June 16, 2025 • by Fei Yang
Abstract
In this paper, I discuss Alex Garland’s 2024 film Civil War in conversation with the objectivity ideal in photojournalism and the ambivalent ethics of war photography and anti-war films. Specifically, I highlight how the claim to objectivity can mask the dehumanization which occurs in representations of violence, even those which aim to critique violence. I begin by outlining how the film articulates norms of effective representation through the usage of stills as well as through the opposing character arcs of Jessie and Lee in terms of how their relationship to photography is affected by violence. I argue that Civil War reflects the present political culture of the US and UK, in which neoliberal ideology represses systemic challenges to policy by encouraging exclusionary consensus-building over political contestation. Politics in the neoliberal era are understood as irrational commitments to illusory ideologies that interfere with the expression of more fundamental truths such as anti-authoritarianism. I connect this background to the film’s efforts to document political conflict objectively, prior to ideological commitments, through immersive close-ups of physical violence. I argue that the film expresses a surface-level realism by dramatizing the brutalization of its marginalized characters and reinforcing a disinterest in understanding their personal history, even as it intends to contest the dehumanization of these groups. Rather than merely neutrally documenting violence, the film’s method of representation enacts its own form of violence by reducing the expression of their humanity. By claiming to view violence objectively, the film obscures the ideologies and dynamics of power inherent in its brutal realism. Civil War thus legitimizes a surface-level understanding of violence as merely physical, failing to recognize its own culpability in structural violence and encouraging its viewers to do the same.
The Scene
Approximately two-thirds of the way through Alex Garland’s 2024 film Civil War, the central characters find their journalist colleagues Jessie and Bohai kneeling next to a mass grave, held at gunpoint by two white men in military uniforms. Joel, Lee and Tony cautiously approach the men, and Joel engages them in conversation, attempting to maintain a casual tone. The lead man asks them what they are doing in the area. Not knowing which side the men are on, Joel comes up with a politically ambiguous lie. Unimpressed, the man flatly asks Joel, “This guy is your colleague?” gesturing at Bohai. Joel nods. The man abruptly shoots and kills Bohai. The camera cuts to Jessie, who is now in shock and hyperventilating. Joel lifts his hands in a pacifist gesture and pleads, “We are American, okay?” The man, irritated and losing patience, replies, “Okay. What kind of American are you?” Joel is silent. “Central American? South American?” “Florida,” Joel finally says. The man, eyebrows raised, retorts, “Central.” He points his gun at Joel, who tenses up, before turning to Jessie and asking her the same question. Jessie is terrified and unable to speak, but Lee calmly invites her to respond. “Missouri,” Jessie then says. He chuckles and nods. “It’s American. Hundred percent.” He then asks Lee, who responds, “Colorado.” “That’s what I’m talking about. American,” he says approvingly. Tony, who has been standing behind Joel and mostly kept out of frame or shown blurrily in the background, now comes into focus. He is sobbing silently and completely frozen with fear. The man notices Tony, walks up to him and asks him where he is from. Tony shakes his head and makes incoherent sounds. The man asks condescendingly, “You can’t speak English?” Tony nods. Pointing his gun directly at his chest, the man says, “Tell me where you’re from. Just make sure it’s clear f***ing English. Okay? Where are you from?” “I’m from Hong Kong,” Tony manages to say. “Oh- China.” The man shoots Tony point-blank. He turns back to the others. The scene erupts into chaos: Lee is crying, Jessie is screaming, and Joel is panicking and yelling at him to stop. The man points his gun at Joel and advances at him while Joel frantically pleads and backs away. Suddenly, the camera cuts to the group’s press van speeding towards them. The van hurtles into the armed men. In the driver’s seat is their colleague Sammy, who yells at them to get in the car. The camera then focuses on Jessie, who fell into the grave amidst the chaos of the collision. In slow motion, she realizes that she has landed in the massive pile of bodies, and her eyes widen in horror. The scene loses all diegetic sound, and eerie, off-tune music begins playing; the entire scene is devoid of music until this moment. An overhead shot shows Jessie amidst the expanse of corpses and follows her as she crawls over them to the edge of the grave. Diegetic sound returns and the scene reverts to normal speed when Joel pulls her out. The group frantically runs to the car and escapes while getting shot at. In the car, Jessie and Joel stare at each other, visibly traumatized. Jessie screams while Joel sobs, but once again, we only hear the blaring music.
