Critics’ Conversation: ‘Civil War’ and Civic Anxiety

David Rooney and Lovia Gyarkye
·10 min read

DAVID ROONEY: We’re nearing the middle of one of the most contentious election years in America’s history, with bitter divisions making a mockery of the increasingly obsolete appellation, “United States.” People are ANXIOUS as they weigh a presidential vote destined to fuel the rage of one side or the other, potentially inciting violence.

That climate would seem to make this the ideal time for Alex Garland’s Civil War, which set a house record for A24 with its $25.7 million opening weekend and held strong at No. 1 in its second weekend. You can’t argue with those numbers. But what’s more interesting is the debate the film has ignited as to whether its fuzzy politics are a cop-out.

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In probably the most rah-rah American movie of recent years, 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, the foreign enemy with a uranium enrichment plant that needs bombing was identified with vague allusions at best, just as the enemy was in the sequel’s progenitor, 36 years earlier. It’s no great leap to imagine that as a strategic choice by studio bean-counters to avoid alienating any international market.

Garland’s motives are likely less cynical, but one of the chief criticisms of Civil War has been that the movie — directed with visceral muscularity and led by a haunting Kirsten Dunst — sets up an incendiary near-future nightmare while refusing to clarify the battle lines. Sure, there’s a fascist president in office, a fear shared by many Americans in 2024, but who’s fighting whom exactly?

In the movie’s opening minutes, we learn that militarized troops dubbed the Western Forces are fighting for the secessionist alliance of California and Texas. That unlikely union seems to announce that this is not today’s America. It shrugs off the standard red/blue binary of the American political landscape with an evasiveness that many have interpreted as a lack of the kind of ideological coherence that’s needed now more than ever.

Civil War raises the question of whether our precarious moment — with a second Trump term a distinct possibility — is the right time for coyness in political art.

LOVIA GYARKYE: What’s striking about the reactions to Civil War is how much they reflect this anxious national need for moral clarity and direction. People have always projected onto art, but there seems to be a renewed desperation for it to tell us how to be and what to do. I think there’s value in these conversations, because I believe popular culture is a critical space for negotiating our understanding and awareness of politics. But can art stand in for political education?

I admit that for me, the strongest scene in Civil War is one in which Lee (Dunst) and Joel (played with a cool charm by Wagner Moura) are covering a confrontation between police officers and civilians in New York. There’s little dialogue, but the stakes are clear: The people are demanding water and the state, represented by the cops, are blocking them. The scene recasts an increasingly familiar image from recent protests, wherein a situation between law enforcement and civilians becomes volatile. It’s a powerful, and explicit, moment.

But elsewhere, I was bothered by the film’s vague anti-war position, which just feels inadequate to the national and geopolitical moment. War is bad, but what else?

Civil War feels eager to warn Americans of incoming doom, but doesn’t want to name the evils. Perhaps there is a real-world timeline in which Texas and California would form an alliance, but some fleshing out of that scenario would be nice; what are the political realities that make this feasible? Of course, answering that question might offend some viewers, which wouldn’t be good for the bottom line. 

ROONEY: I’m reminded here that in the recent announcement of an upcoming Broadway staging of Romeo + Juliet, to star Rachel Zegler and Kit Connor, director Sam Gold said, “With the presidential election coming up in November, I felt like making a show this fall that celebrates youth and hope, and unleashes the anger young people feel about the world they are inheriting.” The tagline for the production is “The Youth are Fucked,” which suggests a broiling generational fury aimed not at a specific target, but at a world gone crazy.

And maybe that’s the kind of amorphous political art we’re going to be consuming at a time when no one seems to want to shrink their audience by picking a side in a 50/50 polarized nation.

GYARKYE: It’s hard to ignore economic motives when considering the coyness of today’s mainstream political art. In that way, I think Civil War is in step with much of what’s out there. Take racial satire, a subgenre that inherently invites risk. I recently wrote about how films like The American Society of Magical Negroes and Oscar winner American Fiction never deliver on the kind of lacerating satire that made comparable films of the past like Spike Lee’s Bamboozled and Ivan Dixon’s The Spook Who Sat By the Door so fierce and bracing.

If we widen this conversation to include music, while there’s a lot I enjoy about Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, the album’s concern with a broader national politics is cursory at best. Despite moments that gesture at a wider critique of America’s broken promises, the artist’s interest seems primarily in disproving her detractors.

I think some of this work might have felt edgier or more forceful 15, 10 or even just five years ago, in the afterglow of President Obama’s election or in the shadow of Trump’s blatant immorality. More Americans back then believed elected officials acted in the interest of their constituents. Today, the idea that the state, in many ways, divests from communities is becoming more persuasive. The response to the COVID-19 pandemic, corporation-fueled inflation and, recently, the U.S.’ refusal to call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza are just a handful of things that have shattered illusions. There’s an argument to be made that today’s art, even in the mainstream, needs to, at the very least, name what is happening.

