Alex Garland’s first novel, The Beach (1996), later made into a film starring Leonardo Di Caprio and Tilda Swinton, takes us to a hidden idyll off the coast of Thailand with a British backpacker named Richard, whose ideas about Asia were formed by the psychedelic Orientalism of Hollywood Vietnam War movies.
The man paused. “You’ve been here before? I don’t recognize you.”
I smiled. “Sure I’ve been here before,” I replied. “In my dreams.”
Fragging. Bagging. Klicks. Grunts. Gooks. Charlie. MIA. KIA. LZ. DMZ. FNG….
Where do I learn these things?
I saw 84 Charlie Mopic in 1989. I saw Platoon in 1986.
In the film, backpackers at a hostel watch Apocalypse Now!, and at one point, Richard imagines he’s in a video game, but these are mere grace notes compared to the images and tropes that pervade the source text. One could even call The Beach itself a kind of war novel: a story about a young man who craves the authenticating trauma of violence so badly he creates his own ersatz war.
After The Beach, Garland went from writing novels to writing movies, then directing them, and since his breakout Ex Machina (2014), he’s earned a reputation for cerebral, stylish, provocative films that skirt the literary edges of science fiction and horror. His latest film, Civil War (2024), set in a speculative near future in which the United States has broken apart, tells the story of four journalists on a road trip from New York to Washington, D.C., hoping to interview a Trump-like President before he is killed by secessionist forces. Like The Beach, Civil War is concerned with mediation, as well as with questions of experience and trauma. The film’s main arc follows the relationship between an experienced war photographer named Lee Smith (Kristen Dunst) and a novice who adopts her as a mentor, Jessie Cullen (Cailee Spaeny).
In some sense, as Garland has admitted, the film is deeply personal, even autobiographical: as a young man, Garland had toyed with the idea of becoming a war reporter, even going to conflict zones to take photos, just like Jessie. An older journalist told Garland he wasn’t taking the danger seriously enough, and unlike Jessie, Garland took the advice. His experiences as a wannabe war journalist went into The Beach and inform Civil War: we might say Garland is both Jessie and Lee, both eager naïf and cynical veteran.
Indeed, this archetypal relationship is heightened almost to the point of bathos. Lee is not only a war photographer, but a pathbreaking, world-famous war photographer. Jessie, on the other hand, is practically a babe in the words. She shows up at a riot in Brooklyn wearing no protective gear, with no press credentials, carrying her dad’s analog film cameras, as if she just got off the bus from Missouri that morning. We hardly learn anything about Lee or Jessie except where they’re from, and their individual character arcs don’t allow for much development. What’s more, while Dunst and Spaeney offer compelling performances, Garland’s dialogue sometimes undermines the characters’ authenticity. When the narrative achieves its dramatic fulfillment in the White House, with Jessie taking a photograph of Lee’s death—in effect becoming Lee—the transformation is more deflationary than tragic, because neither of them had really come to life in the first place.
The Jessie-Lee problem is emblematic: while Garland’s dialogue is tight and the actors’ performances excellent, there is a structural and aesthetic indeterminacy at the heart of the film that raises serious questions about its coherence and integrity as a work of art.
Real War
Let’s say it’s a war film, an instance of that dubious and often misunderstood genre. Offering an aesthetic spectacle of choreographed social violence, the war film is wrapped up in national identity and collective memory, yet rarely is it political in any meaningful sense. This may seem counterintuitive. Since All Quiet on the Western Front, if not before, creators, purveyors, and consumers of war films have rhetorically justified the genre by claiming that such films are “anti-war films,” just as Lee justifies her war photography: “Every time I survived a war zone, I thought I was sending a warning home: don’t do this.” It’s not clear, however, that war films are really capable of doing that kind of work. [1]
The limit case might be Elem Klimov’s grueling masterpiece Come and See (1985), which tells the story of a Byelorussian boy named Flyora who joins the partisan resistance against the German armies invading of the Soviet Union during World War II. No plot summary can convey the devastating experience of watching the film, which piles horror upon horror in a grinding carnival of surreal violence. Director and World War II veteran Samuel Fuller once joked that the only way to make a really realistic war movie would be to machine-gun the audience, and while Come and See doesn’t quite do that, it comes the closest of any film I’ve seen to conveying the terror, confusion, degradation, and brutality of war. It is not a thrilling film, it does not inspire, and it is not beautiful.
