Civil War: Confronting Terrible Futures
Thinking the unthinkable to prevent the worst
On the evening after Donald Trump’s ear was grazed by a would-be assassin’s bullet at a campaign rally, I sat down to watch a movie about a possible end state of political violence in America, Alex Garland’s Civil War. The film follows a group of journalists on their way to DC to interview the president before rebel forces can fight their way there and kill him. It’s not cryptic about its central message: the main character says that her war photography, until now conducted in faraway countries, was serving as a warning to us: “Don’t do this”; the film serves the same role. We’re living in an age of heightened political violence and federal-state dysfunction, so this warning is increasingly urgent.
The Film as a Cultural Artifact
Before the film even came out, it was making waves. It was through the online chatter around the trailers etc that I learned that right-wing conspiracy theory aficionados considered it the latest example of “predictive programming”, where elites use popular media to normalize ideas they plan to shortly carry out, in order to pre-emptively dull the outrage and resistance of the general public. Despite this being ridiculous on its face1, it shows the growing cultural static to imagine or illuminate possible futures. It’s plausible that big public futures projects could regularly see the kind of opposition that things like the UN Development Programme Millenium Development Goals do today.
I hope everyone likes a long detour for a personal story: this movie taught me some powerful futures lessons before it even came out. I was in a futures session at work2 this spring and was trying to illustrate how people get so certain about what is and isn’t possible that they basically turn off their imagination. I decided in the moment to show the Civil War trailer to the other 4 people in the room (a 5th participant had stepped out for a meeting), so I could talk afterward about how many people online dismissed it with something like “this is stupid, because Texas and California could never join forces like that”. First lesson: despite this trailer sparking tons of conversations in my Futures and news/political circles, none of the 4 similarly West Coast urban professionals had even heard of this movie; I need to remember to slow down and make fewer assumptions about shared cultural touchpoints3. But, after a moment of people digesting the intensity of the trailer, the first, entirely unprompted comment was “it’s a little funny that they had Texas and California on the same side”! OK great, so then we spent a couple of minutes brainstorming what kinds of changes would make that plausible (continued Hispanic demographic growth, other kinds of migration or demographic change, both states have been pretty grumpy lately about federal interference, the simple fact that California has more Trump voters than Texas, etc). Overall it was a good, mind-expanding conversation. Then person #5 walked in, and I said we had just been talking about the Civil War trailer. He said he had heard of the movie but hadn’t seen anything about it, so we immediately watched the trailer again. First words out of his mouth: “yeah but Texas and California could never be on the same side, that really detracts from the film and shows an outsider’s perspective”. I’ve never seen a teaching moment like it before or since.
The film has several specific and general futures connections I want to explore. Spoilers below, etc — by now you should know how this works.
The Film as Plausible Future
In many ways, the film is much more straightforward4 than other Alex Garland efforts such as Devs. The plot of the outer journey is disarmingly straightforward - the summary I gave in the first paragraph is explained in the first 10 minutes, and then that’s exactly what happens with no deviations. The inner journey is about the almost pathological detachment required of journalists, documenting atrocities and outrages but not feeling affected by or responsible for them, acting as passive sense organs for the rest of humanity; the paradox being that actually investing in your work and feeling the gravity of events as a full human or moral agent makes you unfit for the job, to be replaced by the next generation who you have mentored but who doesn’t yet share your sensibility. This is similar to the way futurists have the responsibility to present people with images of possible futures to spur them to new thoughts and actions, and the way that some foresight professionals feel exhausted and worn down by the manifold unpleasant futures that look increasingly plausible5.
There are still some signature Garland flourishes, such as jarring sound/music choices, but this time around it’s usually upbeat contemporary music over very discordant scenes6. The visuals are striking — everyday America locations like car washes, farmhouses, and office buildings become the site of violence and even atrocities. By taking events we’re used to seeing or thinking about “over there”, such as regular power outages, refugee camps, riots over distribution of water, etc, and showing them in an American context not only as possible but to some extent as an extension of existing signs of societal decay such as abandoned malls, the film forces viewers to grapple with what most people think of as things at or just beyond the knife-edge of plausibility. I remember reading stories at the beginning of the Ukraine war, about Ukrainians trying to work their web design jobs from home with intermittent power outages and dealing with grocery shortages, and it had a similar effect on me of taking war from being an abstract thing that happened to other people already leading very different lives into something much more familiar7.
One of the things that the film depicts clearly is how a sudden shift from peacetime to military chaos affects different groups so differently. Some people would welcome the collapse of the social order, because they already have violent power fantasies and would get the opportunity to enact them. Many people (probably most) would love to pretend that nothing is happening and maintain as much routine as possible, enabled by people (rather than institutions) maintaining violence at the (much smaller) boundary. The very young (and their caregivers), the old, and the disabled have more difficulty and fewer options when trying to flee violence, bringing to mind the words of Jesus about coming afflictions: “Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days!…For in those days there will be suffering, such as has not been from the beginning of the creation that God created until now and never will be.” (Mark 13:17,19) All this suggests the importance, when describing or sharing future scenarios, to talk about how each future differentially affects different groups — a personas approach, or maybe focusing on the stakeholders from the domain assessment.
Overall, Civil War is incendiary and offensive - it’s intentionally provocative to unsettle people. Wild cards, in futures and fiction, serve as warnings, not predictions, and as an opportunity to reconsider some of our assumptions. There’s nobody to root for in Civil War, and I’m not exactly sure how to describe how I felt by the end. It strikes me as good filmmaking, but mostly it just opens a gnawing fear in the mind. It’s our job to turn that into actions that move us toward a different future.
Specifically for this film, a civil war almost invariably means that things are not, in fact, going according to the plans of the elites, without positing some elaborate 4-dimensional chess situation.
I can’t wait for the day I can talk more about this!
This is personally challenging, because I have a liberal arts education and a broad set of interests and am prone to pepper conversations with subjects from the Peloponnesian War to Yeats to Russian spy whales.
And less pretentious, unfortunately.
This reminds me of the advice Jim Dator gives to participants when running a futures visioning session:
Whatever you may initially feel about the future into which you have been so suddenly placed, please suspend your disbelief!... For the next few minutes, make the best of the future you find yourself in, just as you obviously do in the present. Don't argue over whether you think it will happen as described or not, or whether you like it or not. Please just accept it, and try to respond positively (according to whatever you think is "the best you can do") to the world in which you find yourself. Don't dwell on the "negative" aspects except to understand them, and to develop a "positive" response to them. It just doesn't get any better than this!
My guess is that the sound for those scenes didn’t advance the plot and he decided to put something in to heighten the fact that Americans are fighting and killing each other instead of driving to work and taking kids to soccer practice. However, I’m not sure it works all that well, coming across as weird.
Most accusations you might make at this point of privilege, Eurocentrism, American exceptionalism, etc, are valid. My point is that there are tens of millions of people in the same circumstances, that need a very specific kind of a firm shake to pierce the manufactured normalcy field.