The confused liberalism of Alex Garland and Civil War (2024)

There’s a lot to admire about Alex Garland’s Civil War, a film which takes place in a conflict raging between the United States, led by a fascist President, and Western Forces, a seceded Texas and California. But the war is nearly at an end and the Western Forces are closing in on the White House. The film follows seasoned war journalists Lee (Kirsten Dunst), Joel (Wagner Moura) and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), along with newbie Jessie (Calie Spaeny), who is keen to join their ranks.

For a start, it looks fantastic. As the journalists travel through the decimated country to Washington DC for the “only story left” - an interview with the President - a dystopic vision of the United States is convincingly rolled out before us. Cinematographer Rob Hardy and the art department do stellar work here. A crumbling JCPenney store; eerily empty landscapes; abandoned burnt out car pile ups. The sound design is also pitch perfect. You feel every explosion and gunshot. The vignettes of encounters with various combatants add texture to this tapestry. Snipers locked in a stand-off. Men in combat fatigues burying dead civilians in a mass grave. Others hung for days, tortured for looting. It’s all pretty unflinching. As a piece of world building, Civil War excels.

It is a shame, then, that such a “completely political film”, as writer/director Alex Garland describes it, feels so deeply confused. Garland has outlined his intentions with the film quite clearly in interviews. It was born out of ““concerns, loosely, based around polarisation and division”. Garland describes himself as a “centrist”, and Civil War is an “attack on polarisation”; a plea for centrism in a polarising world.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines centrism as “a member of a centre party” or “a person who holds moderate views”. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as “political beliefs or policies that are at the centre of a range of political opinions”. Put simply, it’s a moderate political stance and can exist on the right or the left. Centrism defines itself by not being of the ‘extremes’. The centrist ultimately believes in capitalist liberal democracy, considering this the most sensible, equitable and balanced way to run a society. Deviations from this framework are deemed too partial, too severe, too one-sided to be politically relevant. The social, political and economic status quo is broadly fine, centrists agree, and merely needs a little tinkering with here and there. For those who feel the status quo is definitely not broadly fine, there are issues with this. Writer Rebecca Solnit encapsulates them well here in an article in The Guardian:

“[Centrism] believes it speaks from neutral ground, which is why it forever describes a landscape of mountains and chasms as a level playing field… Centrist bias is institutional bias, and all our institutions historically perpetrated inequality. To recognize this is to delegitimize them; to deny it is to have it both ways – think yourself on the side of goodness while insisting no sweeping change is overdue.”

The following example neatly sums up Garland’s centrist blind spot. The main protagonists are journalists who are, as Garland effuses, “a check and balance on corrupt government” and sees attacks on them, not unreasonably, as attacks on this role. He describes the film reflecting this as it “[tries] to function like a reporter itself [and] remove its own bias and sequence of events as a reporter would”. However, it’s telling that he lists the BBC as a media outlet he considers impartial. It’s sad to have to point out the obvious, but no media outlet is impartial. What is chosen to be shown or not shown to show, what to emphasise or play down, is always a decision. Some of those decisions will, intentionally or not, be politicised. The BBC operates in the paradigm of liberal democracy. It reflects the current political culture. This is not impartiality; it is, to borrow Solnit’s phrase, institutional bias. Garland appears to feel it’s unbiased because it reflects a politics that’s agreeable to him, a politics which sees itself as beyond reproach. “Neutral ground” as Solnit puts it. All this is to say that Civil War’s thesis fundamentally flawed, built on an illusion of impartiality.

Garland elaborates his position with some pretty fuzzy language. He describes Civil War’s President (Nick Offerman¹) as a “fascist”. He goes on to describe the core aspiration for a centrist democracy is to be “not fascist”. Garland shares his take on how fascism can come about:

“Fascism can come out theocracy, it can actually come out communism, it can be intentional fascism and can come out of democracy. And it has come out of democracy more than once”

This is confusing wording without offering a solid definition of fascism. For a start, I have no idea what “intentional fascism” is – the Internet throws up few answers. He’s correct in saying that fascists have come from other backgrounds which aren’t fascist: Mussolini’s background was in socialism; Hitler galvanised his power through exploiting the weaknesses of interwar Germany’s liberal democracy. But they didn’t carry those values with them into fascism as fascism inherently opposes them. This is further muddied when he discusses Offerman’s role as President:

“Nowhere in this narrative does it let you know what political side this President began on. He may be a fascist at the point we meet him, but he presumably in his first term didn’t say [that] … Nick [Offerman] is interesting in the way that he refuses to let you read him”

Why does it matter which political position the President began with if he became a fascist? Putting the pieces together, it would seem that he is using the word ‘fascist’ erroneously. While the presentations of fascism are diverse, we can certainly say that all fascists share a desire to gain total state power using nationalism, race and/or ethnicity as the binding social factor of the population. This would not include, for example, Stalin’s dictatorship, as the binding social factor dictated by the state was class. Garland most likely means the broader term ‘totalitarian’, where indeed tyrants have come out of communism and theocracy.

