The Tip Sheet is spinning off. Introducing Space Invaders, a newsletter about movies and pop culture that invades this space on Saturday. Arrives irregularly during this pilot phase.
Alex Garland’s Civil War begins with the President of the United States making a speech. He says that his forces are about to achieve “the greatest victory in the history of mankind”, which is a lie. He’s actually about to lose the titular war. The bombast of the fictional president’s fabulation is purposely meant to invoke the spirit of Donald Trump, and so are details revealed throughout the movie like the disbanding of the FBI or the use of military suppression against civilian protestors, both have which Trump has threatened to do in the past.
There’s no doubt that Civil War is provocative, release a movie called “Civil War” set in a near modern day America and release it during a presidential election year, it’s got to be, but if you’re expecting Garland to say something about American politics as they stand in this moment in 2024, you’re bound to be disappointed.
Why? Because Garland doesn’t care about the political machinations of how a modern civil war in the U.S. *might happen* so much as he’s interested in the effects of such a confrontation on the people. In Civil War, we see it all through the eyes of four journalists as they make their way from New York to the frontlines outside Washington D.C. They encounter gas station owners torturing attempted thieves, enemy soldiers being summarily executed when captured, and a pair of guys in fatigues burying civilians in a mass grave. That last one is more jarring because it’s never explicit explained who’s doing the burying and who’s being buried and why.
For being such a staunchly politically coded movie, Civil War is almost shockingly apolitical. You can’t even really call Civil War an anti-war movie because nowhere is anyone really commenting on the brutality of it because everyone is just universally brutal, and our journalist main characters are so invested in their clinical detachment that they casually converse about making sure that if one of them is killed that the other one “gets the shot”, meaning the photo.
In this approach, you understand why Garland doesn’t care about working out the logistics of how California and Texas ended up aligned as the Western Forces, and the main antagonist against the film’s tyrannical POTUS. The news junkies among us know that the personal and political animus between current California Governor Gavin Newsom and Texas Governor Greg Abbott is so great that they probably couldn’t agree about what to get on a pizza, so Garland’s movie is less of a hot-button political thriller as it is a fable about giving in to our worst instincts. It’s a warning about the potential endgame of our gross cynicism, indifference, and selfishness.
It's just too bad that Garland doesn’t listen to his own insights…
In an episode of Pod Save America, Garland talked about the ideas that led to Civil War and how they were informed by real-life American politics, and if you think that Civil War has nothing real to say about Trump, Biden, or any of it, you’re righter than you think. In the interview, Garland talked about the supposed misfire of Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment in 2016 and how demonizing Trump supporters is bad form. He also talked about how there’s extremism on “both sides”, which is why his movie is not aligned to the left or the right and instead portrays its POTUS as a kind of neutral evil.
This is a phenomenon I call “sacred centrism”, the idea being that if it’s bad to be an extremist on the sides of any issue, then the middle path is always correct, and the more noble. The problem with “sacred centrism” is that it’s based on a completely amoral viewpoint; if extremism is bad, then you must find a middle path between the two polls.
But let’s consider two real-life American politicians: Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Both are considered the extreme ends of their party, but while Greene is more chaos, insurrection and conspiracy beliefs, AOC fights for a living wage, universal healthcare, and social equality. Where is the middle in this scenario, and does it make sense to choose a kind of partisan neutrality when one-side wants to improve people’s lives and the other just wants to watch the world burn? Considering that political operatives aligned with Donald Trump have publicly laid out a plan to dismantle the social safety net and replace thousands of career civil servants with far-right political hacks, one might argue that “sacred centrism” this election is tantamount to appeasement.
Maybe it’s silly to expect that Garland, a successful filmmaker from Britain, has anything interesting or insightful to say about American politics; if he did, he might be writing for The Guardian instead of Hollywood. Perhaps it’s the audience that’s at fault. It’s not Garland’s job to tell Americans how to vote, and if those voters can be persuaded by the imagined journey of pretend journalists through a war that never happened, we’re in more trouble than we thought.
Or maybe it’s the framing. A budget of $50 million is nothing to sneeze at, but it terms of current Hollywood productions, Civil War is dirt cheap, implying a kind of purity of purpose. And being produced and released by A24, a boutique independent studio that has made many of the most talked about movies of the last decade (including one Best Picture winner in Everything Everywhere All at Once), it’s not unusual to have high expectations about the cultural relevancy of Civil War. But maybe those expectations are misplaced, just because a movie is smartly made that doesn’t mean its smart.
