One of the film directors I admire most is Michael Haneke, so it hurt a bit to tell him, probably the only time we met, that I couldn’t stand one of his films. We talked about “Funny games” and I admitted that I had to leave the cinema, the violence became too real. I was afraid that Haneke would be pissed off. Instead, he beamed, relieved: “I don’t want people to be numb.”
Depictions of violence and war always run the risk of aestheticizing the violence, creating a distance where the smoke clouds of the rain of bombs become beautiful abstractions, like a burning sky in William Turner. In his war films, Stanley Kubrick succeeded in both seducing us and questioning why we were seduced. Alex Garland has equally high ambitions in his new film “Civil war”. He understands that a good war film is like Haneke – a film you can’t quite manage to watch. But artistically he’s not quite there yet. Visually, he lands a little too often in Hollywood conventions.
Even though is a film about an American Civil War, it may have more to say about US foreign policy. It abounds with visual references to known war crimes, from Vietnam to Iraq. It is understood that the USA is now haunted by the violence they have caused in the outside world.
Garland’s portrayal of America’s domestic conflicts is seasoned with contemporary details – a diffuse “Antifa massacre”, a young news dodger who sounds like a character from the comedy series “Portlandia”. It feels as if trend-sensitive producers A24 wanted to tick off a checklist of American zeitgeist, like hidden hashtags on an Instagram post.
The problem is not that Garland doesn’t take a stand, the film would probably have been unbearable if the militias had red Trump caps, but that the film seems to take place in a world where ideology barely exists
The film has been criticized for ducking the ideological. The problem is not that Garland does not take a stand, the film would probably have become unbearable if the militias had red Trump caps, but that the film seems to take place in a world where ideology barely exists. The diffuse domestic politics make, as Kerstin Gezelius wrote in her review (DN 19/4), the film less relevant than it could be.
However, it can reinforcing an existing paranoia about a relatively distant scenario. The latent violence is already part of America’s political everyday life, but it will be a while before Maryland looks like Bakhmut. If fascism takes over the United States, it will not be with militias in funny sunglasses, but with ink pens, courts and water-combed lawyers from the right-wing radical Federalist society.
Photo: Murray Close
Wired magazine’s reviewer warned that the film’s murky politics could make it recruiting material for far-right extremists. It is unfair to blame art for the least calculated reactions, but the forecast was correct. Youtube channels for gun fetishists, have already made videos inspired by the film that have reached millions.
The bigger risk is that the film relies on a more banal, but actually more dangerous myth: that both sides, those who defend democracy and those who try to crush it, share the blame for the political crisis.
The problem with fascism is not that it “polarizes” the population. The problem is fascism.
Read also:
Loaded “Civil war” makes the speculation about civil war sensually credible