Nor does it convey a message: it would be inaccurate to call Come and See an anti-war film, since the film cannot be said to be interested in persuading anybody of anything. At the end of the movie, after watching an entire village burn to death in a locked barn—except one woman the German soldiers gang rape—Floyra escapes and rejoins his band of partisans. The film is an act of witness, as the title, taken from the Book of Revelation, attests: “And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, ‘Come and see!’ And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” Klimov apparently did not even expect people to watch the film. According to an article in Аргументы и факты, Klimov recalled:
I understood that this would be a very brutal film and that it was unlikely that people would be able to watch it. I told this to my screenplay co-author, the writer Ales Adamovich. But he replied: “Let them not watch it, then. This is something we must leave after us.”
Klimov faced significant resistance from Soviet censors in making the film, which took him seven years to complete and drove him to nervous breakdown. And while it was critically lauded on its premiere at the 14th Moscow International Film Festival in 1985 and has since been recognized as one of the greatest war movies ever, Klimov never made another. Come and See may be unwatchable, but its influence can be seen in Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Red Line, Fury, American Sniper, Zero Dark Thirty, 1917, and numerous other films, including Civil War. Garland made his lead actors watch it as part of their preparation.
Garland is a smart and stylish director. His work is concerned with images, surfaces, soundscapes, reflection, and light. While such stylishness can easily veer into superficiality, Garland at his best descends into the reflection, achieving a fractal luminosity, as with Ex Machina and his brilliant series Deus. There are moments of such depth in Civil War, for instance in the opening scene, where we watch Nick Offerman’s President practicing his speech, intercut with what seems to be archival footage of protests and riots, which then cuts to Lee watching the speech in her hotel room, looking out over a battle-torn Manhattan, then photographing her TV screen. We watch a political image constructed, refined, transmitted, consumed, recontextualized, deconstructed, remediated, and transformed, all within two and a half minutes, while Garland uses blurring, extreme close-ups and zooms, irregular cuts, aggressive sound editing, repetition, and reflections to emphasize the director’s creative role constructing the narrative in partnership with the viewer, a relationship dramatized on screen by Offerman’s President and Dunst’s Lee. Civil War’s first battle scene achieves a similar complexity, as Garland triangulates between Hawaiian-shirted Boogaloo soldiers trying to rescue an isolated comrade, Lee and Jessie taking pictures, Joel’s concern for Jessie, and Jessie and Lee’s still photos, which interrupt the action.
Garland’s use of sound is particularly striking. During the fight, the shattering noise of combat contrasts starkly with the silence of the photos, and after the fight’s end, Garland’s extra-diegetic use of De La Soul’s “Say No Go” creates an ironic distance between viewer and scene, in which we see each character coping with the stress of combat: Lee isolates, Joel jokes with the soldiers, and Jessie takes a photograph of prisoners being machine-gunned. The key effect here is a kind of Brechtian verfremdungseffekt, or distancing-effect, which alienates the viewer in order to provoke an intellectual response. Such an effect requires careful tuning, and works in this case because the scene is transformative: the hapless naif from Missouri who couldn’t even remember to snap a photo when faced with tortured prisoners now emerges as a steely professional, alert and ready to shoot. Garland’s distancing helps us reflect on what that transformation means for Jessie and what it costs her, instead of allowing us to simply identify and sympathize.
This Brechtian approach is used throughout Civil War. Again and again, intense moments are refracted through stylized visual and audio effects that dampen their impact, distancing the viewer from the action. Yet while this strategy succeeds in a few specific scenes, the overall effect is mixed and sometimes rings false, as when the traumatized characters drive through a burning forest to the tune of Sturgill Simpson’s “Breakers Roar,” which comes off as both glib and sentimental. Too often, Garland’s stylized, music-video approach cuts against his photorealistic but inferential worldbuilding, and his action-movie instincts make the combat scenes aesthetically pleasurable in ways that undermine his ostensibly “journalistic” approach, as when Sammy saves Jessie, Joel, and Lee from being executed, or in the long scene outside the fortified gate leading to the White House. At such moments, it becomes clear that Civil War doesn’t know whether it wants to be a war movie, an anti-war movie, or simply an action movie. Garland may have Brechtian tendencies, but he is no Godard; his movies entertain as much as they disturb, and as much as they may “provoke conversation,” they also traffic in popcorny cinematic thrills.
