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--:-- Noel King: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Noel King.
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--:-- Noel King: The new movie Civil War delivers a sensational story about political polarization spilling into mass violence. If that seems reckless, it's what apocalyptic films have done forever. The LA Times's Mark Olsen and Northeastern University's Nathan Blake explain.
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--:-- Noel King: Let's start with the movie Civil War. I went to an advanced screening of it, and my colleague Zach Beauchamp, who also saw it, describes it as having little to say about America. The movie opens on the 163rd anniversary of the OG American Civil War. So what is Alex Garland trying to say here?
--:-- Mark Olson: The movie, it's set in a sort of undefined near future where America has been torn apart by a civil war. Nineteen states have seceded. The United States Army ramps up activity. The White House issued warnings to the Western forces as well as the Florida Alliance. The three-term president assures the uprising will be dealt with swiftly.
--:-- Noel King: And a group of journalists who are in New York City are attempting to make their way to Washington, D.C. to get what they assume will be the last interview with the president, who's about to be deposed by rebel forces.
--:-- Mark Olson: We're moving to D.C. today. We need to go down there. They shoot journalists on sight in the Capitol.
--:-- Noel King: Is this movie spinning the polling out to its logical conclusion? Is it tempting fate?
--:-- Mark Olson: I think it's just about the sense of division that many people feel, not just in this country, but in countries all over the world. So I think a lot of the movie, you know, has a sort of a larger perspective than just what's happening in the United States.
--:-- Noel King: Although the United States, in some ways, is the prime example of a, I would never imagine that this could happen here, country.
--:-- Mark Olson: I chose America because everybody looks to America. But the things it's talking about are quite global.
--:-- Noel King: It's interesting. Garland says he wrote the script in 2020, so most notably ahead of the events of January 6, 2021. But yet it feels like it's very much in those same cultural currents.
--:-- Mark Olson: And those are the kind of things that you're thinking about as you're watching it.
--:-- Noel King: There's some kind of misunderstanding here. What?
--:-- Mark Olson: Well, you're American, OK? OK. What kind of American are you? Is this supposed to be a war movie? Is that what it's doing?
--:-- Mark Olson: I think it's operating in a sense on two tracks as far as that goes. It's interesting in that the trailer and a lot of the marketing materials, I think, are slightly misleading in that they do have people think they're going in to see something that's much more of a war action movie and also much more of a kind of a red state, blue state divide movie, like an us versus them type of movie.
--:-- Noel King: And in actuality, because the main characters are journalists, the movie actually becomes almost more of a meditation on the ethics of photojournalism than I think most general audiences are going to be expecting.
--:-- Mark Olson: Why didn't I just tell him not to shoot them? They're probably going to kill them anyway.
--:-- Noel King: How do you know?
--:-- Mark Olson: He doesn't know, but that's besides the point. Once you start asking yourself those questions, you can't stop.
--:-- Noel King: So we don't ask. We record so other people ask. Want to be a journalist? That's the job.
--:-- Mark Olson: As well, Garland, in a lot of his interviews that he's done, has talked about how he wanted to be very careful that the film be an anti-war film and that, you know, movies tend to glamorize things and that even the movies that have an intention of seeming anti-war often become sort of a pro-war because just the glamorizing aspects of, like, watching a cool movie and, like, a kind of a boss action sequence.
--:-- Noel King: The villain in the movie, Such As One Exists, is a third-term authoritarian president played by Nick Offerman. And he has a kind of Trumpian bearing and delivery.
--:-- Mark Olson: The character's not in the movie for very long, but he reminded me of Donald Trump.
--:-- Noel King: He has clearly reminded a lot of people of Donald Trump because people online are writing about this.
--:-- Mark Olson: If the bad guy is going to remind a lot of people of Donald Trump, and other than that, we don't know the politics of the movie, how does this appeal to people who like Donald Trump?
--:-- Mark Olson: I think people who are Fox News viewers are gonna watch it and probably feel it's for them in some ways. And people who are MSNBC viewers are gonna watch it and feel it's for them in some ways.
--:-- Noel King: That I think the fact that the president in the film, it is debatable the extent to which he does or does not seem like our former president Donald Trump
--:-- Mark Olson: And I think also so many of the signifiers in the movie like the who is what side who are you kind of rooting for What the point of view of the journalists Who are they embedded with It's often sort of flipped around from what our sort of real world analogs would be so that the rebels in the movie are not politically aligned in the same way that insurrectionists here have been in our actual United States.
--:-- Noel King: And so I think it's one of the things that makes the movie really complex and really fascinating.
