Phase Two is Missing: Civil War & The Sweet East

Perhaps one of my favorite scenes from South Park comes from an early season – the episode with the gnomes who steal underpants. If it’s not my very favorite scene in the whole show, it’s certainly the one I reference the most often. The gnomes explain to the boys, who are trying to understand what a corporation is, that stealing underpants is “big business,” but are unable to define how. In their three-step business model, Phase One is the collecting of underpants. The final phase is simply labeled, “Profit.” But Phase Two is just a big question mark. None of the gnomes knows how collecting underpants winds up being profitable. They have the tactic and the end result, but what we’re missing is conceivably the most important part: the process of how we arrive at the result.

The gag points out how most people don’t really know how corporations work. How do people at the top become multi-millionaires simply by selling goods and services? I get this feeling when I watch high-concept commercial movies as well. We’re introduced to the concept, but it’s often unclear to me how we arrive at the end point of the Hero’s Journey. Sometimes, my disbelief is suspended to the point where I don’t care – a lodestone in the bag of tricks movies deploy. But when a sense of up-to-the-moment relevance is emphasized in the marketing campaign, announcing a work that aims to help curious, thoughtful moviegoers make sense of an era defined by confusion and despair, the illustration of that process matters and its absence leaves out too much necessary exposition to be a structuring point. This is how I wound up thinking of that South Park episode I first saw in 1998 during Alex Garland’s Civil War. We’re missing the Phase Two that comes before the payoff.  

Garland’s film depicts an America in which several states have broken out into armed conflicts following newly formed rebel alliances based in California, Texas and maybe Florida targeting the federal government, and moving in on Washington D.C. and the President in the White House. Neighborhoods and highways mostly look like war zones, with firefights taking place in some areas, while others seem untouched, their citizens alarmingly unconcerned. The journalists head for D.C. hoping for an interview with the President-in-hiding, encountering the ugliest elements war has to offer: mass graves, suicide bombings and torture. Random eruptions of violence can break out anywhere at any minute, and a sense of futility hangs over a journey that seems increasingly suicidal and insurmountable. 

I suppose the crucially absent Phase Two of Civil War could be defined in terms of any trace of curiosity about how the America depicted in the movie got this way. We’re briefly told or overhear about Phase One and the film consists only of Phase Three, the equivalent to viewing only the final flourish of a magic trick. The events that led to this gruesome reality are never illustrated. We don’t know what side the fighters in a given scene are on, even though most of them are wearing military fatigues. Are they a faction composed of Rogue State Guard troops from the delinquent territories? White Nationalists? Or legit US armed forces trying to suppress the uprising? We hear that the President (Nick Offerman) has dismantled the FBI and is serving a third term, which sounds like it could be that infamous figure we know, but without context, this information is useless. An “Antifa Massacre” is mentioned without any indication as to whether they were the ones getting massacred or doing the massacring. The words “Democrat” or “Republican” are never once mentioned in the film. No exploration of a divide severe enough to apparently merit a large-scale groundswell of militarized sectarian violence worthy to be called a war. These gaps in context are supposed to make the open-endedness of the allegory richer but they never do. They come off as irresponsible and barren.

Not one positive review I’ve read of Civil War seems to have a problem with this. I can go along with the notion that this is not a film about politics but about journalism, survival and the effect of war on the minds of the people in it. Veteran photojournalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst, strong as ever) holds the view that journalism should be objective. It’s easy to conflate her tough attitude and hardness with inner strength, but professional ethics may be all she has left to cling to. She doesn’t speculate on what any of the horrors of this journey mean as a result and neither does the movie. Of course, objectivity in journalism is a good idea, if a bit of a fool’s errend. But in a fictional film – an artistic medium, this objectivity not only is impossible, but undesirable. We certainly don’t get emotional objectivity – there are enough harrowing or captivating moments to make the movie a gripping experience – but a more dangerous kind of intellectual and ideological objectivity. The merit of a film like this should be to enrage or move you about the present, or the world outside of the abstraction – the alternate reality in which the movie takes place. Then the success of Civil War in hitting its intended targets would be apparent.

A sequence depicting a stop at a gas station on this road trip to the epicenter of the dystopia – Washington D.C. as the heart of the beast - in which even an innocuous transaction has to be negotiated like a cold war prisoner exchange, serves as a good example. Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a young acolyte of Lee’s, joins the team in hopes of learning wartime journalism firsthand from the best. She stumbles on two captives strung up in the station’s car wash – looters whom the attendant claims to have grown up with, and we share her horror. Having abandoned any sense of empathy or humanity – as wars and their expounders encourage, the gun-toting captors take pride in their work. We see, as the gunman brags and poses in front of his victims, the way Jessie learns how to be unflinching in the face of human horror in order to get that elusive shot. We’re dreading a development following Jessie’s discovery of the captives that never actually comes – the opposite of the way most movies indict the audience by building them up to cheer a dastardly act. But when it doesn’t, the sequence just kind of ends.

