Civil Wars Are About Politics, and Politics are About Morals, Whatever Reporters and Directors May Wish

I am going to do something terrible. I am going to talk about a movie I have not seen, based only on what the director has said and one review that stood out to me. In my defense, I am not talking about the quality of the film but rather the lack of courage it appears to show and how that lack of courage reflects upon our larger society. I realize that I may well be doing the movie a disservice, and you are well within your rights ot call me an idiot or worse. But I do think that the director’s words and the review provide enough information to discuss these points intelligently.

And I know: this has nothing to do with technology, hockey, or books. What can I say? I am terrible at branding.

The movie, of course, is Civil War. If you have seen the trailer, you will note that the near-future, ripped from the headlines Civil War II: This Time It’s on TikTok has the remnants of the federal government squaring off against an alliance featuring Texas and … California? Anyone who has spent five minutes’ worth of attention on politics in the last twenty years or so knows that sort of alignment is unlikely to be charitable. And by unlikely, I mean bat-shit insane.

When pressed on such an obvious stupidity, the director’s response was somewhat less than reassuring:

At one point, Garland rather passionately pointed out that Civil War is trying to create a conversation about political divisiveness in general that vilifies the other side; ratcheting up rhetoric into an ethical debate which makes it easier to see others as evil — and once somebody is considered morally wrong, their opponents can justify all sorts of extreme measures to stop them.

“Why are we talking and not listening?” he asked. “We’ve lost trust in the media and politicians. And some in the media are wonderful and some politicians are wonderful—on both sides of the divide. I have a political position and I have good friends on the other side of that political divide. Honestly, I’m not trying to be cute: What’s so hard about that? Why are we shutting [conversation] down? Left and right are ideological arguments about how to run a state. That’s all they are. They are not a right or wrong, or good and bad. It’s which do you think has greater efficacy? That’s it. You try one, and if that doesn’t work out, you vote it out, and you try again a different way. That’s a process. But we’ve made it into ‘good and bad.’ We made it into a moral issue, and it’s fucking idiotic, and incredibly dangerous … I personally [blame] some of this on social media. There is a an interaction that exists human-to-human that floats away when it reaches a public forum.”

This is a childish argument. Politics is the art of arranging our collective lives. While not every political question is a moral question, many are. Access to abortion is a moral question. Calling immigrants “poison” is a moral question. Making it easy to ban books just for talking about LBGTQ+ kids is a moral question. You have to be ether deeply morally obtuse or incredibly privileged to not see that morality is at the heart of modern politics.

You might argue that the movie is meant to be a dumb action flick, the equivalent of Independance Day. Garland, though, clearly does not see it that way. Garland clearly sees his movies, including this one, in conversation with contemporary concerns:

“When I worked on Ex Machina, [which was] about AI, people sometimes use the word ‘prescient’ or ‘predictive’ [to describe the film] and I always feel slightly embarrassed when people say that because at the time I wrote it, there was [already] a huge debate happening about it,” Garland said when asked about the film’s timing. “I think all of the topics in in [Civil War] have been a part of a huge public debate for years and years. These debates have been growing and growing in volume and awareness, but none of that is secret or unknown to almost anybody. I thought that everybody understands these terms and, at that point, I just felt compelled to write about it. If you cast your mind back to when I wrote this in June four years ago, there was an election coming and we’re dealing with Covid — the same conversations as now. Identical. So that’s where it came from.”

Garland thinks he’s made something deeper than a popcorn flick. And the reviews seem to agree, and in at least one case, that is as disturbing as Garland’s blindness.

Tasha Robinson of Polygon reviewed the movie and claimed that politics was irrelevant to its central arguments:

This isn’t a story about the causes or strategies of American civil war: It’s a personal story about the hows and whys of war journalism — and how the field changes for someone covering a war in their homeland instead of on foreign turf.

…

All of which makes Civil War a movie more about why war correspondents are drawn to the profession than about any particular perspective on present American politics. And it’s a terrific, immersive meditation on war journalism. Lee and her colleagues are presented as half thrill-seeker adrenaline monkeys, half dutiful documentarians determined to bring back a record of events that other people aren’t recording. They’re doing important work, the movie suggests, but they have to be more than a little reckless both to choose the profession and to return to the battlefield over and over.

Lee never gives any big speeches about the difference between covering war in Afghanistan and in Charlottesville, but it’s clear she’s fraying under the pressure of watching her own country in such a rattled and ragged state, with hardened soldiers on both sides demonizing other Americans the way Americans have demonized entire foreign nations.

This is completely wrong, and it is sad but not entirely surprising that a journalist would be wrong in such a manner. The politics of the Civil War are essential to the journalism of the war. They always are, but even more so when you are covering your own people. You cannot be neutral in a moral conflict. Either one side is right and one side is wrong, or both are immoral. But the politics matter. There were not good people on both sides of Charlottesville. The process of covering such a conflict forces journalists to take a side if they are to be honest with their readers/viewers. The choice between truth and what they have been taught is objective cannot be avoided. It is the central conflict of journalism in such a time.

That a journalist would watch a movie about people covering their own civil war and think that not touching such a central conflict is not a massive failure is disturbing and telling. It is why journalists can convince themselves that when people complain from both ends of the political spectrum the substance doesn’t matter — they must be right because the criticism is coming from both sides. It explains why the New York Times’ publisher can think that it is not his job to sound the alarm when major political figures act in authoritarian manners and that reporting means complicating simple stories. Or that a major lie in the State of the Union response can be missed by all the major media covering the response — because they were focused on the politics not the substance.

To normal people, covering a war inevitably means asking hard questions about who is right or wrong — especially about a war in your own country. Journalists, the people tasked with helping people discover the truth should be even more concerned with that. That journalists could praise a movie about an American civil war that never approaches the question of right or wrong and still claim it is a serious look at war time journalism says nothing good about journalism. And that the director of a movie that is supposed to take seriously the hard questions of the day doesn’t think the morality of the politics matters in a civil war says a lot, none of it good, about the privilege and immaturity of certain members of our elite.

Maybe I am too harsh on the film. Maybe the director’s words and reviews don’t actually represent the way politics and morality are dealt with in the movie itself. Maybe I was foolish to discuss a piece of art that I haven’t actually experienced. But the director seemed clear. And the review seemed cogent and descriptive. Given that, I feel at least a little bit safe in saying: this shit matters. Politics is about morality. Journalism is not about the sterile repetition of both sides but rather the search for the truth. Any movie that purports to be a serious look at journalism in a time of war cannot ignore the politics and thus the morality of that war. If it does so, it’s not a hard look at journalism, but a child’s pantomime.