Civil War is a dystopian action-war thriller that follows a small group of journalists, consisting of the young and ambitious Jessie, the accomplished and no-nonsense Lee, the wise and grounded Sammy, and the extroverted and slightly unhinged Joel. Their aim is to travel to Washington D.C. to interview the president amidst a civil war in which rebel forces are attempting to overthrow the federal government. Throughout the film, the group encounters and documents various scenes of violence that showcase the nation’s deterioration. In this previously described scene, Garland builds tension and plays with the audience’s anxiety by deploying sudden bursts of violence and highlighting the characters’ emotional distress through close-up shots. It is an immersive and harrowing representation of violence that gives viewers a sense of being actually present at the scene, momentarily forgetting that they are watching a film. In every other scene of violence, the journalists are detached enough from the violence to be able to capture it through photos. This is the only violent scene in the film where no pictures are taken.
Photojournalism in Civil War
The occupation of photojournalism has historically held itself to the norm of objectivity, claiming that the goal of journalism is to be impartial and that the medium of photography is capable of capturing unmediated reality. Michael Schudson (1978) writes that “the belief in objectivity is a faith in ‘facts’, a distrust of ‘values’, and a commitment to their segregation” (6). The concept of objectivity relies on the assumption that truth can be secured through the rules upheld by a professional community, rules which procedurally remove the influence of biases and value judgments (Schudson 1978, 6). According to Fred Ritchin (1984), the prospectus for Life magazine identified the role of the photojournalist as “an all-purpose witness and messenger, conveyor of an exotic, seemingly unmediated reality” (23). The photojournalist is traditionally thought of as “almost a transparent extension of the public’s eye” (Ritchin 1984, 23). Their purpose has historically been to document events without bias. In the film, Lee embodies the practice of this objectivity ideal. Early on in the film, she tells Jessie, “We don’t ask. We record so other people ask. Want to be a journalist? That’s the job.” Lee serves as Jessie’s mentor figure, teaching her how to be a proper photojournalist and embody objectivity.
Throughout the film, photographs taken by the journalists are represented as stills. Oftentimes, the act of taking a photo is followed by a momentary interruption of the scene with the corresponding still. In one scene, Jessie and Lee look through Jessie’s photos that Jessie took during a shootout. The audience was previously shown many of the photos as stills during the scene of the shootout. Jessie is embarrassed by most of them, but she pauses on one. This photo stood out from the others which were shown as stills, in that it was revealed to the audience in black and white while the rest were in color. “That’s a great photo, Jessie,” Lee remarks. Through this remark made by Lee, who embodies proper representation, the film expresses its belief in a distinction between “good” and “not-good” representation. This distinction is maintained in other scenes, where only certain photos are selected to be shown in black and white.
Besides the fact that they are unmoving images, there is no clear distinction between the framing of the photographs and the framing of the film itself. In the moments that images are captured, the photojournalist’s perspective doubles as the film’s perspective. The photographic stills are taken directly from the moving image which was already being shown to the viewer. In other words, the film’s cinematography mimics the photographic eye of its characters. The film thus claims to function as a photojournalist itself, capturing these moments and directly relaying them to the viewer.
Furthermore, the scenes which the central characters pass through are not motivated by any internal logic. They feel disconnected and episodic, momentary flashes briefly illuminating scattered snapshots of the film’s unfamiliar world. There is no overt narrative explanation as to why the journalists should first stop at a gas station, then accompany militiamen overtaking a building, then spend the night at a refugee camp, then visit an idyllic suburban town. This structure mimics our imagistic memory, whereby personal and global events are understood in disjointed visual moments. News is viewed, processed, remembered and concretized through the photos brought back to us by journalists. As Joey Jakob (2017) writes, media plays a fundamental role in our lives by providing “a tool and its products of capture for the technical exteriorization of memory” (89). Again, the film claims to play the role of the reporter through its narrative structure.
