The Second Civil War

Pay attention, class. What was the cause of the Second American Civil War?

It’s clear that Alex Garland’s Civil War goes out of its way to avoid giving the audience details about what caused the eponymous conflict raging throughout the U.S. We’re given tantalizing glimpses, almost throw-away lines by characters who’ve lived through it and thus don’t feel the need to perform exposition for our sake. There’s some realism there, but more importantly I think Garland doesn’t want us to be able to easily identify with any side or faction. The unlikely California-Texas alliance mentioned in the film only serves to confuse the modern conception of what a civil war might look like.

What makes Civil War so brutal may indeed be the lack of identification in the conflict. We spend the film moving across the Eastern U.S. with war journalists, particularly the jaded photojournalist Lee (a brilliant, film-anchoring performance by Kirsten Dunst). Lee and her colleagues Joel and Sammy take on an inexperienced young woman named Jessie, an aspiring photographer who looks up to Lee, as they travel to the core of the armed conflict. Lee and Joel want to photograph and interview the U.S. President, who is facing down an army at his door.

You may hear echoes of the modern era or the current political climate. They may be so faint as to seem illusory or hallucinatory. But often those echoes fade in the face of a warzone; a bullet is indifferent to the motivations of the person who fired it.

So despite the obvious timeliness of the premise, Alex Garland is not interested in our current day-to-day reality or even our politics. This is not a saga of why the U.S. is in the grips of a bloody war. Like the characters in Civil War, we’re living every day through the potential roots of violent political conflict, and we don’t need to perform exposition for each other. There are no easy analogues to Biden or Trump; Garland trusts us to know why he made the film (grab ‘em by the zeitgeist … when you’re an auteur, they let you do it).

Civil War takes place in a future that, unfortunately, seems all too likely. That’s the point. If you haven’t spent any time dwelling in the tension of American politics — increasing polarization, hostility, and willingness for violence — then Civil War might not make sense to you. But for those of us who understand that we’re living through a potential prelude to civil war, or Civil War, then the film should send chills down your spine.

Stephen Colbert famously noted that “reality has a well-known liberal bias”. This is true of Civil War to the extent that it feels like a terrifying consequence of your current reality.

As such, I will argue that Civil War is (and should be received as) a left-wing film in the sense that our current reality is stocked with right-wing fascist lunatics rallying for the end of democracy and pressing their boots on as many marginalized necks as possible. The film may seem neutral, but it isn’t. Not in this reality, because reality is not neutral. The most pressing and chilling moment in the film features Jesse Plemons as an unnamed soldier demanding to know people’s American-ness at gunpoint.

So after all that, what was the cause of the Second American Civil War?