This afternoon I walked out of a matinee of the new movie "Civil War" and checked my phone to discover that Iran had launched a drone attack on Israel. It's not a civil war, but it's war, and people will suffer just the same as a result.
On the way home, I trailed a car with a more-thoughtful-than-usual bumper sticker: "People are more important than beliefs."
That's a belief, too.
Inside my little left-of-center social media circle there's been a fair amount of preemptive contempt for "Civil War" — based, I think, on awkward marketing and also a suspicion that the film might not have the "right" politics. California and Texas are on the same side in this cinematic conflict, and how the hell does that happen? Is this an attempt at both-sidesism? We all know that if the United States has a civil war -- again -- who the bad guys will be, right?
Right?
If you're looking for a movie to confirm your priors, this really isn't it. Oh, there are small hints of perspective: Nick Offerman, our president, is finishing out his third term in office and refusing to leave. His voice isn't Trumpian, but his rhetoric definitely is: At one point he gives a speech in which he says that "some are saying" he's about to win one of the greatest military victories in human history.
But again, "Civil War" isn't about that — or about the abstractions of "good" or "bad" or ideology. It's about what happens on the ground when those abstractions cause us to start murdering each other.
It's about fear.
It's about adrenaline, too.
It's about vomit and blood, and mass graves, and evil men who delight in the opportunity to commit slaughter just because.
It's about death. Because war — civil war — is about who can deliver and sustain the most death before the other side gives up. For the people on the ground, doing the delivering and sustaining, it’s almost entirely about that once the violence starts.
It's about individual deaths. Tragedies, each one. And it's about mass graves.
And it's about the people who swallow their fears and document it all for us, so that we can see without — hopefully — suffering too much ourselves.
The abstractions matter, of course. There really is such a thing as "good" and "bad." But it's the victors who get to write that history, and this movie places us at a point where we can't see who is going to do the writing. There's not room enough to have that perspective. We can only see what's directly around us.
And even if the victors really are good — hopefully they are, though we don't really know at the end of this movie — the final image suggests that something terrible is lost even in victory, even when the good guys win.
People are more important than their beliefs. But you'd never know it from the way people act.
A final note: It occurs to me there's a far-greater-than-zero chance that Donald Trump will be inaugurated as our president next January. And similar odds that two months later, "Civil War" will be honored at the Oscars.
It's a prospective irony I don't relish.
As someone who is both knowledgeable of and invested in national political debates, Joel, did the studiously apolitical, ground-level-soldiers-and-journalists approach of the film bother you at all? The trailers look great to me, but I wonder if I'd be mildly annoyed through the whole thing, always asking "Why?"