✳️ The art of thinking about something seriously in public
Movies as art, asking better questions, the horrors we miss, and A24's latest and greatest film, Civil War
I’m experimenting with some tools from the mid-2000s blogging era. As the Internet slowly divides between mass-produced digital trash and stuff that looks like 2002, I’m picking my camp. 2002 was a good year.
So here I am, blogging about movies like Bush is the President, and Twitter hasn’t been invented yet.
There’s nothing miraculous about this; thousands of people do it daily. At its best, we call it “criticism.” Criticism, as one of my favorites of the genre (Vinson Cunningham) says, is about love, not about being “permanent curmudgeons” and arbiters of the thumbs up/thumbs down of your favorite Marvel movie on Rotten Tomatoes. A work of criticism is not a “review.”
He continues to describe the true critic as:
“someone who loves experience… looks at a phenomenon and wants to extend their life by paying attention, …in their own way, battling death by paying attention.”
Whether you like the word “critic” or not, this vision animates me. I’ve hunted for longer than I dare consider how to live into Thoreau’s vision “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”
The stories we tell are gateways. And so I’m back to the movies. One word of preamble: you do not need to have seen the movie/read the book, etc., to go on the journey. I’ve written these words firmly with that intention. The essay will be in two parts: the first, what I found by paying attention and second, for those interested, what I saw in the watching (in this case, the latest A24 film, Civil War.
Let’s begin.
Part I: Can we love the questions we are being asked?
If you are unfamiliar with Civil War, it tells the story of a photojournalist, played by Kirsten Dunst, and her colleagues as they face a war-torn, near-future United States in search of the essential stories that define a country fallen into chaos. You realize very quickly that what kind of chaos and who is on what side matter very little. This is not a political commentary (to the chagrin of many reviewers).
Its first scene depicts the President delivering a speech through a hotel TV and Dunst taking a picture of the TV screen while military fire flares fly through the room’s picture window.
This movie is not about what we see but how we see. We are watching the world through a lens through a screen through the lens. In lesser hands, this would have been some kind of commentary on the problems of a mediated reality, but our screens are not the villains here, thank god. We’ve had quite enough of that sanctimonious blowharding.
Immediately, I am drawn in. In Part II of this essay, for those interested, I’ll dig deeper into why this movie works and why I think so many people found it wanting, but for those less interested in the film itself and more interested in the questions it asks (which I suspect is most of you), what I could tell from the jump was that we were on a ride that had more questions than answers. Not because it didn’t know the answers but because it refused to accept our—the audience’s—terms of engagement.
Director David Garland was here to serve up a full meal of challenge, disruption, and unfulfilled longing. I leaned back in my Barka lounger movie theater chair and did the only logical thing: let the artist cook.
“I’m not an art person.”
Most people are uncomfortable with the idea of “art.” They don’t consider themselves creative, or they think the category is too high-culture and snooty. This misconception has all kinds of problems.
It keeps you from thinking critically (see definition above) about what you consume, missing both the best and the magic of even the most “low culture” creations, like an album drop, the careful layout of a living room, or the composition of a photograph.
It makes you more susceptible to the opposite of art: propaganda. Art and propaganda use the same tools but for different agendas; more on this later.
It severs the fabric of our connections. Human connection is mostly subconscious. We are creatures of vibe, feeding off the limbic resonances of each other’s brains. These limbic places most respond to the creative arts: music, story, shape, line, color, taste, intuition, and emotion. To hide from art is to hide from each other. You don’t have to go to the MOMA to let art do its work on you; you just have to be open to something bigger than what is happening on the surface.
Art’s job in the world is to juxtapose. To challenge convention. To shift dynamics and open up possibilities. There is no change without art. There is no wonder without art. Nature, when we are willing to see it is the foundation of all art. But nature is also a commodified conglomeration of “resources” when our eyes are closed.
Many reviewers were not ready for the “art” of Garland’s Civil War. They came to it looking for some thinly veiled anti-MAGA allegory or cautionary tale that could swing voters in a contested yet incredibly drab election year. They were very disappointed.