The film’s scariest scene involves an unexpected detour into a makeshift camp run by a white nationalist group. We see the extremes that the factions are willing to go to – or maybe they’re just using the war as an excuse to act on their murderous instincts. The actions of the group’s leader (Dunst’s rangeless husband, Jesse Plemons, thankfully well-cast at her behest) in carrying out the end results of the fascist project link this group in our minds with the most sinister social movements of the 20th century. It’s the ugliest sequence in Garland’s script. It’s also the most powerful, because it might be the only one that gives us some historical ground upon which to stand. This scene could be found in any authoritarian nightmare, any instance of normalized hellishness in the world. A person is asked a single question, the answer meant to instantly identify themselves as a human being to the person holding the assault rifle. The wrong answer lands you in a mass grave. This is what lies at the heart of the ideological assumptions of fascism, which takes in group/out group identification to its most extreme place. At its core, it’s a fundamentally conservative form of revolution that maintains or even reasserts a traditional hierarchical society (things were okay until immigrants and foreigners - the impure or unworthy - penetrated our society). It doesn’t change. That historical connection makes the sequence land.

Of course, these two scenes also scare a peace-loving liberal like me real good, and that’s part of the appeal of the film, doing double duty by stoking that old fear citybound, educated progressives have of being stuck in some flyover state at the mercy of racist rednecks who can do with us what they like, our college educations worthless against an AR-15. A nightmare where we not only lose our lives, but let these knuckle-dragging, inhuman lunatics win. A triumph of their neandertal might-is-right mentality. But beyond this function as a piece of ideologically motivated vicarious horror, the scene is not padded by others that can build on the connection it’s making.

The stoking of misinformation and extremism by unchecked social media and internet culture as a possible root cause for example (we hear mention of “cyberwars”), would illustrate how primitive the state of our media can still be, even despite its fracturing and atomizing within the dissolved monoculture of the 21st century. But unfortunately, the movie’s views about what’s happening mirror that of Dunst’s character; detached. What led to these events would be more important and more useful for an audience. Or a classroom. But perhaps Garland thought the idea of naming specific causes, parties or individuals in his script was too on the nose (a laughable complaint in a country whose mainstream art tends to eschew subtlety) or too risky to be provided with a cinematic world worthy of the name in which to fester. Without this context, Civil War’s ideas about journalism and wartime feel impoverished, naked, unrevivable.

The politics matter. How America appeared to become so ungovernable matters. Implying that they don’t for this kind of project levels them and makes them harder to understand. Not in the movie, but here and now in our reality; who’s doing what, who’s at fault, who needs to step in and lead the way. All political interests are not the same. In 2021, the MAGA wing of the Republican party and its useful idiots, still in the throes of their cult, tried to disrupt the peaceful transition of power following a presidential election. Their candidate was found civilly liable for rape, the likes of which he bragged about. One party, and not the other. That distinction matters.

As arrogant as liberals with their faculty lounge politics and coastal code words come off, as obnoxious and censorious as their smug culture of knowing what’s best for everybody can be, the American Right has a substantial contingent that are comfortable with violent reprisals against their “enemies” and support the banning of books. Public figures, election officials, outspoken celebrities and journalists worthy of the name routinely receive threats of violence or sexual assault for doing their jobs. Arrogant and censorious versus violent and threatening. The idea that those factions and their ideologies might be so similar that they’re not worth exploring in a film about societal failure is a luxury that I’m not sure we can afford – the kind of false equivalency that the terminally naïve and self-absorbed use as their excuse to avoid the ballot box.  

So left with only the language of violence and intimidation as the currency in Civil War’s dystopia, we are denied any ideological or intellectual insight that can help us NOW, making the film politically worthless. Not worthless as ammo in a bullshit culture war that seems to absorb everything from lifesaving vaccines to Taylor Swift, but worthless as any kind of bearing on how to make sense of the present. How in a time when some people feel like the political order could collapse into civil war can a movie titled “Civil War” ignore that precise question? Alex Garland’s previous feature, Men left me with the same feeling, its most promising ideas about patriarchal saturation feeling similarly out of reach. If this film is simply about the way that violence consumes everything allowing a society to function in the wake of a social breakdown, then doesn’t it seem like it’s exploiting the broken current national discourse (or lack thereof) to make that point?