If Civil War aims to function as it believes a photojournalist does, then it also aims to remove its own bias as it believes a photojournalist does. By claiming the existence of “good” representation in photography and then echoing the style of this effective photography, the film claims that its mode of representation can also achieve objectivity. In the scene of Bohai and Tony’s death, there are no photos taken. The photojournalists cannot document, because they are no longer mere witnesses to violence- they are subject to it, they are its direct target. They are submerged in the scene of violence. The film has now taken on their job of documentation, and the audience is bearing witness. Every other scene involves photography. Garland singles out this scene as an exception. He is no longer just showing his characters trying to capture violence effectively; now, he himself is taking a stab at capturing violence in a way that follows Lee’s advice, communicating to his viewers the wrong that has occurred in a way that is effectively, objectively real.
The Violence of War Photography
Civil War is an anti-war film, and it conveys its anti-war messaging through its representation of war photography. In the past, war photography has successfully changed public opinion about wars by shedding light on horrors of which people were previously unaware. For example, the photo officially titled “The Terror of War” but known colloquially as “Napalm Girl,” which depicts nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phúc fleeing from a napalm attack naked and badly burned, revealed to the American public the war’s devastating impact on Vietnamese civilians. According to Hall Buell (1999), the image came to define the Vietnam War and war in general (102). As Ritchin (1984) writes, “the images of the war in Vietnam that were published in the media modified society's easy relationship with journalistic photography. No longer could photojournalists be counted on to be naive, trustworthy scribes to their society's dictates, because through their photographs they began to effectively challenge the legitimacy of the war that their society was sponsoring” (23).
However, such images of violence are by no means clear-cut in their ethics. War photography, and generally any journalism that induces pity, can serve to objectify its subjects and reproduce hierarchies of power. Lilie Chouliaraki (2006) writes that the imagined viewer of such suffering is wealthy, white, and located in the resource-rich regions of the world, and this differential tends “to present the sufferer as a moral cause to western spectators” (6). Meenakshi Durham (2023) notes that war photography dehumanizes its subjects into flattened symbols of violence through their embodied vulnerability (3868). In this way, war photography can serve as a tool for hegemony. Barbie Zelizer (2010) writes that images like “Napalm Girl” invite “public engagement with human suffering and death without insisting that people pay heed to each tragedy on its own terms” (311–312). When repeatedly exposed to violence in this manner, viewers of the news acquire a flattened, surface-level understanding of violence and its subjects. As Ritchin (1984) writes, “Newspaper and magazine photographs continually ask the reader to contemplate physical violence, either its prelude, its emergence, or its aftermath. Readers... are left with a sense that violence is epidemic and everywhere the same, emerging for no particular reasons” (24). The subjects of the photographs remain anonymous, and the root causes of the violence remain unexplored. War journalism perpetuates a disinterest in understanding the actual harms faced by these subjects. Durham (2023) writes, “When photographs or video of embodied vulnerability are circulated in the news, the impact of the images on the sufferers’ communities is typically not a criterion for ethical editorial decision-making” (3872). For example, Allissa Richardson (2021) writes that, despite recognizing the power in having visual proof of police brutality, she became disturbed when she realized that Black deaths were the only ones that the media desired to air in such a voyeuristic fashion (para. 8). Richardson begins from her own emotional and psychological experience of witnessing such media to then argue that, when there is already so much proof available, the circulation of these videos does not serve any purpose other than to retraumatize and disempower Black people and thereby reinforce white supremacy (para. 14). The ambivalent ethics of war photography thus problematizes the objectivity ideal in photojournalism. Its dehumanizing function undermines the claim that one might make to represent one’s subjects objectively, prior to the enforcement of any value systems.