One faction in the film is a breakaway state combining Texas and California. Whose politics do they represent? As someone sitting in the seat, am I cheering for them or against them? Is Kristen Dunst on the secessionists’ side?
To the question of whether the journalists should decide on the right side of the war, she answers:
“We just record it… for other people to decide.”
In this story, Dunst’s character, Lee, carries her numbness like a badge and armor. We do that, too. The artistry of the film allows us to empathize with her disassociation, even laud it, just as it is being shown step by step to be both a lie and her undoing.
Viewers and commentators looking for a tight little allegory from the film, with clear 1:1 correlations to current events will be deeply disappointed. And in their disappointment, the movie will have done its work. Sometimes, great art sickens us, saddens us, inspires us, or rearranges us.
But if it validates us, secures our armor, weaponizes our sense of moral superiority, then it is not art. It is propaganda.
We have all had too much propaganda.
Art in a world made of propaganda.
The title of this essay is “the art of thinking about something in public,” a quote from another critic I love, Alexandra Schwartz. Thanks to the onslaught of social media and a year-by-year dispense of personal boundaries, more is happening in public than ever.
We feel as though we know each other’s lives because there are just enough posts on Instagram to keep our vague curiosity satiated.
Simultaneously, there is less public thinking than ever, and it will only get worse. With the onslaught of AI sludge (gift link), machines randomly assembling words in sequence will increasingly replace what little thinking there is on the now default platforms for human connection. This is, to say the least, a horrifying prospect.
But we cannot solve for this Visuvius-grade onslaught of culture-killing toxicity by complaining about it or even pointing it out. We solve for zig by zagging. If there is no thought in AI (and there isn’t) then we have to find a way to think better. And art is the way.
Propaganda never asks us to think. In fact, it never asks us anything. It nags us with its repetitive drone until we succumb to its will. To click. To scroll. To take the path of least resistance. To align. To get in line.
Propaganda does not need truth, this is why its so impenetrable to claims of falseness. It doesn’t live on the continuum between truth and lies. It’s something worse: What philosopher Harry Frankfurt calls bullshit.
“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.” - Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit
Content that does not need truth is bullshit. This is the heart of propaganda. Words, imagery, stories, music, and emotions are all leveraged with no regard for truth in order to produce the outcomes they demand.
The future will only be protected by people like you and becoming immune to the soul-numbing powers of this bullshit. No small task in a world piling it up faster than Wall-E’s 2085.
Enter art, and YOU, the art critic.
Remember that art’s job is to open questions. To juxtapose. To challenge our assumptions. Not to give us truth but to open us up in the search for truth. To train our eyes to see where goodness, truth, and beauty may be found.
We must think about these things in public. We must be critics in the richest sense. Loving things enough to ask of them what they are asking of us.
If the only thing a thing (a song, a sermon, a community, a life) asks of you is to follow blindly, to numbly press forward, then we can know there is no truth there. Only bullshit. For truth, we need art, in all its low and high forms, break the frames of our assumptions, show the cracks in our carefully crafted myths. Art cannot tell us the truth, but it can ask us to find it for ourselves.
Love the questions
20 years ago, this now infamous Rilke quote was given to me. (Sadly, Rilke, like Rumi, has become a meme as much as art. A case study in how we turn art into propaganda.)
“Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue…”
The power of Civil War was it’s brutal (and it is brutal) willingness to have more questions than answers. It’s a cacophony of bullets mixed with silence, its sardonic soundtrack paired up against the piles of dead bodies in the wake of propaganda gone wrong.
The film flirts with the horror genre, and all great horror asks a penetrating question: Who is the real monster?
As I sat in the theater I realized part of what the film was doing was including me in the possibility. Am I the monster? Me sitting there, wanting the traditional hero’s journey. Me willing to absorb this violence and all the violent images before it. Someone is the audience for these journalists chasing the story as the United States falls into bloody ruin. Are those someones (often portrayed in bucolic peace throughout the film) standins for the audience in all our numbness and voracious hunger for one more photo, one more video, one more media moment?
