in civil war, there is no american exceptionalism.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground.
— Abraham Lincoln
Is American exceptionalism over? One might think so watching Alex Garland’s intriguing, but actually quite conventional, war movie Civil War.
What’s odd is that the film could actually care less about the reasons for the civil war it portrays in a future—but not too distant future—United States. The President has become a tyrannical dictator, but in the end, there is no greater cause, no civic religion, no deeper quasi-religious project of America’s purpose in the world that informs this civil war. The war does not echo the original Civil War between North and South. It even pairs up California and Texas as the “Western Forces,” as if to distance itself from any contemporary blue state-red state comparisons. In this movie, the US civil war is just like any other war anywhere else in the world: a confusing sprawl of factions and a lot of carnage and nastiness and brutality. “July 4th, July 10th, West Coast forces, fuckin’ Heartland Maoists, it’s all the same,” remarks Joel, the journalist played by Wagner Moura, to his colleagues, the photojournalist Lee Smith, played by Kirstin Dunst, and grizzled older journalist Sammy, played by Stephen McKinley Henderson. In this film, American exceptionalism is dead.
In place of any political or quasi-mystical meaning, Civil War is really just a standard-issue war correspondent film to rival the best of them, such as The Killing Fields, The Year of Living Dangerously, Salvador, Full Metal Jacket, and Foreign Correspondent. We track the seemingly unflappable Lee Smith as she starts to lose it among the destruction, first mentoring a younger photographer, Jessie, played by Cailee Spaeny, then being replaced by her. Jessie eventually, of course, steps into Lee Smith’s shoes, or in this case puts her younger finger on her once invincible master’s shutter button. Civil War is a gripping, finely filmed remake of this archetypal Bildungsroman, in which the protégé ultimately replaces the guru.
Along the way, however, Garland creates rather shocking images, at least to any American who thinks of the United States as somehow different and immune to the forces of conflict that have riven other parts of the world. We see a war-torn domestic America in flames, both in its cities and in the countryside. Yet there is no rhyme or reason for who is fighting whom and over what. None of the political dimension of the story is explained much at all. The president has turned dictator, the country has fragmented. That’s about it in terms of political backstory. There are even areas, such as one surreal town the war correspondents pass through, in which no war seems to be going on at all. It is a baffling landscape, one there primarily as backdrop to the journey into oblivion taken by Lee Smith, young acolyte Jessie, sidekick Joel, and wizened newshound Sammy.
Which is to say, we are not only in a conventional war correspondent film, but also in a road movie. Sometimes it feels a bit like following Martin Sheen’s Benjamin L. Willard up river to find Marlon Brando’s Captain Walter E. Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, but not really since what the Civil War crew finds at the end is not particularly illuminating in the least. It is just more banal conquest, captured in images for posterity. You can barely remember the name of the president in the film, and certainly not why he was able to consolidate power and subsequently unleash such a monumental collapse of his country.
There are moments of hope during the trip, such as when the journalists spend a night at a rescue camp in an abandoned stadium where people seem to be finding community amid the anarchic decimation of violent conflict. So too, there are incidents of sheer terror, such as a renegade militia nationalist, played by the now reliably creepy Jesse Plemons, whom the journalists come upon burying bodies in a mass grave (what has become of you, earnest Landry Clarke of Friday Night Lights?). Which side is he on? What happened to create such mass death? Why is he handling the bodies in such a callous way? It all goes unexplained.
Stylistically, the film creates a particularly effective contrast between edgy scenes such as this one, which offer a surreal, sometimes exhilarating apocalypse (now) landscape of war, and then numerous frozen image stills taken by the photojournalists of the atrocities and violence they witness. It is as if they want to try to freeze in time the chaos to give it a kind of order—reifying it, commodifying it, and almost, but never quite entirely, endowing the war with a meaning and purpose that the film itself keeps undercutting. The silence snaps in the silent snaps. They try to hold something in place, maybe a spiritual hush that might make it all worth it, but Garland refuses to grant such relief.
Instead of comprehending why this civil war has happened, one is left by the end of the film asking: meaning in war, what’s that? Civil War suggests there is no larger meaning. Violent conflict is just a pointless shattering, a wreckage, even in a nation that imagines itself on an exceptional track, leading the way toward progress, with a godly mission to serve as a beacon on a hill, spreading the light of freedom, democracy, and justice. The United States of Civil War is no exception. It is not distinctive from other places or peoples. No, Garland suggests. If an American civil war comes again, it will not be much different from anywhere else.
Watching the film, I was put in mind of a remark North Vietnamese war veteran and writer Bao Ninh made in Lynn Novick and Ken Burns’ documentary about the Vietnam War, a civil war whose ghost haunts the movie Civil War far more than the actual American Civil War of the nineteenth century. “Who won or lost is not a question,” Ninh comments. “In war, no one wins or loses. There is only destruction.” In Civil War, an American civil war, like any war, would be uncivil, but it would not be special. The war provides a rush of adrenaline to its war correspondents, and to the viewers witnessing the war through their eyes and through the eyes of their cameras. Yet, like any addiction, the feeling ultimately proves hollow, empty, devoid, nihilistic.
Maybe the addiction to American exceptionalism has reached its conclusion too, Civil War proposes. For Americans, one hopes, the film offers a powerful, sobering lesson. Civil war, American style, will not bring about anything particularly unlike anywhere else. There is only destruction in that direction, as Bao Ninh points out, and no solace in a US version of civil strife. Good riddance, then, to American exceptionalism. But not to the hope that wars of any sort can be avoided, anywhere they might break out.