I do think we have real political art out there, but it struggles to attract eyeballs. These are works that confront how current systems impact people instead of just evincing vague platitudes that a majority of viewers can get on board with. I’m thinking about something quiet like Savanah Leaf’s 2023 film Earth Mama, which observes the racial and socioeconomic layers of modern-day adoption; or something brash like Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker, which subverts cherished IP to create a jolting queer bildungsroman. Both films treat politics as part of the fabric of their characters’ lives instead of an impolite subject to be avoided.

Peter Morgan’s Patriots, which just opened on Broadway, is another compelling example. The production is a zippy dramatic portrait of Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky (Michael Stuhlbarg), who played a crucial role in Vladimir Putin’s rise to power. The sleepy, awkwardly expository first act gives way to a charged second one, in which Morgan uses the relationship between these powerful men to draw a chilling conclusion about politics as a proxy war for the elite.

ROONEY: I agree with everything you’ve written here, though I wonder if there’s some generational perspective I can offer (read: I’m old!). Some gay audiences were indignant when Jonathan Demme’s AIDS drama Philadelphia was released in 1993, partly because the displays of affection between the couple played by Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas were about as chaste as a peck you might plant on your old auntie’s cheek. Brokeback Mountain was another movie criticized for downplaying the sexuality of the tortured relationship between Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal’s characters.

Those mainstream releases and others like Gus Van Sant’s Milk, about the assassination of gay activist and politician Harvey Milk, have often been greeted with detractors decrying them for not being bold enough, queer enough, political enough at times when LGBTQ concerns (including AIDS) and rights (including same-sex marriage) were on the line.

But looking back, it’s hard to deny that those films advanced the conversation. Perhaps a sizeable slice of the American public needed movies like those that were more humanist than radical — not to mention TV like Will & Grace, which could be mischievously edgy but rarely provocative — to get comfortable enough to broach the idea of marriage equality. 

In hindsight, there was something audacious — and yes, political — in Ang Lee depicting a gay love story between two cowboys, the most enduring symbol of American masculinity. While some moralistic straight dudes were outraged — Ernest Borgnine famously refused to watch his Academy screener — enough audiences embraced the movie to make it a global hit, a $14 million production that grossed $178 million worldwide.

The fact that Brokeback Mountain came so close to winning the best picture Oscar (don’t get me started on the Crash debacle) might have helped pave the way, a decade later, for the Moonlight win. Barry Jenkins’ instant classic tackled the sensitive subject of queer Black masculinity with unapologetic candor and sensuality, something that would probably have been unthinkable in a major release 10 years earlier.

What I’m trying to get at is that political art can wield power incrementally. Who knows, maybe we’ll look back on Civil War a decade from now and recognize it as an unflinching snapshot of an ugly American reality, of insurgency and venomous polarization, even if the battle lines remain vague.

GYARKYE: Your comments about queer cinema have me thinking about what we mean by political art here. All art, to some degree, is informed by politics. Last year, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon confronted the ghosts of American brutality, from the decision to drop a nuclear weapon to the genocide of indigenous communities. Reflecting on the past always offers the clarity of hindsight, so discussions of these films focused on acknowledgement and atonement. Maybe it’s easier to wax regretful about the past than recognize present-day moral depravity. (Look at the way people reacted to Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar acceptance speech.)

And while I thought Ava DuVernay’s Origin worked most poignantly as a story of love and grief, the movie is fundamentally concerned with politics: It’s inspired by Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, an intellectual tome that posits a new framework for understanding race in America. Then, of course, there was Barbie. America Ferrara’s much-touted monologue wasn’t all that compelling to me, but it undeniably offered a lot of viewers a basic primer in contemporary feminist politics.

A smaller recent film, Sean Price Williams’ The Sweet East (starring Talia Ryder, Jacob Elordi and Ayo Edebiri), wrestled with the idea of patriotism today. The Alice in Wonderland-like narrative structure allows it to survey different pockets of American life, from an anarchist group to far-right factions. Like Civil War, the result sometimes feels shallow, but I can’t knock the ambition of trying to capture what this country looks like right now.

ROONEY: And what about those who long to forget — at least for an hour or two — what this country looks like right now? It wouldn’t be the first time audiences sought to take their mind off a moment of uncertainty. Think of the movies that thrived during the Great Depression — comedies, musicals, melodramas. You can’t get much more escapist than the kaleidoscopic fantasy numbers of a Busby Berkeley picture.

Allow me to offer two recommendations: Netflix’s Ripley — based on the ingeniously plotted Patricia Highsmith thriller — has been retold in high style by writer-director Steven Zaillian and a superb cast, offering roughly eight hours of intrigue that banish all thoughts of election angst. Ditto the exhilarating energy and sexy fun of Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, which feels like stumbling on an oasis after a long time in the desert. If anyone can unite a hopelessly divided nation, it’s probably Zendaya.

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