--:-- Mark Olson: And also, I think it's going to really carry it from the entertainment pages into, like, the editorial section and on to, like, news segments is the fact that it's, like, hard to pin down.
--:-- Noel King: That people of different political stripes are going to be able to take what they want from this movie.
--:-- Mark Olson: And part of that is we don't actually know what the Civil War is about. Like, there would have been an easy way to do this, which is like, the right and the left in America go to war with each other.
--:-- Noel King: And I'll be honest with you. I found it kind of destabilizing and, like, just tell us what happened.
--:-- Mark Olson: I think the destabilization is the point. That the movie is not trying to make a specific political point on one side of the divide or the other.
--:-- Noel King: I think, if anything, it's trying to get people to pay attention to, listen to what that other side might be thinking or doing.
--:-- Mark Olson: And I think also the sort of, like, hallucinatory quality of the war itself and of often the journalists encounter people.
--:-- Noel King: And they're not—it's not really clear which side of the fight they're on.
--:-- Mark Olson: Someone's trying to kill us. We are trying to kill them.
--:-- Noel King: The idea of like a political side is in many ways set aside by the movie itself.
--:-- Mark Olson: And it's interesting that that is something that I think especially for people who want the movie to have an answer, who want the movie to be making a very specific political point, it's something that is troubling and is difficult for audiences to swallow.
--:-- Noel King: Because we don't know who the good guys are.
--:-- Mark Olson: Exactly. I said to you that I was frustrated by not knowing what caused the Civil War.
--:-- Noel King: But in retrospect, I also, you know, I'm a journalist. I don't want to go to the movies and see on a movie screen like what I am covering day to day.
--:-- Mark Olson: But with, you know, with guns and explosions and like a dangerous road trip involved.
--:-- Noel King: So in that sense, that's kind of a freeing thing that Alex Garland did.
--:-- Mark Olson: You're watching this movie and it doesn't hew that closely to what we experience day to day or where we think this might all be headed.
--:-- Noel King: That's right. I mean, I think it's interesting that there's a few references in the film to people in other states.
--:-- Mark Olson: One of the characters has family in Colorado, another has family in Missouri.
--:-- Noel King: And they both say that their families are just sort of sitting this out.
--:-- Mark Olson: And on their travels, the journalists at one point go through a small town that is eerily normal, where, like, there isn't fighting in the streets, where shops are open and people are just sort of going about their lives.
--:-- Noel King: Are you guys aware there's like a pretty huge civil war going on all across America?
--:-- Mark Olson: Oh, sure. But we just try to stay out. Stay out.
--:-- Noel King: With what we see on the news seems like it's for the best.
--:-- Mark Olson: Yeah. Well, let me know if you want to try anything on.
--:-- Noel King: Even in a moment when, you know, it seems like things are so divided, even in a moment when it seems like there's a sort of constant threat of political violence, things can in some way be something like normal.
--:-- Mark Olson: I don't know that Garland or the distributor A24 is trying to sway the United States presidential election one way or the other.
--:-- Noel King: But I think at a time when people have this stuff on their minds, having a movie that they can kind of like focus on, toss these ideas around, like to me it makes sense.
--:-- Mark Olson: I know that there's, you know, some people say, oh, I'm thinking about this all the time in my own life.
--:-- Noel King: I don't want to go to a movie and think about this more.
--:-- Mark Olson: But I think the conversation that we're even having right now is a great example of how a movie can help us, you know, focus, localize our thoughts, our feelings on an issue like this, and maybe help come to some kind of a, you know, a bigger picture answer at the end of it.
--:-- Noel King: Mark Olson, L.A. Times.
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--:-- Noel King: Coming up, a film professor argues these kind of movies are here to help us process our deepest fears.
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--:-- Noel King: How can it be stopped?
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause, then a gentle transition to the main conversation]
--:-- Noel King: Mob hysteria sweeps one city.
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--:-- Noel King: Before long, the nation, and then the world could fall before the blood-curdling prep of...
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--:-- Noel King: Today Explained.
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--:-- Noel King: We're back and we're talking movies with Nathan Blake.
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--:-- Noel King: I'm a teaching professor at Northeastern University.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: I primarily teach film theory, film analysis, some genre classes.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: One of his genres is the end of the world.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: I mean, I teach a lot of things on apocalyptic film and media or war in media or science fiction and horror films, right?
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--:-- Nathan Blake: So I think film is a really rich way of kind of addressing some of these kind of big amorphous fears or anxieties because it almost by definition kind of condenses things down.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: It puts things in a kind of a framework that can be, you know, it's spectacular and particularly with a lot of kind of Hollywood genre films, it can be kind of introduced, kind of worked through, and ideally in some ways kind of resolved within, you know, an hour and a half or two.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: When you teach and think about fears that people have that filmmakers can help us process by putting them into movies, what kinds of fears are you talking about?
