‘Civil War’ Exposes the USA as Vincible
Photo by Jay Dixit
This month, the movie ‘Civil War’ opened in theaters with a nuanced, but clear message: ‘America’ as you know it can, very well, soon come to an end. The casting of a Brazilian star, Wagner Moura, is calculated, highlighting the ambiguity and complexity of racial relations in the US. Jesse Plemons’ brilliantly terrifying character poses an all too real question to Moura’s character when confronted with the information that they are “American Journalists”, questioning “what kind of American are you, central, south?” Brazilians aren’t easy to place in the US-American narrative of what ‘Latinos’ are. As the most substantial non-Hispanic population in South America, all an ‘American’ supremacist needs to know is that we are not white. Narrative, though, is a powerful, if not the most powerful, weapon of war.
There is plenty of brutal physical violence in the movie, as is expected of war. This signals two things. One is, what does it feel like to witness the horror of war, which is currently ongoing in the world, but in US soil instead? And the second is, even surrounded by heavy duty military weapons, narrative proves to be the most deadly.
The population of the United States is desensitized to the brutality of what its government endorses and perpetrates abroad. Isn’t it horrific to witness the obliteration of everything you hold dear? To have loved ones die, your most powerful institutions rendered obsolete, and your future coming to a halt; this is what this movie explores.
Most interestingly, the film explores the difficulty of embracing a coherent narrative that explains all of this annihilation, or somehow justifies the bloodshed. While the president continues to spout falsities to the public, supremacist foot soldiers despise (and kill) anyone who’s not born and bred in the United States of America, and revolutionaries just kill anyone who’s actively trying to kill them. In a way, it’s as simple as that. But, at the same time, there is little to no explanation for any of the violence.
Wagner Moura’s previous movies in Brazil have been notoriously politically ambiguous, and this one follows suit. He has never shown interest in making simplistic leftist propaganda, but he absolutely finds it necessary to spark a debate about the absurdity of the political situations we find ourselves in. Even if that means leaving room for opposite political interpretations of these stories. There is no better way to convey this nuanced stance than through the work of impossibly impartial journalists.
The way journalists build narrative often relies on the belief that this narrative stems from a neutral standpoint. In theory, journalism tells the story, it doesn’t influence or endorse the events it reports on. This movie may not explicitly claim the White House should be obliterated, but it does seek to show how it can be blown to smithereens. The justification for this could simply be that all the war enacted and fought abroad will eventually come home. Kirsten Dunst’s character describes this as the failed purpose of her work as an international war photographer — it was an ignored warning at home. Hence, journalism does have a political purpose, because without purpose, no one would risk their lives to do it.
Mastering the art of creating a convincing narrative is time-consuming, useful, powerful, and considerably more challenging when it seeks to be truthful. It will never be an immutable truth, because it is, nonetheless, a construction. But it is true to something; to values, to honest objectives, or to a transparent purpose. ‘Civil War’ shows what can happen when we neglect these objectives, lose the clarity of these values, and give up on the purpose of why we do what we do. The way we interpret events or justifications for actions is directly linked to the narrative built around them. This narrative is not the only one, and it’s not supreme. It was created by someone for a purpose. We choose, consciously or not, to subscribe to one over any other.
The first scene in ‘Civil War’ is a depiction of how the narrative the White House spouts, of US American exceptionalism, is not convincing anymore — not even to the president, whose job is to sell the story. At the heart of the political dispute, which descends into war in US soil, is the fact that Americans stopped buying the portrayal of ‘America’ as invincible. This shift in narrative is what leads armed revolutionary forces to take it over. In the film, we don’t need to know who these revolutionaries are, or which presidency it’s supposed to be depicted. What matters is how frail the United States of America, the land of the free, actually is. At the end, there is one simple explanation for it all — if you’re relentlessly shot at, what else is there to do but to shoot back?
Mirna Wabi-Sabi
Mirna is a Brazilian writer, site editor at Gods and Radicals and founder of Plataforma9. She is the author of the book Anarcho-transcreation and producer of several other titles under the P9 press.