Alex Garland is always asked the same question about his new film, Civil war. It’s an obvious question. Garland, best known for Ex Machina, DestructionAnd Gentlemen, wrote and directed a film set in near-future America that centers on a civil war that has torn the United States apart—and yet reveals very little about how that war came to be, or what the warring parties represent. Instead, he tells an almost clinical procedural action story about photojournalists crossing the country to report on that war, without ever delving into the details. Why make an apparently apolitical film about an American Civil War in an era when so many pundits are active? are concerned about that goods on the edge by real civil war?
Garland disagrees with the basis of the question. “I don’t understand how abstract it is,” he told Polygon in an interview ahead of the film’s release. “(In Civil war) There is a fascist president who has dismantled the Constitution enough to last three terms, who has removed one of the legal institutions that could threaten his position in the process, and who is causing violence by attacking his own citizens. It may be abstract at first glance, but to me that doesn’t stand up to any inspection at all, in terms of the actual content of the film.
However, that description sounds a lot more direct than the film actually feels. The above details are all things viewers will only pick up from short, scattered lines of dialogue. As Garland says, the details “come largely from inference,” rather than being the main focus of the film.
Instead, the film focuses on the world-weary experiences of veteran photojournalist Lee Miller (Kirsten Dunst) and her writing partner Joel (Wagner Moura) as they travel across the US to Washington, DC, to interview the embattled president (Nick Offerman). Come along for the ride: rising cub photojournalist Jessie (Priscilla star Cailee Spaeny). The film focuses on their emotional responses to the things they see on the journey: Lee’s growing trauma, Joel’s thrill-seeker bravado, Jessie’s naive excitement. But the characters never talk about politics, or the lines that have been drawn across America.
And that’s completely intentional, Garland says, because the film is meant to be as politically objective as he can make it. “The kind of journalism we need most – reporting, which used to be the dominant form of journalism – had a deliberate removal of certain kinds of biases,” he told us. “If you have a news organization that has a strong bias, it will probably only be trusted by the choir it preaches to, and it will be distrusted by the others. So that was something that journalists used to actively, deliberately and consciously try to avoid. (…) And then the film tries to function like those journalists. So this is a return to an old form of journalism, told in the way of that journalism.”
Photo: Murray Close/A24
Reading between the lines, it seems clear enough that Garland didn’t want to alienate potential viewers by framing the action. Civil war around the conflict itself, rather than the consequences of that conflict. And there are many lines to read in between in his film; Garland reiterated that he uses films to start conversations, not to dictate answers. But that doesn’t mean he thinks the film is vague or hesitant about condemning fascism and warning about where America might be heading politically.
“The question is: Is it marked in the way that cinema usually marks these things?” he asks. “I would accept that this is not the case.”
So the problem may lie less with the method Civil war presents its central conflict, and more surrounding the current nature of the American political conversation, where every possible individual human choice is now a political choiceand those choices have been polarized into only two sides. It is not surprising that viewers walk into an American film called Civil war a sharper, angrier and more direct film about the country’s divides is expected in 2024. But that’s not what Garland was getting at in the first place.
“This happens a lot when I’m working on a movie,” says Garland. “There’s something it really seems to be about – so I think along Ex Machina, you could say that it really looks like it’s about Turing tests. But that is not it Real about Turing tests. They’re there, and that’s the driving force, but that’s not really the agenda of the film.
Image: A24
So how does Garland see it? Civil war‘s main agenda? “It would be a list of things,” he says. “A very simple way that might work on a subconscious level is to make heroes of journalists. When I said I was going to do this, a friend of mine from the film industry said, ‘Don’t do that, everyone hates journalists.’ And it really stung me. I see journalists as a necessity. To me, saying ‘Everyone hates journalists’ is exactly the same as saying ‘Everyone hates doctors’.’ you can not hate doctors, that’s what you are screwed without doctors. That’s just a crazy position to be in!”
Garland blames the rise of anti-journalist sentiment on “politicians deliberately undermining the institutions of journalism,” and on biased media undermining the very idea of news journalism – both problems in themselves, but resulting in an attitude toward journalists that he believes leads to The result is frightening and alarming.
“So part of the agenda would just be a subtle (positive message about journalists),” he says. “Listen, it’s picking up a grain of sand and throwing it in a big fucking pile, but I’m going to pick up the grain of sand and throw it in the pile, right? That’s the movie. So one thing would be to subtly reframe journalists. (…) We need journalists – not as a luxury or as entertainment or as some kind of vague commentary, but as an actual social necessity.”
Part two of his agenda, however, goes back to the idea of making a film with journalistic objectivity, in the hope that both sides of the political spectrum will have something to discuss – and something to agree on. It is no coincidence that in Civil warTwo of the separatist states, Texas and California, have united against a president who is actively working to dismantle democracy. While Garland is careful in how he phrases this, it sounds like he hopes that Americans can at least agree that autocracy would be disastrous for the country, and that both political parties should oppose it.
Image: A24
“I know what my politics are,” he says. “And I know what happens when I talk about politics with someone who disagrees with me. I don’t have to finish a sentence because they already know my argument. If it’s two people yelling at each other, nothing happens. There is a kind of standstill – except that it turns out not to be a standstill, but rather that we are actually drifting apart. Hopefully, in my dream of dreams, (Civil war) would make people think about dispersion, and what areas of division or disagreement are actually worth dividing – because the division could have a more serious consequence than what you disagreed on.”
But Civil war I can’t make that point openly without preaching to the public. And Garland doesn’t want to preach. Although he says journalists play a specific role in society, “holding governments to account,” his film “fits into a more nebulous area.”
“A film works in a slightly different way,” he says. “It’s not journalism, it’s fiction. The function of a film (…) would therefore be to provoke – not in an antagonistic way, but a causal way – to provoke a thought process and exchange.”
And most specifically, he wants to get people talking about authoritarianism and autocracy in person, not online, through news broadcasts or in the media. “Personally, I am less interested in the current form of public discussion, because I find it so problematic,” he says. “I am much more interested in individuals. That’s what I concentrate on.” Individually and in person, he says, conversations may be less divisive and provocative than on social media and in the mass media.
“That would be a very grand hope, but that’s my hope,” he says. “I’m not going to mark it. Because I don’t want to teach. I just want to offer. That is it.”