Media critics, ever attentive and divided in their allegiances, have found themselves entangled in a spirited debate over the curious absence of politics in Alex Garland’s 2024 film, Civil War. Some say that the exact motives of the warring factions should have been expanded on and that the journalists, dead set on remaining passive bystanders, should've taken sides. Others argue, however, that the movie’s depiction of the war as a series of events to be photographed is exactly how photojournalists should see their work. The debate surrounding the film has stayed at the level of politics versus apolitics, humanism versus apathy, subjectivity versus objectivity. A glaring absence in the discourse around the timely film, released during the election year that saw Trump win, is the position that journalists play in the bigger picture of political media and the growth of fascism. What do debates about objectivity matter if the photograph is used, either by the publication or a politician, for political ends? How can a journalist maintain objectivity when the owner of a news outlet concedes to authoritarianism – as Jeff Bezos did by blocking his publication, the Wall Street Journal, from endorsing Kamala Harris for president? And then how does a film about a fictional present-day civil war contribute to the rise of authoritarianism in our country? These are open-ended questions in the film, ones that go unanswered, but the prompts are becoming a harsh reality faced by photojournalists and filmmakers today. Perhaps it’s the responsibility of both journalists and filmmakers to take up their mediums as political tools before it’s too late.
In Civil War, war photographer Lee Smith, played by Kirsten Dunst, and her journalist coworker, Joel (Wagner Moura) are covering unrest in New York City as a crowd waiting for water distribution is blown up by a suicide bomber – a white woman carrying a giant American flag. The country has descended into a civil war between the ‘Western Forces’, led by California and Texas, and the federal government, led by an authoritarian third-term president. In the moments before the explosion, Smith saves a young aspiring photographer, Jessie Cullen (Calley Spaeny), before walking out to photograph the aftermath.
The scene is silent. Smith rises slowly to decide whether she’ll photograph the gory outcome. It’s her natural habitat, and according to war photographers, it’s pretty realistic. Reflecting on a suicide bombing in Pakistan that killed former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, photojournalist John Moore told DW News that after the explosion he faced a choice, ‘which is the choice that you see in the film, of going in and continuing to work or just calling it a day. And I made that choice to go in and photograph.’
In the film, the ensemble joins up with their mentor, Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), to drive down to DC in hopes of interviewing the president before the Western Forces take the capital. They witness a series of battles and spurts of violence before embedding with the Western Forces to advance on the White House.
The film is an extension of the dystopian American road trip genre that includes films like The Book of Eli (2010) and Zombieland (2009). Like those films, America is crumbling – shopping mall parking lots host gunned-down helicopters while mass graves are dug up in rural backyards. Unlike those films, the universe isn’t necessarily apocalyptic – it’s not total anarchy like in the canonical zombie movies or an intact dystopian capitalism like in Children of Men and Wall-E. Instead, journalists are covering a fractured nation at war with itself.
Perhaps the best anti-war message is exposure therapy. That was certainly the belief of the social photographers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, like Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, who, with an air of social reformism, used photographs of labour abuses to spur legislative action. It also happens to be the belief of Civil War’s main character, Lee Smith. While Lee and Sammy are sitting in an abandoned parking lot with shelling taking place miles behind them, Smith makes a confession: ‘Every time I survived a war zone, I thought I was sending a warning home: don’t do this. But here we are.’ In the past, not everyone had immediate access to the details of the daily horrors of war. Today, we do. The daily atrocities in Gaza are posted immediately across social media platforms even as foreign journalists are banned from entering. But even with all this exposure, here we are.
Lee’s philosophy is mirrored by the film, the aim of which is to show what it would look like if the very kinds of wars that America props up abroad were taking place in our own backyard – to, as the left-wing terrorist group the Weather Underground put it, ‘bring the war home’. This is certainly Garland’s gambit in showing a civil war in its most essential form – pure terror and violence – hoping, as he’s said in interviews, to deliver an anti-war message to every side of the political spectrum.
Audiences unfamiliar with the film will be surprised to learn that Civil War is not primarily about a war, but a reckoning with shortcomings of journalism as an end in itself. After the young Jessie freezes when coming across two bleeding looters hanging in a car wash, the veteran Lee loosens up the mood by asking the militiaman to pose next to the dying individuals. Later, in the car, Jessie beats herself up for not taking a picture or doing anything to save them. Lee responds coldly, telling her not to ask those kinds of questions, to stay desensitized. ‘We record so other people ask’, she says.
