BLOOD IN THE AIR, OUR SOUL ON FIRE

MEDITATIONS ON ALEX GARLAND’S CIVIL WAR, AND THE GIFT/CURSE OF A LIFE SPENT BEARING WITNESS TO THE HORROR

AUTHOR-TURNED-FILMMAKER’S NOTE: Generally, when I’m working on a piece of art, I take a break from other artists who are working in similar forms. Which is to say that, when writing a novel, the last thing I wanna do is read somebody else’s novel. If I’m writing songs, I don’t wanna hear other people’s songs right now. And when I’m making a movie, watching anyone else’s movie heads straight to the bottom of my list.

One reason is, I don’t need to be distracted. Creating is kind of an immersive occupation, and my tendency is to go all-in. Another is that I don’t wanna be influenced when I’m at my most pried-open, because the goal is to create something that’s not derivative, I don’t need other people’s words, notes, or pictures in my head. 

But the fact is that I work in those forms because I loooooove those forms. Love books, love music, love movies. So if I’m writing a book, I watch movies like crazy. If I’m making a movie, books are my go-to drug. And unless I’m writing music, all my ears wanna do is dance.

That said: every once in a while, I will make an exception. 

So while I’m maybe a day-anna-half from done with my “paper edit” of The Great Divide – memorizing and logging the hours of footage, to start actual editing by the middle of the week – I had to hit the theater for opening weekend of a film I did not wish to have spoiled by the buzzkilling blather of the yammering class. 

Turns out I have a lot to say. So please stay tuned for my OWN classless yammering, below! 

I was eight when I saw my first human death. A busload, in fact, careening off an overpass and plummeting downward, directly behind me. I turned just in time to see the screaming faces through the shattering glass, in the instant before the whole thing was enveloped by a cloud of smoke and dust, receding in the rear view mirror.

We had just rolled out of Ministro Pistarini International Airport, down the Ruta Nacional, en route to Buenos Aires. Less than ten minutes in Argentina proper, and already there was blood in the air.

I would see a lot more blood, in person, over the next four years (1966-1970), even before the military junta, and the tanks rolling down the streets. In a country where even the traffic cops carried submachine guns, there were no illusions about the limits of power. If you had the guns, your power knew no limits. Unless, of course, the next guy had more.

For example: there was a little bodega I walked past every day, on my way to and from school. And for the first six months, there was a car that the city had left parked out front. Turns out it had belonged to a couple of geniuses who thought that robbing a bank might be a good idea. Forgetting, I guess, those aforementioned submachine guns.

The cops had Bonnie-and-Clyded the living shit out of that car, and then left it by the curb like a head on a spike. The message was clear. If you do this, we won’t just kill you. We will kill the fuck out of you, and then rub it in the faces of everyone you’ve ever known. 

Every day, I would walk past that blood-caked death sedan, peering through the bullet holes that swiss-cheesed its exterior, and going, “Ah. So that’s where this bullet came in, hit the front seat upholstery here, and caused the blood to spray that last lingering shard of windshield there.” A forensic pathologist, by the age of nine.

Other times, it was not so far removed. There was a super-cute little six-year-old kid who used to shine shoes at the train station in San Isidro. The Americans, in particular, favored him, possibly because of his beaming smile and soft blond hair, which they loved to tousle as they gave him his tip. 

This, of course, made the other shoe-shines jealous. So one day, they beat him to death with his own wooden shoe shine box, then fled as I came up the stairs, now awash in the river of his fresh blood and brains.

What I learned, as a child, was that it was my job to bear witness to the horror. To carry that shadow, and to honor it by expressing it clearly. Unflinchingly. No matter how much it hurt.

Which brings us, at last, to the film at hand.

Bearing witness is at the broken, thundering heart of Alex Garland’s astonishing Civil War. It’s a brilliant film – profound and unspeakably timely – that’s being absurdly lambasted online, sight unseen, by people who should but don’t want to know better, working purely from their own wild assumptions: that it’s Trump-flavored fascist agitprop on the one hand, or virtue signal-packed liberal hand-wringing on the other, or just testosterone-flavored chaos porn for muscleheads to jack off to while they wait for the next Michael Bay explode-o-thon.

