Civil War – “Least Woke Since American Sniper”

I was dreading Alex Garland’s Civil War, I’m not gonna lie. I was dreading it because the collective fear on the Left about their imaginary villains on the Right makes me nervous every day. I’m not scared of the Right because I have spent time getting to know them. I have seen things from their point of view. I have humanized them, yes, even Donald Trump. I am having a hard time remembering what it used to be like to be traumatized and afraid all the time, like Stephen King, Barbra Streisand, Stephen Colbert, etc. It’s all a blur.

The idea that this movie doesn’t take the side of the Left is a good thing, especially in terms of box office. The best hope any movie has now is to appeal broadly.  If Hollywood has destroyed its brand it’s for that reason. They disinvited half the country (at least) in the past decade. Many here will disagree with that, of course. But I don’t want to argue.

I thought Civil War was going to be a Bill Maher-inspired fever dream about Trump.  But it looks like the film has thrilled some critics and baffled others.

However, it seems that some people – the red-pilled among us – will see something different than the majority of critics who are very much in the bubble of the Left. If Civil War is “based” count me in.

The best review I could find for the film comes courtesy of AV club’s Matthew Jackson:

“There is an inherent audacity in making a film like Civil War, even before writer-director Alex Garland starts to lay out the finer points of his near-future thriller. At a time when the atrocities of war are unfolding in multiple places around the world, and our own country feels perched on the kind of knife’s edge where just about anything could happen, it’s a bold move to make such a film, particularly outside of the more exploitation-heavy genre flights of things like The Purge. Treating a story like this seriously, even from a distance, feels a bit like juggling multiple powder kegs at once.”

And closes it this way:

“Speaking about the film in a Q&A at SXSW, Garland noted that he wants Civil War to be a “conversation” more than anything, a film that asks questions about the real human costs of violence, how much we as human beings are willing to tolerate that violence, and what we might do if it came to our own backyards. The film does not have easy answers, but rather than making it seem shallow, its lack of clear moral coding instead offers us something more primal and more powerful. It’s a film about the open-ended question of how much humanity we as a species have left in us, and that makes it a provocative, thrilling monster of a movie that will sear itself into your eyeballs.”

Unfortunately, the film doesn’t open until April 12 but if early word proves true, the movie will make a lot of money. I personally can’t wait. I wasn’t a fan of Men but Ex Machina is pure brilliance.

Here is Alex Garland in his own words, from the Hollywood Reporter:

“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. “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.”

And:

“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.”

Agree so hard with this last paragraph. I’ll tell you why, Mr. Garland. It’s a bit of a long explanation so bear with me. The Left (my former side) colonized the internet right around the turn of the millennium. No one expected back then that it would become The Empire. It was during the George W. Bush presidency and we were all building a utopia of sorts in the New World online. I built my own website in 1999.

As Silicon Valley became more powerful, it also leaned Left, thanks to the first social media president, Barack Obama, and by 2008, we had the iPhone, we had Facebook, and we had Twitter. That meant we dominated nearly all culture, media, and, eventually, the economy. As corporations migrated to online shopping, they had to be part of our ideological bubble. If they weren’t, they were not welcome.

When Donald Trump grew his own platform on Twitter and Facebook, we attacked him like a body rejecting the heart of a pig. He was not welcome in “our” country. So when he won it was like the Devil riding into Salem in 1692. We all know how the four years he was in power went. It was waves of mass hysteria; hundreds of people lost their jobs, and a climate of fear blanketed our society (on the Left).

My former side believed that this was our internet, our culture, our country and we wanted the invaders to either comply or scram. By the time Trump was kicked off of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube and they dropped the web app Parler from Amazon’s server, there was clearly a Cold Civil War underway. Eventually, the Right would start building virtual gulags that were kept away from the utopians on the Left. But over time, the gulags started to become more popular, especially as the Left began to destroy itself with “woke” ideology, cancel culture and dogma …it’s boring on the Left now. It’s fun and exciting on the Right.

But you are not to cross over lest you be shunned by the utopians.  You have to be able to survive it, not care what they think — as I write this, I am writing honestly, without fear of what my readers might think. By now, I’ve been attacked by so many people for so long I feel like why bother.

A great Black Mirror episode Nosedive details exactly what we just lived through. The end of it is exactly where we need to be. We need to be able to say things without worrying about offending every last person. We have to loosen up, and, as you say, start listening.

Throughout history, we would have artists and writers who would be brave enough to pierce the hysteria, like Arthur Miller when he wrote The Crucible, or Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone. But most people who work in Hollywood are terrified of being “downgraded,” or publicly humiliated, or canceled.  So very few of them have the courage to “go there.” And until they do, we’ll be stuck where we are now, in a state of paralysis.