‘Civil War’: an allegory for our time
The British writer and director Alex Garland’s absorbing film Civil War depicts, sometimes in licentious detail, the grim, repetitious nature of conflict. The same dreadful, predictable things happening with monotonous regularity, driven by the same impulses: anger, fear, prejudice, revenge, ambition, audacity.
In a dystopian near-future, a dictatorial President is in the White House surrounded by massive concrete fortifications. Texas and California have seceded from the Union and are fighting to oust him.
War (or more accurately, wars) have broken out across America, like so many unconnected bushfires. In between pockets of self-imposed isolation and calm, many Americans are on a score-settling killing spree.
The movie pivots around the moment (spoiler alert!) when a group of photojournalists, on their way to Washington DC for the final battle, are confronted by militia spreading quicklime over bodies in a mass grave. They plead for their lives: “We’re Americans, OK?” “OK,” responds the man in combat gear. “What kind of American are you?” He barely blinks before calmly shooting two of them.
We don’t know how or why we’ve got here. There is no timeline, context or argument. We are not told what either side – any of the various sides — is fighting for or against. The only dialogue is violence.
The background of a divided America and the spectre of a vengeful Donald Trump is the peg on which this movie hangs. American folklore, its songs, its images, its heroes, romanticise the history of the Civil War of 1861-65. The movie says: “Don’t go there. It won’t be glamorous. This is what it will be like”.
But the film needn’t be about America or at, any rate, just about America. It’s not a political film as such, rather a brutal allegory about how what separates us as individuals — the identities we assume and those we allot to others — can spread like wildfire and consume us.
We live in dangerous times. Peace in Europe has been shattered. Ukraine fights to preserve its right to exist. A revanchist Russia is on the march seeking to reassert its identity as a superpower. A war to the death is unfolding with horrific predictability between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. That too is essentially a war of identity.
Thousands are caught in the crossfire. Its echoes spill over into the streets of London and the campuses of America, hardening attitudes and generating fresh conflict. Increasingly these momentous issues are driven into opposing binary, corners
You are either for Israel or for the Palestinians. You cannot be both, because that requires nuance: seeing the other, not as a threat, but as fellow human with lived experience not unlike yours. Better not to see them at all.
The otherness that runs through Civil War is the disintegrating image, reflected back to us, of what we like to call the international world order. Increasingly we can no longer agree on our terms of reference: democracy, human rights, civil rights, even freedom. Whose freedom?
The room for discussion and reason is shrinking. The danger of confrontation growing. An outbreak of civil strife in America may, or may not, be plausible. But it’s part of a growing trend in age of peril.
Liberal democracies, weakened by faltering economies, social friction and polarisation, are struggling to hold on to the attributes that set them apart from totalitarian states after WWII. We are becoming increasingly intolerant.
Whether it’s the Left shutting down the Right by denying them the right to free speech on campus, or the Government abusing its executive powers to ram through measures that don’t make sense, like the Rwanda Bill, it’s another nail in democracy’s coffin.
Then there’s the almighty algorithm. Our response to events – Gaza, Ukraine, asylum seekers on small boats – is increasingly shaped by the narrative others serve up. As many as 100 million servers, distributed around the globe, feed us a skewed reality of events and fake news served up by state and non-state actors. They buy our votes, shift our perspective or sell us air fryers. It’s all the same to them.
This cacophony is exploited by politicians stirring the pot by distorting, exaggerating, poking. Millions of young people explore their identities in public on social media platforms, especially Tik Tok. Fifteen-second clips of exquisite sophistication — the new audiovisual vernacular — nurtures ideological formation, political activism and trolling. Taylor Swift superimposed on Ukraine.
Joe Biden wants Tik Tok’s Chinese parent, Bytedance, to sell its stake in the platform or face a ban in the US. More than 170 million Americans use Tik Tok. Biden fears data on Tik Tok is being harvested by the Chinese government. Why does this feel like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted?
Hannah Arendt, the German-American philosopher, who knew a thing or two about totalitarianism, said: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction… and the distinction between true and false …no longer exist.”
Social friction would be less consequential if it was occurring in a vacuum or at a time when our societies were more cohesive, less diverse, perhaps more inward-looking. But it’s not.
Britain, like its European neighbours and America, is ineluctably plugged into the world beyond. The flow of asylum seekers will not be stemmed by sending a handful of them to Africa. The world economy is a living, changing organism. Human beings adapt, which is why we survive.
Looming over all of this is a new order in the world with fewer certainties and the emerging shape of something difficult to categorise. The US remains by far the most powerful country on earth and it is still staunchly a democracy. But its influence and its vision is increasingly challenged.
Russia and China, in their different ways, are bent on challenging US hegemony. In this they are backed – again in different ways — by a coalition of opportunists, each of whom has its own reasons to test America: Iran, Turkey, North Korea, India. Each of these players has an interest in projecting their interests by shaping our views.
Nationalists wrapped in the flag of St George have been marching to the drumbeat of “I want my country back”. It’s a familiar, even poignant, refrain. “What kind of Englishman are you?” To which, of course, the answer is: “My kind of Englishman.” Just as it is for the self-proclaimed patriots in Civil War. Looking in the rear view mirror doesn’t help you see ahead.
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