Alex Garland's "Civil War"

Alex Garland’s much ballyhooed “Civil War” is a classic case of midcult entertainment, as Dwight McDonald would have put it. It overpromises and under delivers. Garland posits a dire crisis for the fate of the republic but cowardly refuses to lay out the stakes. A complete evasion of any coherent moral point of view masquerades as some putative form of old-style objective journalism. But without that moral point of view the film is nothing more than a cynical grab bag of sensationalistic cliches. It’s all fire fights and madcap pursuits. It never really comes alive, despite all the incessant mayhem.

Midway through the first act I muttered, hasn’t Garland read Sontag’s “On Photography”? Sontag's famous argument is that photography tends to aestheticize and romanticize its subjects rather than act as bearers of witness or unimpeachable representations of reality. This is esp. true of war photography which has a complicated relationship to the truth. For Sontag war photos don't heighten our awareness, they merely anesthetize it. If the film had tackled that it would have been far more compelling, trying to grapple with something complex and real.

“Civil War” purports to follow a group of photo-journalists covering the conflict in order to report the horrific events. As if America were Gaza or Sudan or some other generic war torn hellhole. Not doubt in the pitch meetings this seemed like a daring idea. But in the execution it comes across as hollow. Oliver Stone's “Salvador” covers a lot of the same ground but with far more moral urgency, as does Kubrick’s uneven but powerful “Full Metal Jacket.”

There's a cavalcade of shots of the principals snapping , well, shots, but it adds up to less than nothing. A smug exercise in the self-reflexive. Didn't "Rear Window" and "Blow Up" already cover this ground? But Garland’s staging is so utterly empty, so devoid of actual witness and emotion. Witnessing is represented as mere tedious spectacle. So is the film a critique of social media culture? One the contrary the whole enterprise is massively self-serving. Kirsten Dunst, looking very haggard, works hard to emote in fraught close ups. But the film insults the intelligence of the audience at every turn. Its central conceit is that a photograph is an unembellished represetation of "what really happened." That it conveys an unmediated reality. Of course, no such thing is possible. Images are always already mediations, at one remove from the actual. "Civil War" is nothing more than an extendned act of nostalgia and bad faith.

The film reminded me of a scene near the end of Michael Herr’s brilliant book on Nam, “Dispatches,” where Tim Page, the wild British photojournalist, is asked by a reporter if it’s possible to take the glamour out of war. Page’s response is priceless:

“Take the glamour out of war? I mean how the bloody hell can you do that? Go and take the glamour out of a Huey, go take the glamour out of a Sheridan … Can you take the glamour out of a Cobra or getting stoned at China Beach? It’s like taking the glamour out of an M-79 … it’s like trying to take the glamour out of sex, trying to take the glamour out of the Rolling Stones.”

And indeed, this madcap paean to a deep if unpleasant Freudian truth about our Dionysian impulses is impossible to refute.

So that the net result of all of Garland’s frenetic staging achieves the exact opposite of what he sought to attain. Objective journalism? If only. As Truffaut once observed, all anti-war films end up glamorizing war.

Not once does the film pause to ask – what *is* a photograph? Esp. a photo of an atrocity? The main character, veteran war photojournalist, Lee, clumsily named after the renowned WWII photojournalist Lee Miller, evades all moral responsibility for her vocation – we’re just here to record the event, she says. It’s up to others to explain it – a massive evacuation of the very moral responsibility photojournalism tasks us with. A description, an image, constitutes a moral judgment. I guess she skipped class that day.