Jessie, Lee and Violence
Lee and Jessie are the two main protagonists who undergo significant change throughout the course of the film, shifting in their relationship to war photography as a result of their repeated encounters with violence. Civil War’s argument for a proper way to witness violence is expressed through their opposing character arcs. For most of the film, Lee is cool-headed and unsentimental. Her decades of experience as a war photographer bestowed upon her the ability to deal with volatile situations calmly, rather than allowing herself to get paralyzed in the moment. By contrast, Jessie struggles in the beginning with being too distressed to take action when confronted with violence. Although Lee successfully mentors Jessie into becoming less emotional, Jessie goes too far and ends up becoming more like Joel. Joel is shown to be guiding Jessie as well, albeit in somewhat subtler ways. For example, during the shootout scene, Joel physically protects Jessie by holding onto her vest strap the entire time and pulling her out of harm’s way when she eagerly surges forward to take photos. Joel’s interest in violence is fetishistic- he openly admits to getting aroused by it. As the film progresses, Jessie takes on his personality and increasingly seeks out the thrill of violence. After Bohai and Tony’s murder, Jessie tells Lee, “These last few days- I’ve never been scared like that before, and I’ve never felt more alive.” Early on in the climactic scene, the film suggests that Jessie has taken on Joel’s gleeful stance toward violence by employing sexual innuendo in her dialogue. “We’re so f***ing close,” she says breathlessly, before snapping a photo of the White House mid-breach. Jessie becomes reckless in the face of violence, repeatedly putting herself and others in danger in order to get the money shot. In the film’s culminating scene, Lee sacrifices herself to push Jessie out of the line of fire, and Jessie coldly uses this as an opportunity to capture the moment of Lee’s death. This scene in particular evokes a strong feeling that something has gone wrong in Jessie’s development. The film uses her arc to warn against taking on the wrong kind of unsentimentality, the kind that views violence coldly, as an opportunity for a sensational thrill. Proper witnessing of violence, the film argues, does not look like this.
While Jessie’s path to proper documentation is thwarted by her desire for thrill, Lee completely loses faith in the power of documentation. Even at the beginning of the film, Lee is shown to be haunted by the horrors she has witnessed and questions the ability of photojournalism to prevent more horrors from occurring. In one conversation she has with Sammy early on in the film, she says, “Every time I survived the war zone, got the photo, I thought I was sending a warning home: don’t do this. But here we are.” Sammy is her close friend and mentor, and after he dies from gunshot wounds obtained during their escape from the white nationalists, she completely stops taking photos. The film uses Lee’s disillusionment to urge people to actively engage with the violence they witness. The practice of documentation can only go so far- it cannot have an effect if people are not receptive to its message, the film argues. One might counter that, since we are made to identify with Lee, the film must agree with her conclusion that the communication of violence will inevitably fail to have an impact. However, if Garland did not believe in the power of representation, then he would not have made this film. The film claims that it is not enough to know the proper way to document; the viewer also needs to know the proper way to engage with this documentation.
Polarization and Violence
Civil War is a cautionary tale about polarization. The film intentionally avoids being specific about the ideologies of its various combatants, because it doesn’t want the viewer to concern themselves with which side is right. The main secessionist movement in the film, called the “Western Forces,” is comprised of an alliance between Texas and California. The film’s political situation is an intentionally absurd one, abstracted away from our current left- versus right-wing state of affairs. Furthermore, the combatants in the secessionist movements are still dressed like classic American soldiers, despite aiming to take down the American government. The film thereby suggests that all ideological commitments are ultimately capable of being hollowed out. Approximately halfway through the film, the journalists find themselves caught in the middle of a sniper battle. When Joel asks one of the men what side they are on and who they are shooting at, the man mocks him and simply says, “Someone’s trying to kill us. We’re trying to kill them.” The other sniper has painted nails and bleached hair, representing a stereotypical liberal urban hipster. The effect is visually discordant when paired with his ghillie suit and sniper rifle. The overarching idea is this: political differences become irrelevant once people escalate to the point of violence. Ramzi Fawaz (2024) writes that “the film defies the limited framework of right versus left, suggesting that violence will always erupt when any political side becomes so stubborn, dogmatic, and intransigent” (76). Previously held ideological affiliations have dissolved by the point in time when the film chooses to introduce us to its narrative world. The film is intentionally non-understanding of the ideological underpinnings of its conflict, arguing that these will not matter beyond a certain point.
In the final moment of the film, the Western Forces soldiers have captured the president, and they shoot him as viewers watch from the perspective of Jessie’s camera. His body jolts in slow motion while lighthearted music plays. It’s a moment of gratifying vengeance, but this sense of gratification also serves as a critique. After this final shot, behind the text of the closing credits, we see a photo being developed. The soldiers are smiling at the camera while kneeling next to the president’s dead body. It is a war trophy photograph, like those of Muammar Gaddafi’s assassination, or American soldiers posing next to their Iraqi prisoners mid-torture at Abu Ghraib. By inviting comparisons to these real life horrific war crimes, the film criticizes its viewers who take pleasure in the fantasy of brutalizing one’s enemy. Garland’s usage of cheerful music in this scene calls back to the shootout scene earlier in the film, when upbeat hip hop music plays as we watch the building’s occupants get captured and brutally executed. This choice is meant to be jarring and somewhat disturbing. It serves as an ironic nod to action movies, which often use exciting music in fight scenes to make the violence more entertaining. In the case of the final scene, we are asked to reflect on the pleasure we gain from watching the president’s assassination. The film shows us the catastrophic consequences of letting such extremist fantasies play out. As the credits roll, the question remains of what is to be gained from all this antagonism. The film thereby urges its viewers to stop their political differences from heightening to violent reality.