Politics as Entertainment
Much critical discussion of Civil War has focused on its ostensible politics or lack thereof, in ways that seem mostly beside the point. While throwaway details like Jessie’s reference to “the Antifa massacre” and the joint secession of Texas and California suggest ambiguity, Nick Offerman’s President is clearly a Trumpian figure, and the violent resistance against him plays along with liberal fantasies while also metabolizing the 2020 George Floyd protests, in which more than 96,000 National Guard, State Guard, and Army personnel were deployed to support police response to demonstrations, riots, and looting and involving millions of people across the country, which caused more than a billion dollars in property damage and left 19 people dead. Dozens if not hundreds of police were injured, including many who were shot or rammed by cars, as were more than a hundred journalists. According to Garland, the screenplay for Civil War was written around the same time, and the film must be seen in one sense as a response to the widespread unrest which by some estimates was the largest and most expensive “civil disorder event” in American history.
For Garland, Civil War both dramatizes and performs a kind of representative objectivity: as he told Matt Zoller Seitz in Vulture, “If I was going to be reductive in a way… I would say that—paradoxically, considering the subject matter—the film is about journalism. It’s about the importance of journalism. It’s about reporting. The film attempts to function like old-fashioned reporters.” Yet Garland’s objectivity is compromised by his own political bias, just as his Brechtian verfremdungseffekt is compromised by his cinematic instincts. The film’s journalistic heroes are international, multicultural urban elites with robust expense accounts who go slumming in the world’s worst neighborhoods to “send warnings home” to liberal media audiences, while the film’s deplorables are rural gas station attendants, a white soldier murderously obsessed with national identity, and Nick Offerman’s mock Trump. Civil War’s manifest sympathies are with the journalists themselves, and the only objectivity Lee and Jessie show is one in which the soldiers, civilians, militiamen, and politicians they photograph are no more than objects that might “make a good image.”
What’s more, the kind of objectivity Garland valorizes is achieved not by obscuring the reasons people do things, as he does in this film, but rather by understanding them. As conflict photojournalist Louie Palu attests in an op-ed for the Washington Post, the film misrepresents conflict journalists as being focused on violence, when in fact they are usually more concerned with photographing the effects of violence, particularly on civilians. As Palu writes,
It is not only what the photojournalists photograph, but also what they don’t, that rings false. When the two spend a night in a displaced-persons camp, neither character raises her camera to document what’s around them, ignoring the civilian victims of the war…. The pictures being taken during the film don’t explain a civil war any more than the film does.
Thus Garland fails on his own terms, in two ways at once: his film performs a pretense of political objectivity while its sympathies remain with establishment liberalism, and its characters talk like truth-seeking idealists but act like cynical voyeurs. This double-failure is both cause and consequence of the aesthetic indeterminacy at the film’s heart.
The problem is compounded by Jessie’s focus on Lee and the other journalists, as we see her snapping pictures of them and framing them in her photos, evincing a troubling lack of professionalism. Is Jessie really interested in doing journalism, or is she stanning on Lee? Her adulatory fixation has an obsessive quality, inexplicable given what little we know about her. Is her unseemly preoccupation a directorial comment on mass media narcissism, postmodern hyperreality, or generational shifts in media consumption? Or is it a reflexive critique lodged within the film’s own subconscious? Is Garland subtly subverting his panegyric to “the importance of journalism”? Could it be that the “heroes” at the heart of Garland’s story aren’t heroes at all, not even to Garland, and that all of his press junket claims about the film are so much chatter? Is that why some of Civil War’s archival footage comes from notorious right-wing journalist and Antifa critic Andy Ngo? The film’s final shot of soldiers grinning over the President’s corpse while Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream” plays over the credits, evoking prisoner abuse photos from the Iraq War, certainly does not leave one with a feeling of confidence in the moral power of images.
The Iraq War Never Happened
Aesthetic indeterminacy is not bad in and of itself: it can be put to powerful use to open perspectival and ontological ruptures, as in the work of Godard, the “transcendental style” of Paul Schrader, or the polyphonic surrealism of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. With Civil War, the work’s formal and generic confusion work against its archetypal narrative structure, giving us either an action movie that asks to be viewed as serious political art, or a serious political film undermined by its ironic sensibility, but without cueing viewers which way to watch it.