For an exercise, I might suggest viewing Sean Price Williams’ The Sweet East immediately before watching Civil War. Afterwards, one may feel that a viewing of Civil War may not even be necessary. Captivating and scary, yes. Undoubtedly. But much of what you might need for insight into the complex and multifaceted sense of frustration and despair facing western society at the moment (despite the fact that in both films, as in Idiocracy, other countries aren’t even mentioned), is addressed in this satire penned by Sight & Sound contributor, Nick Pinkerton.

Pinkerton’s writing for S&S has always stood out to me, as his refusal to chastise every film he writes about for not propping up what are the acceptable 21st century attitudes regarding identity and justice strikes me as refreshing. It’s debatable whether he and Williams are trying for more than they could achieve, because so much of their film is beautifully and purposely unclear. But one thing is certain upon viewing The Sweet East: they’re trying to create an arthouse film that appeals well beyond an arthouse audience. More than anything, Williams and Pinkerton praise their star (Talia Ryder - a major find) who, in what could be called a career-making performance, they describe as “somebody who understood, perhaps better than us, what the movie was doing” (S&S, April 2024). They’ve fashioned a picaresque tale of directionless youth that’s episodic and absurd (think Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man or in a political sense, Sorry To Bother You). It exists entirely inside Phase Two, and is interested in little else.

I’m hesitant to describe the film as “anti-woke” (one of many loaded terms, around which the discussion is now broken), or any other label which would box it in. It doesn’t criticize and satirize a specific ideological or political belief, but rather the idea of belief – the privileging of belief - externalized in American life as a destructive force. Americans in this movie live in their own heads, to the exclusion of other people’s humanity, and it’s in this way that everyone encountered by Ryder’s heroine is going crazy in their own personal manner. Campaigning politicians love to stress in speeches that there are “Two Americas,” indicating the divide they face in trying to unify the electorate. But this observation seems quaint. Our atomized culture sees to it that there may, in fact, be as many Americas as there are Americans, as life in a country with so much wealth and so many resources sports a consumer culture that provides citizens with an infinite number of rabbit holes in which to lose and find themselves. We can use the internet and our handheld tech to shop for any reality that looks attractive to us, and confirmation bias takes care of the rest.

Pinkerton has stressed that he does not see the American experiment as a failure as of yet, making his film a kind of signpost about what kind of chasm lies just underneath its fragile ground. The America of The Sweet East is depicted as an interwoven and multivariate collegiate of cults, where life is just a matter of picking out a cult that you like. In a country where the values of low entertainment, with their emphasis on showmanship inform everything from political campaigns to the dissemination of information through forms of media to basic social interactions, the mentality of culthood and tribal agendas have poisoned every facet of American life. Nothing in this vision of the U.S. seems real, which is why it feels absolutely up to the minute.

The film opens with Lillian on a class trip to Washington D.C. – complete with a George Washington tour guide in wraparound sunglasses – that perfectly sets up Williams’ and Pinkerton’s world. The guy Lillian is shown in bed with at the beginning dangles his spent condom in front of her, speculating that it may be worth something if he gets famous. Nobody in the film seems to see validity in their actions unless the exposure provided by fame and wealth is potentially possible. The opening credits play out of over what could be called a music video, with Ryder singing a ballad of disaffection to her own mirror image. She’s both a private star and audience of one in the bathroom of this arcade/pizzeria, and this is the only instance of introspective clarity a character has in the film, just before it’s cut short by a woman firing a gun and falsely claiming the restaurant is fronting for a child prostitution ring.

This is of course, a direct reference to the debunked 2016 “Pizzagate” conspiracy that went viral in the presidential election cycle and it’s one of many ways in which The Sweet East draws on the same world you and I are living in to suggest depth rather than an abstraction of its own creation. Throughout her adventure, Lilian appears as a blank canvas upon which the gallery of pent-up, n’er-do-wells she encounters hang their political, religious or artistic aspirations. She’ll take in with an antifa “artivist”(Earl Cave) and his band of ill-prepared crust punks one minute, a EDS-obsessed Muslim fundamentalist the next. A perfectly cast Simon Rex, seen here as a different type of groomer than his manipulative ex-porn star in Red Rocket, plays a professor of 18th century literature concealing a white supremacist agenda. His Lawerence watches only silent movies, avoids anything “too contemporary”, while spouting his drivel in that way that white male intellectuals do in the presence of the younger women they need to revitalize them.