The Neoliberal Frame
The ideological project of neoliberalism is to foster a political culture which opposes antagonism and legitimate its policy through a pretense of objectivity. As an economic project, neoliberalism aims to reduce the government’s intervention in the economy. To use Bart Cammaerts’ (2015) definition, neoliberalism is “a worldview that not only advocates a minimalist state, but above all promotes the primacy of the free market, capitalism, property rights and individualism in all walks of life” (527-528). On this view, policies should prioritize market efficiency, and solutions to social problems should be driven by market forces. Alex Lykidis (2021) writes that neoliberal policies have “created a consumption crisis that has been managed through financialization and the expansion of debt, which has accelerated the frequency of financial crises” (9). Income inequality and monopolization of production have only increased. Furthermore, critical responses to these crises are dulled because the public has largely withdrawn from the political sphere. According to Lykidis (2021), technocratic governance, defined as the appointing of experts to lead or advise areas of policy, lacks accountability and transparency by “insulating neoliberal rule from the political pressures that originate from mass constituencies and their representative institutions (parties, unions, advocacy groups)” (167).
A primary goal of neoliberal ideology is to render itself invisible in order to obscure the existence of viable alternatives and make its policy seem objective and natural. Cammaerts (2015) writes, “The neoliberal project positions itself as a post-narrative—as facticity, as non-negotiable and thus as quintessentially anti-ideological, while positioning [its] constitutive Others as deeply ideological, as biased, as mad or nostalgic—of a bygone era. It has in other words naturalized ‘itself out of History and into Nature’, thereby becoming ‘invisible’ as an ideology” (528). Lykidis (2021) writes that “by claiming that its decisions are the result of dispassionate reasoning, neoliberal governance adopts the imprimatur of objectivity which renders its policy prescriptions incontrovertible and beyond reproach. This pretense is bolstered by the concomitant denigration of political advocacy and party politics as biased and irrational” (168) This formulation of governance suppresses political contestation against the particular class interests that it serves. In short, “The democratic deficits of the neoliberal order have evacuated the political sphere of the antagonisms that are needed to transform the relations of power in any society” (Lykidis 2021, 167). Those who contest the ruling class interests protected by neoliberal policy are viewed as dangerous extremists, especially if their methods are violent or systemically disruptive. They are granted visibility by the media, however this is “usually in a highly negative way by adopting a derisory inferential tone or by inducing moral panics” (Cammaerts 2015, 530). These populations are excluded from democratic participation, creating a deliberative democracy that is built upon exclusionary consensus.
Civil War is an expression of neoliberal ideology. The film patronizes ideological commitments and aims to make lack of belief a noble pursuit. It argues for a way of seeing reality that is more objective, rather than being limited by one ideological lens. The film is not absent of political claims—it unequivocally takes the stance that racism and authoritarianism should be stopped—but it suggests that these claims are operating on a different level of politics, one that is more fundamental than the divide between left and right. Namely, the film is concerned with the divide between centrism and extremism. In accordance with the neoliberal project, it promotes consensus-building over adversarial politics (Lykidis 2021, 168). It warns us against political antagonism: if left unchecked, the mutual ignorance and anger toward the other fostered by those on either side of the culture war will inevitably result in catastrophe. By claiming political objectivity, the film obscures its own ideologies.
The Violence of the Scene
I now return to the scene of Bohai and Tony’s death. Garland wrote Civil War during the coronavirus pandemic, and this scene gestures directly at the violence experienced by Asian Americans during this period. From 2019 to 2020, hate crimes against the Asian population increased by 145% in the 16 largest cities in the US (Han et al. 2022). In the scene, Tony and Bohai are the only two characters killed, and the film demonstrates that this is simply because they are foreigners, both from Hong Kong. The scene is a criticism of xenophobia and the violence that it motivates. However, even though this scene is aimed at a critique of racism and white nationalism, I argue that it enacts its own dehumanization of marginalized groups by dramatizing their brutalization and perpetuating a disinterest in understanding them as people, a status which only the white characters are fully granted. In the process of conveying its political message, the film exploits the marginalized groups that it represents, using them as means to its rhetorical end.