But can a dumb movie say something smart?
On the same weekend that Civil War opened the 2013 movie White House Down was being shown on one of the cable channels. If you’ve never seen it, it’s one of two movies released that year that could be described by the six-word elevator pitch, “Die Hard in the White House.” Down comes from Roland Emmerich, destroying the White House for the fourth time following Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, and it stars Jamie Foxx as the not-so-subtlety Obama-modelled President Sawyer, and Channing Tatum was wannabe Secret Service agent John Cale.
What’s interesting about White House Down is not seeing Foxx as an Obama amalgam, a cool and charismatic leader trying to turn the page on the War on Terror, it’s seeing who the bad guys are. While Olympus Has Fallen had the White House attacked by a group of highly skilled North Korean commandos, Emmerich made a group of conspiracy goons and white nationalists the villains. Their leader? The head of the Secret Service played by James Woods, in what might be his last major film role before becoming a full-time devotee of the MAGA cult. In fact, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public found that Woods was a top spreader when it came to election misinformation on social media after the 2020 presidential vote.
Now that’s not to say that Roland Emmerich is a prophet, or particularly insightful, but when there was a real-life attack on Washington D.C. in 2021, the perpetrators looked a lot more like the villains from White House Down than they did in Olympus Has Fallen, one of a couple of Hollywood films that highly inflated the abilities of North Korea because they really wanted to use China, but the Communist Party doesn’t let you put a movie in front of one billion sets of eyeballs when they’re the bad guys.
So is it possible that a dumb political movie can say something smart about politics? Of course, but applying real-world logic to the movies may be as pointless as expecting real life to run like a movie. In this world, the villain doesn’t go away even when they’re defeated, victories are never completely won, and the action continues after the end credits roll and seamlessly transitions into a sequel, even when it’s a part two nobody wants.
You can now see Civil War in theatres everywhere, and you can stream White House Down on Netflix.
The Bookshelf:
Humane (Sat-Mon)
The King Tide
The Take (Wed)
Starting Friday: Sasquatch Sunset
Galaxy Cinemas – Woodlawn:
2001: A Space Odyssey (Wed)
Abigail
Barry Lyndon (Mon)
A Clockwork Orange (Sun)
Challengers
Civil War
Aespa: World Tour (Sat)
Eyes Wide Shut (Sat)
Full Metal Jacket (Tues)
Gabru Gang
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
Godzilla x Kong: New Empire
Kung Fu Panda 4 (Sat-Sun, Tues, Thurs)
Paths of Glory (Tues)
Peter Rabbit (Sat)
Shayar
The Shining (Sun)
Spartacus (Sun)
Spy X Family Code: White (till Wed)
Unsung Hero
Starting Thursday: The Fall Guy
Galaxy Cinemas – Clair:
Abigail
Boy Kills World
Challengers
Civil War
Dune Part Two (till Wed)
The Fall Guy (starting Wed)
The First Omen (Sat, Tues)
Godzilla x Kong: New Empire
Irena’s Vow (till Wed)
Kung Fu Panda 4
Monkey Man (Sat, Tues)
Starting Thursday: Tarot
Mustang Drive-In (Fri-Sun Only):
Abigail (early show)
Monkey Man (late show)
Princess Cinemas – Twin:
500 Days in the Wild (Sat)
Alien – 45th Anniversary
Irena’s Vow (Sun, Tues-Thurs)
Killer Water (Sun)
Late Night with the Devil (Tues)
Wicked Little Letters
Princess Cinemas – Original:
La Chimera
Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind (Sat, Wed)
Humane (Sat-Sun, Tues-Thurs)
The Notebook (Fri)
The People’s Joker (Thurs)
Solaris (Sun)
Very Semi-Serious (Mon)
Apollo Cinema:
Aavesham (Sat)
Immaculate (Tues, Thurs)
Kiki’s Delivery Service (Sat-Sun, Wed)
Malayalee from India (Thurs)
Pavi Care Taker (Tues)
Rathnam (Sun-Wed)
This week on End Credits, Peter Salmon co-hosts as we get sexy in the world of tennis with the new romantic drama from Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino. We’re reviewing Challengers starring Zendaya, who’s already had one big hit this year with Dune Part Two, but we will look ahead to the coming summer movie slate to predict some other big hits of 2024, or at least talk about the movies we’re looking forward to seeing!
And finally, feel free to reach out to me by email at adamadonaldson [at] gmail [dot] com, or find me on Facebook, Twitter, and, of course, GuelphPolitico.ca!