Does Civil War count as a horror film? I was going to write about Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (for which Demi Moore certainly deserves all the laurels), but it turns out that something about this new wave of grotesque body horror films, reminiscent of 1980s films like The Blob and Society, and David Cronenberg’s work, doesn’t quite click for me – or maybe it does, and it’s just difficult to capture the way they utilise disgust to invoke horror in words. Alex Garland, director of Civil War, is well-versed in horror – he’s written 28 Days Later and Sunshine, and directed Annihilation and Men. What all these films share, on some level, is transformation on some levels – sometimes literally, physically, sometimes more esoterically. A specific experience, or a historical event, or trauma, change society, a group of people, an individual protagonist. This isn’t limited to horror – it’s general fuel for storytelling, to depict impact, but I find it easier to consider Civil War is the context of what Garland portrayed as the true horror of 28 Days Later (not zombies, but the loss of humanity in reaction to them, and the attempts by the main characters to hold on to connection in spite of it).
I think what makes Civil War interesting isn’t any question about its depiction of the United States in its titular rift: there are many debates about Garland’s vagueness, his non-commitment to outlining ideologies according to what the viewers might expect if they’d extrapolated from the current moment into the future. The ambiguous image of an antifa massacre that can be read in two different ways is deliberate, but so are the two moments of the film where the vagueness is replaced by the very conscious choice to model a speech by the President (Nick Offerman, who was also very good in Garland’s Devs) to resemble the jumbled, histrionic words of Donald Trump, and to have Jesse Plemons’ character decide who dies based on their place of birth, how truly “American” he considers them, as he is standing over the mass grave of his victims. The driving force behind the film isn’t a story about the transformation of a democracy into the chaotic, violent reality of a civil war. It’s the transformation of Cailee Spaeny’s Jessie into a war photographer who no longer flinches, or considers the moral cost of making a shot instead of intervening in the unfolding horrors.
In that regard, Civil War is almost a straightforward Bildungsroman of sorts, delivering a set of situations (stations of a kind) for the characters to pass through to arrive at the final image that they have set out to capture. The goal that propels them forward, with disregard of their own safety, is a career-making scoop: the tides of war have turned enough that an end is in sight, and the embattled President will likely not survive once the Western Front troops reach DC. Kirsten Dunst’s seasoned photographer Lee wants to capture a final shot of him, Wagner Moura’s reporter Joel will ask him hard-hitting questions, just before the end. Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a journalist for “what is left of the New York Times” tags along because he cannot stop, even though he outlines the way that they will all certainly die in the attainment of their goal – shot or garrotted on the lawn of the White House by Secret Service Agents (here the film captures how the adrenaline rush of being in the midst of it is an addiction that none of these doomed characters can quit). Spaeny’s Jessie, in her early twenties, stumbles into their car in a way that seems accidental: she spots her idol, Lee, during a protest. Uncredentialled, she doesn’t have the press vest that keeps Lee and Joel safe (the idea that it makes a difference makes Civil War feel almost too optimistic). Lee assumes responsibility for her, as if Jessie’s idolisation of her and her profession mean that she has to, but she also seems to see her own instincts in her, and help her become better. She is still horrified to find that Joel has decided to take Jessie with them into a situation that is inevitably going to cost lives.
Garland deliberately tips his hat to the decision to name Lee: a reference to Lee Miller, war correspondent for British Vogue during the liberation of Paris and the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dachau. It’s one of the odd coincidences of pop cultural history that Ellen Kuras’ Lee, a biography of the photographer, came out last year: championed by Kate Winslet, who stars in the titular role, it’s fascinating to see how close the two performances are. We encounter Kirsten Dunst’s Lee at the height of her career, struggling with the images that are stuck in her mind (it must have been a deliberate decision to have the scene in the bathtub, considering what shot Lee Miller is most famous for). She doesn’t speak about the cost to Jessie: her teaching is about finding a shot, identifying what would make a good image, and how to stay as safe as possible so as not to be a burden to the others. In one of their first stops, the group ends up in a gas station, and Jessie follows one of the armed men to a car wash, where two “looters” have been strung up. Jessie is scared out of her mind, but Lee follows them and immediately assembles an image. While Lee photographs, the man asks them to decide what should happen to the captives: death or life. Neither of them makes a choice, and Jessie struggles with not having intervened, or saved a life (Sammy points out that the outcome would have likely been determined anyway). Worse, she couldn’t even bring herself to take a single photograph, a moment wasted. But she learns quickly. Lee imparts on her that their job isn’t to intervene, but to tell the story truthfully: and Jessie, eloquently, asks if Lee would capture Jessie’s death.
The entire film turns around that question: it shows the camaraderie of shared peril, the necessary light moments in-between necessary to mentally survive. Lee and Joel have been friends and partners for years, and they both care deeply for Sammy. And yet, their entire job depends on putting themselves in danger, and pointing a camera and witnessing death and atrocity, including when they become part of the story themselves. Holding a camera means not holding a gun, but to take the shot, Lee and Jessie can’t act, they can only document, which leads to a thorny question about culpability. The decision to pursue the story at all cost is juxtaposed with Jessie’s and Lee’s parents, who are living out the war on their respective farms, “pretending this isn’t happening”, which is as close to a moral judgment of specific actions either of these characters get (looking away from atrocity deliberately). The choice that Garland makes here is interesting: the longer Lee travels with Jessie, the less she follows her own paradigm. When Jessie and another journalist they meet on the road are kidnapped by Jesse Plemons’ group of soldiers, Lee watches them through the lens of her camera. She sees as they kneel down, as the moment of execution approaches. By her own rules, she should stay where she is and take the shot, but instead she decides to intervene and attempt a rescue (Jessie survives, the Hong Kong-born journalist is shot). They narrowly escape, but Sammy is fatally shot during the heroic rescue, and Lee from that moment on seems incapable to continue as she was before. She deletes the final shot of her friend. She photographs less and less, just as Jessie gets more and more confident and reckless. Whatever cold-bloodedness is inherently required to do the work has become inaccessible to Lee: she is no longer unaffected, and she has taught Jessie all she could teach.
The film culminates in the final battle to reach the White House. Lee, Jessie and Joel follow as the troops press forward under heavy fire, and enter along with them. Jessie is at the peak of her recklessness, disregarding considerations of safety to get her shots. Lee ends up saving her life, putting herself in the line of fire, and dying: Jessie is the one who photographs her, and it’s not even a death that the film affords them any time to contemplate. Lee is now just one of the many bodies on the floor, and the group moves forward to the ultimate goal, the last moments of the President of the United States.
This decision not to ponder Jessie here, or to show in any way if and how this death affects her, is so effective – it’s the logical outcome of everything that has come before, but also opens up questions that the film deliberately doesn’t attempt to answer. What has Jessie lost in the transformation from someone horrified at her own indecision to save a life to someone who can unflinchingly point a camera at a dying friend? What has Lee gained, in changing so radically in the process of caring for Jessie, even though she dies in the end? In the final moments, Joel gets his quote – the dying words from the President, where he asks for help, words recorded for posterity but ultimately of no consequence, as they appeal to someone who is only there to create a record. Jessie gets the money shot, and completes her transformation to become who she idolised.
2024, directed by Alex Garland, starring Kirsten Dunst, Cailee Spaeny, Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Nelson Lee, Nick Offerman.