First, this scene leverages the suffering of its marginalized characters by relying on shock and suspense to communicate its message. The fake-out moment in which the armed man points his gun at Joel before turning to Jessie serves no narrative purpose- it is only included as a trick to heighten the sense of tension, using the audience’s knowledge that Joel is in greater danger because of his racialized status. Garland plays with the audience’s anxiety by amplifying the characters’ psychological distress through close-ups of their facial expressions before deploying sudden bursts of violence. Many of the shots are filmed from Tony’s point of view, as we watch the armed man converse with the others from behind Joel’s shoulder. Through this use of perspective, we are implicitly made to identify with Tony in order to heighten the sense of tension. We take refuge in hiding behind Joel, which increases our terror when the man, in effect, turns his attention to us. Tony’s suffering is made into a spectacle to feed the audience’s pity and emotional distress. Bohai’s murder, on the other hand, is carried out completely unceremoniously. His death is used, both by the armed white man and by the film itself, to show that the man is serious about the threat he poses. The suffering and deaths of Tony and Bohai are merely instrumental for the narrative. After they die, their faces are never shown again. The narrative immediately advances. Tony’s body disappears from the frame before it even hits the ground. Each time one of them is killed, the focus moves on to the terror felt by the still-living: who will the man kill next? It is the threat of more death which motivates the scene. The suffering of the marginalized characters is pushed aside to make space for the fear of the white characters who now feel themselves to be in greater danger than they were before. Their deaths of Bohai and Tony leave a lasting impact on the viewer, but as living people, the two of them are discarded by the narrative.
Secondly, both of them are notably underdeveloped as characters. They are introduced in the scene immediately prior to this one, and the viewer is given very few opportunities to connect with them or understand who they are. We learn that Tony is fun-loving and somewhat reckless. We learn nothing about Bohai. This is the extent of their characterization- it is the most minimal outline of a personality. Typical of marginalized characters in dominant cinematic practices, they are fated to become defined by their suffering. In other words, Tony and Bohai are tokenized. The knowledge that they were brought into the narrative just to get killed off--and in an ironic twist, they were killed off precisely in order to make a point about the dehumanization of their racial group--makes this scene feel cruel, even insulting. Sammy, a Black man who dies as a result of the gunshot wounds he suffered in this scene, is also exploited: his death is used to push Lee’s arc forward. His loss haunts her, fueling her psychological disintegration. This is an iteration of the 'fridging' trope, but instead of a female character spurring the development of a male character, Sammy is a Black man spurring the development of a white woman.
The primary subject of this scene, and the film as a whole, is not Tony, or Bohai, or Sammy- it is the white journalists who remain after they die, the ones who bear witness to and are traumatized by their brutalization. They are the characters who the viewer is ultimately made to identify with. Besides the fact that it narratively focuses on journalists, Civil War reiterates through visual language cues that the people who are subject to violence merely serve as the backdrop for the real subjects- the witnesses. In one of the first scenes of the film, Lee and Jessie are at a protest in which civilians and police officers are engaging in violent struggle. The fighting occurs in the space between the photojournalists and the film’s camera. In the shot, the journalists are in the center, blurrily surrounded on both sides by the protestors and officers fighting in front of them. The journalists are the subject. Violence is the frame. Nearly all of the people who are killed or brutalized throughout the film remain anonymous. Lee deems Jessie’s photo from the shootout scene “a good one,” but what makes it a good photo? All we can see is that the subject is framed in a way that is visually appealing. We do not know whether Jessie’s photo properly represents its subjects, because we do not know anything about them. Other ‘anti-war’ films express the same tendency: Terence McSweeney (2019) notes that in The Hurt Locker (2008), “We see the war through the prism of American experiences, and the victim’s fate functions more for what it is able to tell us about James [the protagonist] than the man himself” (82). The deaths of Tony, Bohai and Sammy tell us more about the psychology of the white journalists than anything else. In addition to the terror generated by the threat of violence, there is another terror produced by the scene- the terror of uselessness. The trauma these journalists are left with is induced at least in part by their inability to save the other characters. As Neil Narine (2010) writes, “Looking promises pleasure. But it also fosters subject positions that are not pleasurable but plagued by experiences of impotence and guilt” (120). The journalists are unable to do anything other than be passive witnesses. Narine (2010) reads the contemporary trauma film as an expression of the guilt that Westerners feel for the global traumas they enable: “They become enrolled in human networks they are unable to understand, coordinate or act effectively within, paralysing them in the face of the traumas they enable or struggle to alleviate” (123). In the face of social violence—the brutalization of Black and brown people by the police, the hate crimes committed against Asian Americans by white nationalists—white witnesses feel the guilt of impotence, believing that there is nothing they can do.