Similar to those dystopian road trip films, Civil War depicts a loner forced to work with others to survive in a violent climate, but in this case, the main characters avoid engaging in the violence, picturing themselves not as adversaries in a struggle but instead as spectators floating above the conflict, hiding behind the perceived objectivity of journalism. This image is proven inadequate as the road trip unfolds.
In the film’s most popular scene, a militant wearing red sunglasses, played by Jesse Plemons, is holding Jessie and other journalists captive next to a mass grave. Lee and two other journalists arrive and attempt to deescalate the situation by explaining that they’re American journalists. But the militant doesn’t care that they’re journalists; he wants to know what side they’re on. They plead that they’re American, but Plemons’ character delivers the famous line: ‘What kind of American?’ With no stated allegiance to any specific ideology, the journalists desperately try to adapt to survive, realizing that the militant is on a rampage against immigrants and those from ‘less American’ (less white) regions in the country. Everyone skirts by except a journalist who admits he’s from Hong Kong. Plemons’ character shoots him.
The ideology of journalistic objectivity appears dated today with the advent of right-wing media and social media influencers – a nostalgia for the time when there was an abundance of salaried reporters and some semblance of nonpartisanship, when the fairness doctrine – requiring broadcasters to cover controversial issues from multiple viewpoints – was law in America. The doctrine was later overturned in 1987 by a Reagan-appointed FCC, flooding the airwaves with right-wing radio and later Fox News. Today’s partisan radio shows and hectic online media landscape don’t appear in the film, but they’re suggested by an eerie general skepticism that the militiamen have towards the journalists. It’s one of the many specific social realities absent in the universe, an abstraction that’s not new in Garland’s work – films like Annihilation parallel Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Stalker, which prominently feature zones that can’t be studied objectively.
After war photographer Lynsey Addario was kidnapped in Libya and had a gun pointed at her head, she began to question why she was doing what she was doing. ‘I definitely asked myself “why am I here?” and why I’m risking my life, because I thought of my parents in that moment and I thought, “what will they think when they hear their daughter had been killed in Ajdabiya, a place in Libya no one’s ever heard of?”’ she said in an interview with DW News.
There’s another meaning behind the pivotal scene involving Plemons’ militiaman, other than ‘war is complex’. In conflict between warring factions and political movements across the globe, many sides understand that journalists are of course not objective, that they are employed by publications serving certain interests, whether of their country or the individuals who own them. Books like Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent and Michael Parenti’s Inventing Reality have shown exhaustively that increasingly monopolised private media tends to produce journalism that reinforces dominant ideologies. As Parenti puts it, journalists ‘are independent agents in a conditional way, free to report what they like as long as their superiors like what they report’ (p. 35).
On the question of Civil War’s effectiveness in spreading an anti-war message to both sides, the gambit might’ve had an unintended effect. The right wing has seen through Garland’s bipartisan intentions, dismissing him as a leftist who hates America. In a Breitbart article, David Ng denounces Garland’s downplaying of American exceptionalism and accuses him of ‘predictive programming’, a conspiracy theory peddled by Alex Jones, suggesting that ‘the elites’ are using culture ‘to make the population more accepting of future events they are planning for us’ (emphasis added). Instead of becoming peace activists, the right has incorporated Civil War into their own conspiracy theories, pushing them even further to the right.
© Murray Close
On the other side of the aisle, the left has decried the lack of political clarity. In an article in the Guardian, Adrian Horton reflects that ‘in a year of red-hot tension and fear, Civil War runs cold – decidedly anti-war but firmly unspecific, assiduously avoiding any direct correlation to current politics or, it turns out, any politics at all.’
Garland’s lack of politics might have, in any other year in recent history, gone under the radar. One could imagine an older version of Civil War coming out in the 1990s, which critics would, in a professional fashion, engage with Garland's perspective – that is, accepting the story as a one about journalists. In fact, some have done this.