She’s not entirely innocent herself; stringing him along, lying about coming from an abusive relationship. In fact, she seems to reinvent herself in each new culture she encounters, not just to her peers but to us while looking directly into the camera. She abandons Lawerence before he can make the kind of advancement we’re dreading because his actions and justifications, and the actions and justifications of all these Sherwood Anderson Grotesques are less important than what they represent in the grander sense - a made-up way for things to make sense. Here’s another false romanticism for a past that never was - communicated in the most tone-deaf way possible by one more defeated, cloistered malcontent lost in his own mind palace, as he dresses Lilian in his dead mother’s clothes. For all the condescension and mansplained twaddle of this Neo-Nazi, Rex makes us feel weirdly sorry for him. Occasionally, his anti-establishment word salads DO make some objective sense. And that’s the America of The Sweet East – a place of ideological chaos, where lunacy and sensibility are spoken in the same monologue or even the same sentence.

Note the way Lillian is approached by the two Black filmmakers (Jeremy O. Harris and Ayo Edebiri) and how they almost immediately express their desire to cast her in their movie not because of who she is, but because of who they imagine her to be (“It’s like you stepped out of my brain!”). She’s essentially a mental object of whoever takes her under their wing, her meaning or purpose provided for her solely by outsiders. They’re shooting a Merchant-Ivory-esque period drama about the building of the Erie Canal that they seem to be better at talking about than making. All concept and too little product. Their passion and relentlessly positive energy feel insulated to the point of naivete and the scene where Lillian auditions for them without being able to actually audition is (I can say from experience) a well-observed detail in Pinkerton’s script – one of many. When you recognize the situations in a movie from your own life experiences, the “what if” of apocalyptic futures tends to look comparatively dull and unreflective.

The history of cinema in general is both celebrated and mocked in acknowledgement of American political and philosophical traditions whose complexity and seeming randomness make allegiances difficult to sort out. Silent-era title cards are laced in between the adventures like chapter headings. The grainy 16mm photography gives the movie the look of a documentary from the late 70’s and early 80’s. These choices don’t feel arbitrary. They help illustrate the movie’s disoriented present, with all of film history occurring at once just as every archaic form of living, thinking, creating and destroying is jockeying for position with every modern form, until nobody knows what to believe, or what to make of anything.  

Ideological chaos is such a difficult thing to depict in a movie. Perhaps only a self-consciously messy film like this can depict it. It sounds like a cynical experience, but Williams and Pinkerton describe their film as a rejection of cynicism (despite its bleakness), presenting what they call the “democratic rabble” of voices. They never compromise and they take risk after risk, which makes their work often exhilarating. Most of all, they are showing all the things the Garland film didn’t seem to care about. It’s from this pathological muddle that battle lines are drawn and the trenches are dug for what conservatives like to call the “war for the soul of America.” I’ve seen snide films, but none that were as serious. I’ve seen serious films, but none so snide. The quest for peace, progress and fulfillment in an America so isolated and atomized can only to lead to cult ideologies, all of which seem to offer connection but are rooted in psychologically unhealthy activities, the depth of which are so paper thin, it’s a wonder more Americans don’t snap. Have we normalized social insanity to this degree?

Above all, The Sweet East has consideration, for civilization, for art, for politics, for history, for the messiness of the human condition, rather than simply housing of a few slivers of humanity inside a screenwriter’s high concept. There is consideration for what a Democracy actually is: a conversation. Many people (sometimes too many) talking with each other, deciding based on consensus - as opposed to a Dictatorship where one person hands down the entire social order. But the other side of that coin is that demagoguery and totalitarian uprisings are ONLY possible in an ostensibly free society. Democracy contains the seeds of its own destruction. The mess of democracy, and what happens when the ingredients in that stewpot start to turn rancid are the elusive elements The Sweet East is interested in exploring. Citizens are obliged to cultivate their own personal form of insular madness, fitted to their consumer tastes, believing they are holding the One Pure Truth and everyone else is stupid or evil. In the end, it’s another complacency late capitalism is happy to stoke and absorb.

This is why I find Civil War so damaging. It warms me up to a feeling I’ve had for a while now that the idea of pop culture as something radical just isn’t true. Maybe culture is just not the force for change we think it is. Maybe it functions more like a low-dose drug or a smokescreen, with abstractions like a nightmare future substituting for the feeling that something serious is being considered for facing up to the task of fixing this country. What these abstractions have in common is a refusal to deal with the present - understandable as that is – that posits Art as something reflective rather than prescriptive. At the bottom of it all, we might realize that there is no alternative political vision of the world that modern culture – especially modern cinema - can present for a mass audience. The artists are essentially collecting underpants for no reason. Their work can’t say what it thinks because it doesn’t know, so they focus on the trauma of an alternate reality, not the machinations and gyrations of the one they’re living in. Until art becomes a thing we just wish would go away.