Another way to watch Civil War would be to see the entire thing as an exercise in Shklovskyan estrangement, or ostrananie: an attempt to make war real by making it strange. This would be the most generous way to read Lee’s lines about “sending warnings home.” After all, American politics today is shaped and defined by two decades of imperial wars which most Americans have had the privilege to largely ignore. Jean Baudrillard’s pomo quip that “The Persian Gulf War never happened” applies doubly to the Global War on Terror, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, the war against ISIS, and the numerous other conflicts and interventions around the world waged over the past two decades to sustain declining American hegemony, including the catastrophes now unfolding in Ukraine and the greater Middle East. In this way, Civil War could be seen as an unacknowledged film version of Omar El Akkad’s American War, published in 2017, which also tells the story of a new American civil war.
American War follows the displacement and radicalization of an awkward young girl from a small town in Louisiana named Sarat Chestnut, who survives a refugee camp massacre to become a guerilla sniper, is captured, imprisoned, and tortured, and then, after the civil war that defined her life ends, unleashes a virulent pandemic in a horrific act of vengeance. El Akkad’s depictions of the Chestnut family’s displacement, their life in a refugee camp, and Sarat’s detention and torture are closely observed, grounded in his years of experience as a journalist. Watching what the war does to Sarat, who begins as a quirky and curious girl and ends as a broken and vengeful monster, is genuinely heartbreaking. Although not without its flaws, American War is by any definition of the terms a powerful and affecting work of literary art, a striking and innovative war novel, and a book of serious political depth.
“The central trick…” El Akkad told City Magazine, “is inversion. To flip things on their heads…. I wanted a story where the United States was the receiving empire of another’s machination.” Just as Garland takes the war movie and writes it as an American road trip, El Akkad brings the tribulations he witnessed as a journalist in the Middle East and Southwest Asia to the United States, inflicting on the American heartland the violence America has inflicted overseas. But whereas Civil War makes journalists its heroes, American War works to sympathize with a terrorist, getting readers to identify with someone they would otherwise demonize. Reading El Akkad’s novel alongside Garland’s film helps us see what Garland might be up to, and raises questions about what a serious aesthetic response to our current political polarization might look like.
It also raises questions about whether critics, booksellers, cultural gatekeepers, and readers would even be able to recognize what they were reading. American War was a literary hit in 2017, widely and glowingly reviewed, shortlisted for several awards, but less for what it was than for what it represented—that is, as a pretext for what critics and intellectuals wanted to talk about anyway. American War certainly deserves its acclaim, but most critics overlooked the novel’s inversion of American military adventurism in favor of reading it as a prophetic commentary on American politics in the age of Trump, “a cautionary tale of partisanship run amok,” as Justin Cronin put it in the New York Times. Viewed through the narcissism of American establishment intellectuals, El Akkad’s critique of American empire was transformed into an expression of elite anxiety about anti-establishment populism. Similarly, most reviewers have seemed more interested in mining Civil War for their own political commitments than in thinking about the difficult questions it raises.
Serious works of art don’t fall out of a coconut tree. Cultural production is mediated not only through the forms and genres against and through which artists work, not only through techniques like Brechtian verfremdungseffekt and Shlovskian ostrananie, and not only through technologies of production and reproduction like green screens and printing presses, but also through audience expectations, economies of attention, institutional reception, and critical response. When readers, viewers, and critics seek out in works of art only that which comforts their anxieties, flatters their pieties, and plays to their sympathies, they reinforce artistic complacency, condemning risk-takers to marginality, errancy, or worse. Perhaps it was ever thus: the conventional rules because it is conventional, and truly new art has always gone against the grain. Sometimes the cost of dissent is death, sometimes prison, sometimes merely being misunderstood. Pressured to agree that 2+2=5, each artist must make their own choice. A few will make an unwatchable movie, sympathize with people whose politics and actions they deplore, or explore their own complicity in the myths that give their lives drama, but most will do the math. As George Orwell learned working for the BBC, however, even anti-fascist propaganda is just propaganda. Art happens somewhere else, taking form not in the stark black and white of conviction, but in the shadowy hall of mirrors we like to call the self.
[1] See Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, “Is There Such a Thing as an Antiwar Film?” In A Companion to the War Film (United States: Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2016), 404–21; and Lawrence Wechsler, “Valkyries over Iraq: The Trouble with War Movies,” Harper’s Magazine (November, 2005) 65–77.
Roy Scranton
Roy Scranton is the author of several books, includingTotal Mobilization: World War II and American Literature and the novel War Porn. He lives in Indiana, where he teaches at the University of Notre Dame.