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--:-- Nathan Blake: What I find really interesting when I teach a film history or teach genre films through history is we can see how these things kind of continually kind of evolve.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: What are the monsters that frightened people in the 1930s as opposed to the 50s or the 70s or today?
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--:-- Nathan Blake: And what does that say about a given time?
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--:-- Nathan Blake: They're not just simply there because it's about the jump scares.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: So I think there's a kind of a fantasy that we can make these things kind of visible.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: And that's in some ways the first step of confronting and then kind of defeating those anxieties or those threats.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: I want you to tell us when we first start seeing our collective anxieties, our American.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: And let's say in this case our American anxiety is on film.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: And then walk us through the chronology, if you can, up until today.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: Sure. From an American context, I guess if we take Thomas Edison as the American inventor or the inventor of American cinema, one of the first actualities, these kind of early documentary films that they released, was this execution of an elephant at Coney Island.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: And so they used Tesla's alternating current as this way to electrocute this elephant.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: It's both this kind of spectacle of this grotesque moment of death of this giant elephant, but it also speaks to these anxieties of these new technologies, in this case electricity or industrial technologies.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: You know, this is of this period at the turn of the 20th century where you have, you know, a lot of people coming to cities, working in factory jobs, dealing with the shocks and kind of alienation of this new modern world.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: And so they go to the theater, which is also a kind of industrial technology, to see their anxieties presented on screen.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: We see some of the very early kind of apocalyptic narratives in response to the First World War.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: There's a great one called the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse with Valentino in 1921.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: So it takes both the kind of the real world, you know, World War I, and gives it that kind of biblical Horsemen of the Apocalypse kind of framing.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: But it's funny, even in 1946 with the best years of our lives, there's this little bit of this offhand reference in 1946 to the next war that seems to be around the corner and none of us are going to survive it.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: You know, your folks will get used to you and you'll get used to them.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: And everything will settle down nicely.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: Unless we have another war. Then none of us have to worry because we'll all be blown to bits the first day.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: So even as early as 1946, there's this dread of this nuclear apocalypse or annihilation.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: And obviously, with the aftermaths of the Second World War and the nuclear bomb, you see a whole kind of new emergence of science fiction films in the 1950s in ways that seem to conflate the communist and anxieties about the nuclear bomb onto the body of a Martian or an alien or something like that.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: They leave a kind of radioactive trace.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause, then a gentle transition to the main conversation]
--:-- Nathan Blake: From then on, there's no stopping the blob as it spreads from town to town.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: They kind of sneak in to our lives. They're involved in mind control.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: So they kind of stand in as this kind of communist threat, as well as the fears of the invisibility of nuclear radiation.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: All right. Take us from there into the 60s and 70s are profoundly polarized time in American life.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: Tell us what starts to happen in the movies in the apocalyptic movies at that point.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: One of my favorites is Romero's Night of the Living Dead in 1968.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: And what I love about the Night of the Living Dead, and part of I think its progressive bent, is that it sets up another kind of trope we see with so many of the contemporary zombie movies.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: They're kind of the siege mentality. We have to build a wall, barricade ourselves in, protect ourselves from this outside other, the kind of the mass of the horde from the outside.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: We have to go out and get Johnny. He's out there. Please, don't you hear me?
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--:-- Nathan Blake: We've got to go out and get him.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: But what happens with so many of Romero's movies from the 60s to the 70s and 80s and on is that it's the humans on the inside are the ones that turn on each other.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: Helen, I have to get that gun. Haven't you had enough?
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause, then a gentle transition to the main conversation]
--:-- Nathan Blake: It's the family fighting against each other or it's these petty squabbles over material in the shopping mall or whatever it is.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: Also what I love about those movies is that there's a kind of a fantasy sometimes with apocalyptic films, right?
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--:-- Nathan Blake: That it's about this return to a state of nature.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: It's a new kind of state of lawlessness, a state of kind of anarchy in a way that's almost like a contemporary version of the Western.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: That you're free of the kind of alienating drudgery of your everyday life.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause, then a gentle transition to the main conversation]
--:-- Nathan Blake: At least I don't have to go to my day job.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: Romero's films don't offer any kind of escape.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: What about the war movies of the time?
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--:-- Nathan Blake: So the country in the 70s is processing the Vietnam War.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: How do movies depict that anxiety on screen?