Representations of Reality in Civil War
The scene of Tony and Bohai’s death reveals the surface-level realism of Civil War. Although the film humanizes Tony by way of psychological realism, depicting his emotional response to the volatile situation, it is not interested in his history or capacity as a person beyond his immediate psychological experience. Bohai, on the other hand, is not even granted the affordance of psychological interiority. This is where their humanization ends; this is how much they are fleshed out. The viewer can only empathize with them to the extent of suffering as a basic emotional and creatural experience. Creatureliness is the state of being a creature; it refers to the physical limitations of existing as a living being. This is recognized throughout the film in the form of dead bodies shown on screen, but it is expressed most heavily in the scene following Sammy’s death, when Lee has to clean up Sammy’s blood from the seat of the van, and in the process it completely soaks the rag and her shirt. The film stresses that violence is a physical act, highlighting Sammy’s creatureliness to emphasize the permanence of his death. In the case of Tony and Bohai, the film expresses their creatureliness through the experience of being in physical danger, emphasizing how quickly life can be taken.
Garland aims to create a sense of brutal realism in this scene by avoiding classic Hollywood conventions. Tony and Bohai’s deaths are not given the conventional slow motion treatment, as this would break the tension built up by the scene’s progression. Their deaths are sudden, as though they were occurring in real time. As John Trafton (2019) writes, “In the years after 9/11, death-in-slow-motion became a conventional film aesthetic that was no longer achieving the end for which it was originally intended... death-in-slow-motion would have been an illogical interruption to the chosen representational mode, and would have also drawn attention to itself as a ‘Hollywood’ technique, inciting mistrust from the viewer” (123). Inverting this observation, it seems that Garland is aiming to incite trust from the viewer- trust that the film is being faithful to reality. The deployment of the slow motion convention would make the viewer conscious of the fact that they are watching a film. Roman Jakobson (1971) identifies the breaking of convention as one style of realism, in which the artist rebels against a given artistic code and its deformation is received as a more accurate rendition of reality (41). The realism expressed in Civil War is not the removal of stylization altogether; it is simply a different kind of stylization. It refreshes the movie-going experience for audiences who have grown tired of the typical thrills, who are no longer entertained by the traditional conventions used in the representation of violence.
Civil War aims to provide viewers with an unmediated depiction of reality by maintaining experiential immediacy. Film differs from photography in that it moves, and it moves through time. It has a sequence, it actively engages its viewer through the temporal progression of events. The film makes use of this affordance of film, keeping its audience immersed “in combat action close and pounding enough to be merciless but so succinct as to avoid gratuitousness” (Stevenson 2024, 167). Civil War’s brutal realism allows the viewer to momentarily feel as though they inhabit the world depicted in the film, as though they can access its reality.
