As I have so many other times in the last few weeks, I have just rolled home from the cinema thinking I have enough to write about to fill an entire thesis, or at least several lengthy essays. I just watched Civil War, once again with John. It struck me, above all, as a dark, brutal story which a deeply divided nation is telling about itself to itself. In the film, we find the United States of America embroiled in a brutal civil conflict, with militias roaming the country shooting one another. The interesting thing is, we aren’t given much detail about the background of the conflict or how it came about: apart from a few hazy references to things like a California/Texas alliance, that is a space which is left open for the audience to read what we will into.

The film is thus deliberately ambiguous: we know it’s about contemporary America and the scary social and political divisions opening up there, but the film does not overtly state which side the four main protagonists are on, who is fighting who, or indeed who is the goodies and who are the baddies. Yet that is obviously the whole point of the film. It does not matter why these guys are fighting, just that the USA is destroying itself. It is a warning about where the country may be heading, figuratively if not literally.

Mind you, as a brit, I couldn’t help noticing the total lack of references to other countries. Apart from an extremely fleeting mention of Canadian dollars, it was as if the outside world didn’t exist. If the world’s biggest economy was really tearing itself apart, you would think other global powers would try to intervene. Instead, it was as if the USA was the stand-in for all of humanity, and the rest of us didn’t matter. I think we can read quite a bit into that: even when Americans tell stories about how fractured their nation is, they cannot escape their own self-importance. It kind of reminded me of a hypochondriac bemoaning their own woes, yet refusing to acknowledge that other people may have bigger problems, or that other people might be around to help. In this sense, this film was about the current fashion for self pity written onto the scale of a state: these days, so many people are destroying their selves internally without any real, definable reason for their suffering. In reality, the USA is not at any risk of tearing itself apart. Some Americans just fear it is, so we start to see the appearance of fictions in which it has, just transposed up onto the scale of some kind of global armageddon. In other words, In Civil War and films like it, we can read a type of nationalistic paranoia: a sense of American greatness and importance, undercut by an intense fear that it could squander that greatness at any moment.

That, however, may be an overreading on my part. Above all, Civil War is one of the most interesting, engrossing films I’ve seen in a long time. I still want to write plenty more about it, but better do some research first. For example, I want to look into it’s relationship with films like Apocalypse Now. In the meantime, I would once again encourage everyone to go and watch it, and to check out Mark Kermode’s review here.