Questions like “are we the monsters in this horror?” are likely to make us run disembodied into our smallest screens and our sacred texts (like the carefully-selected Bible verses, Fox News or the New York Times). Questions, by their nature, chase us either into ourselves, into each others’ comfort, or into the opiates of propaganda.
But if we learn to love art for its own sake, can we like Rilke asked of us… can we learn to love the questions themselves?
These are questions art asks of us. If we are willing to think critically about them, maybe we could fall in love with the questions themselves. And in doing that, maybe we could fall in love with the whole world.
I’m trying. Maybe you are too.
____________________________
Part Two: Does Civil War actually work?
A film criticism (spoiler-free)
One of the reasons I couldn’t wait to sit down and write about this movie and explore its lens was the polarization of its reception. Even critics I love (particularly critics I love) were vaguely irritated by it. Some were even willing to acknowledge that it struck them in a personal way, not supplying them with the clear POV they demanded of a film about its topic.
As you may have cleaned from my separate essay above, I think the film works quite brilliantly, and the befuddled critical reception is proof of its working.
Let’s start with the obvious: Kirsten Dunst has year-by-year transformed into a grounded, subtle, and nuanced actor worthy of all her accolades. She is a true creative in a town full of celebrities—a rarity in the Internet age.
The movie is in many ways a road movie, as the bulk of it takes place on a roundabout path from Brooklyn to the White House, avoiding the carnage and danger through more secure routes. The film sets up Kirsten’s Lee as the grizzled veteran who knows what war costs and is forced to deal with lesser peers and an unwanted tagalong fangirl/protegé (Cailee Spaeny as Jessie).
We are lulled into believing that her professed objectivity is her strength. While Wagner Moura’s Joel “gets hard” for the violence and Stephen McKinley Henderson’s Sammy (the emotional taproot of this film) is deemed “too old” to function, we are led to believe that Lee is the heroic newshound. Her stoicism about the world she faces calls back to every “journalism saves the world” movie you’ve ever seen, from All the President’s Men to Spotlight.
But you must remember that this film is an image of an image of an image. Its primary question is if those images can be trusted. Without spoiling the conclusion, this question, about Lee in particular, is worth asking.
Jessie, the hungry artiste with her black and white film Nikon in hand, goes from panting sycophant to standing in the line of fire. This film will do much of Spaeny’s accelerating career. Early in the film, she forwarns the stakes. Lee is threatening her with the dangers of war correspondence and the risk of death. Jessie’s response is telling and chilling all at once:
Would you photograph that moment, if I got shot?
By the midpoint, we are invited to a different question out of a different archetype.
Is this movie Jessie’s hero’s journey?
As she falls into a pit of dead bodies, she is transformed—a turning point in the film for all of our characters—leading us to ask: will she rise to vanquish the monsters in the end?
This is A24’s most expensive production to date, but it carries with it many of the arthouse’s landmarks: Incredible imagery. Transformative sound design. Discomforting needle drops. And a tinge of horror.
As a horror film, the question of who the monster is looms large, refusing to be resolved by a script that won’t clarify its politics. God, how critics wanted it to play its politics out loud. (The L.A. Times said not doing so “betrayed its characters.” That's a vicious shot to any screenwriter.)
But I am convinced that this unclarity is the biggest gift the film has to offer. It frees us to zero in on the more pungent questions. Instead of asking the film the same questions we ask of a social media post, “Does this person agree with my politics?”
We ask it something more interesting: What is the movie asking us about ourselves? And dare we consider the answers?
Does Civil War actually work? The answer depends on what terms you are willing to ask the question. If by “work” you mean work for your particularly political needs, probably not. (On all sides.) It is neither a liberal fever dream nor a MAGA monument, but it’s also not some “both sides are equally bad” milquetoast. The movie works, like the best do, when you let it work on its own terms, accepting the limits in scope it offers you and welcoming the manipulation of familiar tropes that indict us all a little in the using.
No studio in the world is keeping the film industry honest to its place in the discourse like A24 while simultaneously producing stunning creative work.
Can’t wait for what they do next.