In point of fact, it ain’t none of those things. Takes no political sides. Is in nobody’s pocket. Has no party’s ax to grind. And is definitely not getting off on all the naked atrocity. 

Instead, what we get is a riveting ground-level portrait of a freshly authoritarian America blowing itself to smithereens, as seen through the eyes of battle-scarred and haunted photo-journalist Lee (a heartbreakingly hollowed-out Kirsten Dunst, never better). She has covered brutal foreign wars for decades, brought back award-winning signature shots of the mayhem, in the hopes that we would learn from these mistakes. Yet here she is, back on U.S. soil, where evidently we have learned precisely nothing. And a three-term President who has journalists shot on sight is hunkered down in a White House under siege, with secessionist forces (from California and Texas, no less) moving in to reclaim whatever’s left of the nation.

Lee and her adrenaline junkie reporting partner Joel (Wagner Moura, cracklingly vibrant and engaged) want to get this renegade President on the record, before it’s too late. So they journey from the relative safety of NYC (if you don’t mind terrorist bombings and riots in the streets), taking the back roads to our nation’s capitol in the hope of surviving the trip.

They are joined – against Lee’s better judgment – by their venerable, wise, but dangerously out-of-shape mentor Sammy (a radiant, no-bullshit Buddha-like Stephen McKinley Henderson) and a very green but extremely determined young woman named Jesse (the scene-stealingly incandescent Cailee Spaeny), who desperately wants to follow in Lee’s footsteps.

What follows is a road trip movie through our worst possible national nightmare, where you can’t tell one set of camouflaged battle fatigues from another amongst all the tracer fire. (At one point, when a sniper pinned down under fire is asked what side he’s shooting at, he rolls his eyes and says something like, “How the fuck should I know? He’s trying to kill us, so we’re trying to kill him.”)

This is the point of Garland’s film: that once you let the genie of armed violence out of the bottle, everybody gets caught up in the crossfire frenzy. And we are all collateral damage. 

I gotta tell ya, I spent a good bit of my time in the theater windshield-wiping the tears from my eyes, cheeks, and beard. Partly out of childhood PTSD. But mostly out of terror that such a fate might befall us. Because I know for a fact that it could.

See if you can spot the culprit! (Hints: tie askew, faraway look in the eyes.)

On June 8th of 1970, I had just turned thirteen. It was, as I recall, the last week of school. And one of my friends was having a birthday party, right down the street from the Escuela Lincoln in the suburb of La Lucila, about a dozen train stops from downtown Buenos Aires.

So we went to the party straight from class, all of us still in our stupid school uniforms. We’d just received the first albums by Led Zeppelin and Santana, so they were dominating the turntable as we blew through the snacks and goofed around, awaiting cake.

Then the phone rang, and it was my dad. Which was weird, because my dad never ever ever called. He was busy with his job at the State Department. He was busy with his new girlfriend. He was busy collecting hi-fi equipment, or golfing, or writing tax loopholes for foreign governments. (Honestly, I had no idea what the fuck he was doing. It was not like we talked a lot.)

But here he was on the phone. And what he had to say was this, in a tone that was all business. 

“You have to come home. Right now.”

“But…” Slightly stunned. “We haven’t even opened presents yet!” 

“Now,” he said. And hung up the phone.

So I turned to my friends and said, “Dad says I gotta go. See you guys tomorrow!” And headed promptly out the door. 

It was a sunny day. I was a mopey teen. I had no reason to believe that I wouldn’t see them tomorrow. Or that my world was about to turn upside-down.

But as the train rolled into Retiro Station, I couldn’t help noticing the panic in the streets. And as I stepped outside, onto Avenida Del Libertador, I suddenly understood why everyone was running and screaming.

There were tanks in the street. Armored, military tanks. And they were rolling straight toward us. To either side, they were flanked by men with machine guns. Not just cops now, but full-on soldiers.

They were headed to the Casa Rosada: the Presidential mansion, where Presidente Ongania resided, having deposed the previous office holder and established his own cruel, dictatorial reign. 