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--:-- Nathan Blake: It's funny One that I like to use as an example is it a kind of maybe a little bit of a forgotten one but Little Big Man with Dustin Hoffman.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: He this Anglo character but he kind of makes his way into a couple of Native American tribes during the old Wild West period
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--:-- Nathan Blake: You know, and what is the most kind of mythic American spirit genre, right, is the Western.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause, then a gentle transition to the main conversation]
--:-- Nathan Blake: Custer shows up and just massacres everybody.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause, then a gentle transition to the main conversation]
--:-- Nathan Blake: Sets fire to the teepees, shoots everybody in the back. like, you know, women and children and stuff like that.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: And it's this horrific kind of scene.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: And it was released just a few months after the news reports of the My Lai Massacre.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: So you're taking this kind of mythic trope of, you know, cowboys and Indians, but using it as this allegorical framework for the war in Vietnam and the kind of demythologizing the American myth to kind of critique the kind of genocidal underpinnings of America's founding.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: We got through the 70s and then we get into the 80s again.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: America is changing.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: We have different kinds of anxieties.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: What are the movies reflecting at us at that point?
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--:-- Nathan Blake: I think some of the signature elements of the 1980s, in some ways it's a beginning to see kind of a backlash against the second wave feminism.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause, then a gentle transition to the main conversation]
--:-- Nathan Blake: Women entering into the workplace or Roe v. Wade.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: You get a lot of demonic children.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: Or from a kind of reactionary male perspective, it's women entering the workplace, it's jobs going overseas, computers entering the workplace.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: So you see in two very different movies in some ways, but Robocop, who becomes a kind of a product.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause, then a gentle transition to the main conversation]
--:-- Nathan Blake: This guy is really good. He's not a guy, he's a machine.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause, then a gentle transition to the main conversation]
--:-- Nathan Blake: What are they going to do, replace us?
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--:-- Nathan Blake: It's the kind of corporate capitalism taking over the police force, privatizing sort of everything, which really challenges our sense of autonomy, in that case the kind of male cop autonomy, or a movie like Die Hard, which the whole kind of initial premise is that he's estranged from his wife who's gone across the country to work for a Japanese company, and then he has this kind of high noon kind of standoff against these bank robbers.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: Happy trails, Hans.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: So I think a lot of this is this kind of backlash against automation, women entering the workplace, as well as obviously a kind of renewed anxieties about nuclear war.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: And then 22 years ago, we get the movie 28 Days Later, which is an apocalyptic film about zombies.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: Not so much zombies, but like a virus makes everybody really aggressive.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: And that is written by Alex Garland.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: What do the movies of the more recent era, what fears are we working through in these movies?
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--:-- Nathan Blake: Yeah, that's a really interesting one.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: And it's funny in terms of the timing, because it's my understanding that some of the stuff they shot for 28 Days Later kind of predates 9-11.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: And it's sort of read kind of, I guess, retroactively as something that kind of evokes this 9-11 with the wanted or missing posters and all of this kind of stuff.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: This kind of lifeless, evacuated downtown London.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: And what I find interesting is kind of a point of distinction from the very slow zombies of Romero.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: But with 28 Days Later, it's this shock of this suddenness.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: The animals are contagious. The infection is in their blood and saliva.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: One bite! Stop! Stop! You've no idea!
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--:-- Nathan Blake: It also has this hyper-violent, hyper-kinetic, out-of-nowhere kind of thing.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: So even if it was primarily shot before 9-11, I think it speaks to this moment of fears of terrorism, something that seems to come out of the blue and take us unaware.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: And where have we been? What time period have we been in since then?
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--:-- Nathan Blake: What are we seeing?
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--:-- Nathan Blake: Well, it's funny. I think throughout a lot of the early 2000s, with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, you see these allegories of invasion, not unlike, I guess, Star Wars in the post-Vietnam era, where Americans or humans or whoever get to be the kind of underdog that we fight off some kind of alien invasion and battle Los Angeles or whatever.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: When you invade a place for its resources, you wipe out the indigenous population.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: Right now, we are being colonized.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: So we can be these kind of underdogs that fight for our country in a way that doesn't have all of the kind of ugly moral ambiguity of our contemporary conflicts.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: And that brings us to the present day where our contemporary conflict in a lot of ways is internal, right?
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--:-- Nathan Blake: It's the United States against the United States.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: And, you know, I don't want to overstate it, but people have been using the language of civil war for about five, six years now, right, since the Trump administration.
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--:-- Nathan Blake: Are we going to descend into that?
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--:-- Nathan Blake: There's been a lot of discussion about whether a movie like Civil War coming out at a
