Perilous Stories
The American photographer Sally Mann encouraged her students to “photograph…what is closest to you, photograph the great events of your life, and let your photography live with your reality.” On a hot September day in 1987, Mann met her son Emmett on the road outside their house as he was coming home from a play date. The road was busy with construction, and she held up a hand to tell him to pause before crossing. Emmett, misinterpreting her gesture, sprang forward into the road just as the flagman signaled the first car in the waiting queue to go ahead. The hood of the car caught Emmett mid-leap. He flew more than forty feet before landing crumpled and bleeding in the road.
Miraculously, Emmett survived with nothing more than a few scratches. But while Mann knelt on the hot pavement holding her son, a thought flashed through her mind. “I actually wondered as I lay there, with my dying son (or so I thought) if I could even hold a camera up. And, of course, there was no way. I am just not that kind of photographer.”
But the thought had occurred to her.
The first clue that Alex Garland's latest movie Civil War might be exploring a similar question is in one of the opening scenes. The hardbitten war photographer Lee (Kirsten Dunst) arrives at a confusing scene in the streets of New York City—protesters push against police in riot gear, cordoned around a water truck. A flock of journalists have descended, including Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a 23-year-old aspiring war photographer using her father's cameras. A bomb detonates in the chaos. Jessie is in the right place at the right time to take the first of many black and white photos that the audience gets to see as well: Lee, crouching in the bloodied street with her eye against her viewfinder. A photograph of a photographer at work.
The brutality of the scene, like most others in Alex Garland’s dizzying and often thrilling movie, is not explained. The United States is torn in a civil war, the remnants of the federal government pitted against California and Texas united as the “Western Forces,” with a vague third set of actors known as the “Florida Alliance” lurking somewhere on the edges. The cause of the war is not explained, nor are the motives of the various factions. All that Lee and her thrill-seeking journalist partner Joel (Wagner Moura) are trying to do is get to Washington, D.C. ahead of the Western Forces so they can photograph and interview the President (Nick Offerman) before his presumed inevitable downfall. Jessie and the aging journalist Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) tag along as ingenue and sage, respectively.
So, yes, this is a movie about political violence in a divided America, but it's also about the role of journalism in covering that violence. That’s why Sally Mann's thoughts as she cradled her son in her arms will be on the audience’s mind as well as the journalists embark on their road trip through a war-torn America. Should I raise the camera? What kind of photographer am I? The question is implicit in every decision Lee, Jessie, and company make as they variously cover militia shootouts, bombed shopping malls, and even tranquil moments of everyday life. Sometimes the question is explicit. At one point, Jessie asks Lee if she would photograph her if she were shot in combat. “What do you think?” Lee responds tartly.
That, of course, is one way to answer Mann's question: an iron-clad commitment to objectivity and its companion necessity of noninterference. “Once you start asking those questions you can’t stop,” Lee says. “So we don’t ask. We record so other people ask.” But Alex Garland isn’t stupid and neither is Civil War; the journalists’ default to objectivity is questioned again and again as they scrape through one harrowing sequence after the next. That’s another way of answering Mann’s question: objectivity is a myth, intervention is inevitable, and we should try to intervene for good.
At this point you might be wondering if understanding the context around this civil war would help develop this question. But the setup I’ve described is about all you get. If anything, the few additional details are presented in a way that serves only to deepen your confusion. For instance, it’s mentioned that Lee became famous for documenting something known as the “Antifa massacre.” Two words, myriad possibilities.
Yet that isn’t to say that Civil War doesn’t compellingly imagine a second American Civil War. It does so spectacularly, through sight and sound. The road trip from New York City to D.C. takes the long route across Pennsylvania, then down through Pittsburgh. My family has lived in Pittsburgh for over 20 years1, and I felt a shock of recognition at a stretch of interstate I’d driven across—now choked by the smoking remains of a military convoy. “Go Steelers” is scrawled in black spray paint on the side of an overpass, from which bodies hang. I can hear yellow warblers singing in the woods before the thud of an explosion or the report of a rifle. By matching the mundanity of Americana with the mundanities of war, Civil War is immersive and believable. This is no less true when the action rises to a fever pitch, which happens with breathtaking frequency during its precise hour and fifty minute runtime.
Hence the core of Civil War’s unsettlingness: a rich visual vocabulary and soundscape on the one hand and a void of explanation for it on the other.2 The effect may seem at best deliberately frustrating, at worst an exercise in limpid both-sidesism, cowardice masquerading as high art.
It’s brilliant.
A civil war will be, like any historical event, a story we tell ourselves before it becomes one that we live in. Thus, many of us hope that if we can imagine that civil war right, before it happens, we can wrestle the narrative into the shape we want, head the column off at the pass. That is why we try to understand the other, create communities with narratives of unity, imagine a better future. It’s vital work. It’s the task of building worlds together.
But narratives are wild things, and Civil War’s power is that it never forgets it is telling a story it may ultimately have no control over. I think it is, in fact, obsessed with that reality, and it is both enthralled and repelled by its own imagination. The journalists are often reporting just behind the shoulders of a squad of militia or lying next to a sniper team or crouched behind a tank. Cinematography that heavily employs handheld cameras embeds the audience in action sequences that feel as hair-raising as they must for the journalists themselves. But we almost never witness Lee or Jessie’s viewpoint through their cameras’ viewfinders. Instead, the action stops, starts, and stutters with the still frames of their photographs, fragmentary moments of meditation where the sound drops out as a soldier drops to the floor before the chaos resumes.3 And here, the barrier between movie and characters and audience begins to dissolve. Because Lee and Jessie’s photographs have the same framing as the movie cameras. As if you are holding the camera. As if you have been framing the shot, whether the plot is progressing at twenty-four frames per second or one. Suddenly, the obscurity of the worldbuilding details becomes a maddening temptation, a tantalizing promise that you could choose the terms of your participation in this story. And as I watched the final battle sequence power towards its heart-pounding climax in the streets of D.C.—streets I’ve walked on, eaten on, taken phone calls on—I had the uneasy sense that I was complicit in creating every terrific act. As if I were a character in some Borgesian nightmare, willing the movie into existence by the act of watching it.
After her son’s accident, Sally Mann tried to photograph it in other forms. She photographed Emmett’s bloodied bedsheets in the hospital the night of the accident. A few weeks later, she posed him in a blurry recreation, his tongue dangling from the side of his mouth. She tried a self-portrait, stained clothes spilling out of her own head. None of them were satisfying.
But she tried.
This is how we make sense of our lives. We make a story of it, before the fact, after the fact, during the action. But every act of storytelling is perilous. “I’ve never been so scared in my entire life,” Jessie declares after one intense scene. “And I’ve never felt more alive.”
Civil War is better than an anti-war movie. It’s better than a journalism movie. It’s a movie about all of the above that invites you into the making of it. It dares to give you exactly what you want. And then it asks: Are you sure?
Jeremiah Scanlan is a fiction writer and birdwatcher, currently studying law.
Our stake also used to be assigned to the D.C. temple district, and I’ve spent several summers living in and around the District. I first discovered Sally Mann’s photographs at the National Gallery of Art.
Garland is particularly good at unsettling. To create the mutated version of Florida wilderness known as “Area X” for the movie Annihilation, he apparently dressed up a UK forest to look like an American one.
 | A guest post by
|