Civil War’s Alex Garland makes it clear that his movie actually has nothing to say about America

From the very first trailer, it seemed like director Alex Garland’s Civil War would be a scathing indictment of something, be it the American Empire in general or more specific concerns like the rising threat of fascism or people who have the privilege to “stay out of politics” even outside of the United States’ borders, but it all seemed a bit murky. The weirdness of the world that Garland had created for the film didn’t help, with California and Texas allied against (and successfully invading) almost the entire midwest and east coast in a new civil war even though that doesn’t make a damn lick of sense, but all Garland had really said—until recently—was that the logistics of the war aren’t really the point and that the film was more about the importance of journalism (Civil War centers on Kirsten Dunst as a reporter documenting the horrors of the war).

That made a fair amount of sense, but during a recent South By Southwest panel (via The Hollywood Reporter), Garland felt the need to clarify the film’s politics by saying that it basically doesn’t have any—at least not in terms of any real world specifics. For starters, Garland explained that Civil War isn’t really about America, because America’s problems can happen and have happened all over the world, even with what he refers to as America’s assumption that it is “immune to some kinds of problems.”

He says you could go to Britain, where he’s from, and see “the same stuff happening,” and he doesn’t even see the easy access to guns in America as part of the issue in his film. “Any country can disintegrate into civil war whether there are guns floating around the country or not,” he suggested, adding that “civil wars have been carried out with machetes and still managed to kill a million people.”

He’s probably not wrong there, but, again, all of the promotional imagery used ahead of Civil War was at least partially about America and/or guns—from Jesse Plemons’ character holding an assault rifle as he asks the other characters what kind of Americans they are to the poster with snipers inexplicably positioned on top of the Statue Of Liberty. Apparently none of that is actually trying to say anything about America.

So if it’s not America and it’s not guns, what is the movie about? Garland explained that it’s about political divisiveness in general and our insistence on “talking and not listening.” He said there are politicians and people in the media “on both sides of the divide” who are “wonderful” and that “left and right are ideological arguments about how to run a state” and nothing more. He says what we should be doing is trying one, voting it out if it doesn’t work, and then trying the other one. “But we’ve made it into ‘good and bad,’” he said, which made politics a “moral issue,” and he said that’s “fucking idiotic and incredibly dangerous.”

The idea in Civil War is that Garland took “the polarization out of it,” as he said at SXSW, which is why the typically blue California has “put aside their political differences” and teamed up with the typically red Texas. Garland claimed that the justification for this is explained in the movie and it’s “very clear” at that, suggesting that the existence of a “fascist president who smashed the Constitution” is part of it but that the audience needs to “step to it and not expect to be spoon-fed these things.”

It all seems a bit silly and out of touch with reality, like the kind of high-minded idealism that cannot fathom the existence of people who want to act in bad faith and want to see other people suffer. But the fact that Civil War doesn’t seem to have any connection to real politics, beyond the existence of divisiveness, is apparently The Point. Besides, having something to say would just lead to more divisiveness, and that’s the real threat the world is facing right now.