Let’s be fair, say he misspoke and meant Civil War as concerned with totalitarianism rather than specifically fascism, and that the film is an appeal for the protection of centrist democracy before it succumbs to extremism. This is equally worrying when we consider the political climate in the United States over from 2015 - 2024². If we’re supposed to be concerned about all kinds of totalitarianism, the far left as well as the far right, where is the far left’s power? Surely any honest reading of the political landscape of the United States in 2024 would be that after Trump’s victory in 2016 and the January 6^th 2021 attempted coup of the Capitol (and those are just the fascist highlights) the problem is with the far right. I find it strange that the far left in the US, or anywhere in the Commonwealth or Europe in the last forty years, could be considered a significant political influence at all.

When you consider Garland’s centrism, however, it makes sense in context. To him, they are as dangerous as each other. That’s why Garland praises Nick Offerman’s performance for not letting the audience in. The President, and much of the film, become a Rorschach test for our prejudices. This all sounds very clever, but one of the film’s more troubling aspects is that it equalises the far left and right despite the clear power imbalance. For example, Civil War mentions “the antifa massacre”. It also repeatedly mentions Charlottesville, where in 2017 a white supremacist Unite The Right march was held. This was physically opposed by a diverse range of groups and individuals who rightly found people marching in public with lit tiki torches chanting ‘The Jews will not replace us’ to be fucking horrendous. It resulted in a white supremacist intentionally driving his car into counter-protesters, injuring 35 people and killing 32 year-old Heather Heyer.

There’s an implication in Civil War that not only is grassroots community opposition to fascism part of the issue of polarisation, it’s also as bad as fascism. This is emphasised by the purposeful obliqueness of the film. It’s never stated directly what exactly the antifa massacre was, or why Charlottesville is being mentioned repeatedly (thematically, that is – in the film it’s a Western Forces base). They are recognisable political touchstones for the audience, shorn of meaningful context. This lack of staking a clear position leaves a bad taste of equalising fascists who are emboldened by the White House and anti-fascist counter-protesters who have no such protection. And this is before we get to the true roots of why anti-fascist resistance is necessary: because centrist governments and their police do not deal with fascism effectively, and perpetuate economic and social conditions that make fascism an attractive alterative to liberal democracy. This seems especially true of the United States government and police’s own well-documented racist violence³.

This leads us to Garland’s somewhat reductive ideas on how centrism can protect us from fascism. Trump, who expounds explicitly far-right views, won the election in 2015 and at the time of the film’s release was still leader of the Republican Party, building up to the 2024 election. According to Garland, this is due to centrist democratic ‘safeguards’, such as journalism, being damaged or removed. This ignores the broader appeal of fascism in times of crisis, when capitalist liberal democracy is simply not delivering the basics to many in its population. In the context of journalism, the Internet and social media has made new ideas easily accessible. This chimes with a distrust in the legacy media because, as with centrist government, many recognise they simply aren’t being represented, let alone considered. Garland misses a key point: that the popular discontent with the current system, including the press, is already present for fascists to exploit, regardless of safeguards.

Civil War creates a frustrating, contradictory dynamic for those wishing to engage with it. On some points, such as the President’s perceived politics, Garland states: “The film puts that in the viewers’ hands”. However, he also has stated how he has intentionally inferred certain aspects of the narrative without spelling it out. For example, he has discussed the implicit backstory to Texas and California uniting, despite being traditionally Republican and Democrat respectively: that they have joined forces against fascism in the name of centrist democracy. But the film is so undefined that it’s very difficult to know when it’s supposed to be a blank canvas for our reflections or when Garland is giving us breadcrumbs to follow. This taciturn posturing serves a centrist construct. If you read your politics into either side, you are part of the problem of polarisation. As Garland says, “people on the far right and far left will dislike an attack on polarisation”. If you see the whole situation on all sides as a problem – congratulations! - you’re a centrist. Now sit back, relax and be titillated by society’s breakdown, safe in knowledge it won’t be your fault when it happens. Given the state of United States’ political culture outlined above, this feels like a cop out as a piece of political art. If I were being cynical, I would say this is an artist wanting it both ways. Critiques can be brushed aside as personal interpretation; likewise, praise can be attributed to Garland’s intention. It does not feel like a fair relationship with the audience.

If Civil War is supposed to kickstart a discussion on polarisation, this discussion only occurs in a depressingly thin band of political possibility. It does not want to engage with ideas outside of centrism, a toxically narrow position to propound. We need imagination, integrity and creativity in politics (and our political art), particularly in times of crisis. Fascism, of course, can never deliver this. And neither can centrism. But many movements seeking social, political, economic and environmental justice do. To lean on centrism as the solution is the antithesis of discussing polarisation. It silences discussion by handing the monopoly of debate back to political and economic elites. Sadly, Civil War, as tremendously well-made and well-acted as it is, is very far from finding a solution to its own problem.

Sources

Alex Garland’s interview discussing Civil War in The Atlantic

1. Distractingly cast given his fame from Parks and Recreation

2. Newsflash: it hasn’t improved

3. I cite as evidence the history of the United States