In the film, Civil War (2024), Texas
and California have “tecaexited” the U.S., to use the European recondite ideological
parlance for secession that began with “Brexit” in order to evade “seceding
from the Union.” The U.S. president in the film repeatedly lies to the public
that the secessionists are on the run; in actuality, as the film progresses,
the three journalists, Lee, Joel, and Sammy, along with their young protégé, Jessie,
eventually witness up-close the rebel military conquering the White House in
order to shoot the president in the Oval Office. The film provides only scant
clues as to the reason for the secession; the rebel who shots Tony, a friend of
the three journalists, obviously detests foreigners and delights in “real Americans,”
such as are from Colorado and Missouri. This could be a reference to Trump’s “MAGA”
movement, so the film is possibly playing out Trump’s followers revolting;
historically, on January 6, 2021, some of them rioted, though admittedly did
not as a revolt so to topple the U.S. Government, but rather to make a
statement by temporarily stopping Congress from counting the States’ respective
electoral ballots for president. Even so, it is too great an inferential leap
to conclude that the two States seeking to exit the U.S. in the film are MAGA,
even though MAGA ideology and the “woke” ideology clashed in early (and mid) 2020s
when the film was being put together. Rather than being about contending,
violently clashing ideologies, the film is about how violent our species is
when not suppressed by an overarching police presence that can act as a deterrent.
In Leviathan, Thomas
Hobbes, a seventeenth-century European political philosopher, argues that in
order to stave off a short, nasty and brutish life filled with recurrent
threats of theft and violence, a person, together with the others, must cede all
political (and even theological interpretive) sovereignty to a governing
authority, whether a king or an assembly. The only right retained even against
such a power is that of self-preservation, though the sovereign has the right
to put a rebel to death. Similarly, Machiavelli wrote The Prince to give
rulers strategic “Machiavellian” advice in the context of political fighting so
those rulers could survive in power even ruthlessly. That philosopher’s History
of Florence left out such advice because the context in the book was stable
rather than violent. The message of these two philosophers is that left to our
own devices in a state of political nature, we can regress to our ruthless savage
nature, which is always there but latent in a societal context in which a
sovereign power acts as a suppressant and deterrent.
In the film, as the three
journalists and the girl drive west then south from New York, ending up in
Washington, D.C. to witness the secessionist army shooting its way into the
White House to kill the president, indications of small-scale violence are very
evident. At a gas station, a man holding a machine gun shows Jessie where two “looters,”
too bloodied to be recognizable, are hanging, while still alive, out back. The
man even agrees to be photographed by Lee showing him standing between the two
hanging men. The subtle message is that he has nothing to fear in being held
accountable for shooting the two victims as Jesse and Lee are still there to
witness. Man’s savagery goes beyond just killing other humans; not even severe
cruelty is sufficiently resisted if there is no fear of having to pay a price
in terms of lost freedom or pain.
After Jessie foolishly
switches cars through open windows as both are being driven fast and is taken
prisoner by two rebels who are operating independently in having killed a
truck-load of people, one of those two men shoots Tony and Bohai because they are
not “real Americans.” The sheer arbitrariness of the acts to Joel causes him to
momentary react angrily before suddenly realizing that the shooter is so
irrational that anyone could be shot next, even Joel. Fortunately, Sammy
comes to the rescue by driving the journalists’ car into the shooter, but at a
cost, for the other shooter kills Sammy as he is driving away with the other
journalists.
Relative to these isolated cases
of wanton, unjustified violence by individuals, the coordinated military attack
on the White House by the rebel army looks civilized. In fact, it is
astonishing just how embedded Joel, Lee, and Jessie are with the soldiers as
they are shooting at U.S. soldiers and the Secret Service agents. That the soldiers
who are about to shoot the president in the Oval Office pause so Joel can get a
last quote from the president suggests that the cause is political rather than
just for the sake of getting to be violent and kill. In other words, the indications
and instances of isolated killings in the countryside en route reveal our species
violent, unimpeded nature more so than do the scenes of army units fighting
against opposing units.
By implication, political
movements in the early 2020s to “defund” local police departments in some of
the American States seem wrongheaded, for even if police-power is too much for
human nature to wield properly, human nature itself, as depicted in the film,
attests that having a police department is a necessary evil that a society
cannot (and should not) do without, and, furthermore, that the strictures that
only being in a society can provide are also necessary, for in the proverbial
state of nature, which can exist even within a society (e.g., neighborhoods on
the south side of Chicago), human nature is too prone not only to violence, but
also to cruelty—even to the point of enjoying it. Nietzsche argues that the origins
historically of punishment lie in the debtor-creditor relationship, wherein creditors
found pleasure in taking “a pound of flesh” strangely as if that pleasure from inflicting
pain were equivalent and thus sufficiently compensating. Nietzsche states that the
rendering of such an equivalence is “strange,” but he may simply be discounting
or ignoring the savage nature of our species underneath the patina of civilized
Man.
It should not be lost on the
viewers, however, that glimpses of the finer qualities of human nature are
included in the film. In the camp in the stadium, for example, camera shots
showing people being docile, even kind to each other, are likely meant to show
this contrast to the film’s leitmotif. Lee’s self-sacrifice at the end of the
film in saving Jessie’s life by taking the bullet herself when Jessie is in the
line of fire in a hallway in the White House attests to the sheer normative distance
that exists within human nature, for, building on a famous line that is
in the book, The Killer Angels, which is about the U.S. Civil War,
if we are angels, then we are surely killer angels, though this does not mean
that violence and cruelty exhaust human nature for we are capable of
self-sacrificial love for other human beings. Though even if we are “made” to
be creatures of love, still we have not managed to shake our innate penchant
for violence and even cruelty. The true civil war is perhaps that which exists within
each of us.
