On Civil War

This will contain spoilers, so I’ll say that if you think you’d like this movie based off of the trailer, you’re probably right. For this essay, though, I’ll assume that I’m the last person to see it out of all of the people who might have and so I’ll just spoil away.

Still here? Okay.

I got invited over to a friend’s to watch the A24 flick “Civil War”, now available to rent on Amazon Prime.

Directed by the guy who directed Ex Machina and it generated a lot of discourse when it came out and so… Okay. Fine. I’ll watch it.

Here’s the poster from the flick:

What’s the first thing that I notice? California and Texas are allies in having seceded from the US. On top of that, Oklahoma isn’t joined at the hip to Texas. On top of that, New Mexico and Arizona aren’t members of the Western Alliance. On top of *THAT*, Oregon and Warshington aren’t tied to California. And see all of those state lines between the Loyalist States and the New People’s Army? Yeah, those lines would be jagged. And South Carolina would be part of the Florida Alliance.

And those are just off the top of my head.

Should *YOU* see it? I dunno. If you’re the type of person to get hung up on stuff like “why isn’t Oklahoma joined with Texas?”, you might like the movie more than you think you will… because there’s a *LOT* of stuff that will have you thinking “that doesn’t make any sense”.

For example, there’s an early scene where we see that a particular city is experiencing a water riot. Later on, we see our protagonists drive a few hours and people are watering their lawns. There’s an arbitrage opportunity here!

The protagonists of the movie are Journalists, with a capital J. Old school reporters going out and chasing down the story. Not taking a side… just documenting what happens. There’s a famous photojournalist who made her name taking that famous shot at the Antifa massacre, there’s an alcoholic reporter (where is he getting all that vodka?) who wants to get an interview with the Trump-coded dictator of the Loyalist States, a young wannabe hotshot photo journalist who has the famous photojournalist as her hero, and an old hard-nosed reporter who has been a reporter longer than you’ve been alive, kid.

We’re in the waning days of the Civil War and we travel through contested territory just getting the shot, just getting the story. Not taking sides. Just taking pictures and getting quotes.

Until, of course, we reach a town that is in denial that we’re in a Civil War and the reporter asks “you know we’re in a Civil War, right?” and the person behind the counter at the cute little boutique shrugs and says that they’re trying to stay out of it… and this, of course, is seen as a horrible attitude for her to have.

Anyway, on the road trip, we see multiple war crimes done by multiple sides and some of the war crimes are shown dispassionately and, hey, we’re just getting the pictures. We’re just getting the story. Other war crimes are shown as being monstrous. And, eventually, we see war crimes that are portrayed as “what did you expect?” kinda war crimes. This is war and war is hell and what the hell so hell with it, right?

The main thing that I noticed was that the journalists were portrayed as unquestionably heroes who were doing their best to be neutral, but neutral in the service of doing good and opposing the Trump-coded dictator. We’ve established that not taking a side is bad, right?

Well, the movie feels about reporters the way that the television show The Librarians feels about librarians. Now, I think that the show The Librarians is great fun. It’s awesome. But I’m married to a librarian and, lemme tell ya, the show takes a *LOT* of liberties with what librarians do. I felt the same way as I watched Civil War. “Journalists aren’t like that… certainly not anymore and that’s if they ever were.” There was an offhand line about how journalists were shot on sight in DC and I immediately thought of the Aesop “The Trumpeter Taken Prisoner“.

But before really being able to explore that thought, I found myself remembering what Ben Rhodes said about the reporters that he talked to when he was working for Obama: “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

The movie was about modern-day Woodwards and Bernsteins and Lee Millers. But the ones currently doing the job literally know nothing.

And so I found myself watching this movie in which journalists are portrayed as fearless heroes dodging bullets (or trying to) on their way to get the shot, to get the story… and thinking about Taylor Lorenz. Thinking about James Bennet.

The movie isn’t *BAD*, by any stretch of the imagination. The scene that created the meme “what kind of Americans are you?” was not cringey, like I had feared it would be, but is, quite honestly, the best scene in the movie.

But it’s a movie that had me complaining about the various incoherencies going on in the universe it explored rather than thinking about what kind of unrest must the country have experienced such that California and Texas joined forces (but Oklahoma stayed out of it and South Carolina decided that it had more in common with DC than Georgia/Florida).

You know how Starship Troopers is a movie about how a fascist society would imagine itself to be?

Well, this is a movie about how journalists who literally know nothing would imagine journalism to be during what they imagine a Civil War in the US would look like.

Be sure to make popcorn.