SubFilm: A film Divided cannot stand "Civil War"

So first up this movie isn't about a civil war, its about how deeply amoral and fucked up journalism makes you. The marketing campaign is fundamentally selling a different story. The civil war itself provides a setting for a sort of road trip through hell where Kirsten Dunst meets her younger self and trains her to be jaded and amoral.

The politics of the actual conflict are only gestured at because the characters fundamentally don't care. Their journey is to get a good shot/quote/interview.They witness war crimes and do nothing to stop them, intervening only once to save the life of one of their cadre.

To its credit the movie does not have centrist politics per se. It doesn't really have politics as we would discuss them. How do you make a movie that thanks Andy Ngo? The movie answers; you don't care. This movie has more in common with The Hurt Locker and Nightcrawler than it does with say DMZ, or Bedstuy. It is about the apolitical nature of journalism and of violence.

In the end the film itself becomes nihilistic to the point of being apolitical. The Kirsten Dunst line in the trailer "I thought every picture was a warning," isn't her lamenting how stupid revolutionaries are, its made clear that if anyone has legitimate grievances its the seperatists, the line is her lamenting that her reporting did nothing to prevent the civil war because journalism is useless.

She's having a crisis of faith that the movie ultimately agrees with. They accomplish nothing. The war accomplishes nothing, or rather it is explicitly stated that as soon as the fed is defeated the secessionist states will turn on each other. The violence and journalism will continue, regardless of politics or ideology because neither the violence nor the journalism cares about ideology. Cameras and guns don't care what they're pointed at.

Before the movie started the theatre showed bits from the press tour where Garland and Dunst talked about how timely the story is and how important journalism is in a democracy. I found this confusing as the movie seems to be making exactly the opposite point. Either the marketing department is running a bait and switch or they fundamentally don't understand the movie they made, or I do.

Ultimately I suppose "no one wins a civil war" could be a lesson you walk away from this story with. But if so, this movie lands squarely in the "it would be bad if this happened to America" and I think its smarter than that. I would say my takeaway from it is that journalism/raising awareness has no particular political effect, much less a guaranteed positive one, and that it is only a bulwark of democracy if it is done in a way that is intended as such and within the context of an engaged and active populace and government institutions commited to freedom.

Or put simpler ; CNN can't save you, but they'll take your photo if you try to save yourself.

Overall, I enjoyed it. Probably more than I would have if it was trying to Say Something.

While combat looks awesome it is also clearly a meat grinder. People die for no reason, there are tactics, they are a meat grinder. The Spectacle of Combat is undercut by the Spectacle of War Reporters Creating The Spectacle of Combat. I feel like the complete nihilism of the film creates in a sense the most affective form of this story you can without having some kind of ideology to ground it in meaning. Or rather, the story is about how without an ideology of some kind the war is just going to be nonsensical. The loss of meaning in the chaos, "truth is the first casuality of war" is an interesting angle to take, especially since it is not the loss of the ability to speak truth (our characters are journalists. Sociopathic sure, but not liars), but the loss of there being any meaningful truth to tell.

And so the reporters are limited to nihilistic spectacle. Which limits the movie to nihilistic spectacle.

Maybe if I were American and had been taught from a young age that USA was eternal the thought of it collapsing into a bunch of warring states would be more shocking. Individual communities on the fringes being seized and ‘protected’ by local militias would seem like a betrayal, rather than an extension of current small town politics. The president’s brains being splattered on the white house carpet (spoilers) would seem unthinkable, rather than likely.

But if that was the goal of this movie, it missed and hit a better story. The collapse of a country into nothingness because there was no reason for that country not to collapse. It no longer believed in anything, it no longer stood for anything. It was just a pile of guns and people and money and leaders vying for the top of that pile. And if you have no ideology, no deeper purpose or hope for your community, only patriotism and power, that’s all a state can ever be.

Sic Semper Tyrannus. Sic Semper Imperium.