In an article for the Ecologist, seasoned journalist Brendan Montague notes that in the heat of war, it’s not always possible to know which soldier belongs to which faction in the field. ‘In actual civil wars’, he says, ‘it simply is not easy to establish which side you should be on – especially when, as suggested again and again – your “own” political side might actually be shooting at you.’ One should recall the Spanish Civil War, in which anarchists and communists fought each other while the fascists rolled through the country. (Spanish Civil War photographer Gerda Taro, who was also Robert Capa’s partner and is believed to have made some of the images credited to Capa, was originally under contract by the Communist Party of France’s newspaper Ce soir. She was killed when a friendly tank accidentally crashed into her car.) Nonetheless, Montague still advocates for the most essential takeaway from the film, whether intended or not: choosing sides. ‘If fascism haunts the most powerful country on earth, can we simply ignore the threat and keep our heads down or do we have to mount a defence even if that means ending up in an unmarked grave?’
In the vast business of apocalypse and dystopia, certain filmmakers are pushed to the front like so many explosive, profitable enterprises. Unlike traditional science fiction with its painful attention to detail and politics, Garland’s Civil War has taken a step back by aestheticising politics, boiling it down to obscurity. Perhaps Garland should’ve revisited Walter Benjamin’s work, where he would’ve found his proclamation that ‘all efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.’
While politics isn’t completely absent from the movie – the first scene of the president rehearsing a statement immediately hints at Trump’s speaking patterns and mannerisms – it’s just abstract enough to fit unfashionably into a decades-long debate about fascism, a debate that has been re-sparked in America today.
The American left is split on whether or not Trumpism is a fascist movement. Liberals see it as fascism, but only as an anomaly, a perversion of democracy rather than a systemic issue rooted in capitalism. Ultra-leftists have argued that everything is fascism, including Biden’s presidency, diluting the term to the point of meaninglessness. Academics have downplayed its relevance, arguing that fascism was a historical phenomenon unique to the twentieth century, unable to reemerge in its prior form. This was paralleled in some ways in the twentieth century as theorists fought over the definition of fascism: Trotsky saw it as a reaction of the middle class, Arendt blended it with communism to create authoritarianism, and the Communist International understood it as the last resort of finance capital. The film reflects this ambiguity, never clearly defining the warring factions, leaving the audience to project their own political anxieties onto the screen. The vagueness of Civil War mirrors this broader contemporary debate: Are we facing a distinct new form of authoritarianism, or is this the familiar, brutal logic of fascism repeating itself with modern aesthetics?
In his essay about Civil War, philosopher Slavoj Žižek finds that real journalistic truth can only be found through taking sides, which he sees as the real takeaway of the film. ‘Today, engagement is more needed than ever, to be desensitized to violence means we already are part of a violent system’, he argues. ‘In Ukraine, in Gaza and the West Bank, and in hundreds of other places, only an engaged view will find the truth we are all looking for.’ Žižek’s critique underscores what the film ultimately fails to address: that neutrality in times of crisis amounts to complicity.
In the fights against fascism, many photographers and writers took sides plainly against fascism – not just as liberal-minded chroniclers, but as committed, card-carrying Communists. The photographers of the Spanish Civil War, including Capa and Taro, were not neutral observers but active partisans documenting the struggle with the clear purpose of rallying support against Franco’s fascist forces. The work of Tina Modotti and Kati Horna similarly served as a weapon against reactionary regimes. To quote the American Communist writer Meridel Le Sueur, ‘you cannot be both on the barricades and objective or removed at the same time. I suppose you can but you are likely to receive the bullets of both sides.’
It is static to complain about the film. In trying to put culture back in the war against fascism –which is precisely the criticism of Civil War, that it does not clearly contribute to fighting the rise of Trump – one need not insist that current films be changed, even though there are some highly qualified candidates for revisions. Instead, nobler existing films should be resurrected and championed, especially in the case of the 2022 box office flop Amsterdam, which was based on the true story of the Business Plot, in which American industrialists attempted to overthrow FDR in favor of a fascist dictator. The task of leftist filmmakers (and photojournalists) lies not in catering to the right wing but instead in their ability to translate capitalism’s festering alienation into an effective model for transformation. The real question isn’t whether Civil War takes a side; it’s whether artists today understand that neutrality is the first step towards defeat.