Civil War(s)

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

Though art often imitates life, that’s not a good thing when the art in question is a vision of what a contemporary U.S. civil war might look like. That’s the premise of the 2024 dystopian film Civil War, which imagines that the “Western Forces” of California and Texas have united to secede from the federal authority in Washington, D.C., triggering an overall breakup of the United States and an orgy of violence throughout.

The central characters in the film are journalists trying to cover the “story” of their collapsing country. Kirsten Dunst is a famous photojournalist with a 10,000-yard stare, traveling from New York to D.C. with her cheerfully damaged handler/reporter colleague played by Wagner Moura.,. They’re joined by an over-the-hill but wise and kindly New York Times reporter played by Stephen McKinley, and a much younger photographer eager to get a piece of the action and played with a beguiling mingling of intensity and vulnerability by Cailee Spaeny.

A screenshot from the 2024 thriller Civil War. Courtesy photo.

English writer-director Alex Garland is no stranger to dystopia. He wrote Ex Machina, Annihilation and Dredd, but his other writing credits include video games, including the Devil May Cry series. Those grim ruminations on societies in decline coupled with the frenetic cinematic sensibility of his video game work come through in Civil War, but it’s not quite the film that many critics and audiences alike thought they were sitting down to view.

True there are long sequences of high anxiety, vehicular escapades and white-knuckle gunfights; but, at its core, Civil War is about the social and political power of narrative and who controls it.

On one hand, there’s the president of the United States (played by Nick Offerman) broadcasting propaganda from inside the barricades of the White House. Each time we see him, he’s promising that the feds are on the brink of one of the greatest military victories of all time. However, conditions on the ground couldn’t be further from the truth.

The Western Forces are everywhere, and in the cracks between their insurgency and the government troops are partisans who roam the shattered countryside as death squads. We’re never given a clear idea of the reasons for the Western Forces’ rebellion, but a particularly chilling mid-film appearance by Jesse Plemons spells out the deeper animus stalking the land.

When the protagonists arrive at a tidy-looking farm somewhere in the D.C. hinterlands, they find Plemons in nondescript camo, sporting a long gun and pink-tinted sunglasses. Behind him, a dump truck is depositing bodies into a mass grave. The journalists’ credentials don’t endear them to Plemons’ character. Telling them that they’re Americans prompts him to ask, “What kind of Americans?”

A scene from the 1997 satire The Second Civil War. Courtesy photo.

No further spoilers here, but suffice it to say he has definite ideas about what constitutes a “real” American.

Militarism and jingoism are clearly the deadly impulses at play in the film, but the subtler critique is of media representations of violent politics, the often vulture-like process of “getting the story,” and how it desensitizes both practitioners and consumers. 

Dunst’s character has been tainted by the moral implications of standing by and taking photos while someone is burned alive by insurgents. Meanwhile, the most effective emotional element of the plot is her character’s fear that Spaeny’s young would-be journo is careening headlong into a similar existential hazard.

The reviews of Civil War have not been great, but that’s because these deeper ideas about the primacy of “the story” have escaped many audience members.

All that said, there’s another film that puts those exact concepts into play in an eerily similar context. Though apparently forgotten, the 1997 satire The Second Civil War is eerie in more ways than one. Specifically for Idahoans.

Shot as a TV movie, it features a cynical governor (played by Beau Bridges) who decides to score political points by closing Idaho’s borders to immigrants amid waves of refugees pouring into the U.S. from conflict zones around the world — notably, a busload of Pakistani orphans bound for Twin Falls.

The xenophobic power play by Boise triggers the bungling president (portrayed by no less than Phil Hartman) to dither with his advisers about an appropriate response, which is finally arrived at after consultation with his deep-state P.R. fixer (James Coburn): They’ll set a deadline for Idaho to reopen its borders or else, but it has to be timed so it doesn’t interrupt All My Children.

Meanwhile, a sleazy national TV producer (Dan Hedaya) is trying to cash in on the crisis for ratings, deploying his reporters to the Gem State to provide wall-to-wall coverage.

One of those reporters (Elizabeth Peña) has been sleeping with the governor but they’re on the outs because she’s a Mexican immigrant and despises his anti-immigrant stance. Another reporter (Denis Leary) is hotdogging among the forces in a standoff at the Idaho-Utah border, while still another reporter (James Earl Jones) is trying to work the story with some old-school integrity but sidelined by the cutthroat spirit of 24-hour news.

As tensions mount and all sides dig in to benefit their respective interests, other states send their National Guard troops to Idaho to reinforce the governor’s border closure. From there, the nation is poised for its “second civil war.”

Like Garland’s 2024 film, 1997’s Second Civil War foregrounds the notion of narrative power — and specifically “image” — in animating the political and financial self interest that divides Americans and pushes them toward unthinkable acts of treachery toward each other and the nation as a whole. 

Somehow, though, even with its TV-movie feel and joke-y tone, the 1997 film hits closer to home both with its ideas and — literally — close to home through a bullseye critique of Idaho’s peculiar anti-government strain.

For instance, trying to cajole a bunch of rednecks to give him an interview, Leary’s character could have just as easily been providing commentary on one of today’s talking head shows when he tells the bumpkins that he knows they’re suspicious of the media, “because of the way they’ve portrayed you in the past — let’s face the facts, why not? 

“They’re always portraying you as these sort of stereotypical ultra right-wing, gun-crazed, union-busting wackos,” he adds, pausing to consider a granny with a shotgun. 

However, he wants to “jump right over those left-wing, liberal, East Coast media-elite types, and bring your story right to the American people.”

If that’s not art imitating life, I don’t know what is — but I’m not sure I like it.

Stream Civil War on Max. Rent The Second Civil War on Amazon.