front lines of a battlefield, it’s hard not to conclude that the news media can serve as just another part of the war machine, whose heroes turn out to be as helpless and confused as the rest of us. But whereas most have the coping mechanism to look away, they keep looking. In a world gone mad, the purpose of documenting the madness may be all that separates them from having to confront how it’s impacted them.
In one scene, after a traumatic run-in, the aspiring young photojournalist who’s come along for the ride, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) begins wondering what they might have done differently. Lee responds that it’s not their job to wonder about things like this, “We take photos, so other people can ask questions.” My question is, why shouldn’t we all be asking these questions? Why is a job or a draft enough to make killing or standing idly by killing okay? And how often does loyalty to these structures of identity prevent us from really feeling the grief for what’s happening around us?
The dark social psychology behind these questions is the subject of the following poem, inspired by Civil War, which could be from the perspective of a soldier or a photographer, obsessed on getting their assigned shot at all costs.
Being party to killing isn't something that I like that I like that I do but others like it enough to assign me more of it and if I'm doing it not to disappoint them, it's not selfish it's heroics on red ice. So I don't know how to stop, not stopping makes me feel so alive. The helicopters are armored flies and the tanks sand brown beetles. Crushing a bug, being crushed by a bug a difference of degrees dying under the shadows we breed awarding bloodshed on a big enough screen. Depiction does not equal endorsement like lawmaking does not demand enforcement, they just send momentum marching forward. Could they ever equal prevention or is that just how we talk ourselves up to the firing line? Now I light up the night sky and I litter bodies on the ground too thick to sprout like fallen samaras too hard to grow through broken compacts' soil. Because tomorrow is another war, I can't hear ethics, I've got orders. My arms are claimed so my mind is honorbound to stay the same. They'll never take me alive, only in flames.