Democracy cuts both ways. Especially in America.
I have no words today.
I give you 'Civil War' (2024), written and directed by Alex Garland. It was first shown at South by Southwest in March 2024, and then released at the theatres a month later. Made with US$50million, it has grossed US$126million and counting. The cast stars Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Sonoya Mizuno, and Nick Offerman.
Blockbusters truly like to blow up government institutions and iconic buildings, American or otherwise. Have we been so desensitized to violence that we love watching these disasters and destruction onscreen? I watched it shortly after it was released, and shuddered. America is the battlefield. You incinerate the idea of democracy and the entire idea of America, and while you're at it, throw in the Constitution of the United States too.
Manohla Dargis's review of this film in The New York Times said,
If the violence feels more intense than in a typical genre shoot ’em up, it’s also because, I think, with “Civil War,” Garland has made the movie that’s long been workshopped in American political discourse and in mass culture, and which entered wider circulation on Jan. 6. The raw power of Garland’s vision unquestionably owes much to the vivid scenes that beamed across the world that day when rioters, some wearing T-shirts emblazoned with “MAGA civil war,” swarmed the Capitol. Even so, watching this movie, I also flashed on other times in which Americans have relitigated the Civil War directly and not, on the screen and in the streets.