The Violence of Objectivity
Civil War immerses its audience in scenes of violence as a way to access violence objectively, prior to ideological commitments. However, representation is not documentation, nor is documentation pure transmission. As Narine (2010) writes, “Witnessing trauma is a social experience that often disturbs the witness and even poses a threat to his or her safety. By contrast, viewing narrative cinema, including the variety brimming with violent imagery, remains a fantasmatic experience that has been arranged meticulously by cinematographers, sound designers, directors and performers” (120-121). Civil War is in the business of restaging traumas. It enacts mastery over its fictional subjects through this careful, layered process of constructing and controlling a traumatic scene. Within the narrative, Civil War’s white journalist characters are behind their cameras, documenting the brutalization of marginalized people. On the level of cinematic construction, Civil War itself screens and reproduces the brutalization of its marginalized subjects who function as signifiers of real people. The film’s mode of representation is itself a form of violence, serving to dehumanize its subjects and reinforce value hierarchies such as racial stratification. By claiming to access violence objectively through experiential immediacy, the film obscures the ideologies and power dynamics inherent in its brutal realism. Ideology here is understood in the Marxist sense: ways of thinking about the world which serve to justify systems of domination. The physical violence of Civil War, while chaotic, is depicted from a very particular, dominant perspective (McSweeney 2019, 82). The film legitimizes a surface-level understanding of violence, failing to recognize its own culpability in structural violence and encouraging its viewers to do the same.
The violence of objectivity is committed in Garland’s other films as well. The most prominent example of this is Warfare (2025), his subsequent project which he co-directed with former US Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza. The film follows a platoon of American soldiers on a surveillance mission gone wrong during the Iraq War. The press coverage surrounding this film places special emphasis on its realism and authenticity, as it plays out in real time and is entirely based on memory. Many audience members, as well as the people involved in the filmmaking process, insist that the film is anti-war due to its un-glorified, traumatic depiction of combat and its emphasis on the psychological toll it takes on the soldiers. This interpretation assumes that the aims of war propaganda are incompatible with the recognition that war is a horrifically traumatizing experience. Removed from its political context and told entirely from the perspective of American soldiers, Warfare dehumanizes the Iraqi men they are fighting against and compels its viewers to identify with the soldiers and their struggle to dominate their enemy. The film justifies American imperialism while claiming to be objective by immersing its viewer in the brutal experience of combat.
The claim to objectivity serves to conceal the dehumanization and normalization which occurs in representations of violence, even those which aim to critique violence. In Civil War, violence is depicted without context, committed by and against anonymous subjects. This anonymized representation of violence echoes how many media outlets in the US cover conflicts across the globe. By setting the violence of the civil war to take place in the US, the film turns this impersonal mode of witnessing inward into America’s own populace. The film’s audience is encouraged to view the violence in its own communities—against people of color, against immigrants—in the same depersonalized and homogenous way that they view violence in foreign nations. Viewers are also encouraged to understand the violence of systemic disruption as radically dangerous. Cammaerts (2015) writes, “The post-hegemonic war of position which the neoliberal project wages is primarily geared towards controlling and defining the parameters of what is considered to be sane and rational, what common sense really looks like and crucially what falls outside of these parameters – i.e. its ‘constitutive outsides’... Liberal mainstream media do not silence critical voices... Systemic critiques are rather neutralized through co- option or by giving them limited degrees of visibility, precisely with a view to delegitimize them as the constitutive ‘radical’ outside.” (534) Disruptive forms of political expression, such as riots and armed struggle, the kinds of expression used by those excluded from the deliberational sphere, are not made invisible but rather relegated to a certain kind of visibility-- one which delegitimizes their actions and construes them as extremist and irrational. Civil War expresses neoliberal ideology by opposing all kinds of violence and erasing the distinction between its different forms. For example, in the film’s opening scene, the president is shown preparing to deliver a speech while the sequence is periodically interspersed with cuts to real-world footage of police and rioters, painting a picture of a nation in disarray. By combining these clips together, the film erases the distinction between violent methods of domination and violent methods of resistance, labelling both as extremist, two sides of the same coin. The film expresses a contradictory yet widespread political stance of being both anti-fascist and anti-war. It is an ‘anti-war’ stance which does not distinguish between war as a tool of imperialism and war as a necessary form of resistance to fascism and colonial occupation.
The claim to objectivity induces passivity, reinforcing an ideological disposition that takes representation for granted as reality. McLaughlin (2016) writes that skewed Western understandings of the genocide in Palestine, for example, are more than a mere problem “of intimidation, flak and propaganda on the part of the Israeli state. It depends on a certain cultural and ideological disposition among western journalists – a ready receptiveness to the propaganda messages and images that make it apparently easy to internalise them as natural and incontrovertible realities” (60). Representations which claim objectivity disempower their subjects and viewers alike: they normalize the violence committed against their subjects and render their viewers complicit in this violence. Countering structural violence necessitates understanding that the act of representation can be its own form of violence.
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