There, they would surround him and inform him that he had but two choices: either a) surrender the presidency, grab a helicopter outta Dodge, and go on with his nice evil life in exile; or b) he could try to resist, in which case they would blow his tits off, turn his meat into slurry, and drag what was left of his carcass down the street like a fucking parade.

Needless to say, he took the chopper, and lived to the ripe old age of 81. (Dying also on June 8th, in a weird anniversarial twist of fate.) 

Of course, I had no way of knowing this. I was too busy running down the street with the rest of the screaming horde. Not screaming myself, but overwhelmed with excitement, and thanking God we were being herded in the direction of my apartment building. Into which I quickly ducked, and grabbed the elevator up.

But when I opened the front door, the living room was empty. No furniture. No throw rugs. No art on the walls. Nothing.

That was when the terror set in.

Come home. Right now. My father’s voice in my head. For the first time, putting two and two together. 

“Dad?” I called out. There was no answer. Just my own voice, bouncing off the naked walls.

We now lived in a railroad apartment. Which meant a living room entrance, then a long hallway at the back. Kitchen. Bathroom. Bedrooms at the end. 

I crossed the living room, painfully aware of how loud my footsteps echoed. Peered down the long hallway. 

The kitchen was entirely stripped, as well. 

That’s when I froze, as my thoughts slammed together like tailgating dipshits in a twelve-car freeway pileup. Was my dad still here? Was he dead? Had I taken too long? Had he left without me? 

At the end of the hall, shadows moved across the walls. I heard voices speaking Spanish, and the terror blossoms bloomed.

Then I recognized my father’s voice, sprinted all the way down and around the bend. There he was, instructing a couple of men with suitcases. When he saw me, he had no visible reaction. No hug. No “Thank God.” I don’t think he even nodded.

He just pointed at my bedroom, which was completely stripped bare, except for one box of Creepy and Eerie magazines in the middle of the floor.

“You can take one,” he said.

As I recall, I grabbed Eerie # 14, which wasn’t the best, but was hot off the press. Then we got into the service elevator in the back and took it down to the basement garage, where a dark sedan with blackout windows impatiently waited.

From there, we were driven across town to La Boca – the mouth of the Rio de la Plata – where we grabbed a ferry boat to Montevideo, Uruguay. All of our things were put into storage, in a warehouse which was promptly burned to the ground. 

But we got out with our lives, which was more than a lot of other people could say. Especially the tens of thousands who wound up in mass graves over the subsequent decade, discovered and exhumed only once Argentina’s bloodthirsty “Generalissimo of the Month Club” shenanigans finally drew to a bitter end…

I do not regret these experiences, harrowing as they were. Because they peeled back the mask, told me the ugly truths behind the comforting lies we protectively weave around our children.

We don’t want them to know how bad shit gets, because we hope they’ll never need to. And wouldn’t that be nice.

As for me, I needed to know.

Otherwise, I could not bear witness.

I bring this up in the context of Garland’s film, just to remind everyone that this, too, is possible. It’s happening right now, all over the world. In Ukraine. In Gaza. In Sudan. 

And if we’re not very careful, it can happen here, too. 

The great triumph of Alex Garland’s Civil War is that it’s so honest, matter-of-fact, and 100% believable in the moment-to-moment. There are no false notes, no grand moral pronouncements, no happy horseshit to candy-coat the message with Hollywood bells and whistles.

This is a serious film, and it’s here to inform us – if we didn’t know already – that we do not want this. We do not want extremists to pull us over the edge, because once we start falling, it is really hard to stop.

The film itself is impeccably made, with superlative craft and conscience. It’s breathtakingly shot, breakneck-paced, and vivid with a visceral muscularity that harkens back to Oliver Stone’s equally masterful 1986 classic, Salvador. Also about a photo-journalist, bearing witness to the endless cycles of corruption and slaughter to which we, as a species, are tragically wont.

Civil War is, to my mind, a fucking masterpiece. A love letter to all that is best in the human spirit An unflinching mirror for us at our worst. A ringing endorsement of a free and honest press.

And I wish everyone in America would see it.